FIA is National Treasure; Eastern Forests are Thriving in Current Climate

Story worth reading by journalist Gabe Popkin, including a journalistic shout-out to FIA:

To my mind, the FIA is a national treasure, like the James Webb Space Telescope. There’s probably no comparable public dataset in the world, yet unlike the James Webb, most people have never heard of it.

It’s long been known both from FIA and other data that eastern U.S. forests are soaking up carbon dioxide as they rebound from a near-total deforestation that started in the early 1600s and ended only in the early 1900s. One shocking photo I came across recently shows what is now the Brookland neighborhood of Washington, D.C. during the Civil War.

A view of Fort Bunker Hill and a military camp in what is now Washington, D.C.’s Brookland neighborhood. See here for more details. Source: Library of Congress

Sidenote: I’ve been reading a memoir by an Alexandria native who describes the Union Army cutting their woodlands for firewood and structures, so I imagine that’s part of what happened to this area as were farm fields.

This desolate scene is hard to square with the lush, green city D.C. is today, especially in outlying neighborhoods like Brookland. Yet around the time of the Civil War, large swaths of the District were apparently nearly as treeless as a western desert — as, indeed, was much of the eastern half of the country.

The scientists found, unsurprisingly, that American forests have bulked up as they rebound from the deforestation that created scenes like the one captured in the photo. While this regrowth will eventually taper off as forests mature, so far it seems to be going strong.

More remarkably, the researchers also found that regrowth alone cannot explain the blistering pace at which our trees are putting on wood. By examining forest growth rates while controlling for age-related differences, the scientists determined that something else is supercharging growth.

And while the study did not directly answer what that something is, the authors highlighted one likely explanation: Trees are gobbling up some of the excess carbon dioxide we’re putting into the atmosphere. Essentially, by burning fossil fuels in our cars, buildings and factories, we are fertilizing nature. And nature is responding.

Many studies have speculated about carbon fertilization using computer models, experiments and theory. It’s clear that all things being equal, plant leaves respond to higher carbon dioxide levels by ramping up photosynthesis (the biochemical process plants use to turn carbon dioxide into sugars), which could cause plants to grow faster and ultimately store more carbon.

But in nature, many things can affect how fast trees grow. Experiments have pumped high levels of carbon dioxide into young forests and found that trees initially grew faster than in unfertilized control plots but eventually leveled off, presumably as nutrient limitations or other factors throttled trees’ growth rates.

The new study is among the first to provide clear evidence that real-world forests over a vast landscape are indeed able to use the extra CO2 to bulk up. And our trees are feasting on carbon dioxide, those in other places with moderate temperatures and ample moisture, such as northern Europe and eastern Asia, likely are too.

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Now, “carbon fertilization” might sound like a wonky scientific abstraction. But for the 180 million of us who live in this part of the world, it has had real, measurable benefits. The trees in our neighborhoods and parks, and even our own yards, have grown faster than they otherwise would have. That means more shade, more storm protection, more wildlife habitat — and, not least of all, more wood. We have all benefited, in multiple ways.

Now, on to the western US:

In the western U.S., unfortunately, the data tell a different story. Forests there are growing less and less robustly, as heat and drought limit trees’ ability to benefit from high CO2 levels. (Interestingly, the Forest Service has reported this for years based on FIA data, but I suspect their reports rarely get read.)

The plight of western forests has gotten plenty of coverage, so I won’t dwell on it here except to note that the fact that some forests are benefiting from high CO2 levels does not mean we can simply assume that all forests will — and certainly does not suggest we don’t need to worry about climate change.

I asked Lichstein and his colleague Aaron Hogan what implications their research has for natural climate solutions — the idea that natural ecosystems like forests can soak up some of the carbon dioxide we humans emit by burning fossil fuels. Their answer, perhaps surprisingly, was not much. In fact, they said that at the global scale, the strength of the carbon fertilization effect is probably exaggerated in most of the computer models scientists use to forecast climate trends.

In other words, as future warming stresses forests, they will probably absorb a smaller and smaller fraction of our total carbon dioxide emissions. Right now that fraction is one quarter, so the strength of the carbon sink diminishes, we could be in real trouble.

This aligns with my view, based on years of reporting on forest science, that at a broad scale, forests and other ecosystems are probably already doing about as much as we can hope for to slow climate change. The idea that we’re going to jam tons of additional carbon into trees or soil strikes me as more aspirational than realistic.

It seems to me that there are three things going on here (which may be investigated somewhere, hopefully commenters will point this out).  1. Western forests are very different from each other, and some (like the Black Hills) are supposed to be getting wetter based on climate models. 2. Fire suppression allowed many more trees (increased density over time)  in some spots, so competition for water would cause them to grow more slowly. 3. After cutting trees for railroads, firewood, and lumber in various places, at various times from in the 1800s and 1900’s trees are growing back and age might be an important reason that growth slows down.  I don’t know how well the study adjusted for those factors.

It’s also worth noting that most of these fast-growing forests are not in parks or preserves, but on private land. That means they can legally be cut down, but it also means that millions of people have a stake in them. The public ownership that’s more common in the West — and that’s often assumed to be more protective — can also be more neglectful, especially when governments don’t have the resources to properly care for vast tracts they’ve been tasked to manage.

