00:02Retired teacher Geoff Thornton has a front yard seat to an experiment in forest management, eco thinning.
00:09As far as I'm concerned it's logging by euphemism, environmental thinning, what does it mean?
00:16His Pemberton property is sandwiched between sites where trees are removed or thinned from sections of forest.
00:23I mean these are decent sized trees that would have grown into something spectacular.
00:29They've left all the crappy ones.
00:31After banning native forest logging in 2024, the WA government is trialling ecological thinning across the state.
00:39Ecological thinning is designed to go to those sites, remove a substantial portion of the smaller stems
00:46and allow the forest to regrow in a structure that's going to more rapidly get to an old growth form
00:53than it probably would have otherwise.
00:55The ABC was invited by the Department of Biodiversity Conservation and Attractions to compare two sites.
01:02This one untouched since it was logged and this one which was thinned several years ago.
01:08You can have a look at how stressed that tree is and we've compared that with the unthinned area and
01:14the trees in the thinned area are less stressed.
01:17The government says 3,000 hectares of state forest has been thinned so far with up to 150,000 hectares
01:24being considered for thinning.
01:26But some scientists dispute the benefits of eco thinning, warning it makes forests more susceptible to bushfires.
01:33When you come through and you thin and take out most of the trees, you're actually undermining the resilience of
01:38the forest rather than boosting the resilience of the forest.
01:41The Environment Minister Matthew Swinburne said ecological thinning is backed by science and will help make southwest forests more resilient
01:51with a review expected to take place in the next two years.
01:55The Permittance Committee
01:55Let's encourage you.
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