Their main message was that, despite the fire’s size, it was ecologically beneficial to the landscape, exposing bare soil and giving way to the forest’s regeneration.
It’s good that they are showcasing this, presumably as a way to sell wildfires as a potential management tool – still, even with climate change and no “mechanical preparation.” It’s too bad that these kinds of fires don’t get the same kind of media coverage as the “bad fires.” Someone might start to think that maybe fuels reduction shouldn’t show up as the purpose for every thinning/logging project everywhere. And that forest plans should provide guidance for where it is or isn’t desirable (such as desired fuel loads).
This is where the world could support new forests. The map excludes existing forests, urban areas, and agricultural lands. J. BASTIN, ET. AL., SCIENCE 365, 76, 2019
There was a new article in Science that caused a kerfuffle in the Twitterverse (is that a Twitterfuffle?), which may be of interest to us. The story is that Science published an article saying that “planting trees globally would be REALLY good for carbon”. Now you may say that that’s not really news, but the authors made lots of assumptions (!) and ran models (!) and came up with some big numbers (!) and made perhaps out-sized claims. What is of interest to me is the choice of scale, in this case, the world. It takes chutzpah, I think, to think you can model how people could plant trees all around the world, where, and what that would do for carbon, get meaningful results and not need to ground-truth your work.
As you all know, I am a proponent of planting trees. I especially think that planting trees post-fire (where natural regeneration isn’t working), is something most people would support, not just for carbon reasons. I had heard at one time that the Forest Service was going to make a major push on its reforestation backlog, but never heard what happened to that effort. Anyone reading from the FS, please let us know! Anyway, here’s the free info on the paper and a link:. There’s also a science op-ed that has a firewall here.
The restoration of forested land at a global scale could help capture atmospheric carbon and mitigate climate change. Bastin et al. used direct measurements of forest cover to generate a model of forest restoration potential across the globe (see the Perspective by Chazdon and Brancalion). Their spatially explicit maps show how much additional tree cover could exist outside of existing forests and agricultural and urban land. Ecosystems could support an additional 0.9 billion hectares of continuous forest. This would represent a greater than 25% increase in forested area, including more than 500 billion trees and more than 200 gigatonnes of additional carbon at maturity. Such a change has the potential to cut the atmospheric carbon pool by about 25%.
Abstract
The restoration of trees remains among the most effective strategies for climate change mitigation. We mapped the global potential tree coverage to show that 4.4 billion hectares of canopy cover could exist under the current climate. Excluding existing trees and agricultural and urban areas, we found that there is room for an extra 0.9 billion hectares of canopy cover, which could store 205 gigatonnes of carbon in areas that would naturally support woodlands and forests. This highlights global tree restoration as our most effective climate change solution to date. However, climate change will alter this potential tree coverage. We estimate that if we cannot deviate from the current trajectory, the global potential canopy cover may shrink by ~223 million hectares by 2050, with the vast majority of losses occurring in the tropics. Our results highlight the opportunity of climate change mitigation through global tree restoration but also the urgent need for action.
I don’t know how anyone could model “forest loss due to climate change” since we don’t know how the climate will change, nor how trees will respond.
There is an interesting twitter discussion started by (Dr.) Pep Canadell linked here.
Replying to @pepcanadell
Some concerns on methods: only 10-13 factors determine tree cover potential globally – major local and regional-scale constraints missing, e.g. permafrost, subsoil constraints (ex. depth to bedrock), nutrient limitations, var. forms of soil degradation, seasonal inundation.
Replying to @EikeLuedeling @pepcanadell
Very relevant in high-potential areas! They also assume grazing areas and production forests can reach same tree cover as protected areas. In my view, a gross overestimate of actual potential! And a lesson on how machine-learning algorithms still need a reality check.
So I’m not the only person out there concerned about reality checks.
Robert Bonnie was Jim Hubbard’s predecessor in the Obama Administration (I think, the Department may have reorganized). They were/are both the political appointees in charge of the Forest Service. Here are a couple of my thoughts on this op-ed. If we tried to find areas of agreement, would we find one in planting trees? Maybe folks who disagree about other things could work together on that. My other observation is that the authors don’t mention the carbon impacts of switching from wood to other construction material, and still make a case for wood products- keeping forests in forests. Below is an excerpt and here is a link.
This means we must plant more trees — a whole lot more. The U.S. Mid-Century Strategy for Deep Decarbonization, a report published in 2016 and written by some of the federal government’s most-experienced climate experts, called for as much as 78,000 square miles of new forests across America. Mirroring the original New Deal, we should make a dramatic “Reforest America” commitment to plant billions of trees.
