Here’s a very interesting story, which, for me, had an unexpected twist near the end. Or even in the tagline.. “Researchers find as more humans play outside, a smaller proportion are engaged in stewardship that can protect the lands from growing impacts.”
A black bear padding through the forest freezes. It looks up briefly, then something spurs it to turn and bolt in the other direction.
That something is the sound of hikers — a recording of women’s voices in conversation as they walk along a trail. It is emitted by one of many motion-triggered speakers scientists set up in the Bridger-Teton National Forest as part of a study on the impacts of outdoor recreation sounds on wildlife. And as this grainy game camera footage shows, even sounds that appear benign to us humans can disturb animals.
I wonder whether researchers need to put up signs that peoples’ conversations may be recorded?
It sets out to answer several questions, Zeller said, primarily: “Do mammals have increased stress or vigilance or other types of potentially negative behaviors when they hear recreation noise?”
They also want to know if birds avoid noisy areas, if animal communities change group behavior and what types of sounds are most impactful.
Ditmer and Zeller are only partway through data collection and haven’t quantified responses, but Zeller said they’ve seen many spooked animals — and one activity appears to be particularly startling.
“We’ve found that mountain biking with a large group size tended to result in a higher probability of wildlife fleeing a site compared with the other sound treatments,” Zeller said.
Those observations align with a 2016 study co-conducted by Courtney Larson, a Wyoming conservation scientist with The Nature Conservancy. Larson and her co-authors reviewed scientific literature regarding the impacts of non-motorized, non-consumptive recreation on wildlife. Some 93% of the nearly 300 studies that assessed recreation’s wildlife effects found at least one significant effect, most of which were negative, according to their findings.
Those effects can look like habitat fragmentation, or animals spending more time being vigilant and less time feeding, Larson said during a presentation in Laramie this spring. Awareness seems to be growing and people have good knowledge of times of year or places where wildlife are particularly vulnerable, she added. But questions remain on the varying sensitivity of species as well as how much recreation a landscape can hold.
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Deteriorating experiences on public lands are on the rise, their study found. “So some of the biggest changes to our outdoor experiences are those caused by the very people that are enjoying the outdoors,” said Becky Marcelliano, onX stewardship marketing manager. Nearly two-thirds of the respondents cited overcrowding as negatively affecting their time in nature, for example. Outdoor recreation participation hit a record high nationwide in 2022, according to the 2023 participation trends report from Outdoor Industry Association.
Perhaps the biggest takeaway, she said, is a so-called “stewardship gap.” Though industry data shows 77% of outdoor enthusiasts make 12 or more outings a year, only 19% commit to a stewardship activity in that same timeframe, she said.
“Which means that less than one in five are doing the lion’s share of the work to protect and restore our public lands,” Marcelliano said.
At first I thought this was a little odd. Can’t people just enjoy themselves, and feel glad that their taxes are supporting public lands? If they’re federal, state or county lands, shouldn’t employees and our taxes be doing “the lion’s share”? On the other hand, people should behave as responsible human beings, including as they recreate outdoors. Seems like rules, and enforcement thereof, have a place as well.
The Southwest Fire Science Consortium will never get a Nobel (not “cool” enough to the Powers That Be) but they have won my award for Everything Science Should Be.. responsive to peoples’ concerns, integrated with practitioners, and gosh-danged helpful.
We had a serious discussion last week on managed wildfire (or Muwoof, or Mafee?). Well it turns out that NAU, SWFSC and Forest Stewards did a science synthesis paper on this topic, what they call a science synthesis. I am not enough of a fire person to understand all of it, so hopefully someone will read and chime in.
It’s not too often that I get a “laugh out loud” moment in the stuff I read, but the discussion about what term to use.. struck me as pretty funny. Yes, if you want to study something, a definition might be helpful. 🙂
Unfortunately, until the wildfire community settles on a shared lexicon, it will be difficult to track, measure, and understand managed wildfires. Various wildfire incident databases refer to the strategy using different names throughout time, making comparison difficult (Young et al. 2020). Even communication between land managers can become clouded because of differing terminology (Davis et al. 2022).
The “History of Wildland Fire Response and Nomenclature” is pretty interesting and begins on page 2.
Cerro Pelado Fire Was Started by a Burn Pile- Why Did it Take So Long to Figure This Out?
Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham sharply criticized the federal agency in a response Monday afternoon.
“I am — again — outraged over the U.S. Forest Service’s negligence that caused this destruction,” she said in a statement. “We will continue to to hold the federal government accountable for each of the disastrous fires they caused in our state last summer.”
U.S. Sen. Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., released a statement saying: “It is frustrating and deeply concerning to learn now that the Cerro Pelado Fire was also caused by an escaped prescribed fire.
“The warming climate is making our forests more vulnerable to catastrophic wildfires. That’s a reality that our Forest Service can and must urgently respond to when deciding when and how to do prescribed burns. We cannot catch up to this reality if it takes nearly a year to even make the findings on the Cerro Pelado Fire public,” Heinrich said.
