The Path to Healthy Headwater Forests: PPIC Webinar Tomorrow!

The webinar is from 11-12 Pacific and features a presentation of their (PPIC is the Public Policy Institute of California) research paper, a panel discussion, and questions and answers. Here’s the link to the webinar information and registration. The study (found here) has some interesting charts and graphs. I picked a few to highlight below. There’s an interesting interactive map, but I couldn’t copy it here.

Here are their findings:

Last summer, California and the US Forest Service (USFS) jointly agreed to significantly increase two important management approaches—mechanical thinning and prescribed fire—over the next five years. In January, the Forest Management Task Force released California’s first action plan for forest health. State funding for improving forest health has increased since 2019, and the governor’s 2021‒22 budget proposes to continue this trend.

As policymakers and forest managers take steps to accelerate the pace, understanding the scale and scope of recent management efforts can provide useful guidance. Yet until now there hasn’t been a comprehensive picture of how private, state, and federal entities have managed forests. To fill this gap, we did a basic accounting of management efforts in mixed-conifer forests in the Sierra‒Cascade region over the past decade.

Here are four takeaways:

*Forest management is not scaling fast enough to meet forest health objectives. Experts suggest that reducing the spread of severe wildfires requires strategically treating and maintaining approximately 20‒30% of forests on the landscape. Forest managers have treated around 16% of the region’s mixed-conifer forests over the past decade. Management levels vary across the region, with only 8 of the 24 watersheds meeting or exceeding this target (Figure 1c). The pace has been considerably faster on lands owned by the private sector and non-federal agencies (28%) than on federally owned lands (11%).

*Timber harvest has been the main management approach. Though its primary purpose is to harvest logs, some timber harvest techniques also reduce wildfire risk and improve resilience to drought and pests. More than two-thirds of the 912,000 acres managed over the past decade used timber harvesting (Figure 2). The practice was more prevalent in northern watersheds, where private forest ownership is more common. The costs and benefits of different management approaches—timber harvest, mechanical thinning, and prescribed burning—should be at the center of discussions about which to use where.

*Management approaches vary based on ownership. Nearly 90% of acres managed on private forests were harvested (Figure 3). By contrast, federal forests had a more diversified management portfolio, and timber harvest accounts for less than half of managed acres on these lands. In absolute terms, USFS carried out three times more mechanical and prescribed burning treatments compared to private and other public landowners in the region.

*The pace of management has been flat. Although the share of non-timber management has increased, the overall pace of management has remained relatively stable over the past decade—at around 90,000 acres annually (Figure 4). One likely explanation: public funding sources that support management have also been stagnant over this period. The pace should pick up once new state funds for forests reach the ground.

As forest managers and policymakers chart a course to improve forest health, improving our overall understanding of past management activities is essential. Our analysis helps provide a clearer picture of forest management accomplishments and gaps—which can in turn help set priorities for allocating scarce management resources. Yet the technical challenge of even basic accounting of these activities remains immense. Data sets that make accounting possible have different levels of quality and collection standards. Improving the accuracy, completeness, and comparability of data collected on forest management across the headwater region will be critical for evaluating progress toward meeting goals for forest health.

It’s kind of interesting to me that the data we need doesn’t seem to exist, and yet… so much funding seems to be going to various satellite imaging efforts. Maybe it’s time for the western FIA’s to start a Fire-Related Forest Vegetation data effort.. they already have the history of working with stakeholders, States and Tribes and dealing with privacy issues. A bipartisan unity-building effort? After all, everyone likes good data!

3 thoughts on “The Path to Healthy Headwater Forests: PPIC Webinar Tomorrow!”

  1. But a “fire-related forest vegetation data effort” would thwart the whole dishonest scam of fire suppression and fuels management being the problem. Accurate data would show logging has stripped the landscape bare over and over again making the fire resilience (thick bark & no ladder fuels) way worse due to logging than due to fire suppression. It would also show that logging landscapes into plantations combined with a climate driven increase in mega-fires and giga fires is the primary cause of long term permanent deforestation in all but the best growing sites.

    Or as they clearly say: “Timber harvest has been the main management approach. Though its primary purpose is to harvest logs, some timber harvest techniques also reduce wildfire risk and improve resilience to drought and pests.”

    You got that? Preventing wildfire is not the primary objective! So sick of these greedy dishonest forest service employees who need to be fired and replace with qualified wildlife biologists who help the land recover rather than using lies to continue to strip it down to permanent desert landscapes.

    The best science says catastrophic fires are weather driven event no fuels driven events… All these loggers profiting off the clearing of mature soon-to-be fire resilient trees and forests in order to make a profit at the expense of drying out the soils, increasing wind speed in the stands and producing faster burning weedy fuels / plantation-based holocausts are certifiably insane.

    Look at all the news coverage this week on how the town of Paradise did everything the fake fuels build up scientists / timber industry pushes and their whole town burned down anyway. And why is that? It’s because wildfire is weather driven not fuels driven. Rate of spread of a fire is a calculation of average windspeed not fuels. Any properly educated firefighter in a command position knows how to do that math because the lives of firefighters depends on it!

    And with climate change increasing global average windspeed has gone up by 17% in just the past ten years which has resulted in fires like the one that destroyed Paradise with a peak rate of spread of a hectare per second. And then last Summer wind speeds were even more insane with peak rates of spread increasing to 5 hectares per second. This is insane! We need to protect all forests where trees have thick bark and no ladder fuels and lowest possible wind speeds, which means industrial logging is the enemy when it comes to fire resilient landscapes.

    We need to eliminate industrial forestry and all its planet destroying apologists who are continuing to lie on their behalf as employees of the USFS. They all need to be fired!

    Reply
  2. Deann, I live in Colorado. Here people do plenty of mechanical fuel treatments by thinning stands of trees without selling the trees. Many people would sell them if they could. In fact, if you look California is trying to up its market for small trees and other vegetation to be removed in fuel treatments.

    I don’t know what exactly you mean by “industrial logging”, maybe you mean clearcutting (which as Larry often points out is not used by the FS in California).

    So I don’t know whom exactly you would want to fire in the FS. Also the Forest Service is doing what Congress told them to do. By your logic if you disagreed with the current tax law, you would fire everyone at the IRS. PS our burned over areas look more like “desert landscapes” than our thinned areas.

    As to the wind speed, my read of the Zeng et al 2019 study is that the wind increases are part of a natural cycle. I picked that based on this Scientific American article
    https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-worlds-winds-are-speeding-up/ about gloval average windspeeds. perhaps that’s not the one you were thinking of?

    “Discussion
    Although the response of ocean–atmosphere oscillations to anthropogenic warming remains unclear31, the increases in wind speeds should continue for at least a decade because these oscillations change over decadal time frames28–31,35. Climate model simulations
    constrained with historical SST also show a long cycle in wind speed over land (Supplementary Fig. 20). Our findings are therefore good news for the power industry for the near future.
    However, oscillation patterns in the future will probably cause a return to declining wind speeds. Anticipating these changes is important for the wind power industry”

    You say we need to “eliminate industrial forestry” so does that mean you think everyone should give up using wood products? Or perhaps you don’t like certain practices (prefer FSC to SFI?). It would be helpful to be more specific.

    Reply
  3. There’s all sorts of lies and blather about California forests that comes from both extremes. Republicans, today, like to say that all forest management was stopped in the 80’s, too. We know what is needed in the Sierra Nevada but, we need to triple the current annual amount, in those National Forests. Congress won’t do what it will take.

    Reply

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