Liam Parfitt

Moose generally help out forestry as they are very selective towards deciduous.

Of course.

Yes. In a warehouse full of bones. Very cool.

I've seen mule deer nibble doug fir and the odd bit of young lodgepole. Likely they can take some mixed with other things. Moose in Ft St James area can handle 50 percent abies.

De extinction doesn't really exist. An Asian elephant with teeth tweaks better fat storage and some hair would be a great start. It's more like ecosystem improvement. Restoration implies going backwards. Rewilding implies proper nutrient cycling and functionality

Perhaps you guys should have had a primary. No we are stuck with your man child.

Let's hope the mastodon isn't too far away in the deextinction program!

It's a bigger problem than people realize. Spruce has high albedo, low biodiversity and high fire hazard, and no predators so extends itself across the boreal. With a mastodon we'd see less fires and much more proteinz biodiversity and carbon storage, and a lower albedo.

Here is a good paper on spruce and moose. It's mostly either or.

pure.iiasa.ac.at/16903/1/2020...

I watched rocky mountain goats which are more related to antelope eat a lot of birch leaves, and mix some abies in, but the seem to avoid spruce, be curious about real goats. Spruce is the least digestible tree there is. In Sweden the moose love pine but won't touch spruce.

Yukon bison herd makes a big dent in snow pack while grazing grass along bottom valleys that are too wet in the summer to graze. The stomp and rub smaller spruce trees, and add significantly more manure and nutrients to the system, changing grass into higher density fertilizer.

The biggest difference is that Mastodons could eat spruce, and today nothing can. Canada is about 63 percent spruce currently, and it's much thicker than it was previously. Moose depended on Mastodons to make the forest less sprucey and more deciduous.

I bet it didn't eat the tips of trees only.

A grizzly bear versus a short faced bear, both bones found in the Yukon. Crazy to think our landscape supported 1000kg bears until very recently. As per Wikipedia dense forests occurred at the same time as these omnivores went extinct.

First thing to do is to switch forestry practice away from mimicking large fires to mimicking mega herbivory. A mastodon maybe 30 years away but a change in forestry starts in the morning. Check out moose pellet density in 4 types of forest.

Bison latifrons, priscus and bison bison athabaskae are all the same species if a species is when animals can have young. The best news is the Yukon herd is now 250 percent over target and growing rapdily! Here is some winter grazing.

The issue in the boreal is fires reset to 0 often over 10k hectares. The forest grows all at the same time and often has very limited spacial variation over extremely large areas. Definitely misses the megafauna.

Unlikely this century. One cool thing is the moose were moving in within a months and are helping to keep the willows lateral at 150cm height. It's the biggest browser we have left! Mastodon makes it look small though.

Perhaps the garden of eden represented when mammal populations were 2 orders of magnitude higher than they were at start of holocene.

Read this 3 times in last 2 years. He inspired Dr Charles Scweger who wrote this journal article on boreal forests and why they are so different. Changed my life.https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0277379111000357

We are playing with 20 percent of the tools we used to have.

Pre-glacial and interglacial pollen records over the last 3 Ma from northwest Canada: Why do Holocene forests differ from those of previous interglaciations? We synthesize pollen spectra from eleven dated stratigraphic sections from central and northern Yukon. Palaeomagnetic and tephra dating indicates the …

It can be succinctly argued here that humans did more to change boreal forests 12,000 years ago than they are doing today. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Gompotheres?

Here is 3 summers of growth after thinning a very dense 55 year old stand east of Prince George. The original stand was about 5000sph and had moss only as understorey with odd cornus canadensis.

And here is after 7.5 years, oldest site we have. Best guess is depending on how much removed and site index 10 years would be required with maybe 25 years on most open sites. Likely the residual woody debris lifespan would determine reintervals as well. So 10 to 15 good rule of thumb.

Here is 4 years after thinning.

Here is 5 years after. City of Quesnel turned it into a park.

Here is a moose pellet count vs old growth "primary" young plantation, clearcut and partial harvest

Here is a control area not thinned and the thinned portion.