Steve Wilent

The report is here. Highlights, from a USFS email:

Thanks to Nick Smith for the link, from the National Association of Counties.

• The Locally Led Restoration Act would improve relationships between intergovernmental partners and outside organizations, including the private sector, helping to reestablish healthy and resilient federal forests.
• The bill would improve the implementation of stewardship contracts to better support landscape restoration projects and create well-paying jobs in our communities.
• The bill would allow third-party contractors to propose their own stewardship contracts to the U.S. Forest Service or Bureau of Land Management if at least 10 percent of the vegetation to be removed is salvage. The bill classifies salvage as beetle kill, dead or dying trees and wildfire kill.
• Crucially, this legislation does not change the established process for timber harvests on federal lands – it only makes necessary improvements to stewardship contracting.

From the Seattle Times via this site…. Excerpts below. Draft EIS here. The 60-day public comment period will close January 16, 2024.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is proposing to enlist shooters to kill more than 500,000 barred owls over the next 30 years in the Pacific Northwest to preserve habitat for northern spotted owls, a protected species.

…

The goal of a draft environmental impact statement for the agency’s barred owl reduction program is to take out the owls in the northern spotted owl’s range in Washington and Oregon and to focus on heading off expansion of the barred owl into the range of the California spotted owl.

Assuming complete implementation of the proposal, an initial cull of about 20,000 barred owls would occur in the first year. Then, an annual reduction of 13,397 birds a year in the first decade of the program; 16,303 a year in the second decade and 17,390 birds each year in the third decade, in parts of Washington, Oregon and California — 11 to 14 million acres in all.

Dovetail partners has a new report, “Old growth forests: How much is enough?”

Many of us have an emotional or even spiritual connection to old growth forests. This is not just because we like to see big old trees, but because of the multitude of ecosystem services and diverse values they provide. The Forest Stewards Guild lists those services as including wildlife habitat, carbon storage, stabilization of watersheds, nutrient recycling, and biodiversity, amongst others. Old growth forests have also historically had economic and social value by providing timber products and supporting forest based businesses and communities. These forests have cultural and social value to Indigenous peoples, First Nations, and Tribes.  

In this report, we explore the different definitions of “old growth” applied globally and in regions of North America and Europe, including their scientific basis. From these definitions, we examine where old growth forests exist in the world, with a focus on the United States (US) and the European Union (EU).  The report considers why we need old growth forests, and conversely, why we do not, and includes a discussion of old growth forest protection and management. We conclude with a discussion of how much old growth is ‘enough’, how we can create more, and how our understanding of the relationship between people and forests is evolving.

Cut to the conclusion:

The Bottom line

The question of “What is old growth?” holds many definitions depending upon the scientific, cultural, and policy lenses that are applied. The variety in these definitions is a recognition that tree species, climate, soil productivity, human interaction, and disturbance history all influence the development of forests. The question of “How much old growth forest is enough?” can seem almost unanswerable because it is contextual and there are many possible and often competing answers. There are forests that previous generations chose to protect, which current generations will also say deserve protection, and that future generations will wrestle with in their own debates.

Old growth forests have historically had economic and social value by providing timber products and supporting forest based businesses and communities. These forests have cultural and social value to Indigenous peoples, First Nations, and Tribes. Intact old growth forests provide multiple benefits, but the type of wood provided from these forests is no longer essential to meeting our raw material needs. Today’s engineered wood products can produce dimensionally stable beams that are structurally superior to equally large beams from large-diameter trees. Consequently, the value of old growth timber has fundamentally changed, and new approaches for management need to be considered. A new relationship with old growth forests that respects and honors the role of people as part of nature and elevates our capacity to care for forests and engage in these practices is needed. With proper management, creation of secondary old growth forests is possible, and can eventually provide the attributes and benefits of old growth forests. The emerging practice of managing maturing forests to provide old growth characteristics is a strategy deserving of increased attention.

