The March 2022 Journal of Forestry has an article about ‘A “serious game” to explore alternative forestry futures.’ The lead author is David Bengston, a futurist at the station who always has though-provoking takes.”My current research is in the transdisciplinary field of Futures Research (also called Strategic Foresight or simply Futures). Futures Research uses a wide range of methods and techniques to explore possible, plausible, and preferable futures. The goal is to develop foresight — insight into how and why the future could be different than today — to improve policy, planning, and decision making.”

The article is behind a membership wall, but the article also is available from the Northern Research Station.  The abstract:

Serious games are designed to achieve specific educational or other practical purposes beyond pure entertainment. These games take many different forms—from card decks to massive multiplayer online games—and have proliferated across diverse fields. This note introduces IMPACT: Forestry Edition, a serious board game designed to help forestry professionals and stakeholders think more broadly, critically, and creatively about the future of forestry. We describe the game and feedback from beta testing and discuss the advantages and potential drawbacks of gaming methods. A “print and play” version of the game is included as supplemental material. Serious games can make an important contribution to forestry by engaging and informing diverse stakeholders and generating insight that other methods cannot.

Maybe we can have an in-person Smokey Wire meeting and play this game. Hawaii might be an ideal location….

This story map is an excellent resource for folks wanting to learn more about how and what wildfires burn. I plan to use it as a reference for wildland fire students.

Burn severity explained

Shovel Creek: an example of burn severity assessment and ecology in interior Alaska

Interesting numbers from an article in a Montana newspaper (thanks to Nick Smith for the link). An excerpt:

Timber sales on the Flathead National Forest were higher than usual in the past couple of years according to a recently released 2021 biennial monitoring report for the Forest.

In 2019, the Forest sold about 50.6 million board feet of timber and in 2020 it sold 48.5 million board feet of timber.

In 2019, 24.9 million came from salvage sales and in 2020, 28.5 million was from salvage sales. Salvage sales typically come after wildfire or big wind events that blow down a lot of timber.

“Salvage of dead and dying timber accounted for approximately 49 percent of the volume sold in 2019 and approximately 59 percent of the volume sold in 2020. Salvage volume increased in 2020 through the offing of sales with heavy component of over-mature lodgepole pine. Also, a wind event in March of 2020 created blowdown captured as additional volume in active timber sales,” the report noted. [Emphasis added]

All told, about 14,241 acres were treated in some form over the two years in the wildland urban interface, a zone of forest that’s near human homes. The treatments ranged from logging and thinning to prescribed burns. Outside of the WUI, about 7,600 acres were treated.

FYI…. From the DoI’s Office of Wildland Fire….

President’s 2023 Budget Proposes Significant Investments to Address the Nation’s Wildfire Crisis

$1.5 billion, including $340 million in the Wildfire Suppression Operations Reserve Fund, targeted to reduce wildfire risk, build resilient landscapes, and expand workforce capacity

WASHINGTON — The Biden-Harris Administration today submitted to Congress the President’s Budget for fiscal year 2023. The President’s Budget details his vision to expand on the historic progress our country has made over the last year and deliver the agenda he laid out in his State of the Union address—to build a better America, reduce the deficit, reduce costs for families, and grow the economy from the bottom up and middle out.

###

This blog post from Edie Sonne Hall of Three Trees Consulting is aimed at Washington State, but offers an informed look at proposals to lengthen harvest rotations on federal forests, or to set aside vast areas of forest with little or no management to boost carbon sequestration (the “Strategic Forest Reserves” proposed by OSU’s Law, et al, for example). Too long to post here, but worth a look.

Folk, I received this today….

Hi everyone,

On Thursday at the National Forest Health Monitoring workshop, we launched the Forest Health Reporting survey. We have talked numerous times in the forest health* community about what kind of reporting and data delivery would be best in future and have concluded we don’t know what people use or want. So…

HERE IT IS!

At THIS LINK HERE.

A chance to weigh in.

Please take this survey and also forward it to the current or potential users you know: local forest health specialists, researchers, land managers, planners, media specialists, leadership, community organizations – all you think are or should be consumers of forest health monitoring information.

*mostly dealing with non-fire disturbance from insect & disease, other biotic, and non-fire abiotic causes. If you are or are potentially a consumer of this type of information, we are interested in how you prefer information and data delivery.

