Steve Wilent

This press release from Oregon State offers interesting information on a study of the effects of timber harvesting on stream flows. The first sentence mentions “industrial tree plantations.” The Journal of Hydrology paper also uses the term — “industrial plantation forests.”

I wonder about the choice of the word “industrial,” which in some circles is often used in a pejorative sense. The second sentence of the press release says that “Industrial” means “intensively managed plantations” — a phrase that is accurate and much less loaded with non-scientific meaning. Also, a plantation might be intensively managed, but in no way industrial — for example, an area replanted after a wildfire and thinned over time to move it toward older forest structure. This would have the same effect on water flows as an “industrial tree plantation.”

Was this simply a poor choice of words? Is “industrial” an appropriate term is a scientific paper?

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March 17, 2020

Timber harvesting results in persistent deficits in summer streamflow

By Steve Lundeberg, 541-737-4039, [email protected]

Source: Catalina Segura, 541-737-6568, [email protected]

This news release is available online: https://beav.es/4qi

Photo of Needle Branch area of the Alsea River watershed: https://flic.kr/p/2iDGjzj

CORVALLIS, Ore. – Summer streamflow in industrial tree plantations harvested on 40- to 50-year rotations was 50% lower than in century-old forests, data from the long-term Alsea Watershed Study in the Oregon Coast Range showed.

The research, led by Oregon State University’s Catalina Segura, is an important step toward understanding how intensively managed plantations might influence water supplies originating in forests and downstream aquatic ecosystems, especially as the planet becomes warmer and drier.

“Industrial plantation forestry is expanding around the globe and that’s raising concerns about the long-term effects the plantations might be having on water, especially in dry years,” Segura said.

Findings were published in the Journal of Hydrology.

Running through southern Benton and Lincoln counties in Oregon, the Alsea River empties into the Pacific Ocean at Waldport and supports runs of chinook and coho salmon as well as steelhead and cutthroat trout.

The Alsea watershed has a rich research history dating back six decades; in the 1960s, it was the site of one of the first comprehensive studies of the effects of forest harvesting on water quality and fish habitat in the nation.

Those research results provided evidence for standards included in the landmark 1971 Oregon Forest Practices Act, among the first such laws in the United States to set rules to protect streams from the impacts of timber harvesting.

In the current study, Segura and collaborators looked at 27 years of streamflow data to compare the effects of historic and contemporary forestry practices on summer streamflow in three sites within the Alsea watershed: Flynn Creek, Deer Creek and Needle Branch.

Flynn Creek, 210 hectares in size, was designated a U.S. Forest Service Research Natural Area in 1975 and has been left undisturbed; 60% to 70% of its canopy is red alder and big-leaf maple, and the rest is Douglas-fir that regenerated following a 19^th century fire.

Deer Creek is 311 hectares and has been historically used to study how road building and extensive forest management affect water quality. Three 25-hectare areas (25% of the total watershed area) in the Deer Creek watershed were clear-cut in 1966 (buffer areas near streams were left uncut). Over the last 30 years the watershed has been harvested again via intermittent thinning and clear-cutting.

Needle Branch, 75 hectares, has been used for examining how watersheds are affected by contemporary logging practices compared to historical practices – the 1960s and earlier. The entire watershed was clear-cut between 1956 and 1966. Eighty-two percent of that happened in 1966, with no trees left along the stream. It was 100% harvested again from 2009 to 2014 using contemporary methods, including retention of riparian vegetation near the stream.

Together, streamflow data from Needle Branch, Deer Creek and Flynn Creek enabled the scientists to determine forestry practices’ effects on how much water was flowing in the streams.

After the mature forests were harvested in 1966, streamflow increased for seven years, then began to decline as the Douglas-fir seedlings grew, eventually falling below pre-harvest streamflow levels.

Compared to mature forests, daily streamflow from 40- to 53-year-old plantations was 25% lower overall and 50% lower during summer months, when there is minimal precipitation in the Coast Range.

The harvesting of the plantations didn’t lead to much of an increase in streamflow. The likely reason: high evapotranspiration from replanted Douglas-firs and other rapidly regenerating vegetation, and from the vegetation in the riparian buffer.

Evapotranspiration is the sum of the water that reaches the atmosphere through evaporation and transpiration – the process that moves water throughout a plant from its roots to its leaves.

