Bark Beetles

Another Confusing Roadless Story: Aspens, Intervention, and Upper Tier

by

Scott Fitzwilliams, left, and Glenn Adams discuss the health of an aspen grove in the White River National Forest near Silt, Colorado. Photo by Michael Brands.

Thanks again to Terry Seyden for this catch!

It’s a bit hard to tell in this news story, but the story is about a couple of different things that if you weren’t following this story closely, might be confusing. I will try to help.


Chain saw environmentalism at cutting edge of forest fight

Aspen, Colo. • Here is the next front in America’s fight for its Western forests.

Too late to head off a wave of climate-fueled beetles that have altered the evergreen landscape for generations — if not forever — foresters still believe they can rejuvenate this resort town’s namesake. They say the white bark and fluttering yellow heart-shaped leaves that announce fall in the Rocky Mountains are due for a pruning.

It’s chain saw environmentalism, and some of the West’s most ardent wilderness lovers have signed on. They face strong opposition from groups that believe Mother Nature can best repair her own, and their struggle over how best to legally protect untrammeled wild lands will profoundly shape the future of these hills.

“It’s no longer as easy as just saying wilderness is good and everything else is bad,” said John Bennett, a former Aspen mayor and current executive director of the advocacy group For the Forest.

Will aspen shoots — food to elk and other cherished Rocky Mountain wildlife — keep springing from the slopes in a warming and drying region? Can they without human help?

Government foresters want to start cutting down swaths of century-old aspens in hopes that young “suckers” will sprout from the roots to build a new forest. It’s how many of the aspens would have reproduced naturally during the 1900s had Americans allowed fire to scour more of the old trees from the land.

Today, there is some urgency because a widespread collapse that accelerated during a 2004-08 drought foreshadowed dire predictions of climate-linked losses over the next 50 years. The die-off blighted nearly a fifth of Colorado’s aspen stands, researchers say, thinning about a quarter of the forest crown in most of them with precious little regrowth.

Cutting aspens now, in the absence of drought, could regrow vigorous young trees before the next dry spell strikes.

“We certainly don’t have any silver bullets,” said Jim Worrall, a U.S. Forest Service Forest Health Protection pathologist in Gunnison, Colo., who studied the past decade’s so-called Sudden Aspen Decline syndrome. “But we do know that aspen stands less than about 40 years old were not really affected by Sudden Aspen Decline.”

Thus, cutting for regrowth is a prescription that’s taken firm root with foresters and opened a divide among environmentalists who might have unified against logging — if not for the wild card of climate change.

“Nature knows best,” said Sloan Shoemaker, executive director of Colorado’s Wilderness Workshop and a skeptic of the rush into forest interventions. He supports efforts to clear beetle-killed pines posing fire hazards and watershed threats around communities, but believes the aspens and other trees deep in the woods should adapt on their own.

“History is writ with many examples of humans monkeying in natural systems that have gone awry.”

OK, so the above is a question about cutting aspen for the purpose of trying to regenerate them.

That’s why Shoemaker and others with a more traditional wilderness ethic favor a hotly debated revision of Colorado’s roadless forest rule. The state and U.S. Forest Service are considering local changes to a nationwide 2001 rule protecting pristine forests from road construction, and one of several proposals under review would tighten restrictions considerably. It would generally ban tree cutting on 2.6 million acres of “upper-tier” protection zones — two-thirds of the state’s roadless areas.

Millions of acres of dead pines and spruces naturally give aspens new areas to colonize, Shoemaker said, while foresters seem fixated on old aspen stands in areas that aren’t likely to support them in the future. They want to prevent oak brush and other dryland species from taking over slopes that he believes are becoming ill-suited to aspens.

This next section is related to the aspen question because the “upper tier” acreage in the Proposed Colorado Rule does not allow tree cutting for wildlife habitat improvement, or restoration of endangered or sensitive species (fyi, aspen isn’t endangered or sensitive but it is good for wildlife). Note, this is not road building, it is tree cutting.. so people would have to walk in with chainsaws (or ride in on OHV’s) and drop the trees.

This aspect of the Upper Tier designation is of concern to some wildlife-oriented individuals as they may see the need for some cutting and burning to restore wildlife habitat in key corridors so animals can move (and also migrate based on future climate change).
Below is a quote from Colorado Roadless Q&A’s here.

“The Upper Tier designation was added based on public concern that exceptions found in the previous proposal would allow roads and tree cutting anywhere within CRAs. On Upper Tier acres, requirements are more restrictive than under the 2001 rule. The exceptions allow only road construction and reconstruction as allowed by statutes or treaties, and reserved or outstanding rights; and tree-cutting incidental to an activity not prohibited by the Colorado Roadless Rule and for personal or administrative use. ”

So now back to the news story.

“Trying to freeze an aspen stand in time,” he said, “is fighting nature.”

Sitting pretty

Others who love wilderness, and indeed moved here to live among it, point to the bark-beetle infestation — which stripped more than 6 million acres of Colorado evergreens — as evidence such hard-line protections are outdated.

