1 people, esp. employees, who are no longer useful:
When she took over the agency, she streamlined the operation by getting rid of a lot of dead wood.
2 people or things that are no longer useful or effective:
We think that 76% of all retail money is invested in funds which are effectively dead wood.
get rid of/clear out the dead wood If the company is to improve its performance, it needs to take this opportunity to get rid of some of the deadwood.
The canopy is very open causing exposed conditions within the forest, and dead wood above the forest floor is usually very dry.
They found no difference in the amount of dead wood by decomposition class among life zones.
To estimate the annual dead wood net accumulation, all quadrats and transects were resampled again 1 y later.
Dead wood in the form of snags and dead-wood patches a ccounted for approximately 40% of all foraging observations.
Decomposition state (solid, partially decomposed, fully decomposed) was noted for each piece of fallen dead wood.
Dead wood is an important component of forest ecosystems.
The amount of total dead wood was 3- to 14-fold greater in burned forests compared with unburned forests.
The decomposition rates of dead wood can not be understood without information about the saprotrophic organisms involved.
