Reforestation

Science is clear: Catastrophic wildfire requires forest management

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“Science is clear: Catastrophic wildfire requires forest management” was written by Steve Ellis, Chair of the National Association of Forest Service Retirees (NAFSR), who is a former U.S. Forest Service Forest Supervisor and retired Bureau of Land Management Deputy Director for Operations—the senior career position in that agency’s Washington, D.C., headquarters.

I have extracted a few snippets (Emphasis added) from the above article published by the NAFSR:

1) Last year was a historically destructive wildfire season. While we haven’t yet seen the end of 2021, nationally 64 large fires have burned over 3 million acres. The economic damage caused by wildfire in 2020 is estimated at $150 billion. The loss of communities, loss of life, impacts on health, and untold environmental damage to our watersheds—not to mention the pumping of climate-changing carbon into the atmosphere—are devastating. This continuing disaster needs to be addressed like the catastrophe it is.

2) We are the National Association of Forest Service Retirees (NAFSR), an organization of dedicated natural resource professionals—field practitioners, firefighters, and scientists—with thousands of years of on the ground experience. Our membership lives in every state of the nation. We are dedicated to sustaining healthy National Forests and National Grasslands, the lands managed by the U.S. Forest Service, to provide clean water, quality outdoor recreation, wildlife and fish habitat, and carbon sequestration, and to be more resilient to catastrophic wildfire as our climate changes.

3) As some of us here on the Smokey Wire have been explaining for years, the NAFSR very clearly and succinctly states:
“Small treatment areas, scattered “random acts of restoration” across the landscape, are not large enough to make a meaningful difference. Decades of field observations and peer reviewed research both document the effectiveness of strategic landscape fuel treatments and support the pressing need to do more. The cost of necessary treatments is a fraction of the wildfire damage such treatments can prevent. Today’s wildfires in overstocked forests burn so hot and on such vast acreages that reforestation becomes difficult or next to impossible in some areas. Soil damage and erosion become extreme. Watersheds which supply vital domestic, industrial, and agricultural water are damaged or destroyed.”

4) This summer, America watched with great apprehension as the Caldor Fire approached South Lake Tahoe. In a community briefing, wildfire incident commander Rocky Oplinger described how active management of forestlands assisted firefighters. “When the fire spotted above Meyers, it reached a fuels treatment that helped reduce flame lengths from 150 feet to 15 feet, enabling firefighters to mount a direct attack and protect homes,” The Los Angeles Times quoted him.

5) And in a Sacramento Bee interview in which fire researcher Scott Stephens was asked how much consensus there is among fire scientists that fuels treatments do help, he answered “I’d say at least 99%. I’ll be honest with you, it’s that strong; it’s that strong. There’s at least 99% certainty that treated areas do moderate fire behavior. You will always have the ignition potential, but the fires will be much easier to manage.” I (Steve Ellis) don’t know if it’s 99% or not, but a wildfire commander with decades of experience recently told me this figure would be at least 90%. What is important here is that there is broad agreement among professionals that properly treated landscapes do moderate fire behavior.

6) During my career (Steve Ellis), I have personally witnessed fire dropping from tree crowns to the ground when it hit a thinned forest. So have many NAFSR members. This is an issue where scientist and practitioners agree. More strategic landscape treatments are necessary to help avoid increasingly disastrous wildfires. So, the next time you read or hear someone say that thinning and prescribed fire in the forest does not work, remember that nothing can be further from the truth.

Civilian Climate Corps and Western Reforestation and Mitigation: Rhetoric And/or Reality

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Fire crews carry a hose down a hill as the Caldor Fire burns on both sides of Highway 50 about 10 miles east of Kyburz, Calif., on Thursday, Aug. 26, 2021, as the fire pushes east prompting evacuation orders all the way to Echo Summit. The Caldor Fire, the nation’s top priority for firefighting resources, grew to more than 213 square miles (551 square kilometers) southwest of Lake Tahoe but containment remained at 12%, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. Climate change has made the West warmer and drier in the past 30 years and will continue to make the weather more extreme and wildfires more destructive, according to scientists. (Sara Nevis/The Sacramento Bee via AP) I used this photo because it was in the Climate Corp AP story.