“I’m a total wilderness advocate,” said Tom Cardamone, who moved here to work on a student-led wilderness campaign in 1972 and now directs the Aspen Center for Environmental Studies [ACES]. “Also, I recognize the increasing importance of hands-on forest management.”

ACES has a staff of naturalists whose mission statement seeks to nurture lifelong commitments to the Earth while “restoring the balance of natural communities.” Defining and championing proper balance can be difficult in a resort community where most residents moved because they liked things just the way they were — a problem Cardamone calls “the challenge of the perception of the pristine.”

If a place looks nice and attracts hikers and mountain bikers, he said, they don’t necessarily weigh whether its ecology is out of whack. Locals have battled the center’s efforts to restore a stretch of the Roaring Fork River from gravel mining and an alpine bog from peat removal, he said, because the areas remained pretty. Both projects went forward, and now both are hailed as ecological successes.

So it is with struggling forests, Cardamone believes. Residents don’t like the idea of roads and heavy equipment trudging through pristine wilderness, but “I’m also concerned about the damage of climate change to pristine wilderness.”

Confusing, because now we are not talking about Colorado Roadless nor upper tier. No one is proposing building roads for aspen treatments in roadless.

The bark beetles that have munched through at least 40 million acres of Western evergreens since 1997 served a warning. Aided by warming winters and lengthening summers, they attacked forests that were effectively overpopulated. Individual trees competed for soil moisture and daylight to steel themselves against the onslaught, and when it was too late for people to react on a landscape level, foresters started thinning trees in an effort to save favored recreation spots or reduce fire hazards.

The question now is whether active management would avoid a similar collapse among another key forest species, or whether it’s futile to play God. Which lesson should be taken?

Dangers of drought

Aspens host their own species of native bark beetles, and those can find heightened success during droughts. But it is the drought itself — heat coupled with drying soils — that scientists believe threatens to shrink aspen range, currently stretching along the Rockies from Mexico to Alaska.

The Forest Service’s Rocky Mountain Research Station has used greenhouse-gas projections to estimate that up to half the suitable aspen range in the central Rockies will vanish under something like permanent drought by 2060, eliminating low-elevation stands.

Some ecologists believe aspens are resilient, though, and argue that something besides logging could help them thrive.

“The prime culprits are the rising elk populations in the West and, in some cases, livestock,” said Paul Rogers, director of Utah State University’s Western Aspen Alliance. Hunting more elk, restoring wolves to push them around and better managing livestock, he said, would help aspen sprouts survive in many places.

Rogers doubts Sudden Aspen Decline is as widespread as others say. He doesn’t question that, for instance, 17 percent of Colorado’s aspen stands suffered in the past drought, but he doesn’t believe the roots are dead in most of those. Protect the areas from overgrazing and browsing, he said, and many would spring back. Aspens have expanded and contracted with previous climate shifts.

Logging trees, as the Forest Service wants, would stimulate new growth, Rogers said. But none of the sprouts would climb past “mouth-high” if wildlife and livestock aren’t managed accordingly.

“Don’t do anything,” he warned, “unless you have a way to protect [new growth] afterward.”

I’m not an expert on aspen decline, but it seems like it should be pretty clear if “sprouts are not coming up” or “sprouts are coming up and being eaten.” Certainly if you are successful at “sprouts coming up” you would have to manage “sprouts being eaten.” Not sure how this relates, unless it is impossible to manage “sprouts being eaten” so why spend money to help “sprouts come up?”

But to be relevant to the Upper Tier Roadless question, you would have to say that there are no situations for wildlife for any tree species that could be helped by tree falling -ever. Again, going from the specific to the general is a bit confusing.

Buying time

If fire suppression has built aspen forests that are unnaturally old and uniform in age, shaking them up makes sense to Cardamone. Doing so might stimulate young aspens and buy the forest time for humans to slow climate change.

Roadless protections for their own sake, he said, aren’t the ultimate goal anymore.

“Road or no road, if all the trees are dead because we didn’t do something wise,” Cardamone said, “we may regret that.”

That’s the plea echoing around the White River National Forest, which surrounds Aspen and shelters the nation’s largest elk herd. District rangers and Forest Supervisor Scott Fitzwilliams fear that if public pressure leads their agency bosses to choose the most restrictive alternative for their new roadless rule, the forest will shrivel. It’s not even about roads, he said, because the agency could cut trees without building any — if the roadless rule allows.

“We’re losing our aspen pretty quickly in this part of the world,” Fitzwilliams said on a recent drive into the Divide Creek Basin. And more than half the forest there is aspen, mostly tall, stout, old.

Eighty percent are mature to “overmature,” he said.

Fitzwilliams drove up dirt roads past elaborate hunting camps of tents and buses — even one big rig hauled into the woods to outfit enthusiasts — showing what draws elk hunters here, and what he believes is at stake.

