The Smokey Wire : National Forest News and Views
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Oregon Wild has proposed a massive half million acre Wilderness Area, partly to “protect” Crater Lake. The Klamath County Commissioners are saying no, with fears that summer fires would affect public health, and that those unhealthy forests need active management.
Here is a map of what Oregon Wild wants done.
This story seems to deal with some substantive and procedural questions that are popular on this blog. Environmental groups are offering alternatives that the Forest Service doesn’t seem interested in.
Elson, the Flagstaff District Ranger, acknowledged that some parts of the FWPP plan do fly in the face of the Mexican spotted owl recovery plan’s recommendations. But overall, the plan is in the best interest of the species, he said.
“The recovery plan would say we generally don’t want to disturb the owls during breeding season, but that is the necessary price to achieve reduced wildfire risk,” which poses the greatest threat to the birds, he said.
For example, doing thinning or prescribed burning in owl habitat areas during the spring and summer months, which overlap with breeding season, will allow that work to happen two to three times faster, Elson said. And that means a reduced wildfire risk in the area will happen sooner, he said.
Why does the Forest Service get to decide that NOT following the recovery plan is in the best interest of the species – that wildfire poses the greatest threat? How “necessary” is it really to do a treatment “faster?” (Doesn’t that just mean that resources could instead be used to treat other areas?)
This looks to have far-reaching effects on those National Forests within the “core habitats”. This looks like a forced settlement situation, where the Forest Service will probably pay dearly for their loss in court.
http://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2015/06/17/13-35624.pdf
Interesting:
Although the court granted summary judgment to Cottonwood and ordered reinitiation of consultation, it declined to enjoin any specific project.
This by a state administration, but could it happen to Forest Service planners if one of the Republican ‘denier’ candidates wins in 2016?
Under the 2012 Planning Rule, the best available scientific information must be used to inform the assessment, which is then to be used to determine the need to change a forest plan. The Geos Institute has gotten out ahead of the pack with its ‘assessment.’ I’m most interested in this:
“Scientists involved in the Northwest Forest Plan recognized that even with the Plan’s protective standards it would take at least a century to restore the late-successional (mature and old growth) forest ecosystem reduced by logging to a fraction (<20%) of its historical extent. While it is premature to judge the efficacy of a 100-year plan in just two decades, scientific assessments have shown that it has achieved many of its ecosystem management targets.”
The Planning Rule specifically requires that forest plans “include plan components, including standards or guidelines, to maintain or restore the ecological integrity of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems and watersheds in the plan area …” Ecological integrity requires that ecological characteristics like composition and structure “occur within the natural range of variation.” With regard to wide-ranging at-risk species (such as spotted owls), the Planning Rule requires “plan components, including standards or guidelines, to maintain or restore ecological conditions within the plan area to contribute to maintaining a viable population of the species within its range.”
Assuming that “<20% of its historical extent” is at least in the ballpark, what is the rationale (and the supporting best available scientific information) for changing forest plans to allow increased levels of logging of late-successional forest ecosystems? (Has the ‘bare minimum’ changed, or has the science behind how to achieve it?)
26 years after “protected” forests burned, in Yosemite National Park, this is what we now have. Chances are, it will burn again, before conifer trees can become established enough to resist the next inevitable wildfire. You might notice that even the manzanita is having trouble surviving. I doubt that John Muir intended this on public lands. This landscape is probably the future of parts of the Rim Fire, within Yosemite National Park.
High-elevation headwater streams that provide refuge for native bull trout and cutthroat trout would remain cold enough even under the worst warming scenarios to protect and support them. These streams, in places like Central Idaho’s White Cloud Mountains, can carry these native trout through the global warming bottleneck – when many species will disappear – that scientists say the world faces even if nations are able to stop the rise in greenhouse gases. “They are like Noah’s ark for bull trout and cutthroat,” Isaak said.
In February, Isaak and Young briefed forest officials and others working collaboratively across Idaho to restore the health of forest ecosystems while providing jobs for rural communities. The briefing gave local land managers like those on the Boise National Forest a chance to see how their plans fit into these “climate shields.” “There were a few areas in the Lowman District and in the upper Boise,” said David Olson, a Boise National Forest spokesman.
Said Isaak: “The hope is that the information provides a strategic tool that can be used to make more efficient local investments in stream restoration and protection projects, so that the broadest possible distributions of cutthroat trout and bull trout remain later this century.”
Isaak’s Noah’s ark approach won’t just help aquatic species, but also can help managers determine what other habitat will remain viable as warmer winters, earlier runoff and increased wildfire accelerate with warming temperatures. Wolverine biologists are looking at many of the same areas, Young said. Pika, lynx and other mammals that depend on cool summers or good snowpack may find refuge in Idaho’s high country.
