Press release today from Oregon State University. The first few paragraphs:

As more of the Pacific Northwest burns, severe fires change forest ecology

CORVALLIS, Ore. — Over the last 30 years, the landscape annually affected by forest fires has slowly increased across the Pacific Northwest, and in some regions, severe blazes account for a higher proportion of the area burned than in the past.

As a result, the ecology of some of the region’s forests is changing in unprecedented ways.

Scientists calculated that less than one-half of 1 percent of the region’s forest is subject to fire in any given year. But in a project using satellite imagery and ground-based tree inventories, they also found that, in areas historically dominated by low- and mixed-severity fires, nearly a quarter of the burned landscape was subject to patches of high-severity fires that often exceeded 250 acres in size.

Studies of fires prior to 1900 suggest that severe fires occurred over smaller patches of forest and accounted for a much smaller proportion of the total burned area than they do today.

….

New report from the Center for American Progress (CAP): “America’s Forgotten Forests: A Vision for Revitalizing Rural Economies Through Restoration”

Greenwire used this headline: “Think tank urges Trump to transfer agency to Interior” but the policy paper is much more comprehensive. Greenwire says the report lays out policy recommendations that “include responsible timber harvest but also put the focus on forest restoration as a pathway to all kinds of additional positive outcomes, many of which would create American jobs.”

Some folks will find much in the paper to disagree with, as I do. For example, the authors have far too much faith in recreation as a forest resource/value that can adequately sustain rural communities. However, they do highlight the potential of cross-laminated timbers: “Fostering growth in this new market would put more people to work in the timber industry and return forests to health.”

Some folks will discount the paper because of its source — the CAP is widely seen as progressive/liberal. IMHO, the paper is well worth thought and discussion.

Chad Hanson is featured prominently in a Greenwire article today, “Federal fire policy may be based on faulty science.”

“A growing amount of research by Hanson and other scientists suggests forests with a lot of dead trees are at no more risk of catastrophic wildfire — and possibly less — than woods cleared of them.

“The reason: Live trees with oil-rich needles still attached burn faster than dead trees, Hanson said. And though other factors are only an educated guess, he said, researchers believe keeping loggers out of such woods may have a long-term benefit by letting dead trees fall to the forest floor, where they soak up water and slow the spread of fire.”

Until those large 1000-hour-plus fuels dry out and burn, and burn hot, and burn amongst a sea of brush and, given a seed source, young trees. That’s a recipe for a very high intensity fire. Of course, Hanson might say that’s fine, as long as no commercial harvesting had spoiled the pristine snag forest. I would guess that Hanson has never seen — let alone mopped up — a punky, downed, 40-inch ponderosa pine burning merrily and throwing embers across a fire line.

The Greenwire article even brings up Dan Donato’s controversial 2006 Science paper. Overall, an unbalanced article, but it may help with Hanson’s fundraising efforts.

In any case, federal fire policy is not based on ecology alone, even if, as Andy has pointed out, the agency has rearranged the order of the triple bottom line on its web site: “Deliver Economic, Social, and Environmental Benefits.”

NCFP folks,

This is an early call for contributions of essays for a book to be published by the Society of American Foresters, for which I will serve as editor. Working title:

193 Million Acres:

Toward a more healthy and resilient U.S. Forest Service

The book will present a collection of essays describing constructive proposals for increasing the effectiveness and efficiency of the agency. The essays will examine the state of the agency from a variety of viewpoints and propose actions that would address challenges the agency faces. Overall, the book would look at the internal policies and management strategies of the agency itself, including its National Forest planning regulations, but also at the role of Congress and the Executive branch, existing federal laws, legal challenges to resource management, economic opportunities and challenges within and outside of the agency, political support for the agency, the need to adapt forest management as the climate changes, and so on. The purpose of the book is not to criticize the agency, but to offer concrete proposals for how, ultimately, the agency’s operations might be made more efficient and effective and its land-management activities maintained, expanded, and improved. In short, the objective of the book is to examine paths toward a more healthy and resilient US Forest Service.

I’m still working with SAF to iron out some of the details of the book production process. This announcement is intended to encourage potential authors to think about submitting an essay. The preliminary call for contributions is available at:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0By3YLyexT5xIZWh6SnNTcnU0czQ

Steve Wilent
Editor, The Forestry Source
The Society of American Foresters
[email protected]

According to ClimateWire, Rep. Ryan Zinke, President Trump’s pick to lead the Interior Department, “has told senators he’s interested in transferring the Forest Service from USDA to Interior, where the forest agency’s predecessor resided before 1905.”

