Validating Predicted Effects on Forest Soils from Management Activities.

In forested public lands, accurately assessing management impacts on soil quality and productivity is an integral part of management stewardship.  As an agency the USDA Forest Service cites several indicators of soil quality yet it invests disproportionally in pre harvest surface disturbance monitoring to assess impacts. In practice, monitoring focuses on characterizing preexisting disturbance levels in areas being readied for vegetation management, and an incremental degree of impact is applied to the proposed management area primarily based on activity type (e.g., mechanical harvest vs controlled burns) and secondarily based on anecdotal soils knowledge.  In addition, post-activity monitoring data is rarely collected to validate the pre-activity predictions on ecological effects.  Therefore our predicted impacts are mainly extrapolations driven by management operations, and often fail to account for soil geographic variability except in a very broad sense. To explore this disconnect I compare predicted detrimental soil disturbance levels and actual detrimental soil disturbance levels from forest management activities based on several case studies.  The findings suggest a departure from predicted versus actual response of disturbance. However, the findings also highlight the drawbacks on reliance of disturbance as a sole indicator when evaluating the ecological effects to forest soils within the USDA Forest Service land base.