Forest Service: We need more fires

An article in the Missoulian yesterday discussed “Toward Shared Stewardship Across Landscapes: An Outcome-based Investment Strategy,” a new Forest Service initiative that “rethinks the agency’s approach to wildfire, invasive species, drought and disease.”  It seeks a more coordinated and broader-scale approach with the states.  It seems to focus mostly on “systems that evolved with frequent fire.”

“Pre-settlement, 20 percent of California was on fire every year,” Phipps said. “That’s the scale of the problem. Lots of communities are doing wildfire protection planning, but they’ve been looking at, on average, 50 times less than the large landscapes we need to be concerned about.

“This is not about pruning trees,” Phipps continued. “Today, on average we’re treating about 1 to 2 percent of the area we need. We need to create conditions where 30 to 40 percent of that area can be treated with low-intensity ground fire before we get a significant reduction of risk.”

Rawlings also acknowledged that prescribed burning was a more inexpensive way of treating the forest than harvesting. And according to Forest Service research, more burning must happen for even productive timber land to stay healthy. Examinations of last year’s Rice Ridge and Lolo Peak fires near Missoula showed that even heavily logged timber stands had little effect on the big fires’ progress. But past burn scars and prescribed burn areas did slow or redirect the fires.

“We know in these fire-adapted systems, there’s no substitute for fire,” Phipps said. “Even in areas where there’s commercial value, if we want to reduce the fuel density of forests, we still have to bring fire back.”

That raises several challenges. The first is how to reshape public opinion about the need for fire. That means getting people used to having smoky air in the spring and fall, when prescribed burns can take place under safer conditions and release up to 10 times less toxic pollutants than mid-summer megafires.

“Prior planning opens up possibilities for us,” Phipps said. “In a year like this year, it’s not a good strategy to take risks and allow fire to roam on initial attack. But two or three years out of 10, we can allow fire to roam.”

“We need to mutually agree where the best places for investment are,” French said. “The way to get ahead of this is mutual, collaborative, cooperative work across the communities affected. We can’t do it alone.”

It looks like they missed an opportunity to promote the relevance of forest planning to making the strategic decisions about where we consider to be “fire-adapted systems” (or other areas) where active fuels management would be appropriate.

Does a Fire-Ravaged Forest Need Human Help to Recover?

That’s the title of this article.  It starts out with Chad Hanson walking the Rim Fire in California, so I thought there would be some interest here.  Like so many things, the answer I get from this is “it depends.”  It first depends on what the desired condition is.

Several months after the Rim Fire was extinguished, Eric Holst, a vice president of the Environmental Defense Fund, penned a blog stating that “letting nature heal itself” after a high-intensity fire is likely to result in a forest dominated by shrubs for many decades.”

As if that result is inherently wrong.  Whether that is a desired outcome or not is the kind of issue that should be addressed strategically through forest planning.  It may be fine from an ecological standpoint.  If the plan determines that speedier regeneration is needed for old growth species or economic reasons, that should be debated and decided at the plan level.

Then there is the science question of whether that would really be the outcome.  That depends on the nature of the site and the fire.  Regeneration problems seem to be the exception rather than the rule in the Bob Marshall Wilderness in Montana:

“The exception, he says, is in areas that have reburned in less than 20 years, too soon to allow for a seed crop to mature, especially on the west- and south-facing slopes that are hotter and drier.”

The key question to me then seems to be whether salvage logging in susceptible areas reduces the chance of reburns.  That is a determination that could be required at the project level by a forest plan standard (for those areas with a desired condition for rapid revegetation).

The site-specific effects of each salvage project would also need to be determined (and could provide reasons to not log despite the authority in the forest plan to do so), because …

“The scientific literature on post-salvage logging is contradictory. Some studies argue that the practice is beneficial because it churns up the ground, softening hard, water-repellant soils that sometimes form after an intense fire. Proponents also insist that the detritus left behind after logging inhibits erosion.  Critics such as Hanson say that the logging skidders decrease natural forest regeneration, kill seedlings, and compact the soil in a way that increases runoff and erosion, harming aquatic life in streams and rivers.”

Of course, maybe salvage logging is just as simple as how this reporter characterized the latest salvage efforts on the Lolo National Forest:

“The Lolo National Forest wants make the best of last year’s 160,000-acre Rice Ridge fire by logging some trees…  If they can get the chief of the Forest Service to grant an Emergency Situation Determination, the public will not be allowed to object to the project once Mayben makes her final decision.”

