Article from http://www.citizen-times.com on Dec. 16….

No logging on parts of Courthouse Creek

New plan spares 54 acres of high elevation trees

WAYNESVILLE — Environmentalists reached a compromise with the government Monday that will spare some of the most sensitive areas of Courthouse Creek from logging.

The agreement with the U.S. Forest Service means 54 acres of mostly high elevation trees in Pisgah Ridge National Heritage Area are off the table.

The entire project, which the forest service has said is necessary for habitat improvement and forest health, will now include 368 acres in a bowl-shaped zone in Pisgah National Forest visible from the Blue Ridge Parkway and Devil’s Courthouse.

The legal agreement also required the forest service to decommission a road constructed to allow for logging in the three stands that are now out of the project.

Western North Carolina Alliance, one of the groups that challenged the timber plan, will help the forest service remove culverts, re-grade and re-seed the roadbed.

The Southern Environmental Law Center appealed the project on behalf of the Wilderness Society, Wild South and Western North Carolina Alliance.

It’s unclear how much of the timber work will be visible from the parkway, said DJ Gerken, senior attorney at the law center.

He said the agreement, at the least, mitigates the impact to the view and possibly erases it. Overall, he said, the groups are very pleased.

“We didn’t get everything we wanted, that’s what makes it a compromise,” he said. “It’s a substantially improved project.”

The decommissioning of the road is important to long-term environmental health.

“Roads are one of, if not the primary cause of, water quality problems on the forest,” said Hugh Irwin, conservation planner with the Wilderness Society, in a written statement. “Decommissioning the road just makes sense. It saves the forest service money by reducing the size of its road system, protects important trout habitat around Courthouse Creek, and ensures that this road stops causing environmental damage.”

The Southern Appalachian Multiple Use Council, which has in the past represented timber interests, could not be reached Monday.

The logging, which could begin as early as 2015, is dispersed in sites across the 7,000-acre Courthouse Creek area. The project would take four to five years and harvest about 6 percent of the trees in the area.

An update on the 4 Forests Restoration Initiative. Press release below includes mention of The Campbell Group’s project manager, Steve Horner. It will be interesting to see how well Good Earth Power and The Campbell Group manage this huge project.

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So, they’d recover quickly after anthropogenic disturbances, too, I presume.

Forests Recover Quickly After Bark Beetles Attack

http://news.yahoo.com/forests-recover-quickly-bark-beetles-attack-151336713.html

SAN FRANCISCO — A forest ravaged by the “red hand of death” — also known as a bark beetle attack — recovers quickly with little ecosystem damage, scientists said here today (Dec. 9) at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union.

The potential effects of massive tree die-offs in Western forests have been a concern since a sudden uptick in bark beetle attacks in the late 1990s. A species called the mountain pine beetle is one of the primary culprits, leaving large swaths of forest dying of a fungus carried by the tiny insects. Beetle outbreaks have hit more than 30 million acres in the western United States and Canada, according to the National Science Foundation.

Forests look awful after a beetle attack, but the wound isn’t as terrible as it looks, according to two separate studies by researchers from the University of Wyoming and the U.S. Forest Service (USFS).

In Wyoming’s Medicine Bow National Forest, botanist Brent Ewers of the University of Wyoming examined whether tree deaths sent more water into streams (because there is less vegetation to suck up precipitation), as well as released additional carbon and nitrogen from dead, decaying trees. Even when up to 80 percent of trees were killed by beetles, Ewers and his colleagues saw little evidence of these worrisome effects.

“Even though bark beetles have an enormous visual impact, the forest is resilient to the attack,” Ewers told LiveScience.

And in Colorado’s Front Range, in the Rocky Mountains above Denver, pine beetle infestations don’t add extra nitrogen to waterways that eventually drain to the city, according to a study led by USFS research scientist Chuck Rhoades.

It turns out that because beetles don’t kill all the trees at once, the survivors gobble up extra water and nutrients freed up by the fatalities, both studies found. In four different study sites, 40 percent of older trees grew two times faster in the years after bark beetles munched through the forest, Rhoades and his colleagues found. In Wyoming, the understory plant cover — which includes new tree seedlings, shrubs and flowers — more than doubled, Ewers found.

Turns out that both the surviving trees and new growth can eat and drink all the free water and fertilizer in the forest. On the small scale, there may be local increases in stream flow, carbon or nitrogen, but overall, there is very little change after a bark beetle infestation, Ewers said.