As we add new forests, we must also slow the loss of existing forests to urbanization by providing incentives to landowners to conserve forests. While the amount of U.S. forestland is currently stable, projections indicate we will begin to lose millions of acres to development in the years ahead if we don’t act.
Third, policy must promote the restoration of healthy forest ecosystems, particularly on public lands. This will require a dramatic increase in the selective harvest of trees in overgrown forests and the reintroduction of natural, low-intensity fires in order to reduce carbon emissions from catastrophic wildfires, disease and pests.
Accomplishing these goals will require substantial new public investment, matched by private financing. On private lands, financial resources will be required to help landowners plant trees, conserve forests in the face of development, and manage them to increase long-term carbon storage. On National Forests and other public lands, we must provide the U.S. Forest Service and other federal agencies with funding to undertake large-scale forest restoration.
But, public dollars alone won’t meet the challenge. To be successful, we must expand markets for wood products in building, bioenergy and other applications. While this might seem counter-intuitive, private landowners respond to higher wood prices by planting trees and maintaining forests.
Wood markets are needed for conserving forests on public lands, too, where a century of fire exclusion has left our forests overstocked with smaller trees and thus far more vulnerable to wildfire, pests and disease. Robust wood markets can help finance restoration of National Forests and other public lands.
We need to move forward despite a vocal minority who argues that we must curtail forest management and the use of wood products to protect the climate. This approach would risk much greater carbon emissions from climate-induced forest mortality and wildfire. Reducing the demand for wood products would increase the cost of restoring forests on public land while diminishing the financial incentive for private landowners to plant, manage and conserve forests.
“Analyzing large amounts of field data from 18,500 forest plots – from Minnesota to Maine, and Manitoba to Nova Scotia – the study identifies priority regions for forest climate adaption efforts.”
A study funded by the Forest Service found that older forests in eastern North America are less vulnerable to climate change than younger forests in terms of the sensitivity of carbon storage, timber volume and species richness. From the abstract (linked to this news release):
We found the strongest association among the investigated ESB indicators (ecosystem services and biodiversity) in old forests (>170 years). These forests simultaneously support high levels of carbon storage, timber growth, and species richness. Older forests also exhibit low climate sensitivity of associations among ESB indicators as compared to younger forests. While regions with a currently low combined ESB performance benefitted from climate change, regions with a high ESB performance were particularly vulnerable to climate change. In particular, climate sensitivity was highest east and southeast of the Great Lakes, signaling potential priority areas for adaptive management. Our findings suggest that strategies aimed at enhancing the representation of older forest conditions at landscape scales will help sustain ESB in a changing world.
Some of this sounds a little contradictory (maybe someone with more expertise and/or who reads the full article could explain), and I wonder if it has any application at all to more fire-prone forests. But it is a different way of looking at climate change adaptation that could be incorporated into forest planning.
The bark beetles started their invasion when I used to live there, in Mark Twain’s famous Calaveras County. Now it looks like it has reached epidemic levels, requiring emergency action, from multiple agencies.
Even with recent wet winters, tree mortality will remain a pressing issue as long as bark beetle infestations and drought conditions continue, said Brady McElroy, a hazard tree specialist in the Calaveras Ranger District of the Stanislaus National Forest.
“By no means is the issue going away,” McElroy said. “What the Forest Service has to focus on are the high priority areas, the immediate hazards to homes, roads and highways.”
In the long-term, McElroy said the Forest Service hopes to increase the pace and scale of thinning projects to restore overstocked forests that have been allowed for by a century of fire suppression.
“Our forests are overstocked, which increases competition (and) stressors on the trees, (and consequently) their ability to defend against bark beetle,” McElroy said. “The ongoing goal is to thin forests to a healthy kind of pre-European settlement stand to where they’re a little more resilient. We’re focusing on high-priority areas in the wildland-urban interface … We know what happens when these overstocked forests catch fire – we lose them.”
Diana Fredlund, a public affairs officer with the Stanislaus National Forest, said that although federal budget decreases have impacted the scale of the work for the Forest Service, the agency has been able to collaborate with private, county, state and other federal agencies and contractors for tree removal projects.
“We do what we can with what we have,” Fredlund said.
The Forest Service offers its own tree mortality program for homeowners with properties adjacent to Forest Service land. Property owners can fill out a Hazard Tree Evaluation Request Form to be considered for hazard tree abatement.
Whatever the color of the Administration, the relatively obscure wheels of scientific research and development continue along well-worn paths (whether the wording of the day is “low carbon” or “affordable, reliable and secure”). As I recall from my time in R&D, scientists readily change the title, and perhaps some introductory paragraphs, and voila! Thanks to the Forest Business Network for this link.