Elk thrive among aspens, but here and there along Divide Creek, century-old trees are toppling under their own weight, with nothing but grass growing under them. Eventually, without active management, he believes spruces and firs will fill in some of these gaps, squeezing out elk and deer. Oak brush will creep up other slopes.

And Divide Creek, it turns out, is among those zones that his crews couldn’t touch if the Forest Service designates 2.6 million acres for full roadless protections. Step off the existing roads, Fitzwilliams said, and you couldn’t cut a tree in the name of forest health. “If this all becomes upper-tier roadless, I’m out of business.”

Those stricter protections are what the Pitkin County Commission, based in Aspen, requested in its official comments to the agency, and it’s a popular stand among lots of politicians in ski country. But Fitzwilliams has been trying to change minds.

“I’ve joked with the Town Council that they need to change [Aspen’s] name to Spruce-Fir,” he said.

‘Hidden gems’

Beyond ecology, Fitzwilliams said, there’s an economy and a people at stake.

West central Colorado’s wilds are interwoven with a string of ski resorts, highways, electric lines and forested homes. Further limitations on tree thinning would risk catastrophic fire.

Those are fears that many wilderness lovers share, and they accept logging around the edges to improve safety. But many also push not just for more roadless protections, but also for new congressionally designated wilderness areas to limit most man-made disturbances.

They’re pushing a campaign called “Hidden Gems” to expand wilderness areas by 342,000 acres in this part of Colorado, effectively moving the protected zones farther downhill into areas considered important winter range for wildlife.

Outdoor photographer Steven DeWitt, of Eagle County, Colo., is a hiking and snowboarding enthusiast who holds wildlands dear. He sees the need for action near towns and highways, he said, but “what we’ve got for wilderness now is all we’ve got left.”

The pine forest’s rapid decline saddened DeWitt to the point that he has been shooting photos since 2007 for a planned online essay that he hopes will motivate Americans to deal with climate change. But in the backcountry, he prefers to see forests regenerate on their own.

Chain saw environmentalism isn’t for him. Rooting around in wild places sets a precedent.

“It’s a bad cocktail,” he said of Forest Service hopes for logging the roadless areas. “Everybody’s good intentions before anything is cut are great, but a road in a wilderness is a bad idea.”

It seems like Scott Fitzwilliams valiantly keeps saying “we are not talking about roads, we are only talking about the ability to cut trees” but then others are quoted as “roads are bad and you shouldn’t have them.”

I think it would be really hard to understand what the issue is from reading this story. It would also have been a better story if the author had quoted someone from the wildlife community who are concerned about the prohibitions in the Upper Tier.
Some people might say that the Upper Tier acres are “more protective than the 2001” because they don’t allow tree cutting for wildlife habitat or endangered species.. yet what are you really “protecting” by not allowing those actions? Certainly not wildlife, nor endangered species. It’s all rather ideological, and not very real, IMHO.

Further, I don’t think it’s accurate to say you are “logging”, when the material is not removed (because there are no roads). You may be “cutting” but using that darn dictionary again (Merriam Webster online):

“log
verb
transitive verb
1 a : to cut (trees) for lumber b : to clear (land) of trees in lumbering.”

It’s also interesting everyone quoted in the story agrees on a need for tree cutting around towns and highways.

Pine Beetles in the Black Hills

by

For those who need a break from Colorado pine beetle stories..Note that this story is the sixth article in an eight week series in the Black Hills Pioneer. Remember that the Hills are full of ponderosa pine, a different beast in terms of pine beetles than the lodgepole in Colorado, Wyoming and Montana.

Forest Service ‘optimistic’ about success against pine beetles

By Mark VanGerpen Black Hills Pioneer | Posted: Thursday, November 17, 2011 9:38 am

NORTHERN HILLS — The Black Hills National Forest faces some serious challenges in terms of combating the mountain pine beetle, but its managers say there is hope of success.

In terms of the beetle epidemic, Forest Supervisor Craig Bobzien said that with the variety of resources available to us, we can be optimistic about successfully preventing the total infestation of the forest.

“I’m of the belief — and I will say this is a shared belief among a lot of people who are working on this — that in the Black Hills, we have the ingredients in place to have the best chance of being successful in having a healthy forest, of really any place that I know of in the West that’s being threatened right now,” Bobzien said.

To achieve that success, the Forest Service has formulated a strategy for responding to the beetles, but it will also take cooperation with governments, landowners and other entities across the forest.

The Western Bark Beetle Strategy, published by the Forest Service in July, identifies three main “prongs” or considerations in treating for the beetles: human safety, forest recovery after a devastating infestation, and long-term forest resiliency through thinning and treatment methods.

Bobzien said the Forest Service treats for safety first, in areas like campgrounds, trailheads, roads and the wildland/urban interface where public communities meet forestland.

He added, though, that many of those areas aren’t facing serious public safety threats right now.

“(Safety) is our first priority, but it’s the smallest part of what we do on the Black Hills,” Bobzien said. “We don’t have many areas like that because we’ve been able to manage so much of the forest in advance of the beetles.

