Steve Wilent

This press release from October 2020 are relevant to our discussions of forest management — variable-density thinning and Rx fire — in the Sierras and perhaps elsewhere. The study was is Conservation Biology.

An overview, here, provides key findings:

Results – highlights

• Both thinning treatments resulted in densities of >10” trees and species composition similar to what old-growth forests in this area historically contained.
• The board foot volume removed to establish the HighV and LowV treatments averaged about 14,000 ft per acre and allowed the thinning to pay for itself. Had a 30” diameter cap been used, volume would not have differed between the two thinning strategies.
• Prior to treatment, the study site had a high density of Northern flying squirrels (Glaucomys sabrinus), which are an important food source for raptors including spotted owls. While numbers caught in live traps declined in thinned units following treatment, the overall population size in the study area did not change, illustrating the potential benefits of habitat heterogeneity.
• Thinning treatments suffered far less tree mortality during and after the 2012-2015 drought than the unthinned controls. Basal area (the cross sectional area of live tree stems) declined 23% between 2014 and 2018 in the unthinned controls, while the basal area did not change in the thinned units, with mortality balanced by tree growth.
• Between 10-20% more snow accumulated in the thinned units compared with the unthinned controls in the 2013 and 2014 water years. Differences in snow melt out date among treatments were inconclusive, in part because both years were unusually warm and dry.
• Many understory plant species are responding most favorably to the combination of either type of thinning plus prescribed fire. Some shrubs, including Ceanothus – an important browse for deer – show the largest increase in the HighV thinning plus prescribed fire treatment. Germination of Ceanothus seeds is stimulated by fire and the presence of gaps provides suitable high-light environments.

The Rocky Mountain Research Station has a brief paper of interest here: “Hearing Every Voice in the Room: Social Science for Public Engagement During Forest Planning.” Anyone here familiar with the Q methodology? It sounds similar to the methodology used by Region 6 folks in NW Forest Plan revision “listening sessions” a few years ago.

“At the Gila National Forest and elsewhere, Armatas and his coworkers have implemented a public engagement protocol based on a social science information-gathering approach known as Q methodology. Invented in 1935 but recently adapted and peer-reviewed for Forest Service use, Q methodology is a structured analysis of personal opinions on a given topic. It requires participants to complete something called a Q sort, where tradeoffs are elicited and natural resource benefits are prioritized. Participants also identify drivers of change—such as management actions and climate change impacts—that are most concerning to them. Information can be collected in less than an hour, participants generally find the hands-on process to be thought-provoking and fun, and the final results include an understandable and engaging representation of a diverse range of perspectives.”

The Post article says “the United States has been inadvertently pushed back on track to meet the commitments the Obama administration made at the Paris climate agreement…” But the US has been on track since 2005 to meet or beat those commitments, regardless of the pandemic.

US greenhouse gas emissions set to drop to lowest level in three decades

The 9 percent fall has been partially offset by extreme forest fires

The Washington Post

November 19, 2020

Greenhouse gases generated by the U.S. economy will slide 9.2 percent this year, tumbling to the lowest level in at least three decades, a new BloombergNEF study says.

Battered by the coronavirus pandemic, the stalled economy is projected to have generated 5.9 billion metric tons of emissions, about the same level as 1983, according to the private research organization.

As a result, the United States has been inadvertently pushed back on track to meet the commitments the Obama administration made at the Paris climate agreement in December 2015, despite the fact the Trump administration pulled the country out of the pact. Before 2020, the United States had fallen badly behind its targets under the accord.

How Joe Biden aims to embed climate action across the government

Still, net emissions are expected to be 6.4 percent lower after taking into account the unusually extreme forest fires that swept the West Coast and Rocky Mountains earlier this year, pumping carbon dioxide and other pollution into the air and offsetting much of the drop in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. [emphasis added]

The Property and Environment Research Center, “The home of free market environmentalism,” has three new policy briefs, according to an email from them today:

How to Care For Our Public Lands: New PERC Policy Briefs
Our public lands need our help, and now is the time to make a difference. Between maintenance needs, local management challenges, and funding insecurities, getting the incentives right for public lands conservation is crucial. Recent efforts, such as the Great American Outdoors Act, have been a start, but there’s much more to do. The good news is we now have the opportunity to make changes that will help solve these problems.

