Fire and Fuels

“Town Unites Against Federal Mismanagement to Save Forest”

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Weaverville, Calif., was once torn apart by forest-mananagent controveries (as were nunmerous communities in spotted owl country). This article from KQED, a San Francisco-based public broadcasting station, “Town Unites Against Federal Mismanagement to Save Forest,” says that this has changed.

As trees across the Shasta-Trinity and Six Rivers national forests have become drought-stressed and overcrowded, basically all but asking to burn, it’s the forest that has brought people back together. Now, a locally driven partnership forged to make a small community forest healthier is kindling a wider push for resilience and reducing fire risk across the entire county. Community members say a key strategy will be preventing what are often high-intensity wildfires by implementing lower-intensity prescribed burns to eradicate chip-dry tinder and grasses.

“There will be fire on this entire landscape. Do we want it to be controlled or do we want it to be out of control?” said Alex Cousins, a lifelong county resident. “We need to leave these forests ready to accept fire.”

“One of the first federal master stewardship agreements in the country” has helped get work done on the ground. Locals say that thinning and Rx fire has helped:

“The [Oregon] fire ran head on into this thinned and burned unit, and the fire just laid down,” said Nick Goulette, who directs the Watershed Center, a local land stewardship group. “My home was evacuated as a part of that fire, so I was very thankful.”

I reckon many other communities are now interested in such stewardship agreements.

“Landscape-level” Utah Project

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The Salt Lake Tribune has this story on “a landscape-level program of salvage logging, thinning, prescribed burns and reseeding in a 171,000-acre project area along the crest of the Wasatch Plateau.”

Since 2000, bark-boring beetles have killed nearly 90% of the Engelmann spruce on the plateau separating Sanpete and Emery counties, according to Ryan Nehl, supervisor of the Manti-La Sal National Forest. Other areas have become overrun with subalpine fir, crowding out aspen.

…

Currently spruce occupies 5% of this forest, while fir makes up 85%. The Forest Service’s goal is get that species mix to the 60%-30% range favoring spruce, but it could take decades. Nehl also wants to see aspen stands revitalized because of their importance to watershed health and wildlife and their ability to slow big fires.

“While this project is couched as a timber sale, it’s primarily a hazardous fuels-reduction project to try to stem the risk of uncharacteristic wildfire. It’s overstocked right now,” Nehl said. “Another primary purpose of this is to reduce risk to communities and firefighters, particularly culinary and irrigation water supplies, as well as water supply to the [Huntington Power] Plant.”

Here’s the Canyons HFRA Project Environmental Assessment FONSI.

The Forest Service proposes to salvage dense dead standing and down Engelmann spruce (Picea engelmannii) and implement fuel reduction treatments under the Healthy Forest Restoration Act (HFRA). These actions are proposed to be implemented on the Ferron-Price and Sanpete Ranger Districts, Manti-La Sal National Forest, in Sanpete, Carbon, Emery, and Sevier Counties, Utah (Figure 2). The project area where treatments are being considered is approximately 171,000 acres.

Sequoia ForestKeepers Weigh in on HUD Grant for Stanislaus National Forest Salvage

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Volunteer from Tuolumne River Trust working on Rim Fire restoration.
Ara Mardosarian of Sequoia ForestKeeper posted this as a comment on an earlier thread. Since it is specific and about something new, I am posting it here to get more discussion.