“We are really working to look at the areas that are both most at risk and where the public resource values are the highest — said differently, where we’d have the greatest consequence if we didn’t take any action.”

Strategically, Bobzien said the most effective place to be — and where the Forest Service is trying to be and remain — is in the “leading edge” zone, which is the area beetles are approaching but have not yet reached.

Strengthening the forest in those areas will presumably prevent the beetles from extending any farther, protecting the forest from further infestation.

But the cumbersome regulations by which the Forest Service must abide sometimes keep it from getting to leading edge zones before the beetles do, and Bobzien said some of the leading edge zones that were identified earlier are filling up with bug-hit trees pretty quickly.

Delayed action is nothing new for the Forest Service, which is hampered by federal regulations, budget processes and litigation from outside sources. Approving a timber sale can take years. Sometimes plans need to adapt during that time to meet new threats, but regulations prevent a quick change in direction.

“It’s like the Titanic – if you see a threat coming at you, how hard is it to change course and do something different? It’s not very easy,” said Northern Hills District Ranger Rhonda O’Byrne.

Bobzien said that the 325,000-acre Mountain Pine Beetle Response Project, along with various other projects that amount to about 200,000 acres, will help decrease response time to newly-hit areas and increase the ability to create a beetle-preventing barrier of thinned, healthy forest in leading edge zones.

Some of those projects could have boots on the ground by summer of 2012.

Bobzien said that approving that many acres for a quick response is critical to staying ahead of the spreading infestation.

“We have just got to look at every possible stand that could be threatened here and analyze this now,” he said. “I don’t think we can (assume) that this is moving at such a pace that we can keep up with it.”

O’Byrne said the Forest Service’s main defense in battling the pine beetles is the timber sale, which allows the timber industry to harvest trees on federal land and what makes thinning in leading edge zones possible.

Maintaining those timber sales in advance of the beetles is “clearly our niche here,” Bobzien said. Without timber sales, which actually create revenue for the Forest Service, then the Black Hills would have to rely on federal funding to fight the beetles, as many other forests in the U.S. do. And federal funds are in short supply these days.

Unfortunately, while the Black Hills has sold more timber than any other forest nationwide in the past five years, the beetles are still advancing, and the timber industry has limits to what it can economically log on the forest.

In other words, the timber sale can’t be our only preventative measure, and O’Byrne said the Forest Service recognizes that. The Forest Service is working with private landowners and volunteer organizations to find a solution for how to best treat the forest.

A lot of landowners and volunteers have come forward in the past six months, ardently trying to help the Forest Service remove beetle-killed trees from national forest land. But there are time-consuming processes for that too.

While O’Byrne and Bobzien said they are impressed with that effort forest wide, it’s not as simple as handing a volunteer a hardhat and chainsaw and setting him loose in the forest.

Legal questions need to be answered first: what degree of training will volunteers need to undergo? Who will pay for it? If a volunteer is injured on the forest, who is liable?

“We are trying to find some instrument that will let the Forest Service work with these other entities … so that the timber sale contract isn’t our only option,” O’Byrne said.

“Right now we’re looking through law regulation policy that affects the Forest Service, seeing if there’s some way that’s legal out there for us to be able to do it. We really want to be able to work with them, but it’s the mechanics of trying to be able to do that … All the federal processes, the laws that we have to meet, they’re there for a good reason, but it takes time to get through them.”

Along with volunteers eager to help are those eager to offer advice, which in turn generates a wide variety of ideas and values about the best treatment strategies and most critical areas to protect. Bobzien said there is no universal strategy for everybody to follow, because the beetles affect different jurisdictions that have different priorities and methods.

That said, Bobzien said there is a need for cooperation and forest-wide prioritization of areas that need to be treated.

“The reality of it is that we do have to prioritize areas, by looking at the values at risk and the consequences of not going there,” Bobzien said. “We clearly have to do that. We do that on a daily and weekly basis.”

Those priority areas naturally shift as new beetle attacks appear or existing ones expand, and even as funding is allocated and spent. Safety is always the top priority, but Bobzien said the Forest Service will also work to protect the economic, recreational and environmental assets in the forest as well, because even though fighting the beetles is tough to do with limited funds, doing nothing could end up costing even more.

This is the sixth article in an eight-week series that discusses the effects of the mountain pine beetle on the Black Hills. Next week’s article will discuss treatment options and tactics in combating the pine beetle.

Ecologists question research on burns in bug-killed forests after Montana fires

by

Photo by Matt Stensland
Thanks to Derek for submitting. From the Missoulian here.

Last summer, a wall of flame roared through a three-mile stretch of tinder-dry, bug-killed lodgepole pine forest and forced a large group of firefighters to retreat to a safety zone.

An official said later the flames moved through the trees like fire does through grass.

In the upper West Fork of the Bitterroot, another fire blew through 17,000 acres in a day. Much of that area also was covered by lodgepole pine killed by mountain pine beetle.

That unusual fire behavior now has some fire ecologists questioning conventional research that suggests that wildfires won’t burn as fiercely through forests filled with bug-killed trees.