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is providing up to $79 million in funding for bioenergy research and development including biofuels, bioproducts, and biopower. This funding supports DOE’s goal of providing consumers and businesses with a range of domestic energy options that are affordable, reliable, and secure.
Topics areas for the biofuel funding opportunity include the following:
Cultivation Intensification Processes for Algae: Develop technologies for outdoor algae systems that increase the harvest yield, reliability and quality of algae.
Biomass Component Variability and Feedstock Conversion Interface: Research to lower the cost and improve the reliability of biomass handling and preprocessing.
Efficient Wood Heaters: Develop technologies to reduce emissions and increase efficiency of wood heaters for residential heating.
Systems Research of Hydrocarbon Biofuel Technologies: Integrate new technologies and processes in experimental prototype systems to improve and verify real-world performance and lower the cost of drop-in biofuels.
Optimization of Biomass-Derived Jet Fuel Blends: Identify and develop cost-competitive drop-in renewable jet fuel with improved energy density and lower particulate matter emissions.
Renewable Energy from Urban and Suburban Wastes: Support academic research and educational programs that focus on strategies to produce bioenergy and bioproducts from urban and suburban waste feedstocks.
Advanced Bioprocessing and Agile BioFoundry: Reduce the time and cost of developing biological processes for biomanufacturing fuels and products through the use of synthetic biology, low capital intensity methods, and continuous production systems.
Plastics in the Circular Carbon Economy: Develop biobased plastics with improved performance and recyclability and lower the cost and energy-intensity of recycling existing plastics through enhanced degradation.
Rethinking Anaerobic Digestion: Develop anaerobic processes or alternative strategies to enhance carbon conversion efficiency and lower costs of smaller scale wet waste systems.
Reducing Water, Energy, and Emissions in Bioenergy: Identify biofuels or bioproducts technologies with the greatest potential for reducing water consumption, energy consumption, and/or emissions relative to existing conventional fuels or products.
This FOA also supports the Water Security Grand Challenge, a White House initiated, DOE-led framework to advance transformational technology and innovation to meet the global need for safe, secure, and affordable water. In particular, this funding will support research and development focused on anaerobic digestion, a technology that can help achieve the Grand Challenge’s goal to double resource recovery from municipal wastewater.
I particularly like the “wood heaters” project because there are many low-income people already use this as a primary heating source. New cool technologies are cool, of course, but making old uncool but widely used wood heat work better is also important.
There sometimes seems to be an undercurrent here of the idea that environmental groups are rich bullies, and extractive industries are working for the common good, or at least are benign. Here’s some evidence otherwise regarding the latter.
One of the industry tactics is SLAPPs, Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation, wherein corporations try to intimidate their opponents by filing truly frivolous lawsuits – that they can afford but the defendant can’t. Matthew posted about one involving a forest products company here.
But your friendly oil and gas industry seems to be a leader in this field. Meaning that when you pay for your heat and transportation you’re also paying for this; “Using lawsuits to shut people up has long been a part of the oil industry’s playbook…” They lost a notable case recently when they sued youth groups (among others) after the groups won protections against neighborhood oil drilling in Los Angeles.
Many states have passed legislation to prevent this kind of intimidation of free speech, and a proposal is pending in Colorado, as described here, by an anti-drilling activist who has been SLAPPed:
I accept the urgency of climate change, and I am a proud advocate for our public lands. Many here agree with me, and together we have stood up to limit oil and gas development from expanding across the national forest and BLM lands.
The particulars of my case are unimportant here, although they can be easily researched. And I have already been found by a Colorado District Court to not have committed any actionable offense, and also awarded attorney fees for the “frivolous” and “vexatious” complaint made against me.
But all that is under appeal, and so I am still, over two years later, unduly burdened by and defending myself against this action.
Free speech is protected in our republic for good reason. Citizen input is grist for the mill of representational democracy. Dialogue and debate is a plus in pluralistic society. And this value is shared by Americans across the political spectrum. Free Speech allows people to participate robustly in government, speak truth to power, and to challenge the status quo.
Julio Cruz on Thursday works on the Forest Service’s plan to plant about 150,000 trees on land ravaged by the Hayman fire in the Pike National Forest. The plan also aims to protect Front Range water supplies. From the Denver Post.