On 31 May 2019, the Sierra Nevada Conservancy held a field trip regarding a U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Redevelopment (HUD) funding application by Stanislaus National Forest for $70 million, through the National Disaster Resilience Competition, to salvage log burned areas of the 2013 Rim Fire FOR BIOMASS BURNING – A DESTRUCTIVE CLEARCUTS-FOR-KILOWATTS SCHEME. This field trip was attended by 80 persons, including members of more than 20 environmental organizations in opposition to post-fire salvage logging, including Sierra Club and Sequoia ForestKeeper. Dr. Chad Hanson, John Muir Project Fire Ecologist, and Dr. Dominick DellaSala, Geos Institute Director, lead the effort to defend the position to not salvage log recovering burned forest habitats. Brandon Collins, USFS Pacific Southwest Research Station, said there was little to no conifer regeneration within the Rim Fire. We saw seedling regeneration at multiple sites. And the Forest Service saw the seedlings growing in the Rim Fire snag forest habitats as fuel, when we see this as biodiverse habitat. Besides providing habitat for Black-backed woodpeckers and other cavity nesting species, standing burned dead trees/snags provide cooling shade that helps hold the moisture in the ground for the already-growing, natural tree seedling regeneration and for eventual delivery of that retained drinking water to communities below the forest. At no time did the Forest Service acknowledge the value of the standing burned dead trees/snags for sequestering carbon in the forest or counteracting the climate crisis. The agencies would not even address the repeated queries about the emissions from biomass power generation that the project would cause. The blatant climate science denial and antipathy toward nature by the Forest Service and its supporters (John Buckley, Central Sierra Environmental Resource Center), (David Edelson, The Nature Conservancy), and (Craig Thomas, Fire Restoration Group) of this clearcuts-for-kilowatts scheme was stunning. Why is $70 million in U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Redevelopment (HUD) disaster funds going to log federal forests (creating unnatural flammable conditions) when those funds should be spent on community disaster relief? This $70 million of HUD funding should, instead, be applied to the real disaster of the Camp Fire in Butte County, to help the victims in Paradise, California who lost everything.

Note: I think we should be consistent about calling people Drs. or not.. it appears that Brandon Collins is arguably just as much of a Dr. as Hanson and Della Salla, plus his research is equally, or more, relevant, depending on your point of view. Here’s a link to his papers.

Mardosarian makes several claims in this comment that are interesting and worthy of discussion:

1. Collins said there was little or no regeneration (did he say this? is the first question and “is it true?” is the second question).
2. The Forest Service saw seedlings as fuel (in my history with the Forest Service we didn’t think this way, but perhaps times have changed).
3. Standing dead provide shade and reduce moisture loss. I don’t know if this is true but it sounds plausible. But of course dead trees ultimately fall down and dry out, and when burning can potentially damage soil.
4. The shade of standing dead treese provide better microenvironments for seedling establishment and/or growth than open areas.
5. Standing dead sequester carbon in the forest (is that better than being turned into wood products? I think this depends on assumptions)

I am interested in the mechanisms by which people think that standing and fallen dead trees “counteract the climate crisis.”

6. Emissions. If Californians are worried about emissions from biomass energy (unclear whether particulates or CO2), then the obvious answer would be to sell the material to other markets, like our friends in BC, or for CLT, or to turn into biochar or …? To what extent does the ultimate use matter.

In my own experience with a broad range of individuals in the FS and TNC, as we worked on climate change and other issues, they were not “climate deniers” nor have an “antipathy to nature”. Certainly, as Dr. Tom Mills used to say, “reasonable people could disagree” about salvage logging in a specific place at a specific time.

This seems to be the agenda for the tour. If someone has a photo

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.

Bark Beetle Epidemic in Calaveras County

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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.

http://www.calaverasenterprise.com/news/article_fbc896b8-7d6f-11e9-94ea-7b4b381822a0.html

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.

Pellet Exports from California and the Northwest? Interim Findings and a Blast From the Past

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Figure 3 Chip/Pellet Facilities – Pacific Northwest from Forest2Market article linked below.

It seems like pellets and chip markets might be useful for places like California which have 1) extra small trees to think for fuel treatments (conceivably without “industrial logging”, however that is defined, and 2) access to ports.  BC seems to be taking advantage of these opportunities.

Again logically there are two options if the use is bioenergy (conceivably this material also could be used for higher-value products). The first is to burn this material for bioenergy in California (not developed well due to pollution standards) or sell to others (which as Matthew points out, involves use of (more) fossil fuels currently for transport.)  This might raise all kinds of questions about Asia, for example, and their bioburners’ pollution and climate change calculations.