While private ownership is not a panacea either, when a lot of people live among forests, there are a lot of people with reasons to keep an eye on them and care for them. Technologically speaking, we could easily cut down every tree in the eastern U.S. — as far fewer, less technologically advanced people once did. Yet instead, we’ve allowed them to grow at the same time that our own population has grown.

This pushes strongly against what I would describe against the prevailing narrative that people are simply bad for trees. This kind of simplification has even been embraced by the august New Yorker, a publication I would expect to do better.

It’s time to ditch simplistic morality tales for a more nuanced and reality-based view of the relationship between trees and humans. After all, we need trees to thrive in places where people actually live. I’ve argued previously that the densely populated Mid-Atlantic could be a climate refuge, in part because our cities and towns are embedded within what, so far at least, appear to be remarkably climate-resilient forests. The new study suggests the same might be said about much of the eastern U.S.

Slouching Toward Industrial Policy I. Let’s Do a Programmatic EIS for Decarbonization!

What about a collaborative process for decarbonization?

This week, I’m going to post a series of NEPA papers for discussion.  But I’d like to start out with a fairly wild idea.  Last month, I attended a conference put on by The Breakthrough Institute titled “Slouching Toward Industrial Policy.”  For the past years (20 or more), the US has been debating how exactly to decarbonize.    In the Obama and Biden Administrations, the tendency has been to go for solar and wind and hope for batteries.  During the Trump Admin, the focus was on “all of the above” , domestic production of oil and gas and hope for CCS technologies.  The IRA was called “the Most Important Climate Action in US History” by Forbes.

And yet, the IRA is something of an “all of the above” as well.  So, as I call them, all the technological horses in the horse race are getting extra grain via the bill, from batteries to CCS.   And yet, when it comes to permitting or where what stuff will be built, there doesn’t seem to be a plan.   Perhaps an analogy is PODs versus “random acts of restoration.”  Or when I worked in genetically engineered plants, a company wanted to grow pharmaceuticals in outcrossing food plants.  I asked them to begin with the end in mind, in that case, doing an EIS.

Thinking about a more coherent semi-industrial policy, I developed the three A’s which I think are necessary to any such policy. The first is to develop Agreement, the second is Alignment and the third is Accountability. I sometimes wonder whether, like some other environmental issues (say ESA reform), some powerful political figures prefer jabbing the other political party to actually solving the problem. So we’d need an open and transparent mechanism to develop Agreement outside partisan bickering- perhaps some kind of collaborative process writ large?  And hey, I know that Congress doesn’t need to do NEPA, but heck, it’s a process that works for the most part.  It’s, as some Congressfolk say, a bedrock environmental law that shouldn’t be tampered with.  But there’s no reason, in my mind, to restrict NEPA-like processes to small problems, and leave large problems to random political windshifts or flipflops.  The structured analysis, transparency (FOIAble) and opportunities for public engagement  seem to me especially appropriate to our biggest problems that require big solutions (across the landscape).

What if the US approached decarbonizing by doing an enormous programmatic EIS?  As we’ll see later this week, there’s a divergence between what NEPA practitioners generally think of programmatics (not worth the time) versus others like CEQ and some law profs, so maybe CEQ should be in charg?  So I think we’d have willing volunteers from the “programmatics are good” commuity.  Or like the NW Forest Plan, we could have a FACA committee with representatives from different energy producers, distribution systems and so on, unions, economists, national security folks and so on. Alternatives could be developed with realistic scenarios of future demand, supply chains, and labor needed with the people currently working on such things brought in.   Of course,  specific locations of new infrastructure (power plants, transmission lines, etc.), and sources of raw materials would need to be included.

Research funds would be focused on trying to answer questions needed by this group of analysts.  We could have a moratorium on “bad things could happen in the future based on models” climate research, and fund this kind of work, using whatever mix of disciplines and practitioners would be needed to shed necessary light in the dark corners.  And all the information would be publicly peer reviewed.

Sidenote: a foundation funded the Society of Environmental Journalists webinar with Stanford Prof Mark Jacobson. He did a study that showed that 139 countries could go to all wind solar and hydro by 2050. Right now, if reporters wonder about that study, they have nowhere else obvious to go.  If this EIS existed, they would.  We all would.

Things like permitting difficulties due to local concerns,  or even “whoops, our offshore wind economics models turned out wrong” or “gosh, it turns out that those Europeans need our LNG” might show up in scenarios, and uncertainties would be in the open, and in some cases handled by formal sensitivity analysis or other procedures. And of course, there are unknown unknowns, but they exist whether or not the US tries to develop a cohesive and coherent set of policies, or just randomly picks things that sound good to powerful interests of various kinds. I think all of us would learn a lot; and our chosen policies might be more realistic. And think of all the agency NEPA practitioners for decarb projects who could simply tier to that EIS!  What’s not to like?

Forest Service Proposed Rule on Carbon Capture and Storage

From Clearpath https://clearpath.org/tech-101/pore-space-101-carbon-capture-cant-rock-and-roll-without-storage/

This is where all this gets really interesting to me, as it is jostling between different environmental interests- climate vs. traditional preservation types.  So in what used to be our federal lands space, we will have environmental lawyers  and political operatives duking it out, with federal employees doing the NEPA work, the companies rolling the dice,  and the public likely relegated to the bleachers. And without all the partisan rancor featured in other discussions… at least so far.

