Diversity and species conservation

The Sage Grouse Story, A More Complete View: I. Not All About Trump

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Credit: Scott Root, Utah DWR, courtesy of Intermountain West Joint Venture

The Center for Western Priorities sent this out in their newsletter this morning:

The Trump administration released more details on its updated sage-grouse management plan. The previous plan, created in 2015, was a collaborative effort between a variety of stakeholders, from industry to environmentalists. As a result, it was popular throughout the West, with two-thirds of Westerners opposing changes to it.

Conservation of the sage-grouse and the sagebrush ecosystem is vital as industry encroaches on the habitat. In response to the changes to the management plan, a letter written by a collection of scientists stated, “failure to take into account large-scale dynamics when managing sage-grouse will likely lead to an overall loss in habitat quantity and quality resulting in population declines.” Sage-grouse populations have declined for the third consecutive year, with 2019 marking the lowest year since tracking began in 2011.

The link to the scientist letter went to this interesting WyoFile story, but I didn’t see a link to a scientist letter (can someone help and check this? if it’s not just me, I’ll contact them and ask).

I’m going to tell the story of my efforts to arrive at an even-handed description of the sage grouse saga. The CWP mention above simply fits it into the usual Bad Trump Administration overrules Good Obama Administration narrative. One of the many problems with seeing things through this partisan filter is that you miss much of the depth and complexity, not to speak of the contributions of people- state employees, feds, landowners, and so on, who do all the proverbial “grunt work” working with each other, jointly figuring things out, discussing the implications of scientific information, and so on. Of which there were a great many folks, who did this for a long time, for the sage grouse, and are still doing it. Also, it underplays the contributions and intricate political processes and choices at the state and federal levels which are of interest.

My instinctive hairs first went up when changes to the 2015 plan were portrayed as an R vs. D thing. At the same time, I saw stories that D Governors, including Colorado’s supported some changes.. see in this BLM pres release.

Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval also supported the BLM’s effort to incorporate state feedback, noting “The State of Nevada is pleased the final EIS is finished. We appreciate the opportunity to have worked closely with the Department of the Interior on our concerns, and thank them for incorporating our input into the final plan amendments.”

Oregon Gov. Kate Brown: “Collaboration is hard work, and I appreciate the efforts by our stakeholders, state agencies and the Department of the Interior to craft an agreement to protect the sage grouse. Balancing sage grouse habitat protection and economic development requires mitigation of negative impacts. This agreement is a critical step that marks a shift away from planning toward active conservation and landscape management to protect this iconic species. Oregon’s bounty is beautiful and worth continuing to protect and fight for.”

Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper: “We worked with the Bureau of Land Management and our stakeholders to produce a plan that maintains protection for the sage grouse while balancing the potential impact on local economies. This is a significant step that closes out the planning phase and allows us to begin to see the true conservation efforts that safeguard the sage grouse in Colorado.”

So what was the “real” story? Can we even capture that, as opposed to bits and pieces of information from peoples’ different experiences at different levels? When I attended the Western Governors’ Association Working Lands Roundtable in April, I attended a work session on At Risk Species Conservation and spoke to some people there about their experiences with the sage grouse effort. I even asked a nice WGA staff person “is there an article that presents the history of the sage grouse issue fairly?” so that I could post it on The Smokey Wire. He didn’t know of any, but referred me to a person who might be a good source, if I wanted to hear a balanced perspective. So I spoke with him. More on what I found out in my next post. If any of you have found an even-handed representation, please post a link in the comments.

Croatan National Forest Still Recovering from Florence: Carolina Public Press Story

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Botanist Andy Walker of US Forest Service discusses a failed road and culvert that remains impassable this summer in the Croatan National Forest following storm damage from Hurricane Florence last year. Jack Igelman / Carolina Public Press[/caption

Another great story by Jack Igelman of the Carolina Public Press- full of interesting information about what happened on the Croatan National Forest with Hurricane Florence and their response. Here are just a few excerpts. The whole piece is worth reading and there are additional photos.

Facilities

While much of the interior of the Croatan is remote and difficult to access, the heavily used recreational components of the forest along the Neuse River were crippled, including three recreation areas that have campgrounds and beaches that remain closed.

Among the hardest-hit areas was the beach and a retaining wall at Flanners Beach in the Neuse River Recreation Area, which was destroyed by waves and wind that battered the shoreline during the storm.