 

I’d like to start a discussion on a topic I’ve been wondering about, and that Bob Zybach brought up peripherally in a previous discussion of reforestation history.

I know that there is a massive push for a Climate Corps.  It appears that they would plant trees, and do wildfire mitigation, among a host of other things.  But, as Bob pointed out, previously when the Forest Service had big reforestation programs, it went from native workers to undocumented immigrants (how much an artifact of not being desirable jobs/ FS contracting policy?).  The 80’s were really different from today, but then so were the 30s (original CCC). And working in the woods has probably not changed all that much (or has it?)

 

Then there’s the issue of our current low paid positions going unfilled AKA labor shortage.  Certainly it would be an adventure for those wanting to get away from home and not join the military. But the military has had the problem with recruits being overweight and out of shape, I wonder whether the new CCC might have the same problem?

In this AP story:

While the jobs should pay at least $15 an hour, those likely to join the climate corps “are not doing it for the compensation,″ Neguse said. “They know it’s important to connect to nature and do important work for their state and the nation.″

Details are still being worked out, but Neguse and other Democrats say the program should pay “a living wage″ while offering health care coverage and support for child care, housing, transportation and education.

 

It seems to me that those are fundamentally different conditions than during the Depression, the origin of the CCC.  Also perhaps more people then (raised on farms?) were used to hard physical labor?

Here’s what a professor at Syracuse says:

David Popp, a professor of public administration at Syracuse University, said a key distinction between the original Civilian Conservation Corps and the new climate contingent is that the U.S. economy is not in a depression — great or otherwise — as it was during Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency.

While U.S. employers added just 235,000 jobs in August, the unemployment rate decreased slightly to 5.2% as the economy continues to recover from the coronavirus pandemic.

Most of those being targeted for the new climate corps “could find employment elsewhere,″ Popp said, noting a proliferation of help-wanted signs at retail businesses across the nation.

“I don’t know that an unemployed coal worker in West Virginia is going to move to Montana to take a minimum-wage job to restore streams,″ he said.

On the other hand, some of his own students are highly motivated by the climate crisis and may want to spend a year or two on an outdoor job that helps address an existential threat to the planet, Popp said.

“Many young people are very passionate about the environment, and they may see this as an opportunity to do something about the environment and still get paid for it,″ he said.

 

A bit puzzling is what Senator Markey of Massachusetts said:

Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., a prominent supporter of the climate corps, said such criticism overlooks important benefits.

The program will help communities recover from climate disasters such as Hurricane Ida and Western wildfires while creating “good-paying jobs that can turn into clean-economy careers,″

I’m not sure reforestation or cutting and burning trees have ever led to “clean-economy” careers, but I’m sure they are different kinds of jobs in other parts of the country.  Say, solar installation might have a completely different career path than tree planting. Perhaps they would go  to school afterwards (at the same schools they would otherwise attend)?  And perhaps we have a pathway that has led already to many land managers and park ranger careers-  wildland firefighting.

And also puzzling..

Rep. Joe Neguse, a Colorado Democrat who has co-sponsored a climate corps bill, said it’s important to train the next generation of U.S. land managers, park rangers and other stewards of our natural resources.

“This bold investment is a necessary response to the climate crisis and prioritizes the maintenance and upkeep of public lands,″ he said.

 

I’m not disagreeing with him, but there are places where this training occurs, or at least the training that qualifies people to do those jobs in the federal government.  We’d have to ask the folks, say at CSU (in Neguse’s district) if they have enough students in the pipeline to fill future jobs.  In our world, there has always tended to be more people than jobs.. perhaps this has changed and we need more people in the pipeline?

Like so many political ideas that sound so plausible in DC, I wonder if these concepts have been vetted by those with experience running these kinds of programs.  Or maybe a way forward would be to try it on a smaller scale in different parts of the country, doing different kinds of projects, and learn by doing. We know our wildfire folks have been having trouble with Covid in camps.. is this a good time to start camps, or wouldn’t there be camps? Then there’s the question of locational social justice (I just made up that term).. if these jobs are in underserved or poor communities, should local people have some kind of priority? Maybe those concerns are all addressed in the bill- I haven’t read it, hopefully someone out there is familiar with it.

