An apology to Mr Kile's for misspelling his name in the above post. Dashed it out late at night and at over 450 words had some culling to do before uploading and so was squeezed a little for time to proof. Still, not good.

A small addition if I may. I wonder if Mr Kile, as the Executive Director of Forest and Wood products Research and Development Corporation, would support the position that the logging industry now pays for the water yield loss incurred through clearfelling within domestic water catchments at the standard rate of other industry?

The modelling is now of quite high standard and would be up to the task. Of course we would need an investment trust as it is doubtful many of these companies will be around for the 100 odd years that it will take for the coupes they log to return to prelogging water yield levels. However I am confident a workable system would be relatively easy to implement.

I'm sure the public, farmers, and other industry who all are forced to pay for their water usage would look more favourably on the logging industry if they were to make this commitment.

Dr Glen Kile, in his role as the Executive Director of Forest and Wood products Research and Development Corporation, is right to point out that less than 0.2 per cent of Melbourne's water catchments is harvested annually to produce a sustainable supply of timber products.
This small amount is not likely to have any major impacts on Melbourne’s Water supply that is currently struggling to meet demand due to population growth, infrastructure shortfall and the current drought.
Dr Kile’s ability to talk on the sustainability of forestry is undoubted as prior to his appointment to the FWPRDC, he was Chief, CSIRO Forestry and Forest Products.
Foresters invented the term sustainability long before ecology, resource management, biodiversity or environmentalism existed as topics.

Practical measures to sustain and conserve forests were spread around the world during the colonial era, including to Australia. This included forest reserves and regulations and controls on how much could be harvested, so as not to exceed regrowth.

Today our concept of sustainability go far beyond timber yield, but include social, spiritual, landscape and amenity values, water quality and quantity and sustained yield of non timber forest products.

These concepts are incorporated into all forest management and are a priority for all sectors of the industry; they are the major focus of research of groups like the FWPRDC and CRC’s for Forestry.

This careful stewardship of our native forests lead to the common mistake of thinking that all forests are pristine wilderness, when in fact much of it has been subject to industrial scale harvesting for a century, including clearfelling and export of woodchips for almost forty years.

Wow Cinders, Who would have thought that foresters were so sensitive that they had regard for the "careful stewardship of our native forests" or that it was a "common mistake to think that all forests are pristine wilderness, when in fact much of it has been subject to industrial scale harvesting for a century, including clearfelling and export of woodchips for almost forty years".
In the scheme of things 40 years is less than a blink of an eye. How does "stewardship" equate to the exploitation of trees which are 200 -300 years old. True sustainability surely means that your foresters will wait until the regrowth has reached maturity (ie 200 - 300 years) before further clerafelling.

My area of interest was Geelong's water supply however there is some good information including visuals on Melbourne's Thompson catchment here. http://www.tcha.org.au/water.html

As explained it makes a dramatic difference to the amount of water yield lost depending on where you log and coupes in high rainfall areas can result in 4 times the effect of those in low rainfall areas. It is just wrong when people keep using the mantra that such a small per annum logging percentage must have little to no effect of water loss. This is not true and comes from either ignorance or deception.

I acknowledge the Green's campaign during the last state election was also incorrect in the wording used on this issue. The Green's candidate I explained the science with was prepared to alter his message to better reflect the facts. Here's hoping the other side is prepared to do the same.

Dr Kile claims are supported by scientific and engineering reports. Reports that include the independent hydrological study of the Otway Ranges by Sinclair Knight Merz that has been misquoted by critic csteele.

In releasing this report 2001, the Minister for Environment , Ms Sherryl Garbutt, said the study showed that claims that the Geelong region’s water shortages could be solved by stopping logging were not backed up by facts.

“Early claims that there would be significant increases in water yield if logging was stopped were a distortion of the study’s findings,” .

No where in the SKM report is csteele’s claim “that logging in the Barwon Dam catchment was responsible for around 10% yield reduction.”

This is a claim made by OREN, a political lobby group and is based on an incorrect interpretation of SKM results that was never intended by the report’s authors.

This is a favorite trick of the green spin masters, other tricks include quoting unpublished figures or thesis, or using references not readily available to the general public.

For csteele to now make this false claim in this discussion, damages the reputation of SKM and makes unjustified criticism of Dr Kile.

The report, available at the Department of Sustainability http://www.dse.vic.gov.au/dse/nrenfor.nsf/childdocs/-F4B79B67B63D8D744A256AA40012A1A3-C6D91D4FDF0213B84A256AA400129538-3D06476972A58EDACA256F810018D772-ABD9EB675D5EADE84A2569D2000BC2DB?open.
The report applyied models to theoretical scenarios of no logging-no bushfires, logging and no bushfires, and bushfires only. The first two will never happen as Australian forests will always be subject to bushfire.

Whilst the SKM predicted some difference in water yield between theoretical scenarios, it also concluded that the “logging only” results in little change in stream flow over the 100 years of the model.

The bushfire scenario was said to:

“result in changes of stream flow (increases and decreases) that are more than double (at some point in time) that the changes caused by the other scenarios.

Will csteele be “prepared to alter his [her] message to better reflect the facts” now that the science has been explained