“As the Forest Service does the necessary work of updating its modeling and use of prescribed fires, it must also prioritize rebuilding the public’s trust,” Heinrich added. “This will require more transparency and much more concerted and authentic engagement with New Mexicans than the Forest Service has shown up to this point.”
State Energy, Minerals and Natural Resources Department Cabinet Secretary Sarah Cottrell Propst said in a statement that agency’s failure to promptly disclose the fire’s cause, further harmed “New Mexicans who have been unable to file insurance claims pending disclosures of the fire’s origins.”
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Despite being covered by wet snow, this holdover fire remained dormant for considerable time with no visible sign of smoke or heat,” said Martin, in the statement released Monday.
I had a thought.. with all the high technology and defense contractors being funded, e.g. Invidia and Lockheed Martin teaming up to use AI and “real-time sensor data”, seems like a low-hanging fruit would be to put sensors in pile burns left over the winter or maybe fly heat-sensing drones over them, or some other sophisticated, repurposed from the military technology?
FEMA has so far paid out less than 1% of what Congress allocated for victims of NM wildfire. From Source NM.
Good story. If you want a reaction, try The Hotshot Wakeup wondering why FEMA can’t get its act together.
and yet (also from the Hotshot Wakeup) the DOL is capable of doing its job.
*************** DOL (Department of Labor) Investigation of Federal Contractor Violation of Wage Laws
We oldsters won’t be surprised that some federal contractors weren’t paying people correctly. From DOL press release:
As a result of its investigation, the division recovered $152,003 in overtime wages and fringe benefits, as well as an additional $12,577 in liquidated damages for the affected workers. Back wages recovered ranged from $101 to $14,783 per worker. In addition, the company paid $16,981 in civil money penalties assessed by the department for the employer’s violations.
Hotshot Wakeup podcast this week explored both the above stories in detail, and suggested that $17K is not much of a penalty for trying to sleaze out on $152 K for employees.
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Hotshot Wakeup also pointed out, in the same podcast, some of the close ties between the fire aviation industry and defense efforts of the less upfront kind. My sources tell me that NSC is involved in all wildfire topics (going back to the FOIA from earlier this week). So there are ties that aren’t obvious to those of us outside the industry. Which circles back to the issue of “what tech can watch pile burns?”
Normally, this is Jon’s area, but I thought that this is an interesting example.. just on the forest planning side. Apparently forest planning has been going on since 2014 (for almost 10 years) to make a 15 year plan.. which should be a “30 year plan” according to this article. And of course, there will be many changes in those years from climate and other factors, and hopefully the plan will be flexible enough to adapt to these new situations or be easily amended.
In the notice of the lawsuit, filed Wednesday, lawyers for the Southern Environmental Law Center say the forest is home to 28 federally listed endangered and threatened species, as well as 29 other species that are candidates for that recognition. Many of those species have declined dramatically over past decades and require more stringent protection than the final forest plan offers them.
“For example, the northern long-eared bat, which relies on mature forested habitat in the [forests], has declined by more than 90% over the past few decades,” attorneys for the SELC said in the notice. “These declines should not be secondary considerations, subordinated to timber or game wildlife management. Instead, reversing these declines is central to the Forest Service’s mission.”
The filing also alleges that the Forest Service years ago provided incomplete or incorrect information to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which subsequently issued an official opinion that the additional logging planned would have little impact on the listed species.
“We cannot sit back while this irresponsible forest plan ignores the science, breaks the law, and puts these remarkable species at risk.” Sam Evans, leader of SELC’s National Forests and Parks Program, said in a news release. “Forest plans are revised only every 20 years or so, and our endangered bats won’t last that long unless we get this plan right.”
I am reminded of a prophetic statement by Andy Stahl here on The Smokey Wire in 2011.
The big difference between the old (1982) rule and the new proposal is that the new eschews any pretense of “rational” economic planning. The old rule regarded the national forests as factories of goods and services from which planners could divine, with the help of linear programming models, an optimum allocation and schedule of harvests. Each output was assigned a value; each input was assigned a cost. When the model didn’t give the desired answer, planners tweaked the numbers. When the tweaks didn’t work, planners made-up the numbers.
The edifice came crashing down in the late 1980s. A quarter-century later, the Forest Service is still digging itself out from under the rubble.
The new rule replaces economic rationality with ecological rationality. The old gurus (e.g., Krutilla, Hyde, Clawson and Teeguarden) have been deposed by Soule, Ehrlich, MacArthur and Wilson. Leopold is the new God (is it coincidence that the Forest Service released this month a new Leopold biopic?); Pinchot is history.
Perhaps ecologically rational planning will be more successful. But I doubt it. The new forest planning process still pits bitter ideological enemies against each other with the Forest Service serving as self-interested arbiter. The modern-day critic will turn from deconstructing FORPLAN to deciphering HexSim. Every plan will be appealed and most will be litigated.