Anonymous hypothesized here that maybe the answer is availability of supply.  If this sounds like a blast from the past, some of us remember the mountain pine beetle infestation in the 80’s in Central Oregon and trying to do something with the dead trees (forty years ago).  One idea was to get a waferboard plant in Chiloquin, Oregon.  This idea foundered on the shoals of .. supply dependability.  It seems like a bit of a theme.  I think it’s important not to just conflate this with “litigation about projects”, although that may be a piece of the puzzle.  Again logically, a deal could be reached to say (if material x is removed, in y kinds of places, with practices such that z does not happen, to a total amount of a per acreage b, then we will not litigate).  Even so, if I were considering investing, I would be very dubious, given our track record.  It is interesting to think how Canada can provide adequate assurances for investment but we cannot.

I haven’t yet found an expert on this topic, and am still searching, but a forest economist friend pointed me to this piece that compares the Pacific Northwest to the US south and other sources. First, the authors note that a preponderance of forest land is public compared to the Southern U.S..

One notable difference between the US South and the Northwest is the seasonal (but frequent) occurrence of severe, large-scale wildfires. This is related to a combination of climatic conditions in the PNW, ownership/management intensity and harvest restrictions, all of which have allowed for the build-up of excessive fuel loads in many forest stands. One method proven to be effective in reducing wildfire loss is through the use of fuel-reduction thinning operations, especially on public lands.

Due to this lack of forest management, one analysis estimated that up to 12 million green tons of biomass could be harvested via fuel-reduction thinning over the course of a decade. If this management practice is promoted and implemented, the increase in small log and residual material availability could spur a growth in both wood chip and pellet production.

 

Ownership/Supply Chain Characteristics

With forestland ownership being primarily public (federal, state and municipal), the fiber supply chain in the US Northwest is somewhat different than in other regions. Public land management is governed by different sets of rules and procedures, and harvesting is conducted at a reduced level compared to private land.

A large portion of private forestland is owned by timber investment management organizations (TIMOs), real estate investment trusts (REITs), and other large landownerships that supply a majority of the timber in the region. Because of the TIMO/REIT influence in the region, tract sizes are generally much larger and small tracts (under 20 acres) are less prevalent than in other regions. There are small-scale landowners as well, but they comprise a much smaller piece of the available volume.

As a result of this fragmented ownership situation, there is not a robust timber dealer/broker network. Large landowners generally negotiate delivered contracts directly with the mills, and they then pay loggers for harvesting services and transportation from the woods to the mill. While there are some stumpage sale contracts in the region, it is not a common practice as it is in the US South.

 

So there are structural problems compared to the US South (not a robust dealer/broker network) which makes it more difficult to get this material from private land, but this article doesn’t mention the “relatively assured supply” problem from public lands. Seems like if it were a good idea to sell material removed from fuel treatments that California economic development would be on it. Maybe they are.

Recovery from Waldo Canyon: WGA Working Lands Roundtable Presentation by Sallie Clarke

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The Western Governors’ Association has been having a Working Lands Roundtable with sessions on different topics.  I previously posted on a session here.  Here is a link to the presentations- they are all on video. Nothing “newsworthy” happened there. For me, as a retiree who doesn’t work daily with the folks slogging through this kind of work, I realized how much the media I read influences the way I think about what’s going on in the world.  In our forest policy arena, that means that controversies are visible (Bernhardt! Bears Ears!) and the day-to-day work (and non-partisanized successes) mostly invisible.  Speakers mostly discussed  what they wanted to do together, what is helpful and what is problematic, as kind of a large-scale team effort;  to be sure, influenced, but not circumscribed by,  the shifting winds of DC politics and the randomness of court cases.

I’ve mentioned before that sometimes there is a contrast between “people who deal with ideas about things” and “people who deal with things.”  Ideas about things are usually part of academia, other kinds of researchers,  and think tanks. Ideas about things can also be part of partisan narratives, or narratives promoted by unknown funding sources for their unknown reasons.  “People who deal with things” include firefighters, county commissioners, homeowners, agency employees, farmers and ranchers, and so on. These WGA workshops are relatively unique in that the speakers tend to be people who deal with things.

For example, I think this Youtube clip of a talk by former El Paso County Commissioner Sallie Clarke shows what it’s like to be on the ground working with communities during and post fire. Clarke’s presentation caused me to reflect on her and El Paso County’s experience compared to some of the ideas that are floating around out there.