“We definitely saw some unusual and pretty amazing runs under fire conditions that we would normally consider to be moderate,” said Matt Jolly, a research ecologist with the Rocky Mountain Research Station’s Fire Sciences Laboratory in Missoula.

Earlier research based on modeling suggested that stands of dead and dying trees were not as prone to flare into fast-moving crown fires. And if the fire did manage to make it into the crowns, the research said it was unlikely to stay there long.

Firefighters and researchers saw something quite different happen this summer.

“These fires were quite a bit more active than what the conventional research suggests,” Jolly said. “The problem is most of the conventional research used simulation models. If you don’t have good observations, then you have to assume the models are correct.”

Before this year, the past three summers were marked by very wet Augusts, which is typically the peak of the wildfire season in western Montana.

“We’ve been dodging the bullet, if you will, over the last three seasons,” Jolly said.

Canadians have been reporting similar fires in their own forests filled with beetle-killed trees for a number of years.

The fires this summer burned in conditions that weren’t considered extreme over an understory that was often still green. At times, the solid walls of flame reached from the ground to far above the canopy.

In some cases, the fire was burning through a forest of mostly dead trees that had already shed most of their needles.

***

Jolly said trees attacked by mountain pine beetles start a downward spiral that makes them more susceptible to fire early on. Once the trees die, their needles turn red before falling off. The red needles are extremely flammable.

Once the needles fall off, the forest has a gray appearance. This summer, Jolly said the fires blew through those standing gray stands.

“A lot of people have proposed that once the needles fall off, there’s little opportunity for a crown fire,” he said. “In these gray stands, you essentially have a vertical dead fuel with extremely low fuel moistures that once ignited, can create a flaming front.”

Fire researchers also noted the fires were quick to form a column that created its own weather, which further enhanced burning conditions.

For these fires to occur, Jolly said fuel conditions, weather and topography have to be aligned just right.

In many cases, the fire conditions were not considered extreme.

“These fires burned under less than extreme conditions in the same way that a healthy stand would burn under extreme conditions,” Jolly said.

The dead stands are made up of vertical fuels that respond quickly to changes in the weather and humidity levels.

“That’s why it happens very quickly,” he said.

***

With hundreds of thousands of acres of bug-killed stands scattered across the West, Jolly said there is a “very real possibility” of seeing more fires like this past summer’s.

“It’s totally dependent on weather,” he said. “As soon as we have a dry year like we saw in 2000 or 2003, which came with a very prolonged period of drying, it will be very interesting to see what happens.”

Bitterroot West Fork District Ranger Dave Campbell said research like Jolly’s will be important to those who fight and attempt to manage the blazes.

“This was a good opportunity for us to partner with the fire lab, which has some of the best fire scientists around,” he said. “Hopefully, we will be able to make the models for the future.”

Read more: http://missoulian.com/news/local/article_33e5c862-f930-11e0-9771-001cc4c03286.html#ixzz1bEYungr1

NY Times on “Forests are Dying” and Carbon

by

Thanks to Marek Smith for this piece on carbon and forests.
Here’s more on “forests are dying”.
It’s worth reading the whole thing, plus some of the sidebars. I just quoted the part here on our favorite topic, fires’n’bugs.

Wildfires and Bugs

Stripping the bark of a tree with a hatchet, Diana L. Six, a University of Montana insect scientist, pointed out the telltale signs of infestation by pine beetles: channels drilled by the creatures as they chewed their way through the juicy part of the tree.

The tree she was pointing out was already dead. Its needles, which should have been deep green, displayed the sickly red that has become so commonplace in the mountainous West. Because the beetles had cut off the tree’s nutrients, the chlorophyll that made the needles green was breaking down, leaving only reddish compounds.

Pine beetles are a natural part of the life cycle in Western forests, but this outbreak, under way for more than a decade in some areas, is by far the most extensive ever recorded. Scientists say winter temperatures used to fall to 40 degrees below zero in the mountains every few years, killing off many beetles. “It just doesn’t happen anymore,” said a leading climate scientist from the University of Montana, Steven W. Running, who was surveying the scene with Dr. Six one recent day.

As the climate has warmed, various beetle species have marauded across the landscape, from Arizona to Alaska. The situation is worst in British Columbia, which has lost millions of trees across an area the size of Wisconsin.

The species Dr. Six was pointing out, the mountain pine beetle, has pushed farther north into Canada than ever recorded. The beetles have jumped the Rocky Mountains into Alberta, and fears are rising that they could spread across the continent as temperatures rise in coming decades. Standing on a mountain plateau south of Missoula, Dr. Six and Dr. Running pointed to the devastation the beetles had wrought in the forest around them, consisting of a high-elevation species called whitebark pine.

“We were going to try to do like an eight-year study up here. But within three years, all this has happened,” Dr. Six said sadly.

“It’s game over,” Dr. Running said.

Later, flying in a small plane over the Montana wilderness, Dr. Running said beetles were not the only problem confronting the forests of the West.