 

 

Flathead forest plan revision nears finish line

I’ve been looking at the second final forest plan and EIS prepared under the 2012 Planning Rule, the Flathead. I want to commend them for some of the things they’ve done.

They have done a very good job of describing desired conditions for many vegetation characteristics based on their natural range of variation. I can tell you that this is the kind of “specific” desired conditions the drafters of the Planning Rule had in mind for providing ecological integrity. They also conducted an analysis of how vegetation conditions would change over time as a result of the plan, while factoring in expected fire regimes, and they were able to use this for some of their analysis of effects on viability of wildlife species that are closely tied to vegetation. I pretty much only looked at the wildlife parts of the EIS, but I thought the terrestrial part was well organized, and included some thoughtful discussion of what plan components actually do. One of my interests is habitat connectivity, and they have given it a more serious look than most, including actually considering and identifying specific areas to be managed for connectivity.

I was looking for problems related to at-risk species, and there are some. Regarding fire, even though they don’t call the wildland-urban interface a “management area,” it is one because a lot of plan components apply differently there.

I’ve also seen how big of a job it is to review and understand something this massive within 60 days, even with only a limited focus – and I’m someone with probably as much experience at this as anyone. It helped to have followed this process off and on from the beginning, but I have some sympathy for organizations trying to promote changes at this point in the process.   (There’s much more time to prepare for forest plan litigation.)

Next up? The Inyo is on track for “this spring.”

9th Circuit takes out NFMA diversity requirement

In a 2-1 decision, which allowed the Big Thorne timber project to proceed on the Tongass National Forest, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a district court opinion that the Forest Service had complied with NFMA when it adopted forest plan direction related to managing old growth forest for deer to support viability of Alexander Archipelago wolves (an at-risk species).  The dissent pointed out that prior Ninth Circuit precedent had established that:

the forest plan must comply with substantive requirements of the [NFMA] designed to ensure continued diversity of plant and animal communities and the continued viability of wildlife in the forest . . . .” Idaho Sporting Cong., Inc. v. Rittenhouse, 305 F.3d 957, 961–62 (9th Cir. 2002). Specifically, 36 C.F.R. § 219.19 requires that “[f]ish and wildlife habitat shall be managed to maintain viable populations of existing native and desired non-native vertebrate species in the planning area.” Our law is clear that an agency must abide by its own regulations.

The majority (both judges appointed by republican presidents) charted a new course, citing a a BLM case that had nothing to do with NFMA:

Instead, an agency need only supply “a rational connection between the facts found and the conclusions made.” Or. Nat. Res. Council Fund v. Brong, 492 F.3d 1120, 1131 (9th Cir. 2007).

Instead of recognizing the language of NFMA that requires plans to “provide for plant and animal diversity,” the majority opinion cites language that refers to the Multiple-Use Sustained-Yield Act (contained in a case that was not about forest plans).  It concludes:

The NFMA gives the Forest Service flexibility because the Service has many different goals—conservation, commerce, recreation, and so on. See 16 U.S.C. § 1604(e)(2); McNair, 537 F.3d at 993–94. The statute reflects a congressional judgment that balancing these goals calls for policy judgments—judgments that often require trade-offs among worthy objectives, such as wolves and logging jobs.

In other words, NFMA did not take away any of the discretion provided by MUSYA.  This should be news to a lot of people, including the Forest Service.  This case would be a really good candidate for en banc review by the Ninth Circuit.

Here’s a local news story.

A conservation plan puts science ahead of politics

This story about the Pima County Arizona conservation planning effort isn’t directly about national forests, though there should have been (and probably was) coordination with the Coronado National Forest.  And my point here isn’t about the success of a conservation plan driven by the need to protect at-risk species (arguably an ESA success story).  It’s about the role of scientists in the process (Sharon).

“County leaders stated from the outset that their primary goal was to conserve biological diversity through a scientifically defendable process, not to come up with a plan that everybody could agree on,” wrote the late urban planning specialist Judith Layzer in her 2008 book Natural Experiments, which analyzed more than a half-dozen regional land-conservation efforts.

The scientists and county staff discussed the plan in public sessions, but county officials made it clear that their work would not be derailed by complaints from developers and other critics. The scientists established standards for identifying biologically valuable lands and used computer models, observation records and the judgment of local naturalists and recognized experts to come up with a biological preserve map.

In contrast, in other multi-species plans, scientists, politicians, agency staffers, developers and moderate conservationists collectively determined which lands to save, thus bringing political and economic considerations into the science.