(1) One is “wildfires wouldn’t be a problem if people wouldn’t build houses in fire prone country.”  New building may increase the acreage with house, infrastructure and evacuation problems, but fires are still problems with the towns, cities and communities that are already built.  Plus the communities downstream from where the big fires are. So being careful about adding buildings is important, but will not make wildfire/human problems go away.

The second idea is often associated with Jack Cohen’s work on structures and says that (2) if you want to protect homes or other buildings, you need to focus on fire-resilient building materials and a zone close to the house.  Again, that is an academic answer framed as being about structures, not people in communities.  The approach again, is important but not sufficient.  No one wants fire burning through their communities, even if it doesn’t burn down their houses and neighborhood infrastructure. Talk to someone who has lived through an evacuation.  Talk to someone who has large animals to move during an evacuation, which is not uncommon in El Paso County.  Talk to someone who was trying to evacuate and the roads were blocked, and had to decide whether to leave the car and run for it. Just.. not a good idea.

(3) The third idea is “you don’t need fuel treatments if the treatments are not adjacent to houses.” Yet wildfires can cause flooding that is often not good for the environment and destructive to communities and people- anywhere downstream. We often hear about “the vegetation needs high intensity fires to return to HRV or NRV”  but it’s not all about the veg.  Do hydrologists or fish bios get to weigh in on their own “desired range of variation?”  Wildfires not directly adjacent to communities can still impact them via flooding, silting up reservoirs and other impacts.

For some reason, post-fire flooding doesn’t seem to get the media or academic coverage that wildfires do themselves. Perhaps there’s no controversy or drama.  But if you want to get a feel for the things people need to do to slow water and reduce flooding post-fire, and the collaborations involved, check out Sallie Clark’s presentation or slides.

Shared Vision, Shattered Trust and the Building Thereof: OCFR and Somes Bar Projects

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Klamath Justice Coalition activists gather to create a road blockade in efforts to protect the spiritual trails that were at risk during the implementation of the OCFR Project. Credit: Craig Tucker

Thanks to Susan Jane Brown for sharing the link to the Fire Adapted Communities Learning Network. It is a joint effort by TNC and the Watershed Center.  There are many interesting posts there, (and it’s great that there’s a whole section of Fantastic Failures), and I thought I’d highlight this one that tells a story about building trust between the Karuk Tribe and the Forest Service, by Bill Tripp.  Trust is something that people in communities can develop- perhaps it’s harder for national groups or for national elected officials.  Perhaps the exercise of trust-building is not honored as it should be. I’m thinking of a national FS award nominated by externals, with a chunk of change for projects associated with it. This story depicts how a negative interaction, plus continued willingness to work together for mutual interests, are leading to a better future.  Kudos to the collaborators for not giving up, and the Forest Service for fixing what went wrong.

“Can we have a meeting with the contractor?” I asked.

“They tell me I can’t even go to the project site without permission from the contracting officer in Redding” replied the new forest ranger.

We worked diligently to find solutions, but the contracting regulations created barriers at every turn. We couldn’t find resolution and landed in court, the last place any of us wanted to be.

Our stories were told, and it was determined that there was a violation of the National Historic Preservation Act in failing to follow through with the identified protection measures. The judge asked me, “Do you want this project to go away?”

I sighed. “We agreed in the beginning that something needs to get done … we just need to do it right,” I said.

With that, we settled on a remedial plan that was partially negotiated, and partially prescribed by the judge.

The project resumed, but now with Tribal and local Forest Service staff on-site during much of the implementation. Many of the timber units were logged, some of the hand treatment work was done, yet follow-up burning still hasn’t happened. To this day, there are cut trees on the ground and units left untreated. The contractor stopped coming back, presumably due to low timber values, long-haul costs and a bitter taste in his mouth over the delays.

….

A failure? For the most part, I would say yes. However, and oddly enough, relationships among those initially collaborating improved, understanding was gained, and a foundation for building trust was established. Collaboration didn’t stop, it grew stronger. 