“We are working really hard to get the campgrounds and beaches up and running,” Hudson said. But he added that “the number one priority right now is public safety.”

The popular fee areas are also a source of funds the Forest Service relies on to maintain campground facilities.

Also impacted by the storm is an 18-mile portion of the 21-mile Neusiok Trail, a segment of the Mountains-to-Sea Trail, which remains closed until Forest Service fire crews can remove damaged trees.

Gene Huntsman, a retired ichthyologist, helped carve the first mile of the Neusiok Trail in 1973 and remains active in stewarding the footpath. Much of the trail, he said, is maintained by volunteer groups, including the Carteret County Wildlife Club and other recreational organizations in collaboration with the Forest Service.

“The trail got mommicked,” Huntsman said. “It is so jungly down here that when a tree comes down, you don’t just get a tree, you get all of the vines and stuff that come with it. It took many people many hours of chain sawing, clipping and hauling to clear the trail.”

Prescribed Burn Program

One of the direct impacts on forest management from Hurricane Florence was that Forest Service resources have been diverted from managed fire.

Since the hurricane, the Forest Service has not conducted any prescribed burns. Staff members hope to resume burning once damaged roads and firelines have been restored this fall.

According to Hudson, the Forest Service targets managed burns in a single location of the Croatan every two to five years to match the natural cycle of fire. The annual goal is to burn roughly 15,000 to 20,000 acres.

How a fire burns depends on a range of factors, such as wind, humidity, topography and fuel load. A forest understory that’s too thick, for example, can stoke flames that burn longer and hotter and can damage longleaf pines or burn out precious species.

Managing fire and smoke also become more difficult and costly, and may produce health and safety concerns in nearby communities.

Hudson and Walker agree that missing one season of fire is manageable, but they are concerned about other future threats that can slow the progress of regular burns, such as funding, increasing development in areas bordering the forest and future large storms with damage on the scale of Florence.

“Once we fall behind on burning, it makes it that much harder to get caught up. If we get too far behind, the effects could be felt for years. The heavier the fuel load, the more difficult and costly each successive burn,” Walker said.

Rare Species

Since woodpeckers choose aging trees that are often hollowed out by disease, the trees are prone to damage caused by high winds. Throughout the forest, 150 trees with woodpecker cavities were snapped in two or damaged by the storm, which accounts for roughly 10 percent of the forest’s confirmed woodpecker nests.

To make up for the lost nests, the Forest Service drilled cavities in trees and installed 116 inserts developed by the N.C. Division of Wildlife that resemble a natural cavity.

Despite the damage, Cobos said, the woodpecker population is stable and evidence of the resilience of nature.

In fact, some rare species in the Croatan, Walker said, may not only have survived the storm but also are thriving because of it, such as the Carolina gopher frog, which requires fishless bodies of water to breed that were in abundance in the wake of the storm.

Another example is the well-known bug-eating Venus flytrap, whose range is limited to just a few portions of the Carolinas and flourishes in open longleaf ecosystems.

“Their seeds are like little tiny cannonballs that are dispersed by raindrops and may have been carried by floods,” Walker said. “We may find flytraps in places we haven’t found them before.”

Mark Twain to eliminate hunting at request of state

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Source

Of feral hogs that is.  In kind of a turnabout from typical conflicts between states and feds, this is a disagreement between the state and counties (and the hog hunting segment of the public).  (There was some discussion of federal regulation of hunting on the Kisatchie National Forest here.)

The State of Missouri is undertaking a trapping program, which they say that hunting interferes with.  The Forest Service is proposing to use its federal land management authority to issue a closure order to prohibit hunting of feral hogs on the Mark Twain National Forest.  From the Forest Service website linked to this article:

Mark Twain National Forest is proposing a Forest Closure Order to support interagency efforts to eliminate feral swine (also known as feral hogs) in Missouri. The Forest Closure Order would prevent the taking, pursuing or releasing of all feral swine on the forest. The only exception would apply to feral swine elimination efforts conducted by the interagency task force.

The proposal is in response to a Missouri Department of Conservation (MDC) request to make policies consistent across all public lands in Missouri to halt the spread of feral swine and the resulting damage they cause. The State of Missouri feral swine elimination program bans all taking, pursuing or releasing of feral swine on state lands. The State asked the Forest Service and National Park Service for support as part of the Missouri Feral Hog Partnership. The proposed closure order would align lands managed by the Forest Service with the efforts of Missouri and other federal agencies, including USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service.

