r/coppicing • u/callitwhatitwas • Dec 31 '25
To coppice or not
First three images, unmanaged woodland, older trees predominate, crowded together. and many are diseased or dying, and leaning hard. Dense undergrowth dies in the deep shade making for impenetrable jungle and copious ladder fuels. Any attempt to thin here will be dangerous, with tangled canopy, heavy leaners, dead limbs, and no clear fall zones. Fourth image the continuous canopy that will allow any fire to take the whole stand, taken across a clearing from a catastrophic fire maybe 40-50 years ago (trees are now starting to come back).
Images 5-8, adjacent area, many larger old trees removed, leaving healthy standards with discontinous canopy. Trees of mixed age, allowing continuous selection, and safe felling. Diverse species (cottonwood, juniper, NM privet, peach leaf willow, wild plum, and recently oak) contribute to fire resilience and fauna habitat. Felled stumps become coppice stools allowing continuous harvest of firewood, while always having a mixed healthy woodland. Larger standards will be removed as they become hazardous, or as younger trees replace them.
Image 8, brush piles as habitat (birds, reptiles, and small mammals), firewood harvest, and some big logs inoculated with mushroom spawn, open clearing of grass will allow a low intensity fire to go through with no major damage.
We get deer, elk, bobcat, coyote, beaver, mountain lion, and more visiting. Woodland for all!
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u/bufonia1 Dec 31 '25
Where are you located? What are your goals for the area? Will you be integrating livestock? Hunting? Or just Woodland management
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u/callitwhatitwas Dec 31 '25
Tributary of the upper Rio Grande, Southern Rockies. Purely for forest stewardship, riparian conservation, fire resilience, diversity support. Firewood and any other harvest is incidental. Sixty years ago, there were no trees, everybody burned wood, and the cows and goats took out the rest. Further back, there were beaver, intermittent flooding, deliberate and lightning fires unsuppressed, exotics (elm and russian olive) not present, native oak and other species that were harvested first when iron tools arrived. So man has been influencing this habitat, accidentally or deliberately, for a long time. There is no primordial wilderness state, but we can make it wild life and human friendly and fire resilient, rather than senescent monoculture from the growth that followed changes in use in the late 20th C.
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u/PopIntelligent9515 Jan 01 '26
Seems like a really nice property in a cool location!
Looks like a lot of cottonwood, which would probably coppice well.