What happened to dead trees and small trees?
In theory, dead trees and smaller trees, 2 to 9-cm dbh, were to be left on the watershed. The logger was asked to fell these trees, but it was not expected that he would remove them since they were not likely to be merchantable. They were indeed felled, as is obvious in the “clearcut” look of W5 in post-harvest photographs. However, we do not know how many of these trees the logger chose to take and, thus, were removed from the watershed. Certainly some of the more recently dead trees were deemed salvageable, but we can not make a determination from the 1982 survey as to which trees were more recently dead and might have been taken. In that survey, dead trees made up about 15% of the basal area and density, and were categorized as either a snag (stub) or a standing dead tree. Standing dead trees were standing with limbs and generally more recently dead than snags. A snag was a dead tree which had broken off somewhere up in the stem above breast height and had no remaining branches of a