According to this article, “”Park rangers and firefighters hired each summer to serve the nation’s public lands appear to be exempt from the freeze, according to a memo issued Tuesday evening by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget.”

The memo says this applies to, “Appointment of seasonal employees and short-term temporary employees necessary to meet traditionally recurring seasonal workloads, provided that the agency informs its OMB Resource Management Office in writing in advance of its hiring plans.” And others.

Folks, this is from an op-ed by Andy Geissler, a forester who works for the American Forest Resource Council in Eugene, Oregon. He is writing about a previous op-ed on the recent expansion of a national monument in SW Oregon.

The Jan. 12 guest viewpoint headlined “Expanded monument could benefit economy” offers a strange and disturbing perspective on how economic value is placed on certain commodities, and likewise, how Oregon places value on its economy. The context is the expansion of the Cascade Siskiyou National Monument in Southwest Oregon.

The authors assert that “the economic value of tourism associated with an expanded monument would vastly exceed the value of timber that could be extracted.”

I believe the flaw in this approach is that it assumes that whichever commodity generates the most economic value is inherently the “best” or most useful commodity.

…

I can relate to this, as I live very close to the Mt. Hood National Forest in Oregon, which attracts more than four million visitors annually. Those visitors certainly have an economic impact, but most of the folks in the local communities don’t get much of a benefit in terms of well-paying jobs. We’d be much better off if some of the former jobs in the woods, trucks, and mills were brought back — jobs that pay far more than most the recreation and tourism jobs here. And I think we could have both. For us, a more-diverse local economy would be much better than one so largely tied to tourism.

FWIW, two of the 14 homes along my rural road that sold last year were bought as vacation homes. That makes 5 homes now that sit empty most of the year. It is rare that these new owners spend any money here….

Interesting viewpoint from High Country News….

If California wants to secede, let it go

By Robert H. Nelson/Writers on the Range

Many Californians woke up the night after the presidential election thinking that they were living in a different country. A few felt so alienated that they publicly raised the possibility of seceding from the United States.

There is no constitutional way, however, to do this. But there is a less radical step that would amount to a limited secession and would require only an act of Congress. Forty-five percent of the land in California is administered by the federal government — including 20 percent of the state in national forests and 15 percent under the Bureau of Land Management. Rather than outright secession, California could try to assert full state sovereignty over all this land.

Until Nov. 8, California wouldn’t have cared about this, but with the prospect of a Donald Trump administration soon managing almost half the land in the state, Californians may want to rethink their traditional stance. Otherwise, they are likely to face more oil and gas drilling, increased timber harvesting and intensive recreational use and development on federal land in the state.

Much of the rest of the West, moreover, might support their cause. In recent years, Utah has been actively seeking a large-scale transfer of federal lands. During the Obama years, Utah’s government has deeply resented the imposition of out-of-state values on the 65 percent of the state that is federally owned — just as California may now come to resent the outside imposition of new land management practices by a Trump administration.

Utah, ironically, may now see a comprehensive land transfer as less urgent. That has happened before: The election of President Reagan in 1980 took the steam out of the Sagebrush Rebellion in Utah and elsewhere in the West. In retrospect, however, that proved to be shortsighted, as future administrations reversed course and asserted even more authority over Western lands.

If California were to lead the charge, and with Trump as president, fundamental changes in the federal ownership of land in the West might become more politically feasible than ever before. There are additional strong arguments, moreover, for a transfer of federal lands (excluding national parks and military facilities) in the West to the states today. Over the region as a whole, the federal government owns almost 50 percent of the land, and higher percentages in many rural areas. When Washington, D.C., imposes policies and values that conflict with the majority views of the residents of whole states, the federal government, in effect, takes on the role of an occupying force. It may not be traditional colonialism, but there are resemblances.

Defenders of federal land management argue that the public lands belong to all Americans. Although advocates of a federal land transfer promise to keep the lands in state ownership, many Westerners fear that the states might privatize the lands outright or administer them for narrowly private interests. The implicit assumption in this is that there are core national values that should govern public-land management in all the Western states and that the federal government is best placed to advance these values. But the reality is that Americans are today deeply divided on many fundamental value questions — and these divisions are often geographically based.