Perhaps in another quarter-century the FS will abandon any pretense of rational comprehensive planning and consider the incremental, on-the-ground K.I.S.S. approach I suggested. I should live so long.
Andy’s comment was in a post on Pete Nelson’s views on the wildlife provision, posted by our old friend Martin Nie. And now Pete has been hired by the Forest Service to help with policy options for MOG.. and folks are writing in about needing Martin’s specific triggers determined beforehand based on monitoring, and the Forest Service circle of planning to plan continues…
Personally the biggest problem I see is the tension between “with climate unknown emergencies could arise at any time, forests will burn up and or convert to grasslands or brushfields and management will need to be flexible with these unforeseen futures” and “we need planning that’s based on ideas from the past (reference conditions) and is highly structured with many many sideboards. ” Maybe the conversation we need to have is… why don’t you trust federal employees to make the right conservation decisions in the moment? Can we have both, flexibility and trust, without lengthy and protracted exercises that are just another opportunity for “ideological enemies” as Andy says, to attempt to renegotiate previous agreements?
Here’s a link to this site that has a presentation on the project and the final report of the students.
“After a five-month project timeline, we produced a report that includes:
Methods and step-by-step guide to use GIS to focus on sites based on social justice and environmental conditions.
An evaluation matrix with environmental, policy, and social conditions that we used to evaluate and score the redevelopment potential for 9 former sawmill sites
A guide with practical questions and resources for residents and organizations in rural communities that want to pursue public funding to support site clean up.
A comprehensive evaluation of how public policies influence site redevelopment.
Find the final report below and reach out to us. We’d love to answer questions and talk about how we can move this work forward.”
Map of California showing 208 former sawmill sites (yellow) identified in a database from the U.S. Forest Service and University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources. Our team used the database as a starting point for evaluating former sawmill sites. Map by Thomas Miller.
I’m seeing a trend here. Yesterday I posted that folks at CEQ and NSC (!) seemed to be making decisions that formerly would have been made by agencies. Well, the Democratic Science Committee seems to have produced a bill to organize the wildfire research trough without USDA and DOI. Sure, they are looking out for the agencies they are responsible for (they aren’t responsible for other science agencies).. but it sounds a bit like a takeover bid for research long done by USDA and DOI. Maybe legislators need to organize/collaborate in a way that coordinates budgets and responsibilities across committees?
For some of us, when the Science Committee says “premier science agencies” we wince a little, since we know that doesn’t mean us at USDA and USGS. It means Big Science or the Science Establishment which are, of course, the agencies the Science Committee works with. It seems like not much has changed since I was OSTP in 2000. I may have told this story before, but we have many new readers, so here goes.
For those who haven’t worked with the DC Science Establishment, you would be surprised how much of it is about getting more research money for their institutions; and for the Big Science agencies, that means Big Bucks. I worked at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy at the Old Executive Office Building, now called the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. It is a terrific building to work in, very historic, fossils on the floors, boarded up fireplaces and so on. They had old-sized offices, which meant that we Agency folks detailed there (known as Agency Representatives) had desks right next to each other. Mine was next to a nice gentleman from DOE.
At the time, the Los Alamos fires were big news. Sure enough, folks from Los Alamos came in and gave their spiel about how it had been brought to their attention that wildfire is a thing, and they needed lots of bucks to study it. This happened in our office, so of course I asked innocently “doesn’t the Forest Service study wildfire?”. At the time, I was working for Forest Service R&D, and the wildfire research folks were in my group, in fact my Forest Service boss at the time was Bill Sommers, a fire/atmosphere/climate scientist. The Los Alamos folks just looked at me.. as if to say “they don’t really count, don’t you get it?”
I once had lunch with a Stanford physicist who was my boss’s boss in the OSTP chain of command. He said that the problem with USDA (no joke) was that they had capped indirect costs. Which was ironic given the Stanford yacht and weddings apparently procured with indirect costs.. He said “you can’t get the best minds working on something with a cap like that, no one from MIT would touch it.” I can’t really imagine MIT folks working on wheat breeding, for example, in Kansas. I was polite, since he was my boss’s boss, there but.. the lesson is that people really thought this stuff, and it sounds like they still believe their own hype (I thought that was the occupational hazard of politicians, but..)
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I’ve noticed a generalized splatter of wildfire-ish funding patterns in the last few days. The webinar yesterday at University of New Mexico on Chris Marsh’s work studying reforestation practices to help people planting trees was funded by NIFA, a USDA agency that funds extramural work, in this case via the AFRI competitive grant program.
For her part, Grimm, who is the principal investigator on the project, got to work developing a survey to find out how people were getting information about wildfires and what information they might be missing.
“The purpose of the project is to really understand Flagstaff community members’ experiences — the challenges they might have experienced with wildfire communication,” Grimm said.