So I’m raising the question here.. does anyone have recent experience on how this might work in practice? Do States, our laboratories of democracy, have successful examples? Do our friends who run Job Corps centers and fire camps have any relevant observations?  And, of course, the historical perspective on major reforestation efforts is always welcome.

 

Custer-Gallatin Forest Plan: On Climate Models and Planting Trees

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This is an interesting article in the Bozeman Chronicle about their forest plan.

A slash pile near Fairy Lake Road can be seen below a recently logged section of the Custer Gallatin National Forest in the Bridger Mountains on Wednesday, Sept. 29, 2021.
Samuel Wilson/ Chronicle/ Report for America

Many points of interest here.. but I’ll call one out. There’s also an interesting discussion with Dr. Phil Higuera of U of Montana on fuel treatments.

Areas where ponderosa pine forests burned years ago east of Livingston are showing little to no signs of recovery.

That’s according to Cathy Whitlock, Regents Professor Emerita of Earth sciences at Montana State University and co-lead on the newly released Greater Yellowstone Climate Assessment.

“There needs to be a seed-source for the forest to recover, and then those seeds need to become seedlings and develop into mature trees,” Whitlock said. “The concern is, at low elevations it’s just getting too dry for that to happen.”

Scientists predict that as drought and wildfire ramp up in the coming decades, forest ecosystems will change. In some parts of the Custer Gallatin National Forest, trees that die off may never grow back.

It’s interesting to me that when we were interested in reforesting dry ponderosa pine sites in the 80’s (that also had seed source, seed crop size, competition from other plants, munching by predators, mycorrhizae and all those associated variables)… we assumed we could overcome those things and worked on them by a considering it a technical challenge, messing with nursery practices, transportation practices, seedling storage, slurries, vexar and all that. As I’ve mentioned here before in Area 4 (then the Ochoco, Winema, Deschutes and Fremont) we hired a person just to work on that .. the Area Reforestation Specialist. On the west side, they had fewer challenges but even SW Oregon had a major investment in Fundamental Fir with OSU. I wonder how many academics and FS researchers specialize in reforestation nowadays?

Are we assuming that trees won’t live in the future because they’re not coming back naturally? Because in the past, we looked at “not coming back naturally” and said “guess we need to plant, they’re not coming back on their own”. The fact is that we don’t know how the climate of the future will affect the microclimates that trees experience, so my view would be “let’s not give up yet.” A few examples are that we know that aspect is important, as are soil type, competitors and so on. There’s a major scale differential between climate models and the environment relevant to a planting project or even a planting program. And local folks have knowledge of these local kinds of difference (where does the snow stay longest? what different soils are there?)

Now we have arrived in a puzzling philosophical eddy between “leave it alone because that’s natural” and “climate change isn’t natural so should we open up manipulation for various reasons?”
Certainly ESA, even without climate change, has led to an array of manipulations including captive breeding, reintroductions and so on. So perhaps the question isn’t “should we manipulate?” but “what’s a good enough reason?”. Which is definitely a values question, not a science question.

Do we want trees back? For wildlife, people, watersheds, carbon etc.
If so, what are we willing to do about it?

If we take the longer timescale view, the infrastructure that supported large and successful planting programs in the 80’s has gone away, and the people who were involved in these efforts are mostly long retired. And one of the Forest Service’s and partners’ current challenges is to crank back up to reforest after large fires. That time gap of infrastructure availability and knowledge transmission will also make new planting efforts almost starting from scratch again. My point being that I hope people don’t point to some lack of success and assume the reason is climate change. If we’d assumed that in the 80’s, there’d be a lot fewer ponderosa pine trees out there sucking up carbon. It was hard enough to reforest dry sites when we assumed we could, but hadn’t yet figured out how.

Happy Arbor Day! And The Satellite Ping-Pong of Planting Trees

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I’m not sure that this photo is of the planted forest, but part of the Bessey Ranger District on the Nebraska National Forest is from a 20,000-acre (80.9 km2) planting, the largest human-planted forest in the United States. It is greatly enjoyed by critters and people.

