Impacts of salvage logging Research into the role of salvage logging initially grew out of intense controversy in the Pacific Northwest, regarding the effects of post-fire salvage logging. We realized that there was little known about post-wind salvage logging in the eastern U.S., and this prompted the M.S. thesis work of Andrea Leach, who compared salvaged and unsalvaged sites after wind damage in Natchez Trace State Forest in central Tennessee. Her thesis was completed in 2003, and the findings eventually published as Peterson & Leach 2008a (Forestry), and 2008b (Ecological Applications). The Natchez Trace work was limited to the first two growing seasons after disturbance & salvaging, so necessarily can directly speak only to the initial regeneration. In the papers that came from the NTSF work, we reported what we think is the first attempt to quantitatively document cumulative severity, which combines the natural wind damage with the intensity of the salvage logging operation to estimate the total impact of the two disturbances on a site. However, to our surprise, the salvaged areas did not have any detectable decrease in speed of regeneration or reduction in species diversity; species composition was different in the salvaged areas, but probably because those areas had somewhat greater wind damage than the unsalvaged areas. We concluded that after moderate severity of natural disturbance, and moderate intensity of salvaging, the expected negative effects were not seen. Former student Callie Oldfield revisited three of the four site/salvage combinations at Natchez Trace in 2020....21 years after the initial disturbance. Site B/salvaged was no longer available for sampling. The graph below shows a nonmetric multidimensional scaling ordination of species composition in 2020. If we focus on comparing Site A salvaged (orange ovals) to Site A unsalvaged (red ovals), we can see that species composition is indeed different depending on whether a site was salvaged or not.
