Restoring logged forests does not mean closing them off as ‘wilderness’, but actively managing them.

On January 1 this year, commercial logging of native forests in Victoria and Western Australia ended. It was one of the most significant changes in the history of forest management in Australia.

After the chainsaws stopped, the debate began about how best to care for our forests in the future. There has been a flood of articles about the threats of forest thinning, the damage caused by fire management, and confusion about indigenous-led forest management.

These practices are worth discussing, but to conflate them with the destructive commercial logging practices of the past is unfair.

We have a rare opportunity to consider a fundamental question: how much should we intervene and manage our forests? With commercial logging gone, should we strive to create “wilderness” – nature without people – or should we manage Country, as Australia’s Traditional Custodians have done for millennia?

Forest Country has changed dramatically

Before European colonization, Traditional Custodians managed the land by carefully applying or eliminating fire, watching which plants grew and which animals flourished. This experience was built up over tens of thousands of years.

Sadly, Australia’s forest landscapes, once tended by thousands of generations, have been dramatically altered over the past 250 years of colonisation.

These changes began with the displacement of Traditional Custodians and the sudden change to cultural fire regimes. For example, in Tasmania, Palawa people used fire to create open woodlands. After colonization, their fire regime was abandoned and the woodlands reverted to rainforest.

More recently, large areas of Australia’s forests have been damaged by a century or more of logging, land clearing, bushfires and flooding. As a result, today’s forests would be unrecognizable to previous generations of Traditional Custodians.

In response, some Traditional Custodian groups in Victoria have begun to re-engage in cultural management, working with Western scientists to heal the land.

Their efforts range from reintroducing agricultural fire to thinning dense regrowth in forests after logging to create ecological and cultural benefits, such as accelerating the return of large, old trees vital to many other species.

If these efforts are successful, we expect increased biodiversity, healthier and more resilient forests, and new support for the management of cultural landscapes by Traditional Custodians.

What does it mean to care for a forest?

To be clear, no two forests are the same. There is no blueprint for managing all forests.

Some forests are fire-resistant, while others are fire-sensitive. Each forest has its own history of disturbances and its own ability to respond to future disturbances.

For example, in the mixed-species lowland forests of Victoria and coastal New South Wales, trees can recover quickly after fire. But in the tall, wet mountain ash forests of Victoria and Tasmania, recovery can take decades or longer.

The structure of the forest is also important. Forests with large trees are likely to remain healthier and recover more quickly from forest fires than forests with densely packed small trees.

Caring for Forest Country means identifying the needs of each forest so it can withstand whatever the future brings.

Cutting down trees to save the forest?

You might look at a forest with lots of small trees and think that’s good: the forest is growing again.

But you can have too much of a good thing. Very dense forests usually form in response to intense disturbance, whether it’s logging, flooding or fire. Tens of thousands of seedlings can regenerate per hectare. As they grow, the seedlings compete intensely for water, light and nutrients in the soil.

At such high densities, growth slows rapidly and the overall health of the forest declines. This slows the development of large trees, which are disproportionately important for bird, mammal and insect species.

Worse, because these young trees grow slowly, they are vulnerable to wildfires for decades longer. This is critical as climate change drives more frequent wildfires at the landscape level.

Thinning forests involves removing some trees so that the remaining trees can grow larger more quickly. It is similar to how gardeners thin a vegetable garden, removing weaker seedlings so that others can thrive.

For centuries, foresters around the world have been thinning trees to speed up the production of larger, more valuable logs. But thinning can benefit forests in other ways, too.

Research in North America and Europe has shown that thinned forests are often more resilient to warmer, drier climates and have ecological benefits. In Australia, studies have shown that thinning can increase water availability in drought-affected forests, accelerate carbon sequestration and improve habitat outcomes. In other Victorian forests, thinning has increased tree growth and led to a more diverse set of species in the forest understorey.

Thinning is not a panacea: it may provide ecological benefits in some forests, but not in others.

For example, researchers examined whether previous commercial thinning operations affected the amount of crown consumed by a tree in a subsequent wildfire. In mountain ash forests, thinning did not change the rate of crown consumption in young or old forests. In drier forests, thinning reduced fire severity in young forests but not in old forests.

This raises important questions: If the thinning had been done for ecological, rather than commercial, reasons, would the results have been different? If it had been done in other forest types, would the results have been different?

We don’t have good answers to these questions because there has been so little research on ecological thinning in Australian forests. But we do know that it has had positive results in many other forests around the world.

A way forward

Australia’s Traditional Custodians are rightly recognised as the continent’s first scientists. By living and working on Country, they learned how it responded.

As we turn a historic page in forest management in parts of Australia, Western scientists would do well to learn from and work with Traditional Owners to explore new ways of managing Country. Try new approaches. Learn from practice. And work together to figure out how best to heal Forest Country.

Read more: Indigenous Knowledge and the Persistence of the ‘Wilderness’ Myth