Arbor Day. It’s good thing, right? We can trust experts at Extension, NRCS, State Forestry and the Forest Service to help people plant trees where it’s a good idea, and not plant trees where it’s not, right? Well, thanks to climate change and the Satellite Gaze, some have gotten the opposite impression.  Tree planting has become controversial through what I call “Satellite Ping-Pong.” It’s an infinite game of discussing different assumptions about enormous and global questions by volleying between specific places and concerns. But the people directly involved in making decisions, including landowners and communities, are never involved in the game. Others claim to speak for them with varying degrees of accuracy.

First, someone does a study on what tree planting might do around the world. This involves innumerable assumptions and pretty much no input from people as to whether they want trees or not. Or whether trees would live. Or get eaten by ungulates, livestock, insects, fall prey to disease, or get burned up, or any of the (to paraphrase Hamlet) “the thousand natural shocks that arboreal life is heir to.”

This was in Science in 2019:

The restoration of trees remains among the most effective strategies for climate change mitigation. We mapped the global potential tree coverage to show that 4.4 billion hectares of canopy cover could exist under the current climate. Excluding existing trees and agricultural and urban areas, we found that there is room for an extra 0.9 billion hectares of canopy cover, which could store 205 gigatonnes of carbon in areas that would naturally support woodlands and forests. This highlights global tree restoration as one of the most effective carbon drawdown solutions to date. However, climate change will alter this potential tree coverage. We estimate that if we cannot deviate from the current trajectory, the global potential canopy cover may shrink by ~223 million hectares by 2050, with the vast majority of losses occurring in the tropics. Our results highlight the opportunity of climate change mitigation through global tree restoration but also the urgent need for action.

I have to give them credit, they did admit “we really don’t have a clue if trees will live or not due to climate change,” so at least one source of tree death was taken into account. They also say “one of the most effective,”  not “let’s keep emitting fossil carbon.”

You might call this the “serve” in Satellite Ping Pong. Then there started a vast array of critiques. What fascinates me is the way that the stories talk about the real places I know, and who has the authority to speak. For example, this by the Yale 360 pub (well, it’s kind of Yale’s, but kind of separate).

Because of climate change, forests are increasingly vulnerable to destruction by drought, fire, insects, diseases, and storms, which releases carbon back into the atmosphere. Recent research shows that large areas of the American West may have permanently lost their forest cover. Droughts, wildfire, and insect and disease outbreaks are becoming more frequent, and forests are being replaced by grassy shrublands after these disturbances, mostly because it’s now too hot and dry for new generations of saplings to survive. A review paper published in Science last year shows that these threats, although significant and intensifying, aren’t always well understood and are difficult to compensate for. It’s hard to predict how many trees they’ll kill in the near future and how much carbon that will put into the atmosphere, but it’s likely to be considerable.

Not only might tree planting fail to reliably sequester carbon, trees can also heat the atmosphere more than many other habitat types. Kathleen Smart, a post-doctoral researcher at Rhodes University in South Africa, says that replacing surfaces like grasslands or deserts —which, being pale, reflect more solar radiation into outer space — with relatively dark-colored tree plantations can have a heating effect on a local level, and that regional-scale land-use changes have been shown to affect climate and rainfall patterns

As a veteran of efforts to reforest dry areas in the 80’s,  I’m surprised that the solution to not getting trees back is now “give up, it must be climate change.”  Before we thought “it’s a coincidence of not having a good seed year when the soil is still exposed.”

And I  can only speak for the grasslands and deserts I know, but they are not likely to grow trees except along streams (why not replace dying cottonwoods if they aren’t reproducing themselves?) and for windbreaks. Windbreaks help reduce energy use, produce wildlife habitat, and so on. But not at any scale to help with climate change. And that’s OK.

Forrest Fleischman was quoted in this one:

To be clear, critics of the campaign are still fans of trees. They still think forests play a role in solving the climate crisis — their skepticism mostly centers around efforts to plant trees in places they weren’t before, or to plant large swaths of a single species to essentially create “tree plantations” instead of real forests. Another big concern surrounding the call for planting a trillion trees is that it could distract from other efforts to slow down climate change, like stopping fossil fuel pollution and deforestation in the first place.