“Results of this study indicated that 40- to 50-year rotations of Douglas-fir plantations can produce persistent, large, summer low-flow deficits,” Segura said. “While the clear-cutting of these plantations, with retention of riparian buffers, increased daily streamflow slightly, streamflow did not return to where it was before the harvesting of those mature forests, which apparently do not use as much water.”

The findings, together with other regional studies, indicate that the magnitude of summer streamflow deficits is related to the proportion of watershed area in young (30- to 50-year-old) plantations, Segura said. Comparatively little is known, she added, about the specifics regarding how evapotranspiration levels change as a tree ages or how much it varies with changes in forest structure as the forest matures.

“We need to improve our understanding of tree water use at the stand or forest level and how that changes as forests age,” she said. “We also need to continue to maintain our long-term studies as much as we can. The only way we found out what we learned here is because we had the long-term data.”

The National Council for Air and Stream Improvement, the Oregon Forest and Industries Council, Plum Creek Timber Company (now Weyerhaeuser Company), the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, and the National Science Foundation supported this research.

Collaborators included Kevin Bladon and Jeff Hatten of the OSU College of Forestry; Julia Jones of the OSU College of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences; V. Cody Hale of Nutter and Associates; and George Ice of the National Council for Air and Stream Improvement.

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This is an excerpt from a Greenwire article today, “3 years to show visitors a tree? Slow permits hamper guides”… The article offers quotes from one guide, and there may be more at play in this instance than a shortage of staff and a slow process.

An Alaska guide’s three-year wait for a permit to show hikers a big tree in Tongass National Forest has ended — but only after the state’s senior senator intervened last week.

“It’s effectively taking an act of Congress,” Senate Energy and Natural Resources Chairwoman Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) told E&E News yesterday, days after she raised the subject with Forest Service Chief Vicki Christiansen at a committee budget hearing. “They recognize that it is not right.”

Dan Kirkwood, guide and general manager with Pack Creek Bear Tours in Juneau, has been trying to arrange tours of five to 10 people at a time in a wilderness area on Admiralty Island, part of the nearly 17-million-acre Tongass — the country’s biggest national forest. The Forest Service requires special-use permits for commercial activities to guard against overuse of sensitive sites, a system Kirkwood told E&E News he supports.

Kirkwood’s bureaucratic tangle isn’t unheard of: The Forest Service continues to struggle with delays handling the thousands of requests it receives nationally for special-use permits. The trouble is more profound in Alaska, where the agency has a shortage of staff, although Christiansen said officials continue to work at shortening the wait times.

The main attraction for Kirkwood: a giant spruce called the Candelabra Tree. It’s an example of the kind of old growth that endures in areas of the Tongass that haven’t been logged. But it’s not far from areas the public might visit; the spot is about 20 feet away from a state-owned beach, and it’s between two bear-viewing areas that Kirkwood said he already has permits to visit.

“This is a place we knew of because it’s a cool thing to look at,” said Kirkwood, who received a one-year temporary permit that might be extended. “We want to play by the rules.”

Congress and the Forest Service agree that staffing levels are largely to blame for the crunch. Budget cuts have played a role, Murkowski said, especially because the Forest Service appeared to apply them unevenly, with Alaska taking more than its share.

A Forest Service spokeswoman didn’t immediately return a request for comment from E&E News, but Christiansen said at the hearing that she’s making permits a high priority.

“Legal battles slow timber industry, forcing mill closure in Townsend,” an article by NBC Montana, has the usual back and forth over the issue, but includes a table from the USFS with the number of acres and volume affected by legal actions. Totals: 17588 acres, 138.3 mmbf. Anyone know how much of that is sales vetted by collaborative groups?

Ed Regan, resource manager at RY Timber, said: “I think the solution is that timber sales within timber management areas on national forests should not be subject to federal court review.”

That’s unlikely to happen, but it makes come sense to use CEs for timber sales within timber management areas, if there’s no unusual potential effect. After all, most timber sales are common activities and environmental effects are well understood.

Anyone know how much USFS land in Montana is in “timber management areas”?

Figures on USFS ownership in Montana, from the Montana Wilderness Assn.:

U.S. Forest Service: 16,893,000 acres
USFS Wilderness: 3,372,503 acres (~20% of USFS acres)
USFS Roadless: 5,337,694 acres (~32% of USFS acres)

Total USFS wilderness and roadless: ~52%

Here is a very long and detailed “California Legislative Analyst’s Office Report on Governor Gavin Newsom’s Wildfire-Related Proposals.”

