Western Wood Processing Facilities Map

Created by Jean Daniels, United States Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station.

While trying to follow up on this discussion of the size and shape of the wood products industry.. I ran across the above map. You can click on it to get a better scale to check out your own local industry. After a couple of clicks, you get a much smaller scale where you can see the different colored circles for different industries.

The site where I found the map is the University of Montana’s Bureau of Business and Economics Research Forest Industry section here. There is much useful information, including the Timber Outlooks and the Regional Reports (although I couldn’t find these for recent years).

River-restoration guru to target creek in Colorado’s Hayman wildfire area


From the Denver Post here.

DECKERS — The U.S. Forest Service has deployed a river-restoration guru in a $4.5 million gambit to accelerate recovery on a first segment of the South Platte tributaries ruined a decade ago by a massive human-caused wildfire.

The project launched this week by foresters and private-sector partners will try to rework the altered flow of Trail Creek to make it more natural.
For Fort Collins-based hydrologist Dave Rosgen, this also is a chance to demonstrate techniques increasingly in demand worldwide.
The problem is that the aftermath of the Hayman fire unleashed torrents of sediment — sand and decomposed Pikes Peak​ granite — that slumps from barren mountainsides into an estimated 157 miles of streams.

Before the 2002 fire, for example, Trail Creek carried 1,200 tons of sediment a year. Now foresters say 20,000 tons a year course through the creek, which flows into West Creek, Horse Creek and then the South Platte River​, which is the major source of water for people in the Denver metropolis.
Denver Water managers’ struggle to manage the sediment in both Cheesman and Strontia Springs reservoirs is driving up monthly water bills. At Strontia Springs, the utility is involved in a $29 million project to dredge out 675,000 tons of sediment.
Enter Rosgen.
“This is how Mother Nature does it,” he said Friday, describing his plan to stabilize what has become a sluice for corrosive sediment.
The steep banks will first be reshaped, and fallen tree trunks will be used to reinforce the new channel. Then, the stream bed will be raised by about 7 feet so water carrying sediment disperses into a willow studded plane instead of racing down stream.
“We’re going to basically go back in here and re-establish a braided, meandering channel,” Rosgen, 69, told a gathering of county and federal employees.
Amid budget-cutting, federal environmental stewards have turned to private-sector partners for help containing the damage. The National Forest Foundation and the Coalition for the Upper South Platte coordinated funding, with contributions of $750,000 from ski goliath Vail Associates, $500,000 from Aurora Water and $200,000 from the Gates Family Foundation.

Rosgen has developed formulas for calculating rates of erosion, enabling detailed analysis of mountain slopes, fire impact and hydrology. His team at Wildland Hydrology Inc. has restored dozens of damaged streams in Argentina, Costa Rica, Tanzania and around the western United States.

Ever since the Hayman fire, heavy rains have led to increasingly severe flooding across the scorched burn area. Foresters and volunteers have tried to address this, planting 3.5 million tree seedlings.
“But it seems that 137,000 acres doesn’t heal as quickly as we’d like it to,” said Pikes Peak District Ranger Brent Botts.
Eroding mountainsides and clogged streams eventually would stabilize on their own, Rosgen said, but not until the whole area burned by the fire is reforested — a process expected to take 80 years. Meanwhile, the growing Front Range​ population demands water and healthy mountain fisheries for wildlife and recreation.

That forces a decision of whether to intervene by re-engineering key tributaries, Rosgen said. “We’ll work with the river, not against it” with a goal of “getting back to a natural rate of erosion that is acceptable,” he said.
Over the next year, his crews with heavy machinery “will come as close as we can to duplicating the stable natural form of the rivers and their processes,” Rosgen said. “We will become a copycat of nature.”

Wolves on the Move- Western Oregon

I ran across this and just thought it was interesting..from the Ashland Daily Tidings.

First wolf since 1946 enters southwest Oregon
2-year-old male is in Umpqua River drainage; transmitter locating collar shows his progress

By Mark Freeman
for the Tidings
Posted: 2:00 AM November 02, 2011

A young wolf migrating out of a northeast Oregon pack this fall has reached northeastern Douglas County, becoming the first confirmed wolf in Western Oregon in 65 years.

The 2-year-old male, labeled OR-7, has a transmitter collar on it that showed it crossed Highway 97 and moved across the Cascade crest and into the Umpqua River drainage, where he was last located late Thursday, according to the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife.

The animal set out from his original Imnaha Pack of Wallowa County on Sept. 10, wandering southwest as far as Lake County last week before turning due west and crossing the Cascades, said Russ Morgan, the ODFW’s wolf program coordinator.

“It’s the first one in modern times to go in that direction, and he’s really traveling,” Morgan said. “He could turn around and go back. He could go to California or Idaho. There’s no way to predict it.”

It is the first wolf known to be in Western Oregon since 1946, when a wolf killed in Douglas County was the last Oregon wolf turned in under a bounty program.

Morgan said this wolf — a male born in Oregon in 2009 and collared last February — has traveled more than 250 miles so far on its dispersal journey, and there was no way to guess when or where this wolf version of fleeing the nest will end.

“It’ll be interesting to see where he’s going,” Morgan said. “The best approach is you’ll have to wait and see.”

Most dispersing wolves travel alone, and there was no indication one way or another that OR-7 was joined by any other animals, but Morgan said there was a “high likelihood” other noncollared wolves have reached the Cascades.

Oregon has a minimum population of 23 confirmed wolves since the first wandered in from Idaho in 1999.

There was no state population estimate for the wolves, which are protected by state and federal laws here.

What reception this wolf gets in southwestern Oregon “depends on who you ask,” said Duane Dungannon, spokesman for the Medford-based Oregon Hunters Association.

The OHA has opposed allowing wolves to establish themselves naturally in Oregon, maintaining that their potential impacts on big-game herds and the ranching industry outweigh any benefits.

“Our deer and elk populations suffer enough from cougar predation,” Dungannon said. “It won’t do local game herds any good to deal with wolves.”

Spencer Lennard, project director of Big Wildlife, said the region should embrace this apex predator and let packs develop on public lands here.

Studies in some places show that wolves help keep animals such as deer and elk from grazing freely along creekside riparian areas and damaging fish habitat, Lennard said.

“I think they need to be supported,” Lennard said. “They are critical ecological components to this land.”

The collar on this particular wolf was designed to send a location message to a satellite every six hours, but the animal must be in an area with clear reception for that to occur, Morgan said. It is not uncommon to see days lapse between satellite connection with them, Morgan said.

Wolves have been documented to travel more than 1,000 miles during their dispersal, which is a natural event common to most wildlife, Morgan said.

The Umpqua Basin abuts the northeastern portions of the Rogue River Basin.