“You don’t need to plant a tree to regenerate a forest,” Fleischman tells The Verge. Forests can heal on their own if they’re allowed to, he says, and these forests end up being more resilient and more helpful in the climate fight than newly planted plots of trees. He argues that the best way to ensure there are enough trees standing to trap the carbon dioxide heating up the planet is to secure the political rights of people who depend on forests — primarily indigenous peoples whose lands are frequently encroached upon by industry and governments.

There is research backing him up. The world’s leading authority on climate science, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has recognized that when local communities’ land rights are jeopardized, it poses risks to both people and the planet.

I disagree with Forrest on “forests can heal on their own”. If we take a place like the Hayman, where the nearest seed sources are far away, I think it’s better to have tree cover sooner- not just for climate, but for wildlife, watershed (holding soils) and so on. Sidenote: there are exactly the same “local people” arguments questioning another international initiative, 30 x 30.

And I guess the argument that planting trees (as described in the Ping Pong discourse) distracts from stopping fossil fuel pollution is strange. You could say that about any non-energy interventions. So let’s just let the land-use types bow out… including the anti-pastoralist crowd, 30 x 30 and so on.  We’ll just work on resilience, thank you. Whoops, I guess we need to plant some trees for that..

 

Trillion Trees and Natural Carbon Storage Act

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We’ve been talking about developing an actual carbon policy for forest management.  Republicans have been willing to concede that planting trees would be beneficial, but others say that is not enough.  We now have a more comprehensive bipartisan legislative proposal that is getting some attention – The Trillion Trees and Natural Carbon Storage Act.  According to the Washington Post, “The forestry proposal is the first to emerge from the Climate Solutions Caucus, which Coons and Braun launched a little more than a year ago.”  It “directs the U.S. Forest Service to set goals for how much carbon the forests, grasslands, wetlands and some coastal areas should sequester from the atmosphere.”

According to sponsor Senator Young (R-IN), among the things it would do is:

  • Requires that USDA establish objectives for increasing the net carbon stock of American forests, grasslands, wetlands, and coastal blue carbon habitats.

Young’s website provides a link to the bill.  The specific language applicable to the Forest Service is to establish within two years, “objectives for increased net carbon stock for the forest, grassland, wetland, and coastal blue carbon habitat ecosystems of the United States that are owned or managed by the Federal Government.” The objectives “shall be established at levels that assist in achieving (A) the optimally feasible and ecologically appropriate increase in the total net carbon stock.” Those objectives, “shall be based on information relating to the maintenance or restoration of the ecological integrity of the ecosystems described in subsection (a), including maintaining or restoring ecologically appropriate forest, grassland, wetland, and blue carbon habitat structure, function, composition, and connectivity…”  That sounds like it is straight out of the 2012 Planning Rule.  There is no mention of national forest planning per se in the bill, but it is hard to see any other vehicle for implementing this policy and these objectives on national forests.

Young’s website also states that, “This legislation is supported by The Nature Conservancy, National Wildlife Federation, Environmental Defense Fund, World Wildlife Fund, National Audubon Society, Bipartisan Policy Center, American Forest Foundation, American Conservation Coalition, National Association of State Foresters, Conservation International, and Citizens for Responsible Energy Solutions.”

According the Environmental Defense Fund, it “follows recommendations from climate scientists and nonprofit organizations to focus on measuring climate impact instead of number of trees planted.”  EDF’s summary:

  • Expand existing U.S. Forest Service carbon accounting to include grasslands, wetlands and coastal ecosystems, in addition to forests.
  • Ensure that forests and other ecosystems will be valued not only for harvested materials, but also for important climate mitigation functions.
  • Measure progress using “net carbon stock,” a metric that reflects the dynamic nature of ecosystems and how carbon stores can grow or shrink over time.
  • Direct the Forest Service to share expertise, including technical capacity to increase carbon stored in urban forests, with states and recipients of U.S. foreign aid.
  • Provide funding to alleviate the nation’s 1.3-million-acre backlog of reforestation projects.

One section of the bill intends to provide financing “to facilitate the sale of credits in the voluntary carbon market or other recognized environmental market…”  However (as described in the same Washington Post article linked above), carbon offsets have become an issue in relation to the nomination of Mary Nichols, the longtime head of the California Air Resources Board, to be the new director of the Environmental Protection Agency.