Warmer temperatures are causing mountain snowpack, on which so much of the life in the region depends, to melt earlier in most years, he said. That is causing more severe water deficits in the summer, just as the higher temperatures cause trees to need extra water to survive. The whole landscape dries out, creating the conditions for intense fires. Even if the landscape does not burn, the trees become so stressed they are easy prey for beetles.

From the plane, Dr. Running pointed out huge scars where fires had destroyed stands of trees in recent years. “Nothing can stop the wildfires when they get to this magnitude,” he said. Some of the fire scars stood adjacent to stands of lodgepole pine destroyed by beetles.

At the moment, the most severe problems in the nation’s forests are being seen in the Southwestern United States, in states like Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. The region has been so dry that huge, explosive fires consumed millions of acres of vegetation and thousands of homes and other buildings this summer.

This year’s drought came against the background of an overall warming and drying of the Southwestern climate, which scientists say helps to explain the severe effects. But the role of climate change in causing the drought itself is unclear — the more immediate cause is an intermittent weather pattern called La Niña, and research is still under way on whether that cycle is being altered or intensified by global warming, as some researchers suspect. Because of the continuing climatic change, experts say some areas that are burning this year may never return as forest — they are more likely to grow back as heat-tolerant grass or shrub lands, storing far less carbon than the forests they replace.

“A lot of ecologists like me are starting to think all these agents, like insects and fires, are just the proximate cause, and the real culprit is water stress caused by climate change,” said Robert L. Crabtree, head of a center studying the Yellowstone region. “It doesn’t really matter what kills the trees — they’re on their way out. The big question is, Are they going to regrow? If they don’t, we could very well catastrophically lose our forests.”

A couple of thoughts..

It’s interesting to me that people are predicting that trees are “on their way out”. I wonder specifically what evidence is there for this? I wonder about what I call the “pontification to data ratio” of some of these observations.

It’s also interesting when people use the term “devastation” to describe mountain pine beetle killed forests. Because “natural” cycles vs. “climate change induced” cycles look exactly the same (acres of dead trees).

Beetle-kill pine, other wood pushed as power source — and way to aid ailing Colorado forests

by

Another fine photo by Bob Berwyn
From the Denver Post last Thursday..

CARBONDALE — The Roaring Fork Valley lies close to abundant coal and gas fuel sources. But wood is the fuel that has a local consortium — and a state senator — fired up as an energy source that also would aid Colorado’s ailing forests.

A Roaring Fork Valley consortium found through a two-year study that there is plenty of wood in the form of drought- and beetle-killed pine, fire-stoking brush, aged aspen and construction scraps to make it a feasible adjunct to traditional fossil-fuel energy sources. Burning wood for fuel also is viewed as a potentially important part of saving the state from a conflagration like the one that ravaged Arizona forests this summer.

The Roaring Fork Biomass Consortium took the lead on the issue this week by releasing its study, which included trips to Europe to inspect biomass heating systems there and detailed analysis of the carbon footprint of trucks that would be needed to haul wood from forests in the valley.

The consortium also held a bio-mass “summit” Wednesday that brought together experts from across the state and from the East Coast, where a biomass project at Middlebury College in Vermont is looked at as an example for what might be done in Colorado.

State Sen. Gail Schwartz, D-Snowmass Village, said using wood to generate heat is more than an environmental dream. “This is not just another nice renewable thing to do. Colorado needs this,” she said.

Schwartz sponsored forest-health legislation in the last legislative session that created a working group to look at Colorado’s ailing forests and at solutions, such as reducing the amount of dead or diseased wood by using it as a fuel source.

She said that, so far, the forest problem has been looked at piecemeal on a statewide level — not comprehensively as the Roaring Fork consortium is doing.

White River National Forest supervisor Scott Fitzwilliams told Wednesday’s gathering that his agency has plenty of forest available for the collection of woody biomass but noted it would be a byproduct of forest restoration — not the object of such a project.

Like Schwartz, Fitzwilliams stressed the importance of promoting biomass now.

“I think we have a moral obligation to do this,” he said.

One biomass project already is in the planning stages for nearby Eagle County. Eagle Valley Clean Energy LLC is focusing on Gypsum as the site for a $46 million biomass plant that annually would consume 1,200 acres of wood — mainly waste such as branches, thinnings and dead trees. The Forest Service routinely stacks such materials in slash piles and then burns them.

Holy Cross Energy is on board with this project, which is projected to be operational in 2013. The company has committed to buying power for customers who are demanding that some of their power come from renewable sources, said Holy Cross chief executive Del Worley.

Consortium speakers did point out that Colorado faces some drawbacks in moving into woody biomass power. The timber in Colorado is dry because of the climate and thus burns faster. And energy costs are lower in an oil- and gas-rich state, so the savings from using biomass would not be as large as in other places.

Schwartz said she will be working on further legislation that will remove governmental obstacles to creating biomass facilities.