Open access paper in PNAS Nexus:

Near-term investments in forest management support long-term carbon sequestration capacity in forests of the United States

Abstract

We use data from >130,000 national forest inventory (NFI) plots to clarify the potential effects of planting and increased fuel management on carbon trajectories in the conterminous United States (Fig. 1). We constructed 30-year projections of the NFI based on Shared Socioeconomic Pathway 2 [13] and five general circulation models under Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5 to assess forest carbon stocks and fluxes associated with two fuel treatment levels and one planting scenario (Fig. 1, SI Appendix).

Shared Socioeconomic Pathway 2 is a “middle of the road” narrative, while RCP8.5 is considered an extreme scenario that essentially assumes no future efforts to reduce atmospheric CO2. Some call it implausible.

Why not include a more optimistic scenario to balance the extreme RCP8.5? Or just go with the middle of the road model?

The Northwest Forest Plan Area Federal Advisory Committee (FAC) will meet on Nov. 14 – 16, 2023, at the Edgewater Hotel, 2411 Alaskan Way in Seattle, Washington.

For those who wish to attend the meeting virtually, please click the link below to join the live stream: https://encoreglobal.zoom.us/j/95745343302?pwd=OVAyWTlUUlpZeEZEWkp3UW1kcXJKUT09

​Along with presentations from forest managers, the FAC will discuss how experience with forest management can inform the agency in considering updates to the Northwest Forest Plan. The NWFP FAC Agenda details can be found on the NWFP FAC website at: https://www.fs.usda.gov/goto/r6/nwfpfac

All FAC meetings are open to the public and include opportunity for public comments. Note that registrations for in-person oral comments or written public comments for this meeting has closed. Comments received after the deadline will be provided to the Forest Service.  The Committee will not have adequate time to consider them prior to the November meeting, however, they will be considered for the January 30-February 1, 2024, meeting.

Details about future Committee meetings and opportunities to provide comments for them will be posted on the Forest Service’s regional website at: https://www.fs.usda.gov/goto/r6/nwfpfac.

The FAC was established by the Secretary of Agriculture as part of ongoing efforts to amend the Northwest Forest Plan. The purpose of the FAC is to bring together diverse perspectives representing the experiences of communities, experts, Tribes, and other interested parties across the Northwest Forest Plan landscape to inform ways that forest management can effectively conserve key resources while considering social, ecological, and economic conditions and needs.

The Federal Advisory Committee does not replace the public involvement process or the public’s opportunity to engage directly with the Forest Service regarding Northwest Forest Plan amendment efforts during the planning process and future engagement and comment opportunities will be provided.

The Northwest Forest Plan covers 24.5 million acres of federally managed lands in northwestern California, western Oregon, and Washington. It was established in 1994 to address threats to threatened and endangered species while also contributing to social and economic sustainability in the region. After nearly 30 years, the Northwest Forest Plan needs to be updated to accommodate changed ecological and social conditions.

Additional information about the Northwest Forest Plan is available at https://www.fs.usda.gov/detail/r6/landmanagement/planning/?cid=fsbdev2_026990 .

For future Northwest Forest Plan Amendment updates please sign up using USDA Forest Service (govdelivery.com)

This graphic tells a fascinating story. It’s from a press release about a new paper, “What the extreme fire seasons of 1910 and 2020 – and 2,500 years of forest history – tell us about the future of wildfires in the West,” by Philip Higuera, Professor of Fire Ecology, University of Montana and Kyra Clark-Wolf, Postdoctoral Associate in Ecology, University of Colorado Boulder
Tue, October 17, 2023.

Text from a press release. The open-access paper is here.

UC Irvine scientists reveal what fuels wildfires in Sierra Nevada Mountains

Irvine, Calif., Sept. 25, 2023 — Wildfires in California, exacerbated by human-driven climate change, are getting more severe. To better manage them, there’s a growing need to know exactly what fuels the blazes after they ignite. In a study published in Environmental Research Letters, Earth system scientists at the University of California, Irvine report that one of the chief fuels of wildfires in California’s Sierra Nevada mountains is the decades-old remains of large trees.