One problem with the proposal, IMHO: federal funding. 57 percent (nearly 19 million acres) of California forestlands are managed by the US Forest Service and other federal agencies, but will they have funding for adequate treatments?

Conclusion

Various factors are contributing to the state facing growing risks of destructive wildfires, which could continue in the decades to come. Given the long‑term and complex nature of wildfire risks—as well as the challenges and costs associated with effectively addressing those risks—we find it is important for the state to develop a statewide strategic wildfire plan. The purpose of the plan would be to inform and guide state policymakers regarding the most effective strategies for responding to wildfires and mitigating wildfire risks. This could include guidance on future funding allocations to ensure the highest‑priority and most cost‑effective programs and activities receive funding and that the state achieves an optimal balance of funding for prevention and mitigation activities with demands to increase fire response capacity.

In addition, we find that in the absence of such a strategic wildfire plan, the Governor’s 2020‑21 budget proposals are difficult to evaluate and in some cases might not align with some of the key elements we think might be included in a strategic approach. Consequently, it is possible that under the Governor’s budget plan, the state could be committing to wildfire strategies that are not the most effective or efficient. Therefore, until the state has developed a strategic wildfire plan, we recommend that the Legislature consider limiting certain ongoing budget commitments that would be difficult to change in the future. In so doing, the state would better maintain budget flexibility to implement the most effective and efficient wildfire risk reduction strategies recommended by the strategic wildfire plan.

The “urban-rural divide” has been discussed for years, especially in the western US. Duke University’s Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions has a new report on the issue. Here’s a press release….

Dividing Lines — and Common Ground — Between Rural and Urban Voters on Environmental Policy

DURHAM, N.C. — Rural and urban Americans are divided in their views on the environment, but common ground does exist, says a new report led by Duke University’s Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions.

“The urban/rural divide on the environment is real, but it centers not on differences in how much people value environmental protection but on divergent views toward government regulation,” said lead author Robert Bonnie, executive in residence at the Nicholas Institute and a former undersecretary for natural resources and environment at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. “Rural Americans, across party lines, are less supportive of governmental oversight on the environment than their urban/suburban counterparts.”

The study was conducted over two years by the Nicholas Institute with assistance from the University of Rhode Island, the University of Wyoming, Hart Research Associates and New Bridge Strategy. It involved extensive outreach to rural constituencies, including a national survey of more than 2,000 registered voters, focus groups with more than 125 rural voters and in-depth interviews with 36 rural leaders.

Rural Americans have an outsized impact on national environmental policy, from strong representation in the halls of Congress to management of vast swaths of lands and watersheds, the authors note.

Polling results indicated broad support for conservation and environmental protection among both rural and urban/suburban voters. The study also found rural voters to be relatively knowledgeable about environmental policies and the potential economic trade-offs that come with them.

“Americans living in rural communities showed a powerful commitment to protecting the environment, motivated in large part by a strong place identity and desire to maintain local environmental resources for future generations,” said study co-author Emily Diamond, assistant professor at the University of Rhode Island.

Rural voters significantly diverged from urban and suburban voters over attitudes toward federal regulation, the study found. In the polling, rural voters across political parties expressed more skepticism for government policies. Participants in focus group conversations often voiced strong support for conservation and environmental protection in the abstract but raised concerns about the impacts and effectiveness of specific policies.

Climate change proved to be another dividing line between rural and urban/suburban voters.

“Our focus groups and interviews echoed this sense that rural opposition to climate change policies may be tied to negative experiences they have had with other federal environmental regulations,” Diamond said.

“Climate change is a polarizing issue in rural America, but there is a path forward that can win rural support,” Bonnie added. “Our study shows that engagement and collaboration with rural stakeholders will be important to winning over rural support.”

There is no quick fix to bridging the urban/rural divide on environmental policies, the authors said. They recommend that policymakers, environmentalists and conservation groups engage more with rural communities when developing policies that could affect them. The authors also suggest federal policies — especially for addressing climate change — are more likely to gain rural voters’ support if they allow for state and local partnerships and collaboration with rural stakeholders.

Other key recommendations include:

* Working with trusted messengers, such as farmers, ranchers, and cooperative extension services, to convey information about environmental policies to local stakeholders
* Improving scientific outreach to rural communities
* Offering opportunities to address environmental policy priorities in a way that is compatible with rural economies

Support for the study was provided by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Wilburforce Foundation and the Rubenstein Fellows Academy at Duke University. The Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions contributed seed funding through its Catalyst Program to get the project started. The full report, “Understanding Rural Attitudes Toward the Environment and Conservation in America,” is available at nicholasinstitute.duke.edu/publications/understanding-rural-attitudes-toward-environment-and-conservation-america.