Buy Local… Wood? Blue-stain, Bark Beetle and Colorado

by
The curse that is beetle-killed wood is being framed as a possible blessing for a Denver homebuilder. (John Prieto, The Denver Post)

Here’s a story in the Denver Post Business section today, including the link with a video, on using blue-stained wood in home construction.

Colorado imports 95 percent of its lumber, which doesn’t make sense in a state with so many dead trees available to harvest, Cadman said.

New Town, which expects to build about 80 homes this year, will spend about $2,000 per home on the Colorado wood, which is comparable in cost to imported lumber.

Given the smaller size of Colorado’s lodgepole pines, the homebuilder will limit its use to vertical supports.

“We hope the example will encourage and facilitate others to use this wood,” said Bruce Ward, founder of recreation advocacy group Choose Outdoors in Pine.

Beetle-killed trees leave the state at risk of massive forest fires that pollute the air and water supply. Dead trees are falling in greater numbers on roads, tents and power lines, limiting recreational opportunities.

Ward is among those working to find economic uses for the dead trees, including converting them into pellets that can be burned.

The beetles infect wood with a fungus that leaves behind blue streaks, giving it some appeal for use in trim, decorative panels and furniture. Custom and log homes have been built with the material.

But New Town is trying to open up a much larger market — framing production homes. A key hurdle to clear will be convincing city buyers that “blue-stained pine” is safe to use and structurally sound.

“At first it was a little bit scary, and I thought, OK, something is going to happen with my place. Is it going to affect the structure or the strength of the wood?” said Nea Martinez, who has bought a townhome in Stapleton made with the wood.

Martinez said she did her homework and came away reassured.

“They’re turning something unfortunate into a positive,” she said.

Positives include creating jobs in rural Colorado and helping the state revive its lumber industry.

Unprecedented Change vs. Inferring From History: Bark Beetles and Fire

by

Thanks to Matthew Koehler for sending this piece on one of our favorite topics, beetles and fire by Kulakowski and Jarvis. This is a great article to discuss, to talk about why different people might think this is or isn’t relevant to current policy issues (and which ones and why). Also bbs and fire is one of our favorite things to discuss on this blog.

Here’s the abstract with my comments in italics.

“Outbreaks of bark beetles and drought both lead to concerns about increased fire risk, but the relative importance of these two factors is the subject of much debate.

I would argue, not really in practice, only in academia. In reality, drought beetles and age of trees are hopelessly intertwined. And not to be pedantic but it’s not about risk of fires, it’s about “different fire behavior (due to dry trees) with more possible negative impacts to people and soil.”

We examined how mountain pine beetle (MPB) outbreaks and drought have contributed to the fire regime of lodgepole pine forests in northwestern Colorado and adjacent areas of southern Wyoming over the past century. We used dendroecological methods to reconstruct the pre-fire history of MPB outbreaks in twenty lodgepole pine stands that had burned between 1939 and 2006 and in 20 nearby lodgepole pine stands that were otherwise similar but that had not burned. Our data represent c. 80% of all large fires that had occurred in lodgepole pine forests in this study area over the past century. We also compared Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI)
and actual evapotranspiration (AET) values between fire years and non-fire years.

To me, you gotta pick a lane here. Either we are saying that current and future climate conditions are “unprecedented” and are affecting things (which I believe, whether caused by GHG’s or other factors), OR information from 1939 to 2006 can be used to make claims about what is true in nature today.

Burned stands were no more likely to have been affected by outbreak prior to fires than were nearby unburned stands. However, PDSI and AET values were both lower during fire years than during non-fire years. This work indicates that climate has been more important than outbreaks to the fire regime of lodgepole pine forests in this
region over the past century.

I will leave to the climate scientists if a particular drought is really “climate”- I always find that confusing. I don’t think anyone would be surprised to know that more fires occur under drought conditions, if that’s what this is saying.

Indeed, we found no detectable increase in the occurrence of high-severity fires following MPB outbreaks. Dry conditions, rather than changes in fuels associated with outbreaks,appear to be most limiting to the occurrence of severe fires in these forests.

But like I said, it’s not really about “occurrence in the past”. We can go out on the ground and see dried forests due to pine beetles or other reasons, and see that they have different fire behavior, and we can see impacts of high intensity fires with or without bark beetles. I just don’t get the link between this study and any policy issue today, and maybe the authors are not claiming that.

Timber Wars: Bayoneting Those on Life Support?

by

Here’s a press release from Senator Mark Udall’s office:

Today, Mark Udall sent a letter urging the U.S. Forest Service and the U.S. Department of Agriculture to take immediate action to help three of Colorado’s largest sawmills stay afloat and keep rural jobs in the state. Udall suggested that the USFS and the USDA rework timber sale contracts with the sawmills, which are struggling financially. In addition to employing hundreds of Coloradans, the mills play a crucial role in the fight against the bark beetle and wildfire by providing the infrastructure to help clear 4 million acres of hazardous fuels and beetle-killed trees and processing them into wood products.