Since at least the 1990s, many Westerners have become convinced that the management of federal lands in the West is dysfunctional no matter what party is in power. This should come as no surprise, since much of Washington itself is dysfunctional.

So I propose the following. Congress should enact a law allowing each state to call a referendum on the question: Do you want the federal government to transfer federal lands in your state (excluding national parks and military lands) to state ownership? If the vote is affirmative, a transfer would follow automatically. You might call it a Scotland solution, adapted to American circumstances.

California could pursue its preservationist values, while Utah could allow wider access to its new lands. With public-land management decentralized to the state level, where there would be greater basic agreement on ends and means, it might finally be possible to overcome the political paralysis of the current federal land management system centered in Washington.

So I say, let Californians decide if they want to secede, at least in this partial way, and the residents of other Western states as well.
Robert H. Nelson is a contributor to Writers on the Range, the opinion service of High Country News (hcn.org). He is a professor in the School of Public Policy of the University of Maryland, and from 1975 to 1993, worked for eight different secretaries of the Interior Department.

Three National Forests, the Flathead, the Helena-Lewis and Clark and the Custer-Gallatin are all writing the basic governing documents that lay out what can and can’t happen, and where, in their vast territories. In January the Helena-Lewis and Clark is holding a series of public input meetings on their new forest plan.

Montana Public Radion interview with Martin Nie, University of Montana Professor of Natural Resource Policy.

10,000 Square Miles: Montana Forests Testing Planning Reforms

Interesting excerpt about potential new laws under the Trump administration:

Whitney: I guess the other option would be for Congress to write more specific laws, do you have concerns about that?

Nie: Oh, absolutely, and it’s a great question. I think that’s what we’re going to see in the next year, a big pivot point. We’ve seen a number of proposed bills that are really radical overhauls of the existing legal structure, in terms of NEPA, in terms of National Forest management, and so that’ll be the question. And I don’t know what to expect in that regard. We’re at such a pivotal crossroads with federal lands management. It goes even beyond the National Forests. We’ve just had one pendulum swing from another for the last 20 years. And you’ve seen our federal land agencies swing between administrations, and so yeah, I think planning does offer that potential of having a very grounded, place-specific sort of direction for an agency that has the potential of a lot of local and national buy-in.

Some “best available sound science” to inform forest managers….

Key finding: “Across all fires, 43% of all plots had no conifer regeneration.”

But this comes as no surprise to foresters….

From “Predicting conifer establishment post wildfire in mixed conifer forests of the North American Mediterranean-climate zone,” by Kevin R. Welch et al, Ecosphere, December 2016. Link to full text.

Here’s the abstract.

Abstract. Due to fire suppression policies, timber harvest, and other management practices over the last century, many low- to mid-elevation forests in semiarid parts of the western United States have accumulated high fuel loads and dense, multi-layered canopies that are dominated by shade-tolerant and firesensitive conifers. To a great extent, the future status of western US forests will depend on tree species’ responses to patterns and trends in fire activity and fire behavior and postfire management decisions. This is especially the case in the North American Mediterranean-climate zone (NAMCZ), which supports the highest precipitation variability in North America and a 4- to 6-month annual drought, and has seen greater-than-average increases in air temperature and fire activity over the last three decades. We established 1490 survey plots in 14 burned areas on 10 National Forests across a range of elevations, forest types, and fire severities in the central and northern NAMCZ to provide insight into factors that promote natural tree regeneration after wildfires and the differences in postfire responses of the most common conifer species. We measured site characteristics, seedling densities, woody shrub, and tree growth. We specified a zero-inflated negative binomial mixed model with random effects to understand the importance of each measured variable in predicting conifer regeneration. Across all fires, 43% of all plots had no conifer regeneration. Ten of the 14 fires had median conifer seedling densities that did not meet Forest Service stocking density thresholds for mixed conifer forests. When regeneration did occur, it was dominated by shadetolerant but fire-sensitive firs (Abies spp.), Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii) and incense cedar (Calocedrus decurrens). Seedling densities of conifer species were lowest in sites that burned at high severity, principally due to the biotic consequences of high severity fire, for example, increased distances to live seed trees and competition with fire-following shrubs. We developed a second model specifically for forest managers and restoration practitioners who work in yellow pine and mixed conifer forests in the central NAMCZ to assess potential natural regeneration in the years immediately following a fire, allowing them to prioritize which areas may need active postfire forest restoration and supplemental planting.