In our new series of policy briefs authored by PERC research fellow Tate Watkins, we look ahead to the future of our public lands. The series explores the challenges that remain and offers creative solutions to ensure sustainable, secure funding so that our public lands will be taken care of for generations to come.

A Better Way to Fund Conservation and Recreation
Federal oil and gas revenues have generated funding for the great outdoors for decades, but the model warrants reconsideration.

Enhancing the Public Lands Recreation Fee System
Visitors are already helping public lands flourish by contributing revenues that support recreation. Reforms could improve management and benefit visitors even more.

Fixing National Park Maintenance for the Long Haul
Addressing overdue maintenance is vital, but the root of the problem is a lack of attention to routine maintenance.

FYI, from the American Forest Resource Council’s October newsletter:

AFRC Submits Comments on the Eastside Screens EA
On October 12, AFRC submitted comments in response to a Preliminary Environmental Assessment (PEA) published by the Forest Service that considers amendments to a set of guidelines known as the Eastside Screens. The PEA specifically proposes amending that portion of the Eastside Screens that prohibits harvest of any tree over 21 inches in diameter. See August Newsletter for a summary of the findings in the PEA.

Our comments urged the Forest Service to adopt the alternative that best meets the goal of the EA, which is described as “maintaining the abundance and distribution of old forest structure.” The effects analysis outlined in the PEA was based on a robust review of scientific literature and concluded that the Adaptive Management Alternative would permit the “development of more open late old structure than all other alternatives.” As such, AFRC expressed our full support for adoption and implementation of the Adaptive Management Alternative in order to maximize the attainment of the goals of the proposed amendment and the goals of the Eastside Screens.

We are hopeful that AFRC is not alone in its support for the scientifically supported replacement for the 21-inch rule and that the Forest Service adopts this alternative that will allow its forest management professionals the flexibility to effectively manage the diverse forest ecosystems in eastern Oregon without the burden of an arbitrary diameter limit. /Andy Geissler

The USFS Forest Products Lab has a new report, “Cradle-to-Gate Life-Cycle Assessment of Redwood Lumber in the United States”

“This report contains a detailed cradle-to-gate life-cycle assessment method including data collection, development of life-cycle inventory, and life-cycle impact assessment for production of redwood lumber in the United States. The results illustrated that redwood lumber production has a very low carbon footprint (37.97 kg CO2e/m3 of lumber) and stores about 18 times more carbon compared with its cradle-to-gate carbon footprint.”

FYI… US-wide standard, all lands. However….

“This draft includes the “base indicators” for Principle 1 through Principle 10, and associated
annexes, that will be applicable to almost all certified Organizations, but does not include the
Scale, Intensity, and Risk Indicators (i.e., SIR Indicators: family forest indicators and plantation
indicators), nor the supplementary requirements for US Forest Service lands. These additional
materials will be consulted through a separate first public consultation, and then all materials will
be combined for the second public consultation in 2021.”

Public Consultation Open for Revised FSC US National Forest Stewardship Standard

Thursday, 15 October 2020

On October 5th, FSC US opened a 75-day public consultation for the first draft of a revised FSC US National Forest Stewardship Standard.

Due in large part to the quality and rigor of our forest management standards, FSC is widely recognized as the world’s most trusted certification system. Draft 1 of the revised Standard offers further refinement of the respected existing standard for the United States, aligning it with the FSC Principles and Criteria Version 5 and the International Generic Indicators.

Our goal is to deliver a standard that is both best-in-class and achievable by streamlining the existing standard and addressing a number of priority issues, identified below. To help achieve this goal, we will need clear, actionable input from an informed and diverse set of stakeholders during this consultation.

Guided by the FSC US Board of Directors (the Standard Development Group) and a technical working group of experts, the Standard reflects the social, environmental and economic values that underpin FSC’s approach.