The proposal published in the Federal Register would exempt carbon capture and storage (CCS) from an existing agency requirement prohibiting permanent or “perpetual” use of such lands.

Because CCS projects would store carbon dioxide in pore space underground for more than 1,000 years after the gas is injected, it would be tantamount to an “an exclusive and perpetual use and occupancy” not allowed under current rules, according to the Forest Service, which is part of the Department of Agriculture.

By exempting CCS from the prohibition on permanent projects, the Forest Service can review proposals and applications and “authorize proposed carbon capture and storage on NFS lands if, where, and as deemed appropriate,” the proposed rule said.

National forests and grasslands could support greater deployment of carbon capture projects, as they offer billions of tons of CO2 storage potential and blocks of land under government ownership, rather than involving multiple owners.

Some environmental and advocacy groups, however, rejected the prospect of allowing CCS projects on Forest Service lands, saying the plan would create pollution, prolong the fossil fuel industry and put delicate ecosystems at risk.

“This serious rule change invites polluters to apply for dangerous CO2-dumping permits in our national forests,” said Victoria Bogdan Tejeda, a staff attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity’s Climate Law program, in an email. “Our forests should be protected for people and wildlife, not handed over to companies for pollution-dumping pipelines that could asphyxiate and kill people if they rupture.”

In response, Scott Owen, a Forest Service spokesperson, said that at this time, the agency “does not have any carbon capture project proposals under consideration.”

Owen said the proposal only changes the initial screening criteria allowing the Forest Service to consider proposals for carbon capture and storage projects.

“All proposals must still pass secondary screening to be accepted as a formal application,” Owen said in a statement. “Carbon capture proposals are still subject to [National Environmental Policy Act] compliance and approval by the authorized officer on the Forest.”

Each forest has an authorized officer that would review individual carbon capture proposals for NEPA compliance prior to approval, Owen added.

The proposed rule also puts forward a definition for CCS where CO2 would not be classified as hazardous waste.

Tara Righetti, a law professor at the University of Wyoming, said in an email that CCS applications for review could be approved “if they met all other criteria required for special use authorizations, including environmental analysis and consistency with the land management plans.”

“When finalized, this rule will mark an important step towards utilization of forest system lands for CCS,” Righetti added.

Xan Fishman, director of energy policy and carbon management at the Bipartisan Policy Center, a think tank, called the rule a positive step forward.

“Fighting climate change is going to be a massive, massive endeavor and it’s going to require a bunch of solutions,” Fishman said in an interview.

Those solutions will involve point source capture, where CO2 emissions are trapped before they go into the atmosphere, and carbon removal, where legacy CO2 is pulled out of the air, he said.

“Opening up every reasonable avenue” to store CO2 is “smart,” Fishman said. “Here’s a way we can store it underground and it doesn’t mess with the rest of the forest for other uses.”

The comment period for the proposed rule ends Jan. 2.

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Remember in our discussions of the Rock Springs RMP last week, the Wyofile story talked about how rights of way potentially needed for CCS might be blocked off by the conservation alternative.  Anyway, as the E&E story says:

Some environmental and advocacy groups, however, rejected the prospect of allowing CCS projects on Forest Service lands, saying the plan would create pollution, prolong the fossil fuel industry and put delicate ecosystems at risk.

It could be argued that current wind and solar projects prolong the fossil fuel industry, because they require natural gas backup at least until there are scalable batteries, with minerals and supply chain issues not yet worked out; certainly they create pollution and put delicate ecosystems at risk. To be fair, I think CBD is fairly consistent on not wanting wind and solar, transmission lines, nuclear,  nor mines for strategic minerals. If I’m not understanding their views I hope someone will correct me.

I get that certain ENGO’s (and CAP and some media) seem to hate the fossil fuel industry, but it’s hard to see that fossil fuels are going anywhere soon. Center for Western Priorities (run by D operatives) almost has a story about the oil and gas industry being bad in almost every newsletter.  Scratch the environmental veneer and there seems to be the waferboard of partisan self-interest.

There’s the EIA report from last month:

Electricity generation from renewables and nuclear could provide as much as two-thirds of global electricity generation by 2050, according to the EIA.

Solar and wind show the highest levels of electricity generation growth. Meanwhile, coal and natural gas is expected to make up between 27% and 38% of power generation capacity by 2050, down from about half in 2022, EIA Administrator Joseph DeCarolis said on Wednesday during an event to present the outlook.

I found this from the Clean Air Task Force, but am trusting them on the details.  The basic point is that we need CCS to keep global warming to below 1.5 degrees C with no or limited overshoot, according to the IPCC.

Carbon capture and storage (including DACCS and BECCS) is central to IPCC mitigation pathways

WGIII made clear that carbon capture and storage is a critical decarbonization strategy in most mitigation pathways. Among the 97 assessed pathways that keep global warming to below 1.5ºC with ‘no or limited overshoot’ (meaning a reduced chance of exceeding 1.5ºC in the near term), there is a broad range of possible deployment levels for the technology, with a median average of 665 gigatonnes (Gt) of carbon dioxide cumulatively captured and stored between now and 2100.

