Fire and Fuels

Sierra Nevada Logging Examples

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Back in 2012, I worked my last season with the Forest Service, on the Amador Ranger District of the Eldorado National Forest. In particular, I led the crew in marking the cut trees in this overcrowded unit.

The above picture shows the partially logged unit, as well as the sizes of logs thinned.

This part of the same unit shows a finished portion, and two other log landings.

Here is a link to the larger view.

https://www.google.com/maps/@38.6022239,-120.3284245,1019a,35y,90h/data=!3m1!1e3?hl=en

There are also other completed cutting units in the area, which I worked in. Most of those were also cut in 2018, six years after they were marked. The existing plantations were cut back in the 80’s. At least one new goshawk nest was found, and the cutting unit was dropped.

OSB Plant in California Using Small Diameter Material – Why Not?

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One of the things I like about our world is that you can come back in 40 years and people are sometimes talking about the same thing. In the early 80’s, I worked in south central Oregon, on the Deschutes, Fremont, Winema and Ochoco National Forests. We had a serious mountain pine beetle epidemic. One of our silviculture folks suggested that instead of dealing with all those dead trees, we should just put in a large fuel break around the town of Chiloquin. That idea was certainly thinking outside the box, but at the end of the day many of the dead trees were removed by Weyco (as I recall). The other idea that was much spoken of in those days was getting an OSB plant in Chiloquin. The problem at the time was that the Forest Service couldn’t provide assurances of its share of supply.

Flash forward to today. We’ve talked here before about the difficulties of fuel treatments in California (and elsewhere) because there are small trees to be removed, and there are no markets for small trees. Meanwhile, many environmental groups don’t want big trees removed. The fear is that fuel treatments will take all the big fire-resilient trees or that areas will be clearcut. The solution, perhaps, is to find markets for small trees.

So perhaps it seems like a win-win to establish an OSB plant in California. Having driven through California recently, I see that indeed many Californians use OSB. If we look at the map above of current OSB plants, we can see that these heavy products would have to be transported shorter distances potentially leading to fewer carbon emissions per OSB unit at point of use. And if California’s environmental restrictions on the plant are greater than elsewhere, and if a company can meet those restrictions, wouldn’t that be an improvement over other parts of the country?

Here’s part of the Beck Group’s analysis.

Our raw material supply analysis found that topwood from ongoing sawtimber harvests, small diameter trees from forest health treatments, and sawmill by-products such as lumber trim ends, slabs, and edgings could supply nearly 2 times the prospective plant’s annual raw material requirement. An additional consideration is that the recent wildfires in California, while unfortunate, and tragic may have created a situation where community and political leaders are ready to fully support a large wood products manufacturing facility that can utilize the fuel that has built up in the region’s forests.

..

At a production volume of 750 MMSF (3/8” basis) per year we estimate the nearby annual OSB market size is nearly 4 times larger than the capacity of the plant. We also estimate that a Northern California OSB plant would enjoy an average of about a $35/MSF finished product freight cost advantage over other North American OSB producers, which is about 15 percent of the long-term average OSB sales value.

Here’s a link to their blog post. I’m thinking that this sounds like a win-win. What do you think? Thanks to Forest Business Network for this link.

Forest plan promotes “budget-busting suppression spending”

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This article discusses a report from FUSEE (Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology – dutifully described as funded by environmental organizations) on the 2016 Soberanes Fire on the California coast:

In the first week, the blaze destroyed 57 homes and killed a bulldozer operator, then moved into remote wilderness in the Los Padres National Forest. Yet for nearly three more months the attack barely let up.

The Soberanes Fire burned its way into the record books, costing $262 million as the most expensive wildland firefight in U.S. history in what a new report calls an “extreme example of excessive, unaccountable, budget-busting suppression spending.”

The report suggests the Forest Service response was the result of a “use it or lose it” attitude to spend its entire budget, which had been boosted by $700 million because of a destructive 2015 fire season. The agency managed to spend nearly all its 2016 money in a less-active fire season on about half the amount of land that burned the year before.

“They just kept going crazy on it,” report author Timothy Ingalsbee said. “It wasn’t demand-driven. It was supply-driven. They had all this extra money Congress had given them, and they had to justify that.”

An internal Forest Service review produced last year and obtained by the AP reached some of the same conclusions as Ingalsbee.

The review found forest managers didn’t think they could deviate from the “overwhelming force concept” aimed at suppression. It also said the agency’s protocol for managing long-term wildfires “does not sufficiently evaluate and adjust to changing risk.”

One challenge fire commanders faced was an outdated forest management plan for Los Padres that called for full suppression of all wildfires, Ingalsbee said.