You’ve gotta love this business. In 1980 at the Fifth North American Forest Biology Workshop, I remember a fellow geneticist talking about how climate change was going to cause trees to die out because they couldn’t move north due to uninhabitable spaces for them compared to post-glaciation (say fields instead of forests in the Midwest). That was 40 years ago. I remember so clearly because I remember thinking “but we didn’t have pick-up trucks then and seeds could fall into the back, and get moved across those spaces.” And that’s if we didn’t intentionally move them across spaces and plant them, something people are thinking about and now doing.
Here we are in 2019 and here is an article in the NY Times about moving tree species north, now called “assisted migration.” It’s pretty interesting. Here are a few quotes.
As a cautionary tale, Mr. Riely looks to the forest collapse that struck near Denver some years back. Conditions in the Rockies differ substantially from those in Rhode Island; still, he calls it “a water supplier’s nightmare.”
In the 1990s, dry spells, insects and disease began killing trees there. In 1996 and 2002, ferocious fires tore through. Then the rains came. Flash floods carried dark, ash-filled silt and debris into Denver’s reservoirs, clogging them.
So in 2010, Denver Water began replanting the mountainsides, making the forest more drought-resistant by spacing trees farther apart and reducing competition for water. Opening the forest canopy allowed other kinds of plants, which also prevent erosion, to grow as well.
I’m not sure I would agree that the forest “collapsed” prior to say, the Hayman Fire. But it certainly makes sense to plant trees farther apart in conditions where other trees are unlikely to fill in, and otherwise planted ones might need to be thinned at some point in the future. I wonder about the idea of “opening the forest canopy” after Hayman, as it was and is pretty open in a lot of places. Like there are no living trees. See the photo above.
Another interesting thing about this article is that it talks about moving species, and planting species in different microclimates, but not much about using different genetic sources of the same species. That approach would possibly have less disruptive effects on associated organisms in the area. As the concern is mentioned in the story:
Some worry about the unintended consequences of shuffling plants and animals around and that the approach will become widely adopted. “Moving species is the equivalent of ecological gambling,” said Anthony Ricciardi, a professor of invasion ecology and environmental science at McGill University in Montreal. “You’re spinning the roulette wheel.”
In the world of forest genetics, there have been many plantings of different seed sources through time in different places. The last I heard, people were taking advantage of this knowledge where it is available in terms of moving sources. I also remember the effort to grow eucalypts in Florida for biomass (pre-energy) and the hundred year freezes that knocked them out in the 80’s.. Here’s a link to the history by Don Rockwood at the University of Floriday. You can argue that eucs are a different beast because they’re not from North America but still…things can grow well for a while and then.. not so much.
Matching Eucalyptus species to Florida’s diverse weather and soils is challenging. Historically defined climatic regions based on average low temperatures or numbers of freezes provide some broad guidelines, but annual aberrations such as the three 100-year freezes in the 1980s [11], extended cold periods of the 2010-11 winter, and the abrupt freezes of the “warm” winter of 2011-12 profoundly influence freeze susceptibility of all young eucalypts. Rainfall patterns with unpredictable, extended dry spells make Florida’s summer rainfall climate highly variable and difficult for successful planting and early growth.
Finally, I think it’s important to note that worrisome invasive tree pests continue to be imported and expand in the US. So you’ve got unpredictability of different kinds (and climate and pests can interact) over a period of a tree’s lifespan (a hundred years or more). I can see why people might try some things, or wait and see.
Forest companies regularly burn slash piles after harvesting a site for lumber and pulp. Bioenergy companies say slash burning is a waste because they could use the waste material to create pellets. – HANDOUT PHOTO
It’s always interesting to see how our northern friends deal with similar forests with different social, political and economic views. This is from Prince George BC. Thanks to the Forest Business Network for providing this link!
The issue is burning slashpiles in the open air instead of selling the material for bioenergy, and the policies that work against it.
“We want to put it to productive use,” said Stirling. “The idea that we don’t have to burn things into the airshed, we can mitigate the risk of forest fire, and take that forest residual in as a product we can make use of, products we can sell into Japan where we are offsetting nuclear and coal emissions, what could be better?”
All wood-pellet (also called bioenergy, biomass or biofuel) plants in northern B.C. already sell as much product as they can manufacture, as fast as they can make it.
Most of it goes to Asia or Europe where it is used in industrial furnaces or electricity generation facilities to reduce the amount of coal, natural gas, nuclear and the worst of the greenhouse gases pollutants used by factories, mills and communities.
Pacific Bioenergy recently signed the biggest contracts in the history of the fledgling bioenergy sector, a sector that was pioneered out of Prince George. These pacts are for the largest amounts of pellets ever asked for and for the longest duration ever established.
…
Here’s why PacBio and the other pellet companies can only stare at these grey skeletons of trees – entire forests of the stuff.