The downturn in the housing market and the state’s forest-management economy led to financial trouble for the mills—Intermountain Resources (Montrose), Mountain Valley Lumber (Saguache) and Delta Timber (Delta)—because their legacy timber sale rates are higher than it costs to remove the dead trees from the forest. Udall is asking the agencies to work with the sawmills to modify some of their contract terms so the mills can stay open and maintain hundreds of jobs in those regions, mitigate wildfire risks by clearing dead trees, and revitalize the timber industry.

“These mills provide hundreds of jobs in Colorado’s rural communities and are irreplaceable parts of the statewide infrastructure we need to reduce wildfire risk to communities and remove millions of hazardous beetle-kill trees adjacent to roads, powerlines, trailheads, picnic areas, and campgrounds,” Udall wrote in the letter. “I appreciate the role the market must play in timber sales, but at this juncture in Colorado we must maintain an infrastructure to safely and economically dispose of our surplus of dead timber.”

Udall raised the issue of legacy timber sales at a Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing on wildfire management in June, saying that the clock is ticking on helping sawmills deal with beetle-killed trees in economically viable ways. Udall has been working for over a decade to help mitigate the impacts of the bark beetle epidemic in Colorado communities and forests.

The text of the letter follows:

Dear Secretary Vilsack and Chief Tidwell:

I am contacting you today to appeal for your immediate action to help preserve Colorado’s forest management infrastructure. Repeatedly over the last two years, I have been contacted by Colorado’s timber industry and other stakeholders asking for help. Our last three remaining large and medium-size sawmills are struggling financially. In fact, the largest – Intermountain Resources in Montrose, Colorado – went into receivership in June 2010. These mills provide hundreds of jobs in Colorado’s rural communities and are irreplaceable parts of the statewide infrastructure we need to reduce wildfire risk to communities and remove millions of hazardous beetle-kill trees adjacent to roads, powerlines, trailheads, picnic areas, and campgrounds.

While there are a number of reasons that the mills are faltering, including the economic recession, one significant source of financial stress is that all three mills hold legacy U.S. Forest Service (USFS) timber sales that are no longer financially viable and have become a liability. As recently as May 2011, the USFS stated that it was continuing to review its authority to reduce timber sale rates and/or mutually cancel contracts within Region 2 that have become unviable to operate. The USFS has made some contract term adjustments, but none of these adjustments have allowed for the downturn in the market for wood-based products. The agencies have repeatedly pledged to do everything possible to save these mills, but the problematic timber sales remain. I am aware that Intermountain Resources had over 50 timber sales with a variety of terms and issues. However, it is my understanding that the two smaller mills each have only one seriously problematic timber sale. There is an immediate sense of urgency because one of these mills had a periodic payment due last week, and yet has still not heard back from the USFS on its request for a mutual cancellation.

Modifying these contracts and thus helping sustain these three mills will have a direct public benefit. The USFS, other land managers, communities, and industry across the state and region are working to reduce the potential for catastrophic wildfires and restore healthy forests by clearing beetle-kill hazard trees and reducing hazardous fuels adjacent to communities. This critical mitigation work that protects people and property will become exponentially more challenging, if not impossible, if we lose our forest management infrastructure. Without these processing locations in Colorado, the distance to the next closest mill with capacity to process any meaningful volumes of timber is nearly 800 miles away in Montana.

On behalf of Colorado’s struggling timber industry, I ask that you take every action within your power to provide relief for these mills and preserve these critical local jobs. I appreciate the role the market must play in timber sales, but at this juncture in Colorado we must maintain an infrastructure to safely and economically dispose of our surplus of dead timber. It is my hope that in the years to come we can work collaboratively to restore balance to Colorado’s timber economy. Thank you for your consideration and I look forward to your response.

Interestingly, here is a story from the Colorado Independent, with these quotes.

But some members of the conservation community have their doubts.

“The whole issue points out the problem of removing beetle kill — the dead lodgepole pine isn’t worth much as a potential commercial product,” Rocky Smith of Colorado Wild told the Colorado Independent. “That is why there are efforts to create a biomass industry, which might allow the use of dead lodgepole pine for heating and electric power generation. Those efforts have only had limited success.”

The ski town of Vail came up short in its bid to build a multi-megawatt biomass power plant that would use the proven process of high-heat wood gasification to cleanly generate power and heat by consuming chipped up wood products. The process is considered carbon-neutral compared to forests biodegrading naturally or being consumed in wildfires.

“We are not against a wood products industry, but we want to make sure that it is sized appropriately and would sunset when the dead material runs out or is no longer available for product use,” Smith said. “It is tempting to think that there is so much dead stuff out there, so we should try to facilitate creation of a large industry that could utilize it. But that could result in industry dictating what land could be harvested.”

Smith also pointed out that the current state of the economy has lowered the demand for wood products.

But it doesn’t actually sound like they have their doubts about what Udall is doing.. they are worried about the use of biomass leading to “too much” harvesting. So far there is no biomass industry of any size, so this is a preemptive strike. Their comments have nothing to do with helping those sawmills. Strange reporting, IMHO.