The Nature Conservancy’s Fire Learning Network offered facilitated dialogue. We began to access the Fire Adapted Communities Learning Network’s communication channels and peer network. We participated in the formulation of the National Cohesive Wildland Fire Management Strategy. We strengthened our relationships with the state of California. We increased our capacity through hosting Prescribed Fire Training Exchange (TREX) and participating in the TREX coaches network. We helped spawn the Indigenous Peoples Burning Network. This local, state and national work renewed our vigor in community-based action and allowed us to connect again with local partners in the co-design of the Somes Bar Integrated Wildland Fire Management Project (“Somes Bar”).

Although Somes Bar is about twice the size of the OCFR project, we have learned from our past mistakes and feel ready for the challenge. We started differently where things went wrong before. We have seen consistency within the USDA Forest Service despite staff turnover. We have created a more inclusive process and established a shared identity through the Western Klamath Restoration Partnership (WKRP). We settled on a planning area of 1.2 million acres. We are using stewardship agreement authorities that enable our collaborative group to stay engaged during all of the phases — planning, implementation, monitoring and adaptive management. And we have begun to look back at the OCFR project to see how we can bring it back to life under its original intent.

Forest Management: “For a Warming World, A New Strategy for Protecting Watersheds”

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This article was prepared by Yale Environment 360. Although its focus is primarily on protecting watersheds, most of the well validated scientific principles that Sound Forest Management is based on are clearly demonstrated in a way that easily shows the value of human intervention in our federal forests for other site/situational specific prescribed purposes as well. Here are some highlights which have been the subject of many previous posts on this site.

  1. water managers are learning that careful management and restoration of watershed ecosystems, including thinning trees and conducting prescribed burns, are important tools in coping with a hotter, drier climate.
  2. New Mexico’s forests … areas that supported 40 trees per acre in the pre-European era now were blanketed with up to a hundred times as many. This profusion of trees — as many as one per square yard — weakened all of them, and rendered them defenseless against megafires.
  3. the Las Conchas Fire … consumed nearly an acre of forest per second … and left behind nearly 100 square miles so severely burned that even seeds to regenerate the forest were destroyed …
    two months later, when a thunderstorm in the Jemez Mountains washed tons of ash and debris into the Rio Grande River, the water source for half of New Mexico’s population and for a major agricultural area. Only an inch of rain fell, but the debris flows the storm generated turned the river black and dumped ash, sediment, and tree and shrub remnants into a major reservoir⁠, requiring a costly cleanup … a heavy rainstorm two years later generated enough sediment to entirely plug the Rio Grande
  4. In the last two decades, megafires in similarly dry and overgrown watersheds have ended up contaminating downstream water supplies in numerous areas throughout the western United States, including Phoenix; Denver; Flagstaff, Arizona; and Fort Collins, Colorado. Downstream water managers serving millions of urban residents have learned that the security of their water supplies is tied to the health of upland watersheds that may be hundreds of miles away.
  5. In the Western U.S., watershed restoration chiefly consists of two steps: thinning of trees and shrubs, and prescribed burns. In the Eastern U.S., it involves a bigger set of tools, including planting native trees, reducing the area of impervious surfaces, and slowing the speed of stormwater so that more water percolates into soil and aquifers. All these measures are designed to improve water quality.
  6. numerous pilot projects have shown the efficacy of restoration, agencies rarely have enough money to treat entire watersheds
  7. after the Las Conchas fire, residents in the Rio Grande watershed … in 2014 they launched a public-private partnership, the Rio Grande Water Fund, whose 73 contributing members⁠ include government agencies at all levels, foundations and other NGOs, local water utilities, and local businesses and residents. Together they raised enough money for a 20-year program to restore 600,000 forest acres — enough to support the resilience of the entire central and northern New Mexico portion of the Rio Grande watershed. They have already restored 108,000 acres, and are racing to complete the job before another megafire occurs.
  8. The Rio Grande Water Fund’s public-private partnership model has become official federal policy. Last August, the U.S. Forest Service published a landmark report called “Toward Shared Stewardship Across Landscapes” that outlined the agency’s intention to convene watershed stakeholders of all kinds to plan and fund watershed restoration. “Because fire crosses back and forth across land ownership boundaries, the risk is shared,” the report said. “Accordingly, land managers cannot achieve the fire-related outcomes people want… without shared stewardship of the wildland fire environment.”
  • The benefits of watershed restoration extend far beyond water security. Most obviously, healthy forests deter megafires. Laura McCarthy, the Rio Grande Water Fund’s executive director, says that in three instances since restoration work began in New Mexico, wildfires that ran up against restored zones immediately died down. Healthy forests can tolerate low-intensity fires: they possess diverse understories of grasses, sedges, and forbs and rich, microbe-laden soil, all of which supports wildlife, from insects to mammals. Watershed restoration can double the amount of carbon stored in the soil, which means that it’s a vital tool in fighting climate change. And watershed restoration creates jobs: In the case of the Rio Grande Water Fund, many of those jobs go to youths in traditional Hispanic and Native American communities where unemployment rates are 30 percent or higher.
  • In some regions, forest restoration even increases water supplies. Roger Bales, a hydrologist at the University of California, Merced, has shown that because watershed restoration requires the removal of vast numbers of young trees, loss of water into the atmosphere through evapotranspiration in those trees is eliminated. The water instead flows downward, into the soil, often on its way to the watershed’s rivers and reservoirs. Bales’ experiments in California’s Sierra Nevada show that restoration can increase water supplies in downstream reservoirs by 9 to 16 percent. That makes restoration a more cost effective (and vastly less destructive) water supply method in California than building dams. Restoration is also cheaper than fighting the megafires that are otherwise inevitable in the overgrown forests: last year’s Camp Fire in northern California alone caused $11 billion to $13 billion in damage.
  • unless it is followed by prescribed burns, undesirable trees and shrubs grow back. In that case, said Don Falk, a leading fire researcher at the University of Arizona, “You’re either committed to a perpetual Sisyphean cycle of thinning” every 10 or 15 years “or you’ve got to let fire back into the system.” Fire is an integral part of the functioning of many ecosystems: Blazes of less-than-megafire scale germinate seeds, keep native species in balance while warding off invasive species, and stimulate microbial activity that produces soil nutrients.