“Even though the bark beetle visual impact is really impressive and striking, there’s many things going on in that forest that makes it resilient to the attack, and so those compensating mechanisms result in little impact in what the ecosystem itself is doing,” Ewer said.

Article from the Idaho Statesman on the report recently released by the Idaho Forest Restoration Partnership:

www.idahostatesman.com/2013/12/04/2907947/report-finds-zone-of-agreement.html

<em>The report, compiled by the Idaho Forest Restoration Partnership, made up of foresters and conservationists from industry and environmental groups, says projects that fall within a “zone of agreement” can be done with little opposition. But it urges the federal government put up more funds and approve projects quicker so that logging and other fuel treatments can be done faster.</em>

Idaho Forest Restoration Partnership Report – Executive Summary: http://wp.me/a3AxwY-4dU

Idaho Forest Restoration Partnership Report 2013: http://wp.me/a3AxwY-4dV

Idaho Forest Restoration Partnership Report – Appendix: http://wp.me/a3AxwY-4dW

Headwaters Economics takes a look at Wyden’s O&C Bill

Wyden logging bill would favor urban counties in Ore. — analysis

Last-minute notice for an interesting webinar:

And now for something completely different….

Agency mulls best use for drones 7 years after purchase — documents

Emily Yehle, E&E reporter

Published: Tuesday, December 3, 2013

http://www.eenews.net/greenwire/2013/12/03/stories/1059991217 (subscription)

The Forest Service is still unsure how to use two drones it purchased seven years ago, with officials most recently considering deploying them to fight fires, according to documents released today by a liberal watchdog group.

The agency initially planned to use the “Sky Seers” to spot drug trafficking — such as marijuana fields — on public lands. But it has been unable to comply with Federal Aviation Administration regulations, and the $100,000 drones now sit unused in a California facility.

Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility says the purchase was misguided — a waste of money for equipment that was never justified during a time when the agency needed more officers. Today, the group released the results of a Freedom of Information Act request on the status of the 7-year-old drones.

The documents shed a little light on the Forest Service’s plans, with the most recent action being the creation of an Unmanned Aircraft Systems Advisory Group in 2012. The task force sits within the Forest Service’s Fire & Aviation Management division, indicating that the agency may use the drones for firefighting rather than law enforcement.

The group’s charter outlines 10 tasks, including developing a strategic plan for deploying the drones.

In a statement, PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch characterized the task force as secretive and criticized the fact that its charter does not specifically include a review of privacy concerns.

“The Forest Service’s use of unmanned aircraft for fire management would not suffer in the least by being aired with the public,” he said. “The Forest Service would benefit from greater public buy-in before its drones take flight.”

It’s unclear when, if ever, those drones will be used. FAA regulations require, among other things, a certified pilot, something the Forest Service’s law enforcement division was unable to come up with. The FAA is also still working on rules to allow drones for general use in unrestricted airspace.

A Forest Service spokesman did not immediately return a request for comment today. But in the past, agency officials have emphasized that the FAA released regulations after the Forest Service purchased the drones, putting up new roadblocks the agency did not foresee.

The agency has also said the 4-pound drones cannot identify individuals, with one document released by PEER describing their abilities as “functionally similar to a camera looking at a very large parking lot with stick figures moving around.”

Massachusetts forester Mike Leonard recently posted a series of photos, each with descriptive text, of one of his projects:

https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.565717060175138.1073741830.107694529310729&type=1

I was thinking: The Forest Service ought to do the same thing to illustrate projects, from start to finish, and even years afterward. Maybe some districts have posted such photo records, but I’m not aware of any like Leonard’s. The agency puts so much effort into planning. Why not put some energy into documenting its work after all that planning?

Received this press release today from the Pacific Southwest Research Station. This is research that confirms what foresters have long known. I’ll bet that some groups will call this “best available science,” but others will contest or ignore it.

Lowering stand density reduces mortality of ponderosa pine stands

REDDING, Calif.—As trees grow larger in even-aged stands, competition develops among them. Competition weakens trees, as they contend for soil moisture, nutrients, and sunlight. Competition also increases trees’ risk to bark beetles and diseases, and subsequently leads to a buildup of dead fuels. A recent study, led by Dr. Jianwei Zhang, research forester at the U.S. Forest Service’s Pacific Southwest Research Station, considered if the onset of this risk could be determined. The study, which appears in the Canadian Journal of Forest Research, also considered if the relationship between density and mortality varies with site quality as ponderosa pine stands developed.