WGIII also identifies seven specific pathways, termed ‘Illustrative Mitigation Pathways’ (IMPs) that best summarize and highlight different decarbonization strategies – four that achieve 1.5ºC and three that keep temperatures ‘likely below 2ºC. Only one of the seven IMPs includes no carbon capture. However, this scenario requires global energy demand to nearly halve in the next 30 years, which is socio-politically unrealistic given the existing energy poverty around the world and that energy demand must increase as much of the world industrializes and urbanizes. Even the IMP based on particularly high uptake of renewable energy still requires more than 3 Gt ofcarbon dioxide to be captured and stored annually by 2050 (Figure 3.15 in the full report).

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DACCS is direct air capture and storage, and BECCS is bioenergy with carbon capture and storage.

So I guess we gotta do it, according to the IPCC. But not on federal land, says CBD.  And so it goes.. Next post: EIS for thee, but not for me.

New to national forests – carbon sequestration

The world’s largest carbon direct air capture facility has started construction in Iceland

From the news release:

The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service today announced a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) that would allow the agency to consider proposals for potential carbon capture and sequestration projects on national forests and grasslands. This proposal would harmonize the framework between the federal government’s two largest land managers by aligning with regulatory structures already established for the U.S. Department of Interior’s Bureau of Land Management.

If this amendment is finalized, applications for carbon sequestration on national forests or grasslands would be considered for permanent use. The proposed regulation changes the initial screening criteria to allow the Forest Service to consider proposals for carbon capture and sequestration projects and does not allow for any other permanent uses on national forests and grasslands.

From the Federal Register:

The United States Department of Agriculture, Forest Service (Forest Service or Agency), is proposing to amend its special use regulations, which prohibit authorizing exclusive and perpetual use and occupancy of National Forest System lands, to provide an exemption for carbon capture and storage.

Carbon dioxide injected in pore spaces may remain for over 1,000 years after injection and would be tantamount to an exclusive and perpetual use and occupancy if authorized on NFS lands.

The proposed rule would not authorize carbon capture and storage on NFS lands. Rather, the proposed rule would exempt proposals for carbon capture and storage from the initial screening criterion prohibiting authorization of exclusive use and occupancy of NFS lands, thereby allowing the Forest Service to review proposals and applications for carbon capture and storage and to authorize proposed carbon capture and storage on NFS lands if, where, and as deemed appropriate by the Agency.

Proposals for underground storage of carbon dioxide would have to meet all other screening criteria, including but not limited to consistency with the applicable land management plan, potential risks to public health or safety, conflicts or interference with authorized uses of NFS lands or use of adjacent non-NFS lands.

Of course it would have to be consistent with forest plans, but would a forest plan that authorizes “exclusive and perpetual use and occupancy” of national forest lands be consistent with the Multiple-Use Sustained-Yield Act?  (Is the BLM different in this regard?)  I assume that’s why the existing special use regulations are written to prohibit permanent uses.  Maybe this should be viewed as a question of divesting ownership rather than a permitted special use.

 

The degree to which forest fires are caused by fossil fuel-driven climate change

I happened to run across something that contradicts Bob Zybach’s repeated assertions that, “these fires have been clearly predicted by me and others because of USFS management policies and Wilderness designations and have zero to do with warming climate or drier fuels.”  The Union of Concerned Scientists calculated the effect of warming climate and drier fuels on burned area, and the result from their peer-reviewed analysis is not “zero.”

Climate change is causing hotter, drier conditions that are also fueling these increasingly large and severe wildfires. In particular, vapor pressure deficit (VPD), a measure of atmospheric “thirst,” has emerged as a key way of tracking how climate change is amplifying wildfires because of its role in regulating water dynamics in ecosystems and, together with rising temperatures, contributing to increasing dryness (Box 1).

UCS used a combination of data and modeling to determine how much the carbon emissions associated with 88 major carbon producers (hereafter, the “big 88”) have historically contributed to increases in VPD and burned forest area across the western United States and southwestern Canada (see Methodology).

Across western North America, the area burned by forest fires increases exponentially as VPD increases, which means that relatively small changes in VPD result in large changes in burned forest area. The observed rise in VPD has enabled a steep increase in the forest area that has burned across the region since the mid-1980s. Since 1986,1 a cumulative 53.0 million acres of forest area has burned across western North America as VPD has risen. Without emissions tied to the big 88, the rise in VPD would have been much smaller, and 33.3 million acres (IQR 27.7 million–38.5 million) would have burned (Figure 4). That means that 37 percent (IQR 26–47 percent) of the cumulative burned forest area from 1986 to 2021 is attributable to emissions from the big 88. This represents nearly 19.8 million acres of burned forest area, or an area roughly the size of Maine.

You can criticize UCS for being agenda-driven (and we’ve talked about the limitations of “burned area” as a metric), but I’d challenge Bob or others to provide a similarly peer-reviewed research paper that attributes fire effects to his chosen causes.