She wants to look at what people learned about operations such as fire mitigation, property defenses and evacuation preparedness. Then she wants to examine communication during an event — actual messaging about evacuation and on-the-ground firefighting efforts. Lastly, she seeks to research the qualitative experiences of individuals after a fire — how and if people learned about flood risk, insurance and funding availability.
I know it sounds somewhat like Katrin Edgeley’s social science work also at NAU, so I looked to see who was funding Katrin. It looks like JFSP, NCAR and NSF (NCAR is what I call the Temple of Climate in Boulder, and is funded by NSF). Here’s what we know-wildfire is already a funding free-for-all among agencies. And the D’s on the Science Committee want to increase the food at the trough for their favorite pigs.
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But maybe instead of more bucks, there should be a panel of the current science agencies and potential research users (imagine that!) to 1) figure out current overlaps and gaps and 2) require coordination among the agencies. Before any of them ask for more money. Just a thought. But that would be a bill by the “Good Government” party which currently doesn’t exist. NSF’s budget for 2023 was 10.99 billion, while JFSP’s was 4 million. Wouldn’t it make sense for some committee or board across agencies to recommend funding for agencies to do the research that they’re good at? And coordinate so research isn’t duplicative? And involve the communities that would be using the science in what are the problems and priorities?
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Looking back through my career, it seems like there has been a tendency to move research from “what people say they need help with” to “what scientists want to tell higher level decision makers to do.” There’s also been a tendency to move from the specific and local to the abstract and international. And coupled a tendency to leave out local practitioners from involvement in priorities and in some cases having a voice at all. Check out this paper about practitioners and the IPCC.
With lots of remote sensing and machine learning, I fear that people will be left out of the equation. They may become the target of social science to see how they get the right “messages” via NSF’s “disinformation” research, and aren’t given agency in making decisions about what is studied and how. Missing that link, science may lose trust and legitimacy among ordinary people. What we see is anecdotal, what they tell us they’ve observed from a satellite is “science.” The time to strengthen those connections. between the people and what should be their science, is now. IMHO.
So.. one of the things we do here at The Smokey Wire is to learn from each other. Today is our first published FOIA. I asked USDA and CEQ for FOIAs on the fire retardant issue, because I was curious as to who was calling the shots for the Admin position and what their backgrounds were to be able to make those kinds of calls. Remember at the time, we didn’t know whether the judge would enjoin fire retardant while the FS was applying for a permit, estimated to be 2-3 years.
Some people in the emails I know, some people I’ve heard of, and some were a surprise. Please bear with me, as there are several things about this which are above my pay grade. Also, if I got this story wrong, please correct me in the comments or send me an email. I don’t reveal sources and I really want to get the story right.
First, it seems that key people involved were with White House NSC, the National Security Council:
The National Security Council (NSC) is the President’s principal forum for considering national security and foreign policy matters with his or her senior advisors and cabinet officials. Since its inception under President Truman, the Council’s function has been to advise and assist the President and to coordinate matters of national security among government agencies.
If so, I guess fire retardant is related to national security.. but wouldn’t almost everything fit in the broader scope of “national security” then? It’s pretty cool that our humble world has come to the attention of the “big guns” (so to speak),” but folks could wonder “why, why now, and do these people know anything about wildfire? And shouldn’t there be something more directly related to National Security for them to work on?”
So I’m quite puzzled, and maybe you good folks at TSW can help me out.
Second, how do different agencies use “deliberative process privilege”? Is this consistent across agencies/levels? And why are some names and emails in and others blocked out? I’m hoping our legal minds at TSW will have a breadth of experience in this.
Third, I did not want to bring Scott Streater’s article-related drama up in this, but it turned up. It’s interesting to see how things work at White House with media, at least with some media, for some things.
Fourth, I worked closely with CEQ when I worked at the Office of Science and Techology Policy during the Clinton Administration. In fact, the interagency task force I co-led was chaired by CEQ and OSTP. As I recall, at that time, CEQ mostly focused on NEPA. It’s interesting that fire retardant doesn’t seem to have a NEPA nexus, it’s more of a Clean Water Act thing. So it’s interesting how much CEQ seems to be in the weeds of FS policy right now. I’ll go out on a limb here.. I don’t think that having people make decisions who don’t really know about the issue is a good idea for the country.
As Jon noted earlier in a different thread, it’s hard to know what exactly groups mean by no “logging”.. so I’d like to bring this discussion to the forefront, because it seems important that we understand what words mean. We can’t even tell if we disagree or not if we don’t use the same definition.
“The public wants the nation’s mature forests and trees to be protected from the chainsaw, and with good reason,” said Garett Rose, senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). “They store carbon. They protect imperiled species. They safeguard key waterways. It’s well past time for the federal land managers to adopt a rule that durably protects these climate-critical trees — and lets them be a key ally in the climate right.”