On the Kisatchie, the Forest Service used a forest plan amendment to provide long-term direction.  Here, the forest plan is not mentioned, so presumably the closure is viewed as short-term – until the hogs are gone, but from what I hear, good luck with that.

Research: eastern forest old growth more resilient to climate change

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“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.

Forest Service not sued on timber project

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I couldn’t find the project files for the Gatton’s Park fuels treatment project in the Upper Mimbres Valley on the Gila National Forest, but it seemed like it has a lot of features that make it a good example of how to not get sued –

The Nature Conservancy received an initial Collaborative Forest Restoration Program grant for planning the project from 2012 through 2014; when the National Environmental Policy Act process was finished, the Grant Soil and Water Conservation District was awarded an additional grant and took over implementation of the plan beginning in January 2018.

In addition to local residents and logging businesses, the county government, the Forest Service, firefighters, conservationists and wildlife habitat advocates are also seeing the benefit of working together.

So far, thinning has reduced fuels from 50 tons per acre down to 15 tons in treated parts of the 1,500-acre project area and reduced fuels by half in other treated parts of the project area — something that will give residents on the edge of the Gila Forest in the Gatton’s Park development, in particular, a better chance of surviving a wildfire without catastrophic damage. The border of forest land and developed land is known as a “wildland urban interface.”

Partido emphasized the difference between a regular timber contract and the current project. Both attain forest management goals, especially in the area of fire prevention, but the Collaborative Forest Restoration Program is more efficient. “There hasn’t been a timber sale in these parts since the 1950s,” Partido said.

Part of the silvicultural prescription provided by the Forest Service — the tree plan — also takes into account habitats for the threatened Mexican spotted owls in the Gila. Trees over certain diameters are left in place — as are trees with holes where owls might nest.

What happens to the trees that are cut? The two contractors are either bringing the logs to sawmills and making poles and other products out of them or turning them into wood chips — piles of which are regularly offered to anyone who wants to come pick them up, for free. “Some of the ponderosa logs will be brought to the Celebration campground and other campgrounds for people to use,” Carver said.

Forest Service monetizes endangered species

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This just seemed noteworthy.  Maybe it could be replicated for other species …

Kirtland’s warbler tours will be offered daily from May 15 through May 31, 7 days a week at the Mio Ranger District of the Huron National Forest. The Kirtland’s warbler tour costs $10 per adult and is free for children. Funds from the tours help cover costs associated with the tours.

Downgrading wildlife in land management plans

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Siskiyou Mountains Salmander, Plethodon stormi, (c) 2005 William Flaxington

 

The Center for Biological Diversity has notified the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service of its intent to sue for failure to respond to its petition to list the Siskiyou Mountains salamander as a threatened or endangered species. The species is found primarily on BLM lands, but also on the Rogue River-Siskiyou and Klamath National Forests.   Prior listings were avoided largely because of provisions in the Northwest Forest Plan to protect the species:

Conservation groups first petitioned for protection of the salamander under the Endangered Species Act in 2004. To prevent the species’ listing, the Bureau of Land Management (“BLM”) and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service signed a conservation agreement in 2007, intended to protect habitat for 110 high-priority salamander sites on federal lands in the Applegate River watershed. In 2008 the Fish and Wildlife Service denied protection for the salamander based on this conservation agreement and old-growth forest protections provided by the Northwest Forest Plan.

Here’s what’s changed (from the 2018 listing petition):

The Western Oregon Plan Revision (WOPR) which replaces the Northwest Forest Plan, has the express purpose of substantially increasing logging on BLM lands with the range of the salamander and elsewhere (USBLM 2016, p. 20). The WOPR was originally proposed in 2008 and abandoned by the BLM in 2012 after years of litigation. In August 2016 the BLM issued a final Environmental Impact Statement implementing the WOPR (USBLM 2016).

The WOPR presents a substantial new threat to Siskiyou Mountains salamanders in Oregon because it will allow increased timber harvest in late-successional areas, decrease optimal salamander habitat, increase habitat fragmentation, eliminate requirements to conduct predisturbance surveys in salamander habitat, and allow logging of previously identified known, occupied salamander sites. The WOPR removes protections for salamander populations formerly included in species protection buffers on BLM lands. Although some of the reserves on BLM lands have been enlarged in the WOPR, timber harvest emphasis areas will often be subject to more intensive logging, and logging of known, occupied Siskiyou Mountains salamander sites is allowed.

