Buckey Forest Council Presentation

David Maywhoor's presentation on Monday was very interesting. It covered some topics that we have covered in class as well as the book, "Lost Mountain" which we have read this quarter. He also covered some of our research paper topics and related to his field of work. The organization that he works for fights to protect the wooded areas in and around the state of Ohio. In his presentation he showed us different pictures of forests that have been burned or logged in order for people to collect wood for building or just for land for any particular interest. One fact that really stood out to me was that he said that years ago if a squirrel wanted to, it could travel all the way from Virginia to Indiana without touching the ground jumping from tree to tree. The law states that a company can only log 25 acres in a given area, but companies found that they could find a way around that law. They would log 25 acres and then leave a cushion of trees, then log another 25 acres. There was no way to prove that they were breaking the law because technically they weren't. So basically, the companies got what they wanted, the wood. He also talked about controlled burns of the forest. These burns however, would sometimes get out of control and they would have to run a bulldozer to doze over a line of trees to stop the fire from spreading. All this deforestation has a lot to do with my research prospectus. Deforestation leads to destruction of biodiversity in an ecosystem which causes an indirect effect on other species.