(I think Rose meant “fight.”) But chainsaws can’t distinguish if felled trees are going to the sawmill or not.
So let’s look at an E&E story..
The agency reported that more than 495,000 comments came through regulations.gov, and environmental groups say they delivered additional comments in person Thursday as the comment period ended on an advance notice of proposed rulemaking.
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“The primary threat to mature and older forests is logging, not wildfire or climate change,” the Pacific Northwest chapters of Great Old Broads for Wilderness said in a letter typical of advocates for limiting timber production. The organization called for a halt to logging on mature and old-growth forests while the service contemplates a formal rulemaking procedure.
So the GOB group made that claim. That’s not what the data show in the ANPR, though. Unless “primary” has another meaning.
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Agency officials haven’t said how they’ll proceed on regulations or even whether they plan to offer new limits on timber production. But because the call for comments follows President Joe Biden’s executive order directing an inventory of mature and old-growth forest, the timber industry and advocates for more intensive forest management said they worry the latest moves are the first toward heavier restrictions.
At the other end of the spectrum, the Sierra Club and Environment America said preventing the logging of mature and old-growth forests on federal land should be a “cornerstone of U.S. climate policy.” While federal protections such as wilderness designations and roadless-area limits on timber operations prevent logging in many areas of national forests, as much as 50 million acres of mature and old-growth forest on federal land doesn’t have such designations, they said, referring to the recent Forest Service inventory. “If the government lets timber companies chop them down, it will eliminate one of the most effective tools for removing the atmospheric carbon that exacerbates climate change. In addition, it would eliminate essential habitats for countless species and degrade the land,” the groups said in a news release.
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Environment America’s public lands campaign director, Ellen Montgomery, said Friday that while it’s not clear how the Forest Service will proceed, she doubts the administration would put such effort into the matter without planning to propose specific regulations. Time is short, though, she acknowledged, with Biden facing reelection in 2024 and the outcome uncertain. Although the rulemaking could touch on many issues, limiting timber production from national forests is an obvious choice, Montgomery said. “Logging is pretty simple to address,” she said. “We have complete control over what trees get logged or don’t get logged.”
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From the discussion in this news article, it seems like this is the old “no commercial harvest” discussion. But in many places, there is no market or infrastructure and trees are burned in piles. So it’s not clear what these groups mean exactly (we’ll look into their actual comment letters); if a fuels reduction project/thinning is proposed, would it be OK to fall the thinned material and burn it in piles rather than allow feds to sell it and be used? And it seems to be about “timber” and perhaps not so much about use for fuelwood or bioenergy? Because the Forest Service and other parts of USDA are researching uses for small diameter heretofore unsaleable material from both private and public lands. So does it really mean no cutting, no using at all, no commercial use, or no using for sawtimber?
The confusion about what “logging” means led in the Colorado Roadless Rule to us using the term “tree-cutting” to clarify that trees can be cut without being removed. So that gets us into details of the prescription and the harvesting (or not) plan. Many years ago (fortyish?) the silviculturists in our area went on a field trip to Lake Tahoe, where they were removing fire-wood sized chunks in wheelbarrows because residents didn’t want the smoke from burnpiles. On the other hand, many of the people currently involved in MOG (in some interest groups) don’t have backgrounds in on-the-ground practices, so maybe they’re not aware of all these possible complexities.
Heller also quotes NAFSR (the Forest Service Retirees’ Organization)
The National Association of Forest Service Retirees, in a comment letter, said retaining and expanding mature and old-growth forest isn’t a goal grounded in law.
The association cited the Multiple Use Sustained Yield Act of 1960, which established that all forest uses must be considered in planning and management of the land, and said further restrictions on harvest of mature and old-growth trees may go against parts of a 2012 planning rule that’s supposed to govern Forest Service policy.
Drawing on more recent legislation, the retirees group said the potential rulemaking could run against the bipartisan infrastructure law and the Inflation Reduction Act, which provided money for stepped-up thinning of federal forests to reduce wildfire threats, including creation of forest fuel breaks.
Now I can’t speak for NAFSR nor other retirees (remember Jon and Jim Furnish and so many more are all retirees!) but I will add my own perspective (and I hope other retirees and others) do as well.
The Congress, at least the House, is interested in spending fuel treatment dollars wisely and getting the funded work done. Remember this “counting fuel acres accountability” bill from spring this year?
As for me, I really don’t care if such a proposed rule would be against MUSYA except for the fact that it would likely be litigated on that basis. What I mind is asking the agency and partners to revise or terminate the fuel reduction and resilience treatments they’ve been dutifully working on. We know that the Forest Service is having trouble finding skilled employees. It seems like setting them up for even more morale-busting confusion now and down the road. I want the few of them available to be working on PODs and prescribed and managed fire plans on my neighboring forests, and giving recreation the attention it deserves.
