[hinkley]

I think you need to look a bit closer at the pacific coastal rain forests. Even if you had a tree monoculture (which you don't), the amount and number of lichen and moss on untouched, old or even second growth trees is exhorbitant. Those in turn host a huge variety of other organisms.

The number of edible natives is also respectable, and those didn't come from nowhere. They were here all the time in those 'homogenous' zones.

[sandworm101]

I lived in that area for years. And i said homegenous canopy, not monoculture. The blanket canopy works for certain trees, but not for all and certainly not for all animals. Birds like eagles cannot hunt through forrests. Deer dont get as much to eat with diminished sunlight getting to the ground. The edges of clearcuts, the transition from apex canopy to bare soil in the cut, are the most diverse and animal-friendly zones of that forest.

[hinkley]

I think part of the problem here is just lack of age. If fully grown western red cedar falls, it will strike other trees, knocking them down or shearing them off on one side, weakening one of those and potentially setting up a game of dominoes that takes three centuries to play out.

That cedar will lie on the forest floor for decades, hardly decaying (or rather, it would if we stopped meddling). No new cedars will grow in that spot quickly, but hemlock may root on the side of the trunk, fifteen feet off the ground in the moss. Between the precarious perch and hemlock being hemlock, that tree will die in turn, creating a new opening that might contain cedar again.