One central point of contention is her achievement of California’s cap-and-trade program for greenhouse gas emissions. The program allows companies to offset harmful emissions by paying for forestation or other projects that decrease gases elsewhere. But opponents say it amounts to a license to pollute with poor and minority communities bearing the brunt of environmental harms.

Carbon has also come up in relation to the nomination of Tom Vilsack to be USDA Secretary.  The chance to work on Biden’s climate agenda may have made the job more attractive for Vilsack to return.  Carbon seems to offer an interesting opportunity for the USDA to actually unite its agricultural and forestry forces behind a common goal.

Planting Aspen Trees in Ski Country: Tiny Effort Provokes Maximal Skepticism

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Part of video from Vail Daily News story

In the Sunday Denver Post was a reprint of a story from the Vail Daily. The headline was “should aspen replace lodgepole in local forests?”.

This is about a partnership to plant aspen in Summit County, described by TNC this way:

The partners are testing the potential for increases in aspen trees to act as natural fuel breaks for wildfire at the 46-acre Barney Ford open space site, just outside of downtown Breckenridge. Since aspens are less flammable and have a higher moisture content than conifers, they may act to reduce fire severity. Adding more aspen in forests also has wildlife benefits, as it increases insect and plant biodiversity and creates valuable habitat for elk, moose and deer.

Seems like a small, innocuous project, right?

Back to the news story:

“We were very intrigued with the idea of how can we help establish aspens in Summit County,” Lorch said. “One of the issues we see is that as we do the buffers around our communities for wildfire purposes, most of what’s growing back is the same lodgepole thicket that we had before. So in a short period of time, 20 years or so, we’ll have the same issues with fire concerns as we had prior to the cutting. We’ve done some places where we’ve thinned things in order to try to avoid having such a fuels load, but really aspens, and having a more diverse forest, is a much better plan in the long run.”

One interesting thing was this take (drive-by?) on The Nature Conservancy by Tom Veblen, a professor at the University of Colorado.

It’s true that aspens are less flammable than pine trees. And trying to populate former lodgepole zones with aspens can be a worthwhile cause, says forest ecologist Thomas Veblen with the University of Colorado.

“If the financial resources are available to spend a lot of money on forest management, that’s a worthy goal, to increase the area of aspen, and that’s likely to decrease the spread of fires in the future,” Veblen said.

But The Nature Conservancy’s studies on fire fuels reduction, which includes examining aspen repopulation in areas clear cut of lodgepole pine, may end up helping, most of all, The Nature Conservancy, Veblen says.

“They have a structure of people and resources that can do fire mitigation, they’ve got to keep it funded, so there’s a self interest there,” Veblen said. “They have contracts with the Forest Service to do a lot of forest management, so The Nature Conservancy, from that perspective, has a self interest in promoting fuels reduction.”

I called the folks at TNC about this, and while they were interviewed by Mr. LaConte about the project, they were not asked to comment on Veblen’s assertion, and say that it is incorrect.

University of Montana fire ecologist Richard L. Hutto is skeptical of The Nature Conservancy’s efforts.

“I don’t see wholesale conversion of something to something else in the name of fire safety,” he said. “The thing that determines fire behavior and whether it’s going to get crazy is temperature, humidity and wind, not fuels.”

We’ve gotten from diversifying the forest to “wholesale conversion”. I guess that’s building a straw person. We fans of the robust and resilient Pinus contorta know how unlikely that result would be under any scenario. It’s a fairly strong statement to say that fuels don’t “determine fire behavior”.. maybe that’s Hutto’s careful use of language but certainly fuels impact fire behavior.

Another fire ecologist (Baker) says that they should spend money instead on adapting the community and should work with Fire Adapted Colorado (I think it’s likely that they are already doing this). But are fire ecologists good sources of info on what communities “should” spend money on?
Baker also uses the “it doesn’t always work” argument – “in aspen stands many, but not all fires hit the ground.” I’d take “many but not all” over “none” myself.

If Fire Adapted Colorado sounds familiar, it works closely (according to its webpage) with FAC Net, which is of course, a partnership with … The Nature Conservancy.