The Wayne Gretzky approach to fuel reduction

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The hockey star is known for saying you have to “skate to where the puck will be.”  That seems to be what the Forest Service is trying to do by putting thinning treatments where fire risk is high, but research again suggests that the hockey analogy doesn’t work in forests.  Maybe it’s because the “field of play” is so much larger and the entity delivering the puck isn’t on your team (and doesn’t play by any rules).  This article plays off of the recent executive order to treat 8.45 million acres of land and cut 4.4 million board feet of timber, “which is about 80 percent more than was cut on U.S. Forest Service lands in 2017.”

“The Hazardous Fuels Reduction Program received a lot of financial investment and resources over the past 15 years,” Barnett told the Missoulian. “We treat quite a lot of landscapes each year. And less than 10 percent of that had even (been) burned by a subsequent fire. So that raises more broad general questions over the efficacy of fuel treatments to change regional fire patterns.”

“Even if federal land management agencies were able to increase their treatments and meet the President’s goal of treating 8.45 million acres, it would still equate to less than 2 percent of all federal lands,” Pohl said. “It is unlikely these locations will be among the hundreds of millions of acres that burn during the effective lifespan of a fuel reduction treatment, typically 10-20 years.”

And if the goal is protecting homes rather than changing regional fire patterns,

“Research shows that home loss is primarily determined by two factors: the vegetation in the immediate area around the home, and the way the home is designed and constructed,”

You could read this to say that if they treated 2% a year for 10-20 years, there would be a higher encounter rate than historically that might be a better justification, but it doesn’t sound like that is the way they are interpreting it.  The map does suggest that southern California and a couple of other places might be looked at differently, and considered a priority for funding.

The author went off script a bit to say that logging is a good strategy to “improve forest health,” but maybe that’s the semantic problem of “logging” vs “thinning.”  I’m also wondering if an order to produce board feet doesn’t tend to favor logging (of bigger trees) over thinning?