Average time to complete is about 15 minutes.

Thank you, everyone!

Two items of note involving grazing on federal lands, via the Public Lands Council:

Grazing permits: Voluntary Grazing Permit Retirement Act threatens land use, Wyoming Livestock Roundup – On March 3, Reps. Adam Smith (D-Wash.) and Jared Huffman (D-Calf.) released statements following the proposed bill of the Voluntary Grazing Permit Retirement Act. The bill gives grazing permit holders the option to waive their grazing permits on federal lands in return for compensation. The bill was first introduced in the House of Representatives on Jan. 30, 2020. The bill was referred to the House Committee on Natural Resources by the House of Representatives and then referred to the Subcommittee on National Parks, Forests and Public lands on Feb. 3, 2020.

Groups halt grazing in Elkhorn Mountains, Daily Montanan – Alliance for the Wild Rockies and Native Ecosystems Council successfully halt grazing and sagebrush-juniper burning in the Elkhorn Mountains Wildlife Management Area. A federal district court ruled in favor of the Alliance for the Wild Rockies and Native Ecosystems Council in a lawsuit to force the Bureau of Land Management to conduct an adequate environmental analysis before grazing and burning in the Iron Mask Acquisition area of the Elkhorn Mountains. The court’s March 14 order mandates additional analysis, as required by the National Environmental Policy Act, and requires the agency to analyze if existing agency-installed fences and water developments for cattle grazing should be removed.

Dovetail Partners has published a report suggesting that NEPA ought to be revised to include the environmental impacts of proposed actions beyond the borders of the U.S. The report discusses an example: When timber harvesting declined after the Northwest Forest Plan was implemented, timber production shifted to Canada. As Canada shipped more timber to the US, it shipped less to Asia. Japan, Korea, and Taiwan turned to Russia for timber, where forests are far less productive than in the PNW.

Dovetail’s Jim Bowyer, the author of the report, proposes adding this to NEPA:

“Regarding (i) and (ii) above, any proposed action that would have the effect of significantly reducing or effectively eliminating potential domestic mineral, energy, timber or other critical resource development must be accompanied by a statement regarding likely environmental impacts of the proposed action beyond the geographic area of focus, including outside U.S. borders.”

I suggest that NEPA also should require consideration of impacts with in the US but outside of the region in which the project would be implemented. For example, after the NW Forest Plan, the US Southeast picked up production.

From Politico today:

‘Pretty brutal’: Hiring woes plague Biden effort to contain wildfires

The Forest Service has long struggled with staffing shortages, but the challenges have intensified amid a hyper-competitive labor market and cost-of-living concerns.

The U.S. Forest Service has had chronic staffing shortages for over a decade. But amid rising wages and a fierce competition for labor across the U.S. economy, the agency faces a particularly bleak hiring picture, even as it looks to add an untold number of forest management staff (the Forest Service has declined to estimate just how many people it needs to hire) — to fight wildfires in what could be another tough season, carry out an aggressive new land management plan and continue regular forest management and surveys.

In an email obtained by POLITICO, Forest Service officials are already warning employees in California that there have been 50 percent fewer applications submitted for GS3 through GS9 firefighting positions this year compared to last. And regional Forest Service officials from across the Western fire regions reported struggling with low staffing on a Feb. 15 call with Fire and Aviation Management, the minutes of which were obtained by POLITICO. “Hiring frenzy – lack of candidates, unable to staff 7 days in many places. Continued decline of folks to do the work,” the minutes read, describing comments made by Regional Fire Director Alex Robertson.

Here’s a new open-access publication by Oregon State’s Mark E. Harmon, with Chad T. Hanson and Dominick A. DellaSala. This is interesting and needed research, but the authors’ focus on carbon emissions from burned trees is only one part of the bigger picture. The write that “if logged and removed for biomass energy, much of this carbon could be released relatively quickly.” True, but that would offset fossil CO2 emissions. Likewise, harvesting and processing into lumber and mass timber products would sequester CO2 for many decades or perhaps longer, also potentially offsetting fossil CO2 emissions from the production of non-renewable building materials, such as concrete and steel. IMHO, Hanson and DellaSala have long campaigned against salvage logging, which seems to be their aim here.

Conclusions