And if such a “no logging” proposal were to go through, then they would be placed in the weird “maybe-yes we can, maybe-no we can’t” space when AFRC and others litigate and at the same time Congress reacts. Which to my mind wouldn’t be good for employee nor partner morale.
Finally, where do the collaborative groups fit into such a proposed rule? Such a rule could potentially nationalize decisions and override agreements made with local and practitioner knowledge in specific places- as different as the Tongass and the Ocala.
The public is invited to attend a virtual informational engagement session about the mature and old-growth forests initiative on Monday, July 24 at 2pm ET. Information will be shared about where we were, where we are, and what is next. The session will be an opportunity for you to share your thoughts, concerns and to ask questions. We value your time and aim to make the 2-hour session informational, interactive, and worthwhile!
To attend, please register for the virtual Zoom meeting. After registering, you will receive a confirmation with a meeting link.
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Several of us attended one today for specific kinds of partners. It was very helpful to understand where the FS is coming from. I’m still confused about how data that is not ground-truthed (not actually true) can be used to make national and regional decisions, but that’s kind of a more epistemological question. Also I’m getting fairly leery of mapping exercieses.. data has confidence intervals associated with it… map colors not so much. Anyway, I think it’s well worth it. It’s also interesting to hear others’ points of view and realize how very different different parts of the country are and how hard it will be for the FS to develop a regional or national policy that makes any sense.
Montana wildlife agents sometimes use drones to chase grizzly bears away from farms and ranches on the high plains. (Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks)
Some of us have been working on the BLM Proposed Rule and the FS ANPR, so I thought a nice Friday roundup with people agreeing on stuff would be relaxing.
This is a long and comprehensive story, well worth reading. It’s interesting that bipartisan lawmakers agree, but not so much the FS and NPS.
For Hickenlooper, a longtime booster of outdoor recreation, it makes complete sense for Congress to step in and clear up any confusion or questions about whether fixed anchors can continue to be used across many types of federal land.
“We wanted to make sure there was absolute clarity that this is an essential part of wilderness areas as well as our National Parks,” Hickenlooper said.
Back in Washington D.C., Hickenlooper got language that would allow the continued use of fixed anchors for rock climbing in wilderness areas added to a bill that is now awaiting a full senate vote.
Over in the House, a bipartisan pair of Western lawmakers, GOP Rep. John Curtis of Utah and Colorado Democrat Joe Neguse, is working to pass similar legislation. During a hearing on the PARC Act, Neugse said it’s simply about ensuring a clear standard for a practice that’s been going on for years.
“There are a number of national forests that have in effect changed the rules of the game, right? They’ve begun to treat these fixed anchor devices differently than they have been treated previously,” he said.
Curtis added it’s about “creating a predictable standard for the rock climbing community, who have been using wilderness areas since their inception, and, if I might say so, are among our most predictable caretakers of these wilderness areas and who care deeply about protecting them.”
The House version of the policy is also awaiting a full vote in the chamber.
But this idea may have a hard climb ahead of it. The National Forest Service and the National Park Service have both raised concerns, saying it would, in effect, be changing the Wilderness Act by allowing permanent installations in areas that are supposed to remain as pristine as possible.
And earlier this year, Chris French, Deputy Chief of the National Forest System, said in the hearing that the policy is also unnecessary, because they’re already working on guidance around the issue.
“I believe you’ll see that almost every issue that’s been brought forward in your bill will be addressed,” he assured the House committee members.
According to a spokesperson for the Forest Service, the agency is close to publishing the long awaited draft guidance, which would then be open for 60 days of comments. But they don’t have a set timeline for how soon that will be out.
I like this story about grizzlies from the Cowboy State Daily. Since on TSW we mostly hear that this or that FS project needs to analyze for grizzlies more, this is a nice break- farmers and ranchers seem to be dealing with grizzlies coming back to the plains – of course with lots of help from Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks folks..
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Managing Wyoming’s grizzly bears has come with its challenges, but Montana wildlife officials have a unique quandary – prairie grizzlies.
“People in the ‘gap areas’ (between the Yellowstone and Glacier park ecosystems) were already used to black bears” and so they’ve adjusted to grizzlies moving in, said Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks department spokeswoman Danielle Oyler.
“Whereas the folks out on the plains, they didn’t have black bears there. So having grizzlies show up has been a huge challenge,” Oyler told Cowboy State Daily.
Montana’s prairie grizzlies are an “unintended consequence” of the overall grizzly recovery program, FWP bear management specialist Wesley Sarmento told Cowboy State Daily.
“There’s a lot of folks uncomfortable with grizzlies being out here,” said Sarmento, who is based in Conrad, Montana, about 60 miles north of Great Falls. “They didn’t expect to have grizzlies out here. And in the original planning documents for grizzly recovery, there was no mention of grizzlies being out here.”
Home On The Range
Grizzly bears are well-adapted to life on the prairie. They evolved from brown bears on the wide-open steppes of Russia, and at one time occupied most of the Great Plains.