Fire Adapted Colorado is an independent non-profit organization closely associated and born out of the Fire Adapted Community Learning Network (FAC Net). FAC Net is a national network of people working to build wildfire resilience capacity in wildfire-prone communities. It is supported through a partnership among The Nature Conservancy, the Watershed Research and Training Center and the USDA Forest Service. FAC Net’s purpose is to connect and support people and communities who are striving to live more safely with wildfire. A fire adapted community is a knowledgeable, engaged community that is taking actions that will enable them to safely accept fire as part of the surrounding landscape. For more information about FAC Net, visit www.fireadaptednetwork.org.

I’ve always thought that it is interesting when people get together and do something they think is good, and how these stories are reported. For example, how many inches are devoted to description of the actions compared to critics (in the Denver Post reprint, it was almost 50/50). And why people from elsewhere (Steamboat, Boulder, Wyoming, Montana), academics and not, are thought to be experts on managing areas around Breckinridge. And when the doers get a chance to respond to critics.

The Bipartisan REPLANT Act- Does Everyone Agree?

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Forest Service crew plants trees. Michael Giagio, Colorado Springs Gazette

Thanks to NAFSR for their post about this. Does everyone think this proposed legislation is a good thing?
Off the top of my head, I can only think that the folks who are currently collecting the monies (if there are any such people) might not like it. Or perhaps that the difference currently goes into the Treasury which does need the funds. Still, it doesn’t seem like a lot of money, relatively speaking (a billion here and a billion there..).

Here are the introducers of the bill: Congressman Jimmy Panetta (D-CA), Congressman Mike Simpson (R-ID), Congresswoman Kim Schrier, M.D. (D-WA), and Congressman Doug LaMalfa (R-CA) introduced the Repairing Existing Public Land by Adding Necessary Trees Act or the REPLANT Act, legislation to expand funding for the U.S. I don’t know if it’s going anywhere but…

REPLANT Act
Repairing Existing Public Lands by Adding Necessary Trees
The REPLANT Act would:
• Remove the cap on the reforestation trust fund, so that the Forest Service would receive all the monies generated from imported wood products and lumber tariffs.
o The Forest Service currently receives $30 million/year for the Reforestation Trust Fund. The yearly authorization for the Reforestation Trust Fund has not increased since it was established 40 years ago.
o Monies are generated from imported wood products and lumber tariffs. The 10-year annual average amount of tariffs collected on those products is nearly $124 million per year ($309 million in 2019).
o The Reforestation Trust fund provides most of the funding for post-disturbance reforestation on national forests. Reforestation needs caused by wildfire, insects and disease, and weather events have increased and collectively account for 85% of reforestation needs on national forests.
o To address our current and anticipated reforestation needs over the next 10 years, it is estimated to cost approximately 1.8 billion, or $183 million annually.
o Raising or eliminating the cap on the reforestation trust fund would help to close the funding gap and enable the Agency to more fully address reforestation and stand improvement needs across the national forests.
• Require the Chief to work with the Regional Foresters to create a list of priority reforestation projects to promote effective reforestation following unplanned events;
• Emphasize using Stewardship contracting and Good Neighbor Agreement authorities to conduct reforestation activities and directs the Forest Service to quantify the backlog of
replanting needs; and
• Require an annual report to Congress on progress and number of acres in need of reforestation.

To read the full version of the Bill, click on this link –

Touchless reforestation

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Drone technology is being used for tree-planting in response to afforestation and carbon sequestration needs, including use after wildfires. How might this change national forest management?

To quickly plant around a trillion trees—a goal that some researchers have estimated could store more than 200 gigatons of carbon—Flash Forest argues that new technology is needed. In North America, trees need to grow 10-20 years before they efficiently store carbon, so to address climate change by midcentury, trees need to begin growing as quickly as possible now. “I think that drones are absolutely necessary to hit the kind of targets that we’re saying are necessary to achieve some of our carbon sequestration goals as a global society,” she says.