Looking back this spring, Huckelberry, a former county transportation chief, says he was simply applying the best practices from his previous job, highway planning, to land conservation. Typically, both a technical committee and a citizens’ committee review big road projects, he says: “The whole purpose of a technical advisory committee is not to play with the numbers, not to slant the analysis. We felt the political side could potentially be used to manipulate the scientific side, and felt that would bias the entire process.”

After the science team created a map of the proposed preserve system, a separate steering committee of 84 people, including developers, environmentalists and neighborhood leaders, haggled over its details. By then, though, the plan’s broad vision was already solidly in place.

Bringing this back to the Forest Service, this is similar to how a team of biologists developed the Lynx Conservation Assessment and Strategy, which was then followed by forest plan amendments that “haggled over the details.”  The Forest Service doesn’t like some of things it can’t do, but there haven’t been challenges to the science.  The grizzly bear conservation strategies seem to be more like the alternative process, where what the land managers want is infused into the discussions of the science.  (The Yellowstone strategy was already voided by a court once because of scientific issues.)

Resilient forests require change in “default” response to fire

Here is the key conclusion in an article published by the Ecological Society of America (the article specifically addresses “dry forests”):

One of the most important and fundamental challenges to revising forest fire policy is the fact that agency organizations and decision making processes are not structured in ways to ensure that fire management is thoroughly considered in management decisions. There are insufficient bureaucratic or political incentives for agency leaders to manage for long-term forest resilience; thus, fire suppression continues to be the main management paradigm. Current resource-specific policies and procedures are so focused on individual concerns that they may be missing the fact that there are “endangered landscapes” that are threatened by changing climate and fire…. Without forest resilience, all other ecosystem components and values are not sustainable, at least over the long-term. It is therefore necessary to create incentives and agency structures that facilitate restoration of wildland fire and ecologically based fuel treatment to forest landscapes.

The authors have recognized the problem that fire planning is not well-integrated with planning for other resources on national forest lands.  A key recommendation is to, “Make forest resilience a stand-alone, top land management priority and connect it to managing long-term for endangered species.” It criticizes the continued emphasis on fire suppression, including the strategy of suppressing fires to protect at-risk species.   The article strangely omits any specific references to the 2012 Planning Rule’s ecological sustainability requirements, which I think has incorporated resilience, and its relationship to species diversity, as a policy about as well as we could expect. The question is what will forest plans actually do to avoid the alleged “tunnel vision.” The authors credit the southern Sierra revision forests as “pioneering some of these efforts.”

The authors do offer one recommendation that I think should receive more attention in the planning process: “analyze long-term impacts of continued suppression.” I would expand the recommendation to more clearly recognize that forest plans are the place where overall fire management strategies will be adopted, including identification of resources and areas deemed in need of protection from fire. Desired ecological conditions based in these needs must then be a consideration in fire management decisions, which must by law be consistent with the forest plan. Decisions in a forest plan about or affecting fire management, including those that promote fire suppression, will have effects on ecosystems that must be evaluated and disclosed during the planning process.

Lawsuit to stop federal highway on national forest lands

The Sierra Club filed the lawsuit to stop construction of the U.S. 70 Havelock bypass in North Carolina.  According to their attorneys, “The important thing here is that this part of the forest is one of the prime examples still of what used to be a very common landscape in the coastal plain, which is the longleaf pine savannas, so there are parts of the forest that would be destroyed with the proposed bypass and that have intact, 100-year-old longleaf pine savannas that have good ground cover and are in good condition and that provide habitat for species like the red-cockaded woodpecker.”  They argue that there were feasible alternatives that weren’t considered.

The defendant is apparently the Federal Highway Administration, and the Forest Service isn’t mentioned at all.  There is a different set of laws governing federal highway projects, but they don’t exempt the FHA from NFMA’s requirement that “instruments for use and occupancy of National Forest System lands shall be consistent with the land management plans.”  The Croatan forest plan (2002) actually mentions this bypass proposal as an example of “requests for permits that serve a public benefit.”

There was no reference to this project on the Croatan website, but the FHA ROD discusses six issues raised by plaintiffs regarding consistency with the forest plan, finding them all to be without merit.  It talks about Forest Service participation in the project planning process and off-site mitigation elements, neither of which directly address the question of what the forest plan requirements for this area are.  It did mention that “some portions of the easement that would be transferred to NCDOT for the bypass are designated black bear sanctuary.”  How would a four-lane expressway be consistent with that?  There is something wrong with this process if it does not require the Forest Service to directly address the NFMA consistency requirement for highway permits.