But in Montana, they’ve made a home on the range. Grizzlies have pushed well into northern prairie habitat around small communities such as Conrad and Augusta, Oyler said.
“They go well out into the prairies now. They are definitely out in prairie settings,” she said.
The land there is largely private, mostly vast grain farms and cattle ranches, Sarmento said. And adjusting to grizzlies has been tough for prairie folks.
“Kids used to able to run free in the summers and go down to the creeks and go fishing,” he said. “And that’s a lot harder to do right now because of the chance of a grizzly encounter.”
Even so, the grizzlies are probably there to stay, Sarmento said.
“There is a breeding population of grizzlies on the plains, and it’s more and more every year,” he said.
Bruins Making A Comeback
Grizzlies are popping up in many places across Montana where they haven’t been seen in decades, Oyler added. Even some larger communities, such as the state capital of Helena, have bruins nearby.
A grizzly was recently spotted roughly 30 miles south of Billings, as the crow flies, in the the Pryor Mountains. The Pryors extend into Wyoming and are adjacent to the Bighorn Mountains. It was the first verified sighting of a grizzly in the Pryor range since the 1800s.
Grizzlies need only the basics to reclaim habitat, Oyler said.
“What’s ideal for them is good food and availability of cover,” she said.
For cover on Montana’s northern plains, grizzlies have taken advantage of natural river bottoms as well as “shelter belts” of trees and shrubbery planted by humans for wind breaks, she said.
There are abundant natural food sources for grizzlies, depending upon the season, Sarmento said.
In the spring, grizzlies can feast on roots and fresh green prairie grass, he said. And they also might occasionally kill whitetail deer fawns.
During the summer, they switch to gorging on wild berries and chokecherries. In the fall they can finish off wounded deer that escaped human hunters or eat gut piles that hunters leave behind.
The trouble begins when they develop a taste for livestock, Sarmento and Oyler said. It might start with grizzlies raiding carcass dumps where ranchers leave piles of dead cattle.
“They get into ranchers’ ‘dead piles.’ And, unfortunately, they sometimes kill ranchers’ livestock,” she said.
Even when cattle carcasses have decayed, grizzlies can get ample calories and rich nutrients from the bones, Sarmento said. But FWP doesn’t like the bruins hanging around carcass piles, because it puts grizzlies in close proximity to people and livestock, upping the chances for conflicts.
“We’ve started a carcass clean-up program” to help mitigate such grizzly magnets, he said.
Piles of grain spilled during harvest can also draw grizzlies, because grain is an easy and calorie-packed meal for the bears, he added. So FWP also encourages farmers to be diligent about cleaning gain spills.
This grizzly was recently tranquilized and collared by Montana wildlife agents for guard dog research project testing to see if livestock guard dogs are effective at keeping bears away from farms with grain spills. (Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks)
‘Young, Dumb Bears’
Older, wiser bears have managed to adapt well to the northern plains without raising a ruckus, Sarmento said. But with juveniles trying to strike out on their own, it can be a different story.
“For the most part, the bears are pretty good at staying out of trouble. Most of the bears we’ve had trouble with are young, dumb bears,” he said.
Those are typically bears that have recently separated from their mothers and push “east, even farther out on to the prairie” in search of new territory, Sarmento said.
What’s more, they can be much younger than Wyoming sub-adult grizzlies, which usually separate from their mothers around age 2 or 3.
“This area is a system of relatively low risk and high resources for grizzlies. In these kinds of systems, we see young bears getting kicked out on their own by their mothers as yearlings, instead of the typical two-year-olds or three-year-olds,” he said. “And the yearlings can be really dumb.”
Hazing Usually Works
To help keep grizzlies — particularly the young, dumb ones — from getting crossways with farmers and ranchers, FWP has found that hazing is effective, Sarmento said.
“Most bears respond to hazing,” he said. “We use dogs, rubber bullets or cracker shells.”
Cracker shells fire a charge from shotguns. The charge explodes in mid-air, like a large firecracker.
FWP also uses drones to chase bears away from places they shouldn’t be, Sarmento added.
When hazing doesn’t work, FWP might trap bears and relocate them to mountain wilderness areas. There have been only a few cases in which wildlife agents have had to kill prairie grizzlies, he said.
FWP has also launched a guard dog program on some farms, he said.
“We’ve found that dogs are pretty good at scaring grizzlies away from farms where there have been gain spills,” Sarmento said.
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Please feel free to add any stories for discussion in the comments.
The comments requested in the ANPR seem to me to be pretty much about everything the FS does. Which is great, in a sense, because I think it’s an open door to make any comments you think would improve the FS. For example, you could make an argument …. unknown climate changes=changing quickly=flexibility for FS to respond=more trust= better data for the public and more transparency= the People’s Database.
I copied the questions from the ANPR so you can check them out in this post.