Mike Warren, a retired National Park Service firefighter who reviewed the report, questioned the wisdom of suppressing fires in remote wilderness where flames can help eliminate brush and other flammable vegetation that could fuel a later wildfire.

Of course that highlighted part made me curious about what this 2005 forest plan said.  I assume that interpretation is based on a table of “suitable uses” (Table 2.3.4) that shows that none of the six management areas are suitable for “Wildland Fire Use Strategy.”  I can see how that would lead to an approach of burning money.

I also took a quick look at the proposed final revised plan for the Inyo National Forest, to see what might be different.  There are four fire management zones (p. 75) (Inyo zones).

Wildfire responses include a spectrum of strategies that include full suppression, confine/contain, monitoring, and management to meet resource objectives. The entire spectrum of strategies is available in all the zones and wildland fires will be actively managed in all the zones to meet objectives.

That includes the “Community Wildfire Protection Zone,” where (p. 76):

Wildfire is suppressed under most weather and fuel conditions due to the very significant risk of potential economic loss and public safety concerns posed by a wildfire occurring within this zone.

The article also acknowledges the “pressure from politicians, homeowners, businesses, loggers and ranchers to control the fire.  I suppose that kind of pressure was part of why this forest plan says what it does, and other places have different issues, but the forest planning process is a good place to talk about what the tradeoffs are.

What Works to Contain Wildfires? A Bottom-up Study from Down Under

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Figure 3 from the Collins et al. paper.
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This study looks at wildfires from the ground up rather than from the satellite down, as the previous post. Many studies and news articles seem to make the connection “climate change (via heat and drought) will lead to worse fires (I think they mean or imply “worse in terms of damage to things important to humans”).” What stands between weather and damage are a) fuel treatments, suppression folks and their technology, tactics and strategies, and b) peoples’ behavior in terms of developing fire resilient communities, including evacuation technologies and so on. This study looks specifically at many of the variables related to a), and how they interact to contain wildfires. The study is from New South Wales, Australia. I wonder whether readers with experience in the US find that these observations match up with their own experiences?

In order to understand the landscape of the different scientific approaches used in the studies of wildfire, I think it’s helpful to specify the questions asked and the methods used.

Question Asked:

Specifically, we asked what is the relative importance of environmental and human factors in containing grass and forest fires at various time periods from when the first ground crews arrived at the fire. From the findings of previous studies, we hypothesise that:
1. Factors which influence fire behaviour – fuel, weather and topography – will be important in determining the probability of containment.
2. The number of resources and the response time will be important in determining the probability of containment.

Research Methods Data from 2219 forest fires and 4618 grass fires. “Random forest” (from machine learning?) approach.
Who Did the Study? Who Funded It? Scientists from Australian universities. It does not appear to have been funded by anyone.

Here are some paragraphs from the discussion.

Unsurprisingly, the more resources available to control the fire, the more likely the fire will be contained. Grass fires are generally easily accessible to tankers and containment is achieved by directly applying water to the fire edge. If the fire spread is too fast or the flame height too high, then direct attack is made on the flanks of the fire, working from the rear to the head (Cheney and Sullivan, 2008; Luke and McArthur, 1978). The more resources available, the faster the fire will be contained. Forest fires may be directly attacked at the fire edge if it is safe and accessible to firefighters or contained by indirect attack which involves burning back from control lines to provide an effective barrier against the main fire (Fried and Fried, 1996; Luke and McArthur, 1978).

Indirect attack cannot be achieved unless a suitable control line is established, hence the more crews available to prepare the control line and ensure the back burn is contained within the control line, the faster the fire will be contained. Fires are successfully contained when the fire spread has been stopped, therefore factors which influence fire spread, fuel load, weather conditions and topography (Cruz et al., 2015) are also important factors influencing fire containment. Our results align with Tolhurst and McCarthy (2016) who characterised fires burning when the fire danger index<50 as mostly fuel- and topography-dominated fires and fires burning when the fire danger ndex > 50 as mostly weather-dominated fires. In our study, fuel and topography were the dominant environmental variables in forest models with weather less important. However in our study, most (97%) forest fires occurred when the fire danger index < 50. In New South Wales, a fire danger index>50 occurs on average only 1.9% days each year (calculated using 3pm weather data from the Bureau of Meteorology weather stations in NSW over a 30 year period from 1982 to 2013). Studies that focus on fires above FDI 50 find weather conditions are the strongest predictor of fire spread (e.g. Jin et al., 2014; Moritz et al., 2010; Price et al., 2015) and therefore we may expect suppression effectiveness to be more strongly linked to fire weather in these conditions.

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Collins2018_suppression is a link to the entire study.

A Satellite View of Wildfires Since the 50’s

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In this map, wildfires are shown in orange. Private lands are shown in purple while public lands are clear (no color). From Earth Matters.

