Shout out to FS R&D Rocky Mountain Research Station for these timely webinars! I had a choice of copying the announcement with registration links and losing their formatting or posting a screenshot of the announcement. Here is the link to the original, which includes links for registration. They will be posted on their website for later viewing. Note some of our fave topics, fuel treatment effectiveness, maintenance of fuel breaks, post-fire restoration and fuel treatments in grasslands and shrublands.
I don’t post everything they send, so please consider signing up to get this digest and other news from R&D. How to do it is in the tiny print at the bottom of the original post linked above.
How many of the 10 years since tree planting “free to grow ” conifers are “infill” from wind blown seed over the years since site prep and planting? What my question infers is that 300-400 seedlings/acre are planted on a clear cut, and a decade later there must be a “natural” infill by wind seeding of trees from a few hundred feet to miles away. That is the same we see with hatchery salmon and “straying” to streams other than the one where they were released. Seed migrates. I realize that some can come from genetically selected planted and now mature trees. My point is how much diversity is there in species where post wildland fire recovery is only by wind blown seed as opposed to nursery seedlings grown from site local as possible cone collections? My observations are the “left alone” stand removal fire sites are going to burn again, due to excessive fuel loading from the dead trees from the first fire. And then have pioneer brush and grass species that are prone to burning again from unintended ignition sources and that are used as “fire for resource use.” Each time the fire is a threat to unburned stands, and has been the case time and again. Which begs the question of just what is the resource(s) being protected? Few forest animals can escape fire. Many plant species have reproductive help from fire. All that becomes a question of how much “wild and natural” must the private sector endure for the few’s ideology? I will venture to say the human population, 340million in the US, is not why we have pre European landscapes saved, as we save domesticated feline and canine pets, Combines and corn, wheat, Angus and Waygu.
TV news is all about immigration, fraud, on a landscape that can’t house the present population. Available, affordable land is one issue at a time many want to make more private land public. “High cost” materials another impediment. Burning more housing materials than we use from public lands is patently insane. Welfare has made middle class poverty a protected class. I have no answers. Who does? Or is no answers the goal? The planning perpetual motion machine of our times: place taking jobs. A fake. Alchemy. Needs additional energy to operate.
Oregon’s State Bored of Forestry has entered the trees still standing in the Tillamook Burn from the planted trees of 1950s, 60s, into a carbon sequester program that leaves the introduced exotic Douglas fir trees from seed gathered in Idaho, Montana, and across Oregon to stand although Swiss Needle Cast and those trees have been proven ill adapted to the fog belt coastal rainforest sites. That is not an unexpected outcome in the politicized forests and forest administration whip sawed by environmental luddites from urban centers.
I read in County Highway vol 3, issue 4 that each text and call results in a 24 minute period to get mentally and operationally able to return to the task at hand. Also reported we get 144 notices, calls, texts per day. Not a word about students in K-12. Worried about literacy being taught? Work getting done? 1 year and 43 days to excavate, pour foundations and construct the Empire State Building, 1933-34. Under budget and under time to occupation. No AI nor Smart Phones, three screen computers. Engineers and architects with pencil and paper, slide rules. Rudimentary calculators. Handbooks and charts, scales, and artisans. Relate all that to the History of the USFS, Cleveland to Trump.