The study was led by Bonnie with co-authors Diamond and Elizabeth Rowe, a master of environmental management student at Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment. Jay Campbell at Hart Research Associates and Lori Weigel at New Bridge Strategy conducted focus groups and polling for the study.

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You may recall a paper last year that called for large-scale tree planting as “our most effective climate change solution to date.” And President Trump’s call for planting a trillion trees. An op-ed in today’s NY Times debunks this notion, writing that:

There is no way that planting trees, even across a global area the size of the United States, can absorb the enormous amounts of fossil carbon emitted from industrial societies. Trees do take up carbon from the atmosphere as they grow. But this uptake merely replaces carbon lost when forests were cleared in the first place, usually long ago. Regrowing forests where they once flourished can undo some damage done in the past, but even a trillion trees can’t store enough carbon to head off dramatic climate changes this century.

The op-ed mentions a rebuttal to the first paper in Science (open access), in which the authors state that”

“…regardless of the exact amount of carbon that could be stored via forest restoration, this solution can only temporarily delay future warming. The 205 GtC proposed by the authors is equal to about 20 years of global anthropo-genic CO2 emissions at the current emission rate of about 10 GtC/year (2). Without radical reductions in fossil carbon emissions, forest restoration can only offset a share of future emissions and has limited potential. The only long-term and sustainable way to stabilize the climate at any temperature target is to reduce anthropogenic CO2 emissions to zero (over the coming 30 to 50 years to meet the temperature targets of the Paris Climate Agreement).”

In any case, maintaining forest health and resilience, and reducing the chances of large, intense wildfires, is still important.

From Yale University:

Can Wood Construction Transform Cities From Carbon Source to Carbon Vault?

A new Yale study predicts that a transition to timber-based wood products in the construction of new housing, buildings, and infrastructure would not only offset enormous amounts of carbon emissions related to concrete and steel production — it could turn the world’s cities into a vast carbon sink.

Excerpt:

Writing in the journal Nature Sustainability, a multidisciplinary team of researchers and architects predicts that designing mid-rise urban buildings with engineered timber — rather than relying mainly on carbon-intensive materials — has the potential to create a vast “bank vault” that can store within these buildings 10 to 68 million tons of carbon annually that might otherwise be released into the atmosphere. 
 
Simultaneously, society would drastically reduce carbon emissions associated with the construction sector, said Galina Churkina, who led the collaborative research while she was a visiting fellow at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies (F&ES). 
 
“Since the beginning of the industrial revolution we have been releasing into the atmosphere all of this carbon that had been stored in forests and in the ground,” said Churkina, who is a senior scientist at PIK. “We wanted to show that there can be a vision for returning much of this carbon back into the land.”
 
Beyond that, achieving a large-scale wood-based construction sector has the potential to create a new “symbiotic relationship” between natural systems and cities, said Alan Organschi, another author, from the Yale School of Architecture and Gray Organschi Architecture in New Haven.
 
“The city would become a carbon sink rather than a carbon source,” he said. “We would essentially be storing the carbon that would otherwise be combusted for energy or aerobically digested on the forest floor and allowing the forest to ‘continue’ in this restorative, carbon-absorbing system.” 
 
Other authors include Barbara Reck, a senior research scientist and industrial ecologist at F&ES, Thomas Graedel, professor emeritus of industrial ecology at F&ES, as well as researchers from Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Tsinghua University’s Department of Earth Systems Science, and Gray Organschi Architecture’s Timber City Research Initiative.

The abstract to the paper ($) summarized in the Yale article:

Abstract
The anticipated growth and urbanization of the global population over the next several decades will create a vast demand for the construction of new housing, commercial buildings and accompanying infrastructure. The production of cement, steel and other building materials associated with this wave of construction will become a major source of greenhouse gas emissions. Might it be possible to transform this potential threat to the global climate system into a powerful means to mitigate climate change? To answer this provocative question, we explore the potential of mid-rise urban buildings designed with engineered timber to provide long-term storage of carbon and to avoid the carbon-intensive production of mineral-based construction materials.

