Replacing Pine Trees with Silver Beech

Forest and Bird, Issue 307, 1 February 2003, Page 40

Replacing Pine Trees with Silver Beech

KEN MASON

describes two unusual restoration projects in Dunedin.

and Mountaineering Club clearfelled four hectares of pine plantation on its 40hectare "Ben Rudd’ property. Here, high on Dunedin’s beloved Flagstaff Hill, 200 silver beech were trial planted [: 1990 the Otago Tramping

amongst the pine stumps. Spurred on by the trial’s success the club founded its Ben Rudd Management Trust, beginning regular beech plantings in 2000 with the idea of creating a silver-beech ecosystem.

At an exposed 600 metres the trees have grown a little bushy. So trees behind the forest edges are being form-pruned to develop fewer individual stems and a higher canopy. Another 5000 exotic trees were dropped in 1991. The bulk of the property is now returning to kanuka and broadleaf. One area is having its narrow-leaved snowgrass association restored, including celmisia and speargrass reintroductions. The property is to be covenanted with the QE II National Trust. Ben Rudd beech seedlings are sourced from Flagstaff Creek, some 2.3 kilometres away on Three Mile Hill. This is the nearest silver beech forest to Dunedin, and the next for restoration. Sadly, the 1970s pine plantations were expanded around Flagstaff Creek at the expense of tall relict silverbeech forest and its healthy South Island robin population. Ecology Action, a former Otago University-based group, found out in time to save fragments. Unsympathetic plantation logging, roading and windthrow took a further toll of the beech. By 1998, however, there was a

change within the Dunedin City Council’s new forestry enterprise, City Forests Ltd. Now, City Forests, with Dunedin Forest and Bird and the tertiary group Students for Environmental Action, are involved in a joint silver-beech forest restoration project. The project covers about 1.3 kilometres along the banks of Flagstaff Creek in a strip, ranging in width from 20 metres to over 100 metres, and from 200 to 400 metres above sea level. This includes riparian zones and areas deemed unsuitable for production forestry. Further project definition and expansion is occurring, as the pruning, thinning and harvesting of plantation trees takes place. Beech regeneration is very light-demanding. With the beech forest’s fragmentation the remnants were laid open to invasion by both exotic and native broadleaved species. Work to date has focussed on removing exotic trees which are either competing with silver-

beech saplings and seedlings, or preventing regeneration. Where native broadleaved species are doing the same they are either being thinned or removed. Blackberry is being cleared and replaced by beech. The chainsaws of Dunedin Forest and Bird’s wilding tree group have removed the larger exotic trees. This project has helped City Forests Ltd gain Forest Stewardship Council certification for meeting environmentally and socially responsible forest-management practices. FSC certification adds to the plantation’s marketable value. Even higher certification is sought. By managing competing exotic and native trees, a silverbeech ecosystem is being given a future, and a chance to reclaim some of its former extent. Hopefully, the robins will also benefit.

— KEN MASON

is vice-chairman of

Dunedin Forest and Bird, a Ben Ruaa Management Trustee, and an adviser to the New Zealand Ecological Restoration Network.