USFS press release:

Idaho and USDA sign historic agreement to improve forest health

Recent article from Greenwire:

Prescribed burns on the decline — study

AP article today:

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — Utah Gov. Gary Herbert is planning to ask the U.S. Department of Agriculture for permission to thin forests, clear out dead trees and do controlled burnings on protected areas that account for nearly half of national forest lands in the state.

The Republican governor is seeking to adjust how the U.S. Forest Service’s Roadless Area Conservation Rule is applied in the state to allow for better state influence over national forests following a particularly brutal wildfire season, The Salt Lake Tribune reported this week.

The rule protects listed national forest lands that do not have roads from some activities that would require new roads. The rule covers more than 6,500 square miles (16,800 square kilometers) of forest lands in Utah.

The state’s effort is intended to give forest managers the flexibility they need for projects to make forests more resilient and protect watersheds, air quality and wildlife habitat, Herbert spokesman Paul Edwards said.

….

The Washington Post recently ran this story:

“A Colorado resort area comes to the aid of a cash-strapped national forest”

Excerpt:

“The visitor boom — while great for the local economy — is putting a strain on the public lands that are the reason people vacation, day-trip and retire to the Vail Valley. The cash-strapped U.S. Forest Service isn’t equipped to handle the more than 12 million people who come to the 2.3-million-acre White River National Forest each year.

“So Vail and other Eagle County governments are planning to set aside as much as $120,000 to pay for Forest Service employees to monitor trails and campgrounds and to enforce backcountry rules next summer.”

FWIW, the book I edited, 193 Million Acres: Toward a Healthier and More Resilient US Forest Service (recently published by the Society of American Foresters) includes two essays that address the problem, including one by our own Sharon Friedman:

“Wild and Free: Diverse Dispersed Recreation as the Forest Service’s Main Mission,” by Sharon Friedman

“Implementing Sustainable Recreation on the National Forest System: Aligning the Reality and Promise,” by Steven Selin

In addition, I suggest a potential solution in my introduction — excerpt below….

The book is on sale on the SAF web site, www.eforester.org/store (although it isn’t yet listed in SAF’s online store, you can find it by searching for “193 Million Acres”). Proceeds (if there are any after paying production costs), go to support SAF, a non-profit organization.

Steve

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Excerpt from the introduction to 193 Million Acres:

Selin calls on Congress and the Forest Service to “provide a strategic, focused, financial investment” in the agency’s recreation program. The Forest Service’s Framework for Sustainable Recreation (FSR), released in 2010, did not include such an investment. “It is high time the agency did so now,” wrote Selin. It seems unlikely that Congress will provide sufficient funding for this kind of investment in recreation or for addressing other elements of the backlog Thompson mentions. Perhaps an increase in the agency’s ability to be creative and flexible is in order.

For example, a national forest with a large backlog of deferred recreation facility maintenance, given the freedom to develop a solution on its own, might use stewardship contracting of the sort Tholen and others write about. In forest-health projects, a stewardship contractor typically thins an overcrowded stand and uses some of the proceeds from selling the merchantable timber to pay for the removal of small trees and brush that have little or no value, or for other ecological restoration services. The emphasis is on ecological: projects that are not primarily intended to restore or improve ecological conditions or functions aren’t allowed. According to the Forest Service handbook, “construction of developed campgrounds” and “maintenance of non-haul roads not causing water quality degradation”—roads not primarily intended for transporting harvested timber—are not appropriate stewardship contracting activities.

What if every national forest had the freedom to develop a long-term stewardship or service contract under which an amount of timber is harvested each year to pay for some or all of the recreation and/or other infrastructure construction and maintenance planned for the following year, even if such work has no significant environmental benefit? Revenues might be deposited in a recreation or infrastructure maintenance fund; any surplus funds would be carried over to the following year, saved for a rainy day (including the effects of a flood after a particularly rainy day), or spent on other recreation- or transportation-related projects, such building a new campground or fixing potholes. Advice on such expenditures could be sought from the forest’s resource advisory committee (RAC), and RAC recommendations would carry a great deal of weight. Donations to such funds might come from corporations, nonprofit groups, and individuals; in her essay, Friedman suggests something similar in a discussion the importance of “friends of the forest” groups.

An op-ed from the NY Times last week by Chad T. Hanson and Michael Brune, who are against forestry provisions of the Farm Bill, now in Congress: “Using Wildfires as an Excuse to Plunder Forests: Logging won’t end the blazes that are sweeping the West.” Hanson is an ecologist whose research focuses on forest and fire ecology. Brune is the executive director of the Sierra Club.

The authors make at least one point of fact that hasn’t received enough attention:

“Most of the homes that were destroyed by wildfires over the past year, as in the Tubbs fire and Thomas fire last fall in California, were not primarily in forested areas, but in grasslands, shrub lands and oak savannas.”

They are correct that taking measures to help individual homes survive fires is important, but grasslands, shrub lands, and oak savannas will need some form of fuels management if the threat of large fires in these types of ecosystems is to be significantly reduced. Doing nothing means that large fires will remain a threat.