 

Let’s Discuss: the Norm-and-Jerry MOG Op-ed in Politico

Side note: whatever your thoughts, please comment on the MOG ANPR here. That is Mature and Old Growth Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking.  Some people have had trouble finding the link, perhaps due to the bizarre title “Organization, Functions, and Procedures; Functions and Procedures; Forest Service Functions.”  Comments are due June 20th. We appear to be in the middle of a major media campaign on the MOG, so this seems like a good time to discuss some concepts.

Norm Christenson and Jerry Franklin had a an op-ed in Politico yesterday.  I’m a big Jerry Franklin fan, based on my personal interactions with him since the 80’s. I’ve told some of the stories before, so I won’t bore you with them again. Mostly our disagreements have been about west-side vs. east-side practices, ecology and experience.

I like how they tagged on the wildfires in Canada to “underscore the need to let our current mature forest grow old.”  You could also argue that the wildfires in Canada underscore the fact that wildfires are a danger when trying to use forests to mitigate climate change.  Because if you believe that climate change will cause forests not to grow back, you’ve just blown your last tree sequestration opportunity plus released much carbon (and PM2.5).

“It turns out the age and composition of forests makes a big difference in what role they play in preventing wildfires and storing carbon. Old growth forest is the best at both, but there is very little old growth left in either the western or eastern United States.”

I would argue that old growth forest in some species/places is not the best in “preventing” wildfires (what does “preventing” even mean in this context?).  Take a mixed ponderosa/true fir understory stand with large old pp.. how exactly does that “prevent” wildfires? I won’t go into carbon because the sequestering/storage burning up all depends on assumptions which may differ.

As part of the MOG effort, the FS counted the BLM and FS Old Growth acres and you can see them in the above table. It looks like 33 mill acres or thereabouts, or about 18% of the total. Note that this is just FS and BLM, there is probably OG on other state and country and private lands as well. So.. are 33 ish mill acres plus other unknown acres “very little” or not? How would we know what the “right” amount is?

But a large amount of the forests on public lands is what foresters call “mature” forest, which is nearly as good as old growth and in fact is on the brink of becoming old growth. It is these older forests that will help us prevent future forest fires and will do the most to reduce climate change, and its these forests that we need to protect at all costs.

I’m still interested in the mechanism of older forests helping us “prevent” fires.  I have to admit, the old forests in my neck of the wood seem to be slacking off on this.

Then there’s  the “p” word.. protect- the question is “protect from what?” This op-ed seems to mean “protect from removing any trees”.. but you can in the chart below (in the ANPR) see the timber harvest acres (including ecological restoration and fire risk reduction) are relatively tiny compared to fire and bugs and diseases.  I guess I can see the argument “we can’t affect wildfire, and insects and diseases, so let’s focus on timber”; except that we can affect acres impacted by wildfire by thinning.  Unless you believe that fuel treatments, PODs, etc. don’t help protect mature and older forests.  Which isn’t the view of the fire science community nor practitioners.  In fact, that isn’t addressed in this op-ed.

Within a few years, tree seedlings grow quickly, and their canopies expand to form a continuous green “solar panel.” The time it takes for this growth depends on the site’s fertility and the number of pioneer trees in the environment. The result is an immature forest composed of trees of small stature and similar age. These immature forests pose a high risk of wildfire due to the abundance of fine fuel, small branches and leaves, near the ground.

This reminds me of our 1980’s Central Oregon silviculture workshop with Bruce Larsen and Chad Oliver- when trees compete for water, they don’t grow the same way as the standard models and thinking based on competition for light.  The old mesic forest bias.  And when water is limiting, then thinning can increase vigor of trees and reduce beetle outbreaks in some cases. This isn’t scientifically controversial. There’s probably a literature review out there;  here’s one example from the Northern Rockies

Our results show treatments designed to increase resistance to high-severity fire in ponderosa pine-dominated forests in the Northern Rockies can also increase resistance to MPB, even during an outbreak.

So “protecting”  increases risks from pine beetles and wildfire, which doesn’t actually sound, in those cases, very protective.

As to the green “solar panel” well..that kind of implies an even-aged stand, which many stands that I observer are not. And then there are forests that never form continuous crowns due to competition for water.

I can understand if some don’t want to count pinyon-juniper as forests, but then maybe each kind of forest should be considered separately,  including mesic and dry forests.

 

Here are some interesting and relevant Q&As from the ANPR.

Q. What restoration options are available to restore old-growth forest structure in frequent fire forests?
Mechanical thinning and prescribed fire represent the primary approaches to active restoration of frequent-fire mature and old-growth forest areas to reduce their vulnerability to wildfire. Reduction in tree density often increases resilience to the climate-driven impacts of droughts, insects and wildfire.
Restoration prescriptions generally aim to increase the diversity of trees – age, size, and species – and retain the largest trees of the most fire-resistant species in the area. Diverse forests are more resilient because threats are less likely to impact trees species, ages and sizes at once.

Q. Are old-growth forests climate resilient?
Many old-growth forests have resilient characteristics like thick bark, high canopies, and deep roots. Some, like coastal redwoods, require moderate year-round temperatures and abundant moisture to thrive. As such, they are highly vulnerable to shifting conditions. As climate continues to deviate from historical
norms, even otherwise resilient forests are expected to be at increasing risk from acute and chronic disturbances such as drought, wildfires, disease, and insect outbreaks. These threats heighten the vulnerability of mature and old-growth forests resulting in higher chance of forest loss.