While much of the Draft 1 revised Standard remains consistent with the existing US Forest Management Standard, the Standard Development Group identified a set of priority issues to address in the revision process, including:

• Climate Change
• Indigenous Peoples’ Rights, Local Communities’ Rights, and Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC)
• High Conservation Value Areas, Representative Sample Areas, and the Conservation Area Network
• Forest Workers
• FSC US Regions and Regional Requirements

FSC US will be hosting a series of three webinars related to the priority issues.

Visit https://www.engage.us.fsc.org/ to register for the webinars, review the Draft 1 revised standard, read the supporting overviews about the consultation and priority issues, and access the consultation platform to comment.

The public consultation closes on December 18, 2020.

If you have questions, please email them to [email protected].

This list may help us examine our own biases and beliefs. I reckon each of us has employed one or more of these biases, whether we realized it or not…. Curry invites contributions to the list….

From a post by Judith Curry on her blog, Climate Etc., October 4, 2020.

How we fool ourselves

“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person too fool.” – physicist Richard Feynman

Cognitive biases relate to self-deception that leads to incorrect conclusions based on cognitive factors, including information-processing shortcuts (heuristics) (Tversky and Kahnemann 1974). Cognitive biases can abound when reasoning and making judgments about a complex problem such as climate change.

Cognitive biases affecting belief formation that are of particular relevance to the science of climate change include:

• Confirmation bias: the tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one’s preconceptions
• Anchoring bias: the tendency to rely too heavily on one trait or piece of information, such as the mean or previous results.
• Framing bias: using an approach that is too narrow that pre-ordains the conclusion
• Overconfidence effect: unjustified, excessive belief
• Illusory correlations: false identification of relationships with rare or novel occurrences
• Ambiguity effect: the tendency to avoid options for which the probability of a favorable outcome is unknown
• Self-serving bias: a tendency for people to evaluate information in a way that is beneficial to their interests
• Belief bias: evaluating the logical strength of an argument based on belief in the truth or falsity of the conclusion
• Availability heuristic: The tendency to overestimate the likelihood of events with greater ‘availability’ in memory, which can be influenced by how recent the memories are or how unusual or emotionally charged they may be

A fallacy is logically incorrect reasoning that undermines the logical validity of the argument and leads to its assessment as unsound.  There are many different classifications of fallacies. Below are some fallacies that I’ve seen used in arguments about climate science:

• Begging the question is a fallacy occurring in deductive reasoning in which the proposition to be proved is assumed implicitly or explicitly in one of the premises.
• Correlation implies causation is a logical fallacy by which two events that occur together are claimed to be cause and effect.
• Fallacy of distribution occurs when an argument assumes that what is true of the members is true of the class (composition), or what is true of the class is true of its members (division).
• Hasty generalization is the logical fallacy of reaching an inductive generalization based on too little evidence.
• Statistical special pleading occurs when the interpretation of the relevant statistic is ‘massaged’ by looking for ways to reclassify or requantify data from one portion of results, but not applying the same scrutiny to other categories.
• Fallacy of the single cause occurs when it is assumed that there is one simple cause of an outcome when in reality it may have been caused by a number of only jointly sufficient causes.

The category of intentional fallacies is not about how we fool ourselves, but how we try to fool others. Examples of intentional fallacies used routinely in the public debate on climate change include:

• Diverting the argument to unrelated issues with a red herring(ignoratio elenchi)
• Ad hominem fallacy: asserting that an argument is wrong because of something discreditable/not authoritative about the person
making the argument.
• Appeal to motive: challenging a thesis by calling into question the motives of its proposer.
• Asserting that everyone agrees (argumentum ad populum, bandwagoning)
• Creating a ‘false dilemma’ (either-or fallacy) in which the situation is oversimplified
• Selectively using facts (card stacking)
• Making false or misleading comparisons (false equivalence and false analogy)
• Appeal to consequences of belief (argumentum ad consequentiam): an appeal to emotion that concludes a hypothesis or belief to be either true or false based on whether the premise leads to desirable or undesirable consequences.