But to restore forests that have already been lost, the drones can work more quickly and cheaply than humans planting with shovels. Flash Forest’s tech can currently plant 10,000 to 20,000 seed pods a day; as the technology advances, a pair of pilots will be able to plant 100,000 trees in a day (by hand, someone might typically be able to plant around 1,500 trees in a day, Ahlstrom says.) The company aims to bring the cost down to 50 cents per tree, or around a fourth of the cost of some other tree restoration efforts.

This has obvious implications for tree-planting crews, but how about something like salvage logging?  Other issues?

More research on less tree growth after fire

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(RJ Sangosti, The Denver Post)

 

 

This article summarizes some recent research on the topic:

Among Stevens-Rumann,’s work was a 2017 study of nearly 1,500 sites charred by 52 wildfires in the U.S. Rocky Mountains. Her research found that lower elevation trees had a tough time naturally regenerating in areas that burned between 2000 and 2015 compared with sites affected between 1985 and 1999, largely due to drier weather conditions.

More recently, a 2019 study written by her colleague Kerry Kemp found that both Douglas fir and Ponderosa pine seedlings in the Idaho’s Rocky Mountains — just south of B.C. — were also struggling in low-lying burned areas due to warmer temperatures, leading to lower tree densities.

Both studies attribute climate change to be the lead cause of why the trees are struggling to grow back in certain fire-scarred areas.

As a result, some ecosystems will no longer be able to support tree species. Instead they may convert to grasslands, she said.

We’ve talked about this before (for example, here).  But I would like to know how this kind of information is being incorporated into long-term planning for timber harvest levels. In accordance with the requirement for sustainability on national forests, we should be assuming forest growth consistent with the natural range of variation, which should reflect the effects of climate change on future forests.  What I would expect to be seeing based on this kind of research is reduced area suitable for timber production because it would become too dry, and reduced volume resulting from reduced density, slower growth rates and more frequent fires.  “Sustained yield” means that projections of lower future timber yields may lead to reduced near-term volume. I’ve looked at the timber volume documentation for a few forest plan revisions, and I haven’t found anything there about climate change (there’s usually an unconnected section on the effects of climate change somewhere).  (Projected timber harvest volumes are not tending to go down in revised forest plans.)  Maybe that just requires digging deeper than the public-facing documents or maybe it’s not happening.   Does anyone know more about this?

Midwest timber wars revisited

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For the first time in nearly three decades, the Shawnee National Forest in Illinois has proposed a commercial timber harvest of mostly native oaks and hickories. And environmental activists whose high-profile fight against logging in the 1990s led to a 17-year moratorium are once again raising alarms.

Lisa Helmig, acting forest supervisor with the Shawnee National Forest, said the plan is rooted in the best available science about how to maintain the keystone oak ecosystem that is native to the Shawnee foothills.  “The oak ecosystem has been in place here in the central hardwood region for 5,000 years,” she said. But Helmig said the ecosystem is at risk due to a lack of natural or man-made disturbances, such as fire, storms and, yes, even logging. Without these disturbances, non-native, shade-tolerant sugar maple and beech trees sprout up and fill in the forest’s midstory, she said.

The activists have filed an objection, based largely on their past experience with timber harvest on the Forest.

The trees that have grown up to replace the harvested oaks and hickories are mostly 28-year-old stands of “undesirable” beeches and maples.  “When you think about how many oaks were here, it’s heart-wrenching,” Wallace said “Had they not cut the oaks, we’d have oaks here,” Stearns added. In addition to the Farview site, in their letter they write that we also returned to the North End Ecological Restoration project logged in Pope County in the late 1990s. “Little to no oak and hickory have been visibly restored.” They cited other examples, as well.

This is the root of their concern: What the Shawnee National Forest’s leadership claims is happening isn’t.

Asked about their concerns, Helmig said that her “gut reaction” is that the Forest Service likely didn’t follow through with what should be a multiphase treatment. Helmig said she’s confident that the Forest Service is committed to seeing (this) project through… “We have a wonderful silviculturist on staff now,” Helmig said. “He’s been here five years and is absolutely fantastic.”

Hopefully we can assume that there has been a science-based determination that ecological integrity requires regenerating some young oaks and hickories.  But implementation unfortunately still boils down to “trust us,” and “we’re different now.”   (But then the Forest evicted the media from the objection meeting, wrongly according to the Washington Office.)