This story describes a concrete step towards being strategic about climate change by identifying areas that should be used to build the ‘ark.’ Unfortunately, it doesn’t make the connection to national forest plans, where strategic choices about management priorities need to be made. It will be interesting to see how the Nez Perce-Clearwater forest plan revision incorporates this strategy.
Environmental plaintiffs successfully overturned the Clearwater National Forest travel plan in district court (newspaper coverage here). There are some implications for forest planning.
The court found the travel plan to be inconsistent with the forest plan’s requirement for elk habitat effectiveness (EHE) because it used the same methodology to evaluate EHE that was used for the forest plan. The methodology currently used (that the Forest Service helped develop) had added trails with motorized use to its road density calculations. The court considered this to be the best available science, which must be used in determining consistency with the forest plan, even though that creates (as the Forest Service put it) a ‘moving target’ for NFMA consistency. That’s an interesting argument for the Forest Service to make because the trend is for forest plans to defer more determinations to the project level, instead of having more specific direction in a forest plan.
The court also explained what is needed to demonstrate that an action ‘minimizes’ some outcome. (This case was specifically about ‘minimization’ criteria in an Executive Order related to motorized use, but the term is commonly found in forest plans.) Project documentation must explain exactly how a project was designed to meet the minimization criteria. General discussion of the criteria was not sufficient in this case.
The court upheld the NEPA analysis for the travel plan. However, it may have given the Forest Service a break by basing that decision on the fact that the decision was for an ‘entire forest’ and that it was ‘programmatic.’ The idea that NEPA analysis can be less demanding for broad-scale or programmatic decisions stems from the existence of another NEPA decision prior to actual impacts. While that is true for decisions to close roads (closure orders), it is not true for decisions to open roads.
(Since the Clearwater previously settled with motorized users in a case before a different Idaho judge, who kept the travel plan in effect, I’m not sure where this remand leaves travel planning on the Clearwater – especially in the context of ongoing revision of the Nez Perce-Clearwater forest plan.)
The Notice of Intent to initiate scoping for the Flathead revision EIS has been published and comments are due by May 5. Here is a newspaper article. Here is the website. Here is my summary of the summary of the changes needed from the current plan:
(Timber harvest is apparently not included as a ‘change’ because the volume objectives are comparable to recent volumes sold.)
There are some unusual things going on with the wildlife direction in the proposed plan. First, the Forest Service has recognized that including a consistent and scientifically defensible conservation strategy for grizzly bears in its forest plans throughout the Northern Continental Divide ecosystem is its best hope of providing adequate regulatory mechanisms that will allow the species to be delisted. That is the same philosophy that was behind the Northern Rockies Lynx Management Direction, and to some extent the Inland Native Fish Strategy. And yet with changes in the Flathead plan, the Forest Service may be starting to disassemble those consistent and scientifically defensible strategies piece by piece. That would be in line with expectations of the Fish and Wildlife Service IF the forest-specific changes are needed to achieve the original purpose of the strategy, but addressing forest-specific conditions (using best available scientific information). It would probably be out of line, and not supportive of recovery, if it simply represents disagreement with the original direction (which was imposed by a higher authority).
It will be interesting to see how the Forest Service manages this process at a broader scale, and whether it is setting a precedent for disassembling the Northwest Forest Plan and other broad-scale conservation strategies through plan revisions.
The study analyzed 308 species of birds that live on lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service, the two largest public land managers in the western United States. Drawing on 1.7 million crowdsourced checklists submitted to the Cornell Lab’s eBird project, the researchers modeled where each species occurred in each week of the year across the nation. They then overlaid those results on a map of land management compiled by Jocelyn Aycrigg of the National Gap Analysis Program at the University of Idaho, a coauthor of the study. The map showed not only which lands were managed by the agencies, but what levels of formal biodiversity protection the lands had.
“It can get overwhelming thinking you need to do everything for every bird,” said Ken Rosenberg, a conservation scientist at the Cornell Lab and coauthor of the study. “This can really help hone in on what’s important for your piece of land—so you know what are the main species you can concentrate on.”
The study’s focus on so-called multiple-use lands (places that are neither set aside as wilderness nor completely open to development) highlights a strategic opportunity for conservation, Rosenberg said. It’s difficult to set aside new parcels of land, but adjusting priorities on existing lands can have a huge positive effect.
Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2015-01-bird-watchers-federal-agencies-priorities.html#jCp
This sounds like some good science the Forest Service should use to meet the viability requirements of the new planning rule where the Forest Service can not maintain a viable population of species in a plan area:
“… the responsible official shall: (ii) Include plan components, including standards or guidelines, to maintain or restore ecological conditions within the plan area to contribute to maintaining a viable population of the species within its range. In providing such plan components, the responsible official shall coordinate to the extent practicable with other Federal, State, Tribal, and private land managers having management authority over lands relevant to that population. (36 CFR 219.(b)(2))