Your thoughts?

 

Are large, eastside grand firs friend or foe?

Large-diameter grand fir (Abies grandis) in a mesic, mixed-conifer forest of northeast Oregon. Credit: Conservation Science and Practice (2023).

A new release from a some of our favorite authors about the proposed amendment to the Oregon and Washington Eastside Screens forest plan requirements – the “21-inch rule.”  The primary focus is summarized here (and there is a link to the research paper):

“Interest is growing in policy opportunities that align biodiversity conservation and recovery with climate change mitigation and adaptation priorities. The authors conclude that “21-inch rule” provides an excellent example of such a policy initiated for wildlife and habitat protection that has also provided significant climate mitigation values across extensive forests of the PNW Region.”

Until I saw this photo, I had imagined an army of evil grand fir trees sneaking up under pines and larch, and stealing their water and threatening to burn them up.  They seem to be the Forest Service’s Enemy #1 these days in eastern Oregon and Washington.  So dangerous, in fact, that the agency undertook another dreaded forest plan amendment process to give the agency more weapons to fight off this scourge.

This paper portrays them in a much different light, as providing benefits to both carbon storage and resilience to fire (along with their original wildlife protection benefits targeted by the original Eastside Screens amendment) – and NOT posing a substantial barrier to fuel treatment.

“The key rationale for amending the 21-inch rule is that increased cutting of large-diameter fir trees (≥53 cm DBH and <150 years) is needed to facilitate the conservation and recruitment of early-seral, shade-intolerant old ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa) and western larch (Larix occidentalis) by reducing competition from shade-tolerant large grand fir (Abies grandis) (USDA, 2021).

This represents a major shift in management of large trees across the region, highlighting escalating tradeoffs between goals for carbon sequestration to mitigate climate change, and efforts to increase the pace, scale, and intensity of cutting across national forest lands. The potential impacts of removal of large grand fir on wildfire are unclear, although a trait-based approach to assess fire resistance found that the grand fir forest type had the second highest fire resistance score, and one of the lowest fire severity values among forest types of the Inland Northwest USA (Moris et al., 2022).

Large ponderosa pine co-mingle with large grand fir about 14% of the time (259 plots), leaving 86% of plots with large ponderosa pine without large grand fir (1616 plots). Similarly, large western larch co-mingle with large grand fir about 56% of the time. Large ponderosa pine and grand fir are found together on only 8% of all plots in the region, while large larch and grand fir are found together on only 4% of all plots in the region.  (I added the emphasis for clarity.)

Enhancing forest resilience does not necessitate widespread cutting of any large-diameter tree species. Favoring early-seral species can be achieved with a focus on smaller trees and restoring surface fire, while retaining the existing large tree population.”

If nothing else, these conclusions clearly refute the Forest Service argument that reducing fire risk is “impossible” without logging the few (but important) large grand fir trees.

“Using our nation’s forest inventory to open carbon markets to family forest owners”

Here’s an announcement from the Forest Service about a program designed to promote use of small, private forests for carbon offsets.  In particular, it’s about the the use of Forest Service FIA data in this program, but I’m always interested in what management practices are considered to be worth getting paid for, and I don’t think I’ve seen them this clearly specified.  The program website says, “When you enroll, you’ll receive payments for implementing forest management practices that increase the carbon sequestered and stored on your land.”  This program seems to be only available in the eastern U. S., but if you track through the links you can find the specific “management requirements” for several states under the “Practice Overview” documents here.   The three groups of states are each a little different.

Michigan/Minnesota/Wisconsin (Payments are higher for “growing mature forests” than for “promoting diverse forests;” these are requirements for the former, while the latter allows more intensive logging, but has requirements for reserve areas.)

  • Harvests may not remove more than 25% of the basal area at the time of the harvest.
  • Harvests may not reduce the average stand diameter by more than 10%.

Maryland/Pennsylvania/West Virginia (Payment is for “growing mature forests” only)

  • If you choose to conduct a timber harvest, it must not remove more than 25% of the basal area per acre
  • High-grading is prohibited during the contract period. High-grading is defined as a reduction in quadratic mean tree diameter of more than 10% from the pre-harvest condition.

Vermont/eastern New York (Payments are higher for “grow older forests” than for “enhance your woodland.”  The former generally requires deferment of commercial logging for 20 years.  The latter restricts timber harvest based on basal area, diameter, trees per acre, snags and opening size.)

Would something like this make sense in the west?  For federal lands (as a best management practice, since they couldn’t be paid for it)?  (I know we’ve had some discussions about thinning requirements based on basal area vs other metrics.)

 

 

Can Both Things be True? We Need to Protect Mesic Forests for Carbon and We Will Lose Them Due to Climate Change?

 

This is from a classic 1992 paper on genetics in reforestation under climate change. The Douglas fir near my house don’t appear to be suffering, 30-ish years later.

Here’s an article in Mongabay, which attempts to explain this very complicated article in Nature.