This demonstrates again the value of including regulatory mechanisms as protective measures in forest plans: they can keep species from being listed under ESA. There is already a pending lawsuit against the new WOPR (now officially called the Resource Management Plans for Western Oregon), and the Forest Service should keep this in mind when it revises its forest plans that are now governed by the Northwest Forest Plan (especially the “survey and manage” requirement).

The trend seems to be in the other direction, however (see also greater sage grouse). And when a species is listed, regulatory mechanisms are needed in forest plans to contribute to their recovery and delisting. Yet the Forest Service is removing such mechanisms from forest plans for grizzly bears, lynx and bull trout (Flathead National Forest), Indiana bats (Daniel Boone National Forest: to “provide flexibility to implement forest management activities”), and black-footed ferrets (Thunder Basin National Grassland:  “greater emphasis on control and active management of prairie dog colonies to address significant concerns related to health, safety, and economic impacts on neighboring landowners”).   Since plant and animal diversity was one of the main reasons for NFMA it shouldn’t be a big surprise to see these kinds of retrograde actions ending up in court.

 

Wolves On The Rise in Germany: Prefer Military Training Areas to “Protected” Areas

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Wolf pups in Neuhaus, Lower Saxony, on Saturday. Photo: DPA

New Scientist covered this story, which relates to the discussions we’ve been having about Wilderness Xtreme and Wilderness Lite. It also causes me to reflect on the distinction between “ideas about things” e.g. Wilderness in the US, and “things” e.g. wolves and their behavior, and the fact that creatures (including humans) don’t always behave as academics predict. It’s all pretty interesting, and I bolded the quotes I thought to be particularly relevant.

In the 1980s, wolves started returning Germany, mostly from Poland. “We were expecting that the large forest areas northeast of Berlin would be the first place settled by the wolves, because it is close to Poland and has dense forest,” says Ilka Reinhardt at Goethe-University Frankfurt.

But she and her colleagues have now analysed data from national surveys of wolf populations, and found that the first wolf colonies established themselves in Saxony, to the south of Berlin, on military training areas. This land isn’t open to the public, though there are no fences stopping people from entering.

With their dense forest cover and low density of roads, these military areas are a similar habitat to protected natural areas. But the team’s analysis suggests that the military land is in fact better for wolves – the animals died less often from human interactions in these places than they did in land specifically set aside for nature.

“Most of the dead wolves that we find have died in traffic accidents,” Reinhardt says. Though road density is similar in military areas, there may not be as much regular traffic there, she says.

The relative safety of these training areas seems to have helped wolves spread across Germany. Analysing data on wolf distribution collected between 2000 and 2015, the team found that wolves seem to be jumping from one area of military land to another, sometimes moving through and beyond other protected areas before establishing a territory.

Over 15 years, they found that wolves went from one established mating pair to 67 pairs across the whole country, with the population growing exponentially. By 2015, wolves had populated 62 per cent of the military training areas larger than 30 square kilometres, and only 14 per cent of similarly sized protected areas.

While it may seem like tanks and wolves make strange bedfellows, similar trends can be seen in other countries. “Something we see in our work in California is that lots of areas that have destructive processes happening, like logging, can be really important core habitats for large carnivores – here, it’s mountain lions,” says Justine Smith at the University of California Berkeley.

 

Many species are more afraid of humans than they are of our associated machinery like cars or even tanks, she adds. Recreational activities are often promoted on protected lands, while the public has very little access to military land.

“I think what might be going on is that in many parts of the world, protected areas are built in places that have a lot of people already. Or they can attract people to live near them because of the benefits they provide,” she says.

So the relative solitude of a military training ground may be what the wolves prefer. The routine of a military schedule could help as well. “There is some shooting, but it’s always in the same areas and it’s usually during the workday, so the animals can get used to it,” says Reinhardt.

Smith says conservationists could work with federal governments to optimise these lands even more by limiting light or noise pollution at night.

Here’s another news story about wolves in Germany.