“There may not be saw-log material in that stand, but there certainly is material – ideal material, actually – for our business,” said Stirling but he explained that by provincial legislation, only the lumber company with the charter for that forest is allowed to cut it down and they are only allowed to cut down a set number of trees per year. If they cut down the dead pine, even to give it away to the pellet plants, that leaves them unable to cut down the equivalent amount of trees they need to make lumber.
Furthermore, a lumber company has to pay stumpage (a fee to the taxpayers’ bank account in Victoria) on every tree they cut, but the fee is too high if it’s only going to sell at pellet rates. Stirling said what’s needed is a government policy allowing for biomass harvesting of the otherwise useless timber so that it doesn’t count against the associated lumber company’s harvesting rights. Also, a stumpage rate has to be implemented by Victoria that charges an amount realistic for pellet sales instead of lumber sales.
There is another hurdle, though and it pertains to the brush piles. The lumber companies are held to rigid tree-planting requirements that gets in the way of bioenergy companies moving in to collect the woody debris.
“Don’t give out a contract on December the 10th and say you have to have it done by March 31st,” said Parfitt, illustrating a typical scenario. “What if it snows? What if the roads aren’t in shape until June? And that is why they (lumber companies) want it to burn, because they don’t want to plant it later,” as waiting for the right conditions for bioenergy staff and machines to go in and get the piles sets the treeplanting process back.
O’Donnell said, “That’s where it’s frustrating, because Canfor and Lakeland and all those guys understand that and will make concessions for us to go in there and get their piles. FFT (Forests For Tomorrow, a government program for forest management) and the B.C. government? No.”
It might be changing, said Stirling, offering cautious hope despite it being too late for a lot of piles already in flames.
Structural Problem: Using the Power of Hyperlinks in Scientific Publishing.. or Not.
For those of us who grew up with paper journals, journal article size was circumscribed by paper publishing. Now publishing in journals is online, but complex datasets may well require more “room” to get at how things are calculated and which numbers are used from which data sets. This seems especially true for some kinds of studies that use a variety of other data sets. Without that clarity, how can reviewers provide adequate peer review? As Todd Morgan says:
In some ways, I think journal articles can be a really poor way to communicate some of this information/science. One key reason is space & word count limits. These limits really restrict authors’ abilities to clearly describe their data sources & methods in detail – especially when working with multiple data sets from different sources and/or multiple methods. And so much of this science related to carbon uses gobs of data from various sources, originally designed to measure different things and then mashes those data up with a bunch of mathematical relationships from other sources.
For example, the Smith et al. 2006 source cited in the CBM article you brought to my attention is a 200-page document with all sorts of tables from other sources and different tables to be used for different data sets when calculating carbon for HWP. And it sources information from several other large documents with data compiled from yet other sources. From the methods presented in the CBM article, I’m not exactly sure which tables & methods the authors used from Smith et al. and I don’t know exactly what TPO data they used, how they included fuelwood, or why they added mill residue…
As Morgan and I were discussing this via email, Chris Woodall, a Forest Service scientist, and one of the authors of the study added:
“This paper was an attempt to bring together very spatially explicit remotely sensed information (a central part of the NASA carbon monitoring systems grant) with information regarding the status and fate of forest carbon, whether ecosystem or HWP. We encountered serious hurdles trying to attribute gross carbon changes to disturbances agents, whether fire, wind, or logging. So much so that deriving net change from gross really eluded us resulting in our paper only getting into CBM as opposed to much higher tier journals. The issue that took the most work was trying to join TPO data (often at the combo county level) with gridded data which led us to developing a host of look up tables to carry our C calculations through. “
Woodall brings up two structural problems:
Structural Problem: NASA Funding and the Scientific Equivalent of the Streetlight Effect.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect
NASA has money for carbon monitoring based on remote sensing. Therefore, folks will use remote sensing for carbon monitoring and try to link it to other things that aren’t necessarily measured well by remote sensing. Would the approach have been the same if Agency X had funded proposals to “do the best carbon monitoring possible” and given lots of money to collect new data specifically to answer carbon questions?”
Structural Problem: Not all journals are created equal.
But the public and policymakers don’t have a phone app where you type in the journal and it comes out with a ranking. and what would you do with that information anyway? Also, some folks have had trouble publishing in some of the highest ranked journals (e.g., Nature and Science) if their conclusions don’t fit with certain worldviews, and not necessarily that they used incorrect methods, nor that the results are shaky. So knowing the journal can help you determine how strong the evidence is.. or not. But clearly Chris points out that in this case, the research only made it into a lower tier journal. Does that mean anything to policymakers? Should it?