Based on the analysis of 109 long-term research plots established on even-aged natural stands and plantations from 1944 to 1988, and 59 additional ponderosa pine plots measured by the Forest Service’s Forest Inventory and Analysis group, these researchers found that site quality affected the relationship between density and mortality.

“Any silvicultural treatments that enhances growth will reduce mortality rate for a given stand density.” Dr. Zhang said. “By establishing the self-thinning boundary lines from the size-density trajectories, the onset of mortality risk can be determined for ponderosa pine stands.”

The research also confirmed the added value of such long-term study sites which allow new questions to be addressed that were not included in the original studies. Other recently published research from this group of scientists demonstrated thinning forest stands to a lower density reduces fuel buildup significantly, and enhances its economic value by increasing growth of residual trees.  Specifically, stand basal area, which is the cross sectional area of all trees in a stand measured at breast height, is not affected by thinning ponderosa pine stands to half the normal basal area of a specific site quality. If the stand has experienced high mortality caused by bark beetles, it can be thinned more heavily without sacrificing timber, biomass, or volume increment and plant diversity.

In addition, results from these long-term studies show that early shrub removal and tree density control are the most effective and efficient ways to reduce fuel buildup. Under Mediterranean climatic conditions, shrubs reduce overstory tree growth and keep tree crowns in contact with the shrub canopy.  In turn, this growing fuel ladder can carry a ground fire into the crowns of the overstory trees.  Although carbon stocks may be the same with or without understory vegetation, by controlling competing vegetation, carbon is reallocated into the trees instead of shrubs; and carbon loss to wildfire is reduced.

These findings provide useful information for managers in their stand treatment projects within National Forest and private forestlands.

To read the full article, go to http://treesearch.fs.fed.us/pubs/45108; or http://www.fs.fed.us/psw/programs/efh/staff/jzhang/ for other articles.

No sign of the bill or a press release on Wyden’s site, yet, but The Oregonian has a link to the release. Excerpt:

Wyden’s legislation, called The Oregon and California Land Grant Act of 2013, amends the
original Oregon and California Lands Act passed in 1937. Compared to the last ten years it
would roughly double timber harvests on O&C lands for decades to come. At the same time, the
bill would permanently protect old growth trees, ensure habitat for sensitive species, and put in
place strong safeguards for drinking water and fisheries.

The legislation requires the Secretary of the Interior to provide a sustained yield of timber in
forestry emphasis areas, while taking the most controversial harvests off the table, ensuring that
old growth stands in moist forests currently over 120 years old and trees over 150 years old
across the O&C landscape cannot be harvested.

While keeping the O&C lands under the protection of federal environmental laws, the bill
proposes streamlining the environmental review of timber sales by:

· Improving timelines for environmental and judicial reviews;
· Eliminating the individual environmental impact statements for each timber sale and replacing
them with two large-scale environmental impact statements – one each for dry and moist forests
– covering 10 years of timber sales;
· Requiring better coordination between federal agencies during environmental reviews; and
· Requiring upfront studies of areas to prioritize treatments.

The bill would also permanently protect nearly a million acres of conservations areas that
would be managed for the benefit of old growth trees, native wildlife, recreation and tourism.
In the conservation areas, road building would be limited and mining prohibited. Timber
harvests would be limited to improving habitat and forest health.

Finally, the bill provides new ways to consolidate land ownership and reduce the
checkerboard of public and private lands across Western Oregon.

Senator Wyden will introduce companion legislation to this bill that will extend long term
funding to the counties which currently receive PILT, SRS, and similar payments, ensuring that
communities who produce energy, minerals and timber and other resources that benefit the entire
country are fairly compensated for the local impacts of that work. The federal government owes
these communities, and other resource producing communities too much to allow county
payments to end.

###

Excerpt from press release from The American Forest Resource Council, Associated Oregon Loggers, Douglas Timber Operators and Southern Oregon Timber Industries Association:

“At first glance, it appears that Senator Wyden’s proposal falls short of providing our communities the level of legal certainty, jobs, and county revenues they deserve and have been promised,” said Partin. “While it won’t be easy, we look forward to working with Senator Wyden and the entire Oregon delegation to find a comprehensive and permanent solution. Our communities absolutely need meaningful reforms to eliminate the broken policies that have resulted in endless paralysis and failed both Oregon and our federal forests for the past twenty years.”