Another payoff from standards in forest plans

This time mandatory standards ensure that a proposed pipeline project will protect water quality:

In Bath County, the Forest Service said an access road that impacts a wild brook trout stream, Laurel Run, “is unacceptable because it parallels the stream channel with the riparian corridor for much of its length and has numerous stream crossings.”

The letter says the access road is inconsistent with forest plan standards and best management practices concerning soil and water.

Why does the Forest Service want to get rid of standards when they revise their plans?  Do they think that some mealy-mouthed desired condition of “high quality water” in a forest plan would have the same effect?  That it would be legally sufficient to claim such vague, aspirational statements meet requirements to protect at-risk species?

Natural Range of Variation in the southern Sierra national forests

So what did the Sierra, Sequoia and Inyo do to apply this planning rule requirement to terrestrial ecosystems?  I’ve just reviewed the draft plan and DEIS, and I don’t think I’ve got a good answer.  They don’t directly say what NRV is or how they determined it (at least in the places I’ve looked).

The Bio-Regional Assessment says this (p. 39):  “NRV only was not used because at this time conditions are far removed from them in terms of fire regime, and even a modest shift toward that level of resiliency would benefit ecological integrity and is more feasible in a short period of time. The planning rule specifically provides for using ecological integrity based on measures other than NRV where this is the case.”

This view is supported by the Planning Handbook (1909.12 FSH 12.14b) (but again, the Handbook does not appear to be supported by the Planning Rule): “In some situations, there is not enough information to understand the natural range of variation under past disturbance regimes for selected key ecosystem characteristics or the system is no longer capable of sustaining key ecosystem characteristics identified as common in the past based upon likely future environmental conditions. In these cases, the Interdisciplinary Team should establish an alternative ecological reference model for context for assessing for integrity by identifying the conditions that would sustain these key ecosystem characteristics.”  However no “alternative ecological reference model” was documented.

For terrestrial vegetation the Bio-Regional Assessment then apparently ignores itself (p. 98):  “Under the 2012 Planning Rule, “natural range of variability” is a key means for gauging ecological integrity. Ecosystem sustainability is more likely if ecosystems are within the bounds of natural variation, rather than targeting fixed conditions from some point in the past (Wiens et al. 2012, Safford et al. 2012). Safford et al. (2013a) compiled comprehensive, scientific literature reviews on natural range of variability, and these are the primary basis for the summary below.”  The summaries conclude whether ecosystems are within or outside of NRV, but they don’t say what NRV is.

The Sierra Assessment says this (p. 17):  “Comprehensive, scientific literature reviews on natural range of variability were compiled. The following is an overview. Consistent with trends across the entire assessment area, terrestrial ecosystems in the Sierra NF are predominantly outside the natural range of variability (NRV) for key indicators of ecological function, structure, and composition. First, nearly half (44 percent) of the area of the Sierra NF dominated by woody vegetation (or 76 percent of montane coniferous forests) is in a highly departed condition with respect to the historic fire return interval, burning at frequencies that are significantly longer than pre-settlement fire regimes (Safford and van de Water 2013). The Sierra NF has missed an average of three to four fire return intervals across all vegetation types dominated by trees or shrubs (Safford and van de Water 2013). Subalpine forests are the exception, burning at intervals that within one or two fire return intervals.”

The Bio-Regional Assessment describes fire history on p. 33, and the Sierra Assessment appears to use historic fire intervals as a reference, but what are the vegetation conditions that would produce the desired fire intervals (which would be the NRV for vegetation)?  I didn’t find a document that says what what vegetation NRV is or how it was determined, or even what the “key indicators” are.  The draft plan does have desired conditions for vegetation, and the DEIS says those are or are based on NRV.  The quickest way to get a feel for these DC=NRV is Tables 1-7 in the draft revised forest plan.

What is NRV for vegetation characteristics?  Are they based on the best available science? Did they properly use historic reference conditions?  What was the reference period? Did they consider climate change?  Are these sustainable desired conditions?  Do they comply with the requirement for ecological integrity?   Do they provide conditions needed for at-risk species? You’d think the answers to these important questions would be easier to find, but I’m out of time.  Maybe someone else can find some answers on the revision website somewhere.

Join the forest plan revision party

The Francis Marion National Forest was the first out of the gate last fall.  It is now joined by the southern Sierra national forests (Inyo, Sequoia and Sierra) and Flathead.  The draft plan and EIS for the Sierra forests were released on May 27th for a 90-day public comment period.  The Flathead will be officially out on Friday June 3rd for a 120-day comment period (but the documents are on their website now).  Experience the 2012 Planning Rule!