Tuesday, April 19, 2016

Forest Patterns: Dice

A while back I noted a forest harvest checker pattern in northeast Washington (landscape-checkers-in-washington-state). That post got linked to by a site called craked.com and they called the image gods-chess-board.

While scanning through Google earth for researching purposes I stumbled across what one might call God's Dice.



With chess patterns and dice patterns, maybe some clever forester will lay out a backgammon harvest.

The area shown above is within the Capital Forest, a large block of State Trust land managed by the Department of Natural Resources. I am not fully up on the habitat that these circles are supporting or enhancing. The circles or inverted circles for the case of the "3" above are a means of providing a mix of age stands. At some future date there will be stands of open mature timber for spotted owl, marbled murlet or other mature tree canopy dependent species. 

3 comments:

Hollis said...

Interesting! So are they be somewhat common--if you find them occasionally?

Geoff said...

I am trying to think of a silvicultural explanation and nothing comes to mind. It's not spotted owl, or murrelet because that requires expansive continuous and contiguous habitat. Probably some narrow endemic species, and someone just decided to be cute. The even distribution, and the same size of gap and trees stand is what's odd to me.

Anonymous said...

Obviously forestry crop circles