From the American Forest Resource Council‘s January 2020 newsletter:

Colville Forest Planning Second A to Z Project

The Colville National Forest has identified a second landscape project to be managed under the innovative A to Z format, where the contract awardee completes the NEPA analysis, develops a management plan, and performs all tasks during implementation.

The Chewelah A to Z Stewardship Project would encompass 58,375 acres on the Three Rivers Ranger District, within a planning area that includes the Addy, North Fork Chewelah, and South Fork Chewelah planning units. Within the planning area, 52,916 acres are “general restoration acres” as identified in the 2019 Colville National Forest Revised Land Management Plan.

The Chewelah A to Z project will be structured through multiple calls against a Blanket Purchase Agreement (BPA) spanning 15 years. The BPA’s are designed to reduce administrative costs to accomplish small purchases by eliminating the need for issuing individual purchase documents. The intent of the project is to reduce the potential of high intensity wildfire by removing and/or rearranging existing fuel loads on selected project areas located on the Colville. It is anticipated that both commercial and non-commercial logging methods may be utilized, but not limited to other complex logging operations and activities. The resulting contracts will be IRTC, IRSC or service call order services with provisions for timber removal.

Work to be completed by the contract awardee may include but is not limited to, completing the NEPA for the project, developing a program of treatment, unit layout, cruising, marking, road and trail maintenance, fish and wildlife habitat improvement, removal of vegetation to promote healthy forest stands, reduction of fire hazards, and the achievement of other land management objectives outlined in the 2019 Forest Plan. Payments would not be made for the NEPA services performed by the contractor. The risk for performing NEPA and pre-treatment services lies with the contractor, and the prime contractor must have sufficient financial assets to support payment for NEPA services. Once a final NEPA decision is made by the Forest Service, the prime contractor conducts work as ordered by the Forest Service through calls. The Forest Service maintains all inherently governmental functions such as selecting the preferred alternative.

The Chewelah A to Z solicitation has two phases. Under Phase 1, the NEPA work must be performed by the contract awardee with all decisions being made by the agency to avoid a conflict of interest. No payment will be made for this line item and stewardship credits will not be accrued. During Phase 2, the single awardee contractor for Phase 1 will have the exclusive opportunity to accept BPA calls in the planning area at advertised rates. The contractor also has the option to accept or decline the BPA call. If declined, it must be done within five working days after issuance of the BPA call solicitation. The government also reserves the right to re-solicit any declined requirements using any appropriate contract vehicles.

The Chewelah A to Z project differs from the initial Mill Creek A to Z project, in that Mill Creek was overseen by the Regional Acquisition Division and used task orders to complete the work. It is anticipated that with Chewelah A to Z, the majority of the work will be accomplished using IRTC contracts, with oversight provided by the Forests Contracting Officer. Similar to Mill Creek A to Z, if there are IRSC or other service contracts needed, oversight will be provided by the AQM Contracting Officer. Bids for the Chewelah A to Z Stewardship Project are due March 6. / Tom Partin

High Country News has an article of interest:

Observe the BLM’s displacement

Moving land-management HQ out of Washington illustrates the ‘deconstruction of the administrative state.’

We’ve discussed this issue here and elsewhere. Aside from the machinations of the Trump administration, can a case be made that it is better for a land-management agency to be physically closer to the land it manages? For example, the USFS’s Region 5 office in Vallejo, Calif., seems out of place near SF Bay and far from any national forest. Sacramento would have been ideal, as it is closer to the forests and to the state government. Yes, it is crucial for BLM and USFS to have a presence in D.C., but not all national staff needs to be there. A colleague once suggested that much of the USFS staff could work well if distributed around the regional offices. Likewise, many regional office staffers could work from national forest HQs.

Greenwire today: “Groups threaten to sue for wolverine protections.” Excerpt:

Wolverines are the largest members of the weasel family, but they look more like small bears with bushy tails. Conservation groups say the animals need to be listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.

Ten groups want to force the federal government to protect the elusive wolverines.

The groups estimate there are around 300 wolverines left, sparsely scattered across the Mountain West, including Idaho, Washington and Oregon. Their young depend on snowy, high-altitude habitat that could disappear as the climate warms.

Gary Macfarlane is with the advocacy group Friends of the Clearwater, which signed on to sue federal agencies if they don’t add wolverines to the endangered species list in 60 days. The notice of intent to sue includes 10 groups.

The article cites winter recreation (esp. snowmobiles) as a factor. But if climate is the main factor in a Wolverine decline, there isn’t much the agencies can do about it, except to protect habitat as warming progresses.