  • Landscapes are showing signs of losing their ability to absorb the amount of carbon they once could, a new study revealed. That would pose serious obstacles to the fight against climate change.
  • The study reviewed the productivity of carbon storage of different ecosystems between 1981 and 2018, finding that many fluctuated greatly and were at risk of turning into permanent scrubland.
  • Researchers identified a concerning “spiraling” effect, in which landscapes absorb less carbon that in turn worsens climate change, which then destabilizes additional landscapes and puts them at higher risk of turning into scrubland.

One reason for this, the researchers said, is that landscapes have a “memory” of which years had high carbon storage and which were low. Low years are more likely to be followed by additional low years, meaning that as carbon storage potential diminishes, a landscape is more likely to permanently become scrubland.

The phenomenon can be thought of as a “spiraling” effect, researchers said, in which landscapes absorb less carbon that in turn worsens climate change, which then destabilizes additional landscapes and puts them at higher risk of turning into scrubland.

“If we destabilize the carbon net uptake, that will destabilize climate even more,” said lead author Marcos Fernández, researcher at the Center for Ecological Research and Forestry Applications (CREAF). “It’s like a positive feedback loop. As you destabilize the carbon balance, then the climate becomes more unstable, as well.”

The most-affected regions include the Mediterranean Basin, South and Central Asia, East Africa and the west coasts of North and Central America. More specifically, mapping suggests that Kenya, India, Pakistan, Russia, Kyrgyzstan and Iraq are losing their ability to store carbon while in the Americas, it’s the Northern Triangle, Mexico and the west coast of the United States that are the most affected.

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“For the first time, we’ve demonstrated that for certain regions of the world, the land might be reaching a tipping point in terms of its ability to host significantly forested land and absorb significant amounts of carbon,” said co-author Patrick McGuire, a staff meteorologist at the University of Reading and the National Centre for Atmospheric Science in the UK.

****

“We need to take care of our land better and not let all the trees get cut down and converted to cropland,” McGuire said. “Trees can hold a lot more carbon than crops or grasslands.”

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The question is “how did the authors come to that conclusion?” The article was fortunately published with a sharing token from Mongabay, so perhaps you can access it.  Sadly I can’t copy the paragraphs that describe the authors’ thinking. but it’s something like if we measure variability in carbon uptake from year to year that might mean “ecosystems” are in trouble.  They talk about Net Biome Production or NBP.

We can access and copy the peer reviewers comments, though, and they explain perhaps better.. .

Fernandez-Martinez et al. take an interesting and novel approach by analysing changes in the interannual variability and autocorrelation of NBP to infer potential early warning signals for a “destabilization” of the terrestrial carbon sink.

Now it could be that internannual variation of NBP might be early warning signals for “destabilization” but first we’d have to define what destabilization means..  and some of us might want to see some evidence that points in that direction.  I don’t think there is any evidence of a link, just conjecture that there might be with calculations using data from Cams and Carboscope.

Anyway, it appears that CAMS and Carboscope are estimates of carbon in the atmosphere.  TRENDY appears to be a vegetation simulation.

My take: they  took two models at the global level for veg and atmospheric carbon. They used a term “destabilization” without making clear exactly what they meant.  And concluded that trees could die.

What is interesting about these kinds of papers is that they take datasets of unknown quality, define things without understanding or describing mechanisms, and then.. ask for monitoring to see if the results mean anything in the real world.

Last sentence of the paper..

Hence, regions showing increased variability and autocorrelations should be monitored in detail to properly understand the mechanisms and consequences behind these changes given that increasing variability and autocorrelation have been shown to act as early-warning signals preceding abrupt phase transitions in simulations of ecosystem functioning.

(so far observations in the “real world” have not entered in.

Here’s my fave:

Given the main role of climate change as a driver of these changes in their temporal behavior, mitigating climate change is needed to prevent further unforeseen changes in land C sinks.

I think you could probably say that without all this data. Here’s my take:

-Climate change affects trees (among other things)

-Trees sequester and store carbon

-With climate change, tree species may slow down growth or may be unable to live, and be replaced by shrubs or grass or desert.

-And we don’t know exactly what will happen one way or the other- nor can we really, because trees and forest ecosystems are so complex.

-Nevertheless, mitigating climate change is a good idea.

There.. was that so hard?

If we thought western mesic forests were in danger, perhaps we could look for signs that those trees were in serious trouble. What signs would those be?

Science Friday: Yale Forest School Scientists on “Proforestation”

When I first heard about the concept of proforestation, it seemed like an East Coast phenomenon. I thought “So what? Some of the usual suspects wrote an op-ed in Nature and various other outletsl their usual ideological beverage with a carbon twist?” Perhaps it’s timed to be part of a media campaign hoping to affect the Mature and Old Growth initiative of Forest Service and BLM.

Since I’ve worked on letters to the Forest Service about MOG, when I ran across a letter on proforestation by a bunch of scientists from The Forest School at the Yale School of the Environment I could recognize both excellent writing and a host of useful references. The themes that the authors touch on are also found in MOG. What’s particularly interesting to me about this letter is that Connecticut has no National Forests, and isn’t a dry forest/wildfire area. They don’t see forests go up in smoke, with associated carbon emissions. And they are talking about state and private land. So it’s interesting to see what they have to say.