The Big Debate Over What a Species Really is: New Scientist

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It sometimes seems to me that there is a gap between the ideas that laws have enshrined about things.. and the messiness of dealing with the same things in the real world.  Species is one of the ideas that seemed most difficult for me, as my experience as a population geneticist was that different disciplines who study different taxa often had their own ways of thinking about them.  And hybridization happens.. to geneticists, it’s just another way of generating variation without any negative value associated with them (think jack pine and lodgepole hybrids).

Trying to explain that shifting world of species definitions has been difficult for me, but this article in New Scientist, I think does it well.
Some excerpts:

Darwin recognised that his ideas posed a profound problem for the way biologists define species. Curiously, though, his work didn’t lead to a reappraisal of the concept. Rather, the “modern synthesis” of evolutionary biology – a mid-20th century effort to pull together Darwin’s work on evolution and Gregor Mendel’s on heredity – saw species as a real and distinct level of biological organisation, as valid as the molecule, cell or organism. The synthesis was so influential that it still shapes the way many of us think of species. It is why we tend not to see them as arbitrary. And it explains the popularity of the biological species concept. “That made it into the textbooks,” says Zachos. And from there into the popular imagination.

(and from there into law..)

Behind the scenes, however, a different story was playing out. In the past century, scientists have redefined what a species is time and again, heaping confusion upon confusion (see “Parsing nature”). Zachos identifies no fewer than 32 competing definitions in his 2016 book on the subject, Species Concepts in Biology, and notes that two more have been added since then. This partly reflects the distinct ways that researchers in different subsets of biological science see the living world. Ecologists, for example, focus on environment, resources and adaptations, whereas palaeontologists are more interested in the shape of the fossils they study. It also reflects developments in science, with advances in genetics now making it possible to decode the DNA of individual organisms and reconstruct family trees. The upshot is often acrimonious, with players championing their favoured species concept while simultaneously taking pot-shots at rival ideas.

Specious arguments

The profusion of definitions also causes practical problems because different types of biologists use different species concepts. Put simply, an insect species might not be equivalent to a mammal species or a flower species – even though most of us assume they are. “A lot of research is based on counting species,” says Zachos. “It’s as if we think we’re all using US dollars, but in reality we’re lumping together Japanese yen, euros, US dollars and pounds.” (my italics)

These problems are exposed whenever researchers change their definition of species – something that is happening increasingly often. For instance, in 2011, some biologists studying hoofed mammals shifted from a biological species concept approach to one based on heritable differences. Instantly, the number of species in the group rose from 143 to 279. Zachos and others worry about the consequences of such “taxonomic inflation” for conservation. Inflation, he points out, is often associated with a devaluation of the currency. Society might care a little less about losing a few species to extinction.

It’s a very complex idea, ever-shifting, linked to a legal structure somewhat more difficult, or impossible, to shift. Hence tension.

Disagreement About Fuel Treatment: Exhibit A?

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Still More Agreement About Fuel Treatment: Conservation Colorado and former Secretary Zinke

Sharon said:

That’s why I’m thinking that finding some projects that entail:
1. FS clearcutting in California
2. Fuel treatments in backcountry
3. Fuel treatments taking out big fire-resilient (living?) trees

Would help us understand exactly what the issues are.

I think this project might be a good place to start:

Destructive wildfires along the California-Oregon border in recent years has the U.S. Forest Service pursuing projects to clear forests of burnt debris and trees that could feed future fires. One of those projects included selling the rights to log old-growth trees in Northern California, until a federal judge halted the timber sale on Friday.

Environmental groups asked a federal court to halt the Seaid-Horse timber sale in the Klamath National Forest. They say it would violate the Northwest Forest Plan by clear-cutting protected old-growth trees and harming Coho salmon.

Its purpose is: “Reduce safety hazards along roads & in concentrated stands, reduce fuels adjacent to private property, & to reduce the risk of future large-scale high severity fire losses of late successional habitat.”

So it’s got California, clearcutting, fuel treatment and big trees.  It’s also got wildlife issues, which is the other point of disagreement I suggested.  Maybe not back-country, but certainly not front-country – mid-country? 

It even comes with a spokesperson who is probably familiar with our questions:

Western Environmental Law Group attorney Susan Jane Brown says old-growth trees in Northern California provide a habitat for threatened species such as the northern spotted owl. They’re also the most resilient in enduring wildfires.

“We could agree that cutting small trees is a good thing to reduce fire risk, but when it comes to cutting very large, very old trees, that’s an entirely different matter,” Brown said.