However, Hanson and Brune recycle old falsehoods in an attempt to make their case.

The Farm Bill provisions the object to “would include logging of old-growth forests and clearcutting of ecologically important post-fire habitat, upon which many imperiled wildlife species depend.”

Large-scale Logging of old-growth forests isn’t occurring on federal lands in the western US and isn’t likely to be used where fuels reduction is the goal. And “clearcutting of ecologically important post-fire habitat” typically occurs on very small portions of burned areas, such as the Chetco Bar Fire on the Rogue River Siskiyou National Forest in 2017, which burned 170,321 acres of National Forest System lands. The USFS says it plans to salvage 71 million board feet of burned timber from 4,090 acres, or 2.5% of the Chetco Bar Fire area — 97.5% of the “ecologically important post-fire habitat” will remain.

(Note that the Chetco Bar Fire burned a total of 191,197 acres, a bit less than the area of New York City, 197,760 acres.)

The authors insist that “logging does nothing to curb fires. On the contrary, increased logging can make fires burn more intensely. Logging, including many projects deceptively promoted as forest ‘thinning,’ removes fire-resistant trees, reduces the cooling shade of the forest canopy and leaves behind highly combustible twigs and branches.”

Forest thinning, if applied at the appropriate intensity for a site’s conditions, can lead to a significant decrease in fire severity and extent. See “Basic principles of forest fuel reduction treatments,” by noted fire ecologist James K. Agee and Carl N. Skinner of the USFS Pacific Southwest Research Station, who report in Forest Ecology and Management that “Applying treatments at an appropriate landscape scale will be critical to the success of fuel reduction treatments in reducing wildfire losses in Western forests.”

NPR interview, August 31: “Why Seattle Had The Worst Air Quality In The World At Some Points This Summer.” A professor of atmospheric sciences talks about wildfire smoke and air quality, but also forests (which, of course, he’s less qualified to comment on). Still, it is interesting that he says “only a small proportion of this is climate change.” Excerpts:

ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
At some points this summer, the big city with the worst air quality anywhere in the world was not Beijing or New Delhi. It was Seattle, Wash. To talk about why and what this means for the future, professor Cliff Mass joins us now. He’s a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle. Welcome.

…

MASS: Well, the big problem is our forests. We’ve suppressed fire now for almost a century. A lot of the forests surrounding Seattle are in very bad condition. They’re overgrown. They have a lot of slash, a lot of low bushes and trees. And they’re completely unlike the forests that were here 150 years ago. And the problem is when they burn, they burn catastrophically.

SHAPIRO: And I’m sure climate change doesn’t help.

MASS: That’s right. The question is how much of this is climate change. I suspect that only a small proportion of this is climate change. I think that the main problem is the forests, which are ready to burn. We have invasive grasses that have moved in that burn very easily. And human beings are increasingly starting fires with this huge number of people going in for recreation, other uses of the forested areas.

Now, on the long term, as the planet warms up, we certainly would expect more fires. So climate change, global warming probably contributed a small amount to it, but probably the key thing is what we’ve done to the surface of the planet.

SHAPIRO: Are there things that the government or citizens could do to try to prevent this from happening more?
MASS: Well, the key thing is to fix our forests. People know what to do. I mean, if you talk to the people in the Forest Service, it’s clear. We have to thin the forests and then let fire come back regularly but at a much lower intensity.

This is a pretty good story from NPR. One thing that is misses, I think, is that this isn’t all about USFS lands, especially in Northern California’s recent fires near Redding and Napa, where much private land burned. In this light, the USFS’s “shared stewardship” initiative is right on target — except that is does not call for funding to treat areas without merchantable timber that can pay for some or all of fuels-reduction projects.

A recent paper in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is informative: “Decreasing fire season precipitation increased recent western US forest wildfire activity,” by Zachary A. Holden et al. (subscription):

Abstract

Western United States wildfire increases have been generally attributed to warming temperatures, either through effects on winter snowpack or summer evaporation. However, near-surface air temperature and evaporative demand are strongly influenced by moisture availability and these interactions and their role in regulating fire activity have never been fully explored. Here we show that previously unnoted declines in summer precipitation from 1979 to 2016 across 31–45% of the forested areas in the western United States are strongly associated with burned area variations. The number of wetting rain days (WRD; days with precipitation ≥2.54 mm) during the fire season partially regulated the temperature and subsequent vapor pressure deficit (VPD) previously implicated as a primary driver of annual wildfire area burned. We use path analysis to decompose the relative influence of declining snowpack, rising temperatures, and declining precipitation on observed fire activity increases. After accounting for interactions, the net effect of WRD anomalies on wildfire area burned was more than 2.5 times greater than the net effect of VPD, and both the WRD and VPD effects were substantially greater than the influence of winter snowpack. These results suggest that precipitation during the fire season exerts the strongest control on burned area either directly through its wetting effects or indirectly through feedbacks to VPD. If these trends persist, decreases in summer precipitation and the associated summertime aridity increases would lead to more burned area across the western United States with far-reaching ecological and socioeconomic impacts.