Proforestation, on which the working group recommendations are based, is a recent political movement that aims to prevent forest management in the United States under the assumption that excluding humans from forests will serve as a climate change mitigation tool [4, 14, 15]. It also omits important aspects of forest carbon science [16]. It appears to be premised on a single opinion article published in an academic journal last year [14]. The reality is that forest carbon science is complex [17]. Excluding silviculture from Connecticut’s forests could result in them sequestering less atmospheric carbon over time, due to future losses from catastrophic disturbances (such as windstorms, invasive species, and fire) and lack of carbon benefits derived from forest products.
We lack a clear scientific answer to major questions related to forest carbon. These include:
• How do forest carbon dynamics change with forest succession, species composition, climate, and site characteristics? Disturbance events make future forest carbon dynamics, and the longevity of carbon stored in today’s forests, unpredictable [16, 18-23]. These events, which release vast amounts of forest carbon, are predicted to increase with climate change [24]. Appropriate and even optimized forest management can mitigate the risk of disturbance and reduce forest carbon lost in those events [25, 26].
• What is the lifecycle of carbon in forest soils and how does this relate to disturbance, climate, species composition, forest succession, and human activity [18, 22, 27-32]?
• Under what circumstances might unmanaged forests store more carbon than managed forests, and how do time and natural disturbances factor in to this comparison?
• How do methane emissions from forests differ between sites, species composition, and age structure [33-35]?
• What are the climate implications of multiple-use forest management which includes harvested forest products, compared to proforestation? Storage of carbon in forests and/or wood products are climate mitigation components, and wood can also serve as a fossil fuel reduction mechanism [1, 16, 36-38]. System level forest carbon accounting is complex and dynamic which highlights a need for comprehensive, and product specific, wood life cycle analyses and comparisons with non-renewable alternatives and market forces [39]. Woody biomass generated in forest management activities can bring additional climate benefits by either storing carbon in forest products [37] and/or replacing fossil-based counterparts [40].

Proforestation does not account for system level carbon dynamics related to forest products and misleads us to conclude that its adoption would be the most carbon positive of all forest policy choices. Given such questions, proforestation is an undemonstrated, unwise approach as a climate solution while active management provides a suite of approaches that can be tailored to find solutions to known and emerging threats to forest carbon storage and health. The proforestation movement misleads us to believe that people are not part of natural forests, a belief based on a dichotomy of nature and culture that has been shown to promote environmental degradation instead of conservation [41]. Indeed, for thousands of years before European colonists arrived, Indigenous peoples stewarded and actively managed Connecticut’s forests, through prescribed fire and harvesting of wood for a variety of uses. This active management by people still influences the forests we see today. The myth of a “pristine” unmanaged forest being the natural state of Connecticut’s forests is just not accurate or necessarily desirable for carbon sequestration, biodiversity, or other ecosystem services. Active forest management has been crucial through time for ensuring that our forests are healthy and resilient while meeting society’s needs.

What the proforestation movement gets right is that poor land management can decimate the biodiversity and ecosystem services of forests. Just as sound management has conserved our contemporary forest after a period of destructive agriculture in the 18th and 19th centuries, we now need to rely on ongoing management to steward these forests through multiple threats, including more frequent and intense weather events such as droughts and storms, and losses due to invasive pathogens. These increasing threats reflect the fact that Connecticut’s forests are human influenced, they have been for millennia and this is even more true today due to climate and other environmental changes. Keeping forests healthy and growing under conditions of multiplying and intensifying threats will require the ongoing human intervention that management offers. Management allows us to maintain growing forests, and growing forests sequester carbon.

Silviculture enables us to facilitate successional trajectories that will make forests more resilient to ongoing and emerging threats from global change, while supporting rural livelihoods and sustaining biodiversity. The science of silviculture in Connecticut is not about cutting primary forests, planting monocultures, or other such extractive practices which deliver only short-term gain. Outdated caricatures of forestry professionals are detrimental and threaten the resiliency of our state’s forests. Silviculture is about sustaining healthy forestlands, which involves anticipating and responding to disturbances that threaten long-term forest health, through science- and practice-informed strategies.

There are also broader issues at play here relating to sustainable rural economies and environmental justice and responsibility. For example, ‘preservation’ of a wealthy society’s resources leads to greater exploitation of forest resources in places where less regulation and scientific knowledge exist to ensure sustainable management. This concept has been described as the illusion of preservation [42]. We are loath to be drawn into the nuances of these arguments, but suffice to say that meeting energy and wood demands must involve globally-coordinated initiatives with consideration to the differences between biogenic carbon emissions and fossilized carbon emissions [17, 37, 43, 44]. In Connecticut, we have restored our state forestland through management which can continue to maintain – and even enhance – the carbon, other environmental, and rural community benefits of our forestlands. Exporting demands for forest products to regions without our rich scientific and practitioner expertise is damaging to both our state and the planet. Connecticut needs to support the DEEP Forestry Division by providing them with enough resources to fully, and appropriately, steward our State forestlands.

We end by stating that we are ProForests, ProBiodiversity, ProClimate and ProRuralCommunities. In Connecticut, that necessitates being ProManagement.

Attached is the letter with the references and the names of the signatories. My bold on the first sentence.