The Lolo National Forest is working on the “Wildfire Adapted Missoula” project, “a risk-based strategic fuels management project. It proposes mechanized and non-mechanized fuel and vegetation treatments to reduce wildfire hazard and associated risk in strategic locations.”

Location Summary: Project surrounds the communities of Missoula, Lolo, East Missoula, Bonner, Clinton, and Turah (approx. 158,725 acres of National Forest System (NFS) lands).

Scoping documents are here.

IMHO, many areas in the west would benefit from risk-based strategic fuels management projects like this.With limited funding and staff, setting priorities is a must.

Excerpts from an article from the Missoula Current:

Compared to towns in California and Oregon, Missoula was lucky this summer not having any serious nearby wildfires. But with a warming climate, it’s not a matter of “if” but “when,” so the Lolo National Forest is proposing a large treatment project on the suburban forest to reduce wildfire risk in the Five Valleys region.

On Wednesday morning, on the upper part of the Blue Mountain Recreational Area, U.S. Forest Service silviculturist Sheryl Gunn walked along a dirt road pointing up at all the mistletoe infestations in the Douglas fir that grows thicker in the upper sections of forest.

“Where would wildfire hazard be high? It would be high in a place like this,” Gunn said. “We have this forested condition all around Missoula. This forested condition is what we saw in the Lolo Fire. When a fire gets into the crowns of this, nothing really survives. And so we see very, very, very intense fire.”

…

But not all the national forest land will be treated. That would take a lot of time and money. More importantly, it’s more effective to focus on areas of high risk. No point treating a fairly wet or previously burned area farther away from Missoula when there’s a heavily wooded spot right next to town.

This article from Audubon is well worth reading. It sheds light on questions we’re discussed at length here.

Recent ‘Megafires’ Imperil Even Fire-Loving Forest Birds

Many birds, such as owls and woodpeckers, thrive in forest habitats created after fire. But the hotter, bigger, more destructive megafires out West might be too much even for them.

An excerpt:

After the King Fire, Jones returned to his research site to see how California Spotted Owls responded to the devastation. The massive fire swept through more than 97,000 acres, which included 44 percent of the study area and 30 of the owl’s 45 known nesting sites within it. Jones tracked the owls, which had already been outfitted with GPS receivers and colored leg bands, and found that a year later the birds had abandoned the most severely burned areas where more than 75 percent of trees died. These severely burned areas represented 50 percent of the fire’s total burn area.

It’s not that California Spotted Owls avoid all severely burned areas after fire—just the largest patches. They rarely venture more than 325 feet deep into a severe burn, Jones found in follow-up research at the King Fire site. But do they recolonize smaller patches that burned severely? To find out, he also studied owls in three western national parks in the Sierra Nevada where forest managers intentionally set small fires, and let natural ones burn, to maintain healthy, historical wildfire regimes. He saw that the California Spotted Owl returned to smaller patches even if they burned intensely, while avoiding larger ones—maybe because wide expanses with fewer trees are home to less prey or offer less cover from predators, such as the Great Horned Owl. “To us, that suggests again there’s this adaptive response,” Jones says. “Owls are adapted to frequent, low-severity fires,” not intense megafires.

The article also discusses black-backed woodpeckers:

Even the Black-backed Woodpecker, long-considered a bird that thrives after intense fires, apparently has its limits. The woodpecker flocks to burned-out forests to feast on beetle larvae that infest dying and dead trees. However, Andrew Stillman, an avian ecologist at the University of Connecticut and Tingley’s student, made a surprising discovery when he attached radio transmitters to adult and juvenile birds over the course of seven years. 

As expected, adult woodpeckers primarily kept to severely burned areas. “But the juveniles were a different story,” Stillman says. “Right after leaving the nest, these young birds flew to areas with live trees remaining after fire.” He suspects they preferred these areas because the living trees provide protection from predators. This species, too, needs pyrodiversity.

“Our conventional thinking was that more severe fires might be good for certain species that thrive in burned forests,” Stillman says. “But our research shows that even fire-loving species need variation in burn severity to survive.”  

— Thanks to Nick Smith for including the link to this article in his Sept. 30 Healthy Forests, Healthy Communities email.