“Our findings support the idea that large-diameter fuel build-up is a strong contributor to fire severity,” said Audrey Odwuor, a Ph.D. candidate in the UCI Department of Earth System Science and the lead author of the new study.

Researchers have known for decades that an increasing number of trees and an increasing abundance of dead plant matter on forest floors are the things making California wildfires more severe – but until now it was unclear what kinds of plant debris contribute most to a fire.

To tackle the question, Odwuor and two of the study’s co-authors – James Randerson, professor of Earth system science at UCI, and Alondra Moreno from the California Air Resources Board – drove a mobile lab owned and operated by the lab of study co-author and UCI alumna Francesca Hopkins at UC Riverside, to the southern Sierra Nevada mountains during 2021’s KNP Complex Fire.

The KNP Complex Fire burned almost 90,000 acres in California’s Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks. In the fire’s smoke, the team took samples of particulate matter-laden air and analyzed the samples for their radiocarbon content at UCI’s W.M. Keck Accelerator Mass Spectrometer facility with co-author and UCI Earth system science professor Claudia Czimczik.

Different fuel types, explained Czimczik, have different radiocarbon signatures, such that when they analyzed the smoke they discovered radiocarbon values associated with large fuel sources like fallen tree logs.

“What we did was pretty distinctive, as we were able to identify fuel sources by measuring the wildfire smoke,” said Czimczik. “Our approach provides what we think of as an integrated picture of the fire because we’re sampling smoke produced over the course of the fire that has been transported downwind.”

The team also saw elevated levels of particulate matter that is 2.5 microns in diameter or less, which includes particles that, if inhaled, are small enough to absorb into the bloodstream.

The preponderance of large-diameter fuels is new in western forests. “We’re really in a situation that’s a consequence of both management strategies and climate warming since European-American settlement began in California,” Odwuor said. “These fuels are building up on the forest floor over periods of decades, which is not typically how these forests were maintained.”

It’s information that, according to Odwuor, could help California better manage its wildfires.

“The knowledge that large-diameter fuels drive fires and fire emissions – at least in the KNP Complex Fire – can be useful for knowing which fuels to target with fuel treatments and what might end up in the smoke from both wildfires and prescribed fire,” said Odwuor. “The idea is that because we can’t control the climate, we can only do our best to manage the fuels, which will theoretically have an impact on fire severity and the composition of the smoke.”

But the solution isn’t as straightforward as removing trees from forest floors, because, among other things, they provide habitat for wildlife. That, and “once you get them out, where do you send them? There are only so many mills in California that can handle all the wood,” Odwuor said.

Where the new knowledge could be helpful is with prescribed burns, wherein teams burn tracks of forest in a planned fashion with the aim of reducing the amount of fuel available for future wildfires.

“We’re hoping to build some urgency for these management strategies,” said Odwuor.

This essay from The Conversation is interesting.  The author’s study is public access.

“The US is spending billions to reduce forest fire risks – we mapped the hot spots where treatment offers the biggest payoff for people and climate”

Excerpt:

To find the locations with greatest potential payoff for forest treatments, we started by identifying areas where forest carbon is more likely to be lost to wildfires compared to other locations.

In each area, we considered the likelihood of wildfire and calculated how much forest carbon might be lost through smoke emissions and decomposition. Additionally, we evaluated whether the conditions in burned areas would be too stressful for trees to regenerate over time. When forests regrow, they absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and lock it away in their wood, eventually making up for the carbon lost in the fire.

In particular, we found that forests in California, New Mexico and Arizona were more likely to lose a large portion of their carbon in a wildfire and also have a tough time regenerating because of stressful conditions.

When we compared those areas to previously published maps detailing high wildfire risk to communities, we found several hot spots for simultaneously reducing wildfire risk to communities and stabilizing stored carbon.

Forests surrounding Flagstaff, Arizona; Placerville, California; Colorado Springs, Colorado; Hamilton, Montana; Taos, New Mexico; Medford, Oregon, and Wenatchee, Washington, are among locations with good opportunities for likely achieving both goals.