Logging and the slow disappearance of Australia’s large old trees (commentary)

A commentary by ANU professor David Lindenmayer, drawing on more than four decades of field research, argues that logging causes lasting harm to Australia's large old trees despite industry claims to the contrary. His long-term studies found logged and regenerated forests support far fewer such trees, due to direct removal, wind exposure of retained trees, and high-severity regeneration burns that damage or destroy survivors.

Lindenmayer notes that from the 1920s to the late 1980s, Victorian forestry agencies had deliberate policies to clear old-growth forest, with one forestry textbook labeling large old trees 'useless veterans.' He states more than 300 Australian vertebrate species depend on the nesting and denning hollows these trees provide, hollows that can take a century or more to form and do not return once lost.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.