Some of it seems like the same old problems.. like adaptive management. Remember Chief Thomas and the inception of the Inventory and Monitoring Institute? And I think many TSW readers have had their own experiences and ideas which you could write up and send in today, if you haven’t. For me adaptive management always goes down to “how structured? and by whom, to what end?” We also have examples like the Watershed Condition Framework- how did that work out? Some of us were on the front ends of these efforts.. some seem to have fizzled out and maybe we never hear what happened. Michael Ligquri had an interesting comment on that here when I first posted about the ANPR questions.
Two comments:
1) we tend to bog ourselves down with these kinds of open-ended, subjective, and unanswerable questions. All great questions, no doubt. But they tend to promote more “analysis paralysis”, and often fail to advance any significant “adaptation” to management. I’ve participated on several multi-year committees assigned to resolve these types of questions, and while we end up wordsmithing complex answers, little changes. To anyone who understands design theory, such “overconstrained, over-complex problem sets” is an inherently poor frame for solutions.
2) An effective approach that I’ve used to inform “adaptive management” is using performance-based monitoring/research approaches. This starts with structured working hypotheses that are both measurable and testable. It also includes specific targets and action thresholds based on objectively measurable existing conditions and trends analysis. Ideally, such approaches must include an understanding of geographic diversity. Watershed Analysis was originally designed to help inform such standards, but failed in its implementation (for many reasons, too complex to elaborate here).
And the more structured the framework, the less able to adapt to “rapidly changing” concerns and impacts. Not easy. But here are some quotes from the front end of the ANPR:
Climate change and related stressors, such as wildfire, drought, insects and disease, extreme weather events, and chronic stress on ecosystems are resulting in increasing impacts with rapid and variable rates of change on national forests and grasslands. These impacts can be compounded by fire suppression, development in the Wildland Urban Interface (WUI), and non-climate informed timber harvest and reforestation practices.
Multiple Forest Service plans, policies, and regulations already include direction on climate adaptation. However, given (1) increasing rates of change, and (2) new information and ways of assessing and visualizing risk, USDA and the Forest Service are issuing this ANPRM to seek input on how we can develop new policies or build on current policies to improve our ability to foster climate resilience, recognizing that impacts are different in different places across the country.
There’s a couple of interesting things about this framing. First of all, apparently according to this, everything bad is climate or climate-related that needs to be adapted to. So.. if we have a new introduced invasive insect, does that only require attention if it’s “climate-related”? If that’s the case, you can see people making the argument why it is climate-related, even when it isn’t. Pretty soon everything is climate-related. Even Covid-related recreation pressure (if it’s hotter in the cities, then more people will go to the mountains?). If we keep going, then, all resilience is climate resilience, and we’re gone from multiple-use to ecological sustainability to ecosystem integrity to climate resilience, and at the end of the day it’s all the same stuff the FS has been doing with different words. You might also notice that after multiple use in this line-up, people and the social sciences seem to take a backseat. And yes, I understand that “without ecosystem/climate resilience, there would be no recreation” that’s kind of the “ecological sustainability is primary” 2001ish argument. But do all these definitional meanderings actually help any employees and users and neighbors make better decisions about the problems that confront them every day?
The other thing that struck me about this is the “development in the WUI and non-climate informed timber harvest and reforestation practices”. I retired quite a while ago, and even then silviculturists, fuels practitioners and reforestation folks were considering climate in their work. And one of the first papers on reforestation strategies and climate was in 1992, over 30 years ago. I also don’t see how “development in the WUI” contributes to “wildfire, drought, insects and disease, extreme weather events, and chronic stress on ecosystems” except for the obvious way that people who live in the area may start fires (but maybe homeowners are more careful than recreationists because it’s their properties.. do we know?), and neighbors not treating their trees could lead to more insects and disease? But why WUI folks and not other neighbors?
The concern about matching adaptation to “rapid and variable rates of change” reminds me of Chief Jack Ward Thomas on forest plans:
“Land use planning should be a meaningful – a guide to management action and funding – achieved within a year at much less costs. Before embarking on new efforts in planning it is critical to determine why such planning has failed so miserably and short comings rectified. Flexibility should be a component so as to deal sudden alteration in conditions – fires, markets, economics, and, insect and disease outbreaks.”
I think he said this about 30 years ago.. but note he mentions fire and insect and disease outbreaks. Anyway, perhaps this is a good time to consider amending NFMA to help the FS be able to respond to “rapid and variable rates of change” and use the latest science at the period a project is proposed.
Recreation doesn’t play much of a role in this ANPR for some reason and it’s probably the #1 important use of National Forests now, so that’s also interesting. Anyway, if you think they are asking “hey climate resilience is a new and different thing, how should we manage it?,” it seems like an opportunity to respond with any ideas you have for improvement in general.
You can post parts of your comments below or email me. I’m curious about what people come up with.
From onX report here.
