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    Low thinning and crown thinning of two severities as restoration tools at Redwood National Park
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    Presents a key for choosing management options. Discusses silvicultural treatments to ensure reproduction and regulate stand density for efficient timber production. Also discusses water, wildlife, esthetics, and their effects on timber production.
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    Restoration has the goal of returning an ecosystem to a desired, more natural state after human disturbance. Setting this goal is different from restoration science itself. Scientists rarely choose the goals for restorations, which are generally determined in some political process, hopefully with the input of scientists who can advise which goals are feasible. The restoration scientist is then asked: how do we achieve this goal? The design and implementation of a plan for attaining the goal is the actual science of restoration ecology. Often experiments will be necessary to determine whether components of a proposed plan will work. For example, will creating gaps in a forest allow coexistence of a large number of native tree species? Will the gaps help keep non-native species in check, or help them further their invasion? Restoration ecology is fundamentally an interdisciplinary field and restoration ecologists draw knowledge from disturbance ecology, population biology of plant and animals, and soil science among others.
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    Coast redwood (Sequoia sempervirens (Lamb. ex. D. Don) Endl.) is unique among conifer species because of its longevity, the great sizes of individual trees, and its propensity to reproduce through sprouts. Timber harvesting in the native redwood range along the coast of the western United States has necessitated restoration aimed to promote old forest structures to increase the total amount of old forest, the connectivity between old forests, and to enhance the resiliency of these ecosystems. After disturbance or harvest, healthy redwood stumps sprout vigorously, often producing dozens of sprouts within two years of disturbance. These sprouts form highly aggregated spatial patterns because they are clustered around stumps that may number less than 50 ha−1. Thinning of sprouts can accelerate individual tree growth, providing an effective restoration strategy to accelerate formation of large trees and old forest structures or increase stand growth for timber production. However, management, including restoration activities, is a contentious issue throughout the native range of redwood because of the history of overexploitation of this resource and perceptions that overexploitation is continuing. This paper reviews the science of early stand dynamics in coast redwood and their implications for restoration and other silvicultural strategies.
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