I ran across this interesting approach to western fires from NASA. Followers of this blog have read the fire observations of folks like Leiburg in the teens, in which the Native American burning patterns were still visible. Then came big fires and fire suppression efforts, and since 1950 many changes in forest and fire management, invasive species, people living in the forest, people igniting the forest and so on. So to me, anyway, picking the dates 50 til present is within that larger dynamic and understanding the larger dynamic could explain some of the observations.
Data sources for the study are given at the end of the article.

1. There are more fires.
Over the past six decades, there has been a steady increase in the number of fires in the western U.S. In fact, the majority of western fires—61 percent—have occurred since 2000 (shown in the graph below).

(I think we’ve talked about the historic fire databases before.)

2. And those fires are larger.
Those fires are also burning more acres of land. The average annual amount of acres burned has been steadily increasing since 1950. The number of megafires—fires that burn more than 100,000 acres (156 square miles)—has increased in the past two decades. In fact, no documented megafires occurred before 1970.

(This is interesting, even if only from 1950 to 1970. It’s not clear to me what the frequency is on the y axis of this graph).

3. A small percentage of the West has burned.

Even though fire frequency and size has increased, only a small percentage of western lands— 11 percent—has burned since 1950. In this map, wildfires are shown in orange. Private lands are shown in purple while public lands are clear (no color). The location of wildfires was random; that is, there was no bias toward fires affecting private or public land.

Keith Weber, a professor at Idaho State University who led the analysis, was surprised at the 11 percent figure. There’s no clear reason yet for why more of the region hasn’t burned. “Some of the 89% may not burn because it has low susceptibility—not dry enough or it has low fuel (vegetation),” said Weber. “Some areas may be really ripe for a fire, but they have not had an ignition source yet.”

(I’m not sure about the public vs private land maps here.. check out the San Joaquin Valley of California. Also not sure if Tribal lands are considered public or private).

4. The same areas keep burning.
How has only 11 percent of the west burned, yet the annual number of acres burned and the frequency of fire increased? It turns out that many fires are occurring in areas that have already experienced fires, known as burn-on-burn effects. About 3 percent—almost a third of the burned land—has seen repeated fire activity.

The map here shows the locations of repeated fire activity. While you can’t see it at this map’s resolution, some areas have experienced as many as 11 fires since 1950. In those areas, fires occurred about every seven years, said Weber, which is about the amount of time it takes for an ecosystem to build up enough vegetation to burn again.

(It would be interesting to know exactly where those are).

5. Recent fires are burning more coniferous forests than other types of landscape.
Since 2000, wildfires have shifted from burning shrub-lands to burning conifers. The Southern Rocky Mountains Ponderosa Pine Woodland landscape has experienced the most acres burned—more than 3 million.

(Again, this is very interesting but not clear on what it means. Certainly plenty of shrublands are still burning.)

6.Wildfires are going to have a big impact on our future.

Research suggests that global warming is predicted to increase the number of very large fires (more than 50,000 acres) in the western United States by the middle of the century (2041-2070).

The map below shows the projected increase in the number of “very large fire weeks”—periods where conditions will be conducive to very large fires—by mid-century (2041-2070) compared to the recent past (1971-2000). The projections are based on scenarios where carbon dioxide emissions continue to increase.

(This assumes that more bad fire weather=more bad fires. That’s not a bad assumption (projections of future weather changes based on unknown levels of carbon) but reasonable people could also include assumptions about improvements in firefighting, community resilience, warming causing plant life to grow more slowly and lead to lower fuel loadings at less density, and so on.). It’s a bit like predicting deaths from a disease without considering health care efforts.

A Picture is Worth at Least 1000 Words

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“Natural Forest Regeneration”? (in the Eldorado National Forest.)

Beyond the Trumpstorm: How California Is Ramping Up Forest Management

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Current California Governor Jerry Brown

It’s interesting that the many outlets that reported on the President’s tweet seemed to question the relevance of forest management- and didn’t seem to check on what California is actually doing with regard to forest management. Maybe emotional critiques are click-worthy and facts, not so much. It didn’t take me long to access the below information on what California is doing from local media outlets.

We find that Trump was wrong, California is ramping it up forest management-wise and (2) if forest management is irrelevant (or an R plot) why is the California state legislature and governor (all D’s) doing so much? Of course, where there are no trees, forest management isn’t relevant. But plenty of California has trees.

So what has the State Legislature passed? Here’s a detailed story by Guy Kuvner of the Santa Rosa Press Democrat. Kudos to him for digging into the details! There’s also a nice summary of all the new wildfire legislation.

Wara (Stanford professor), who was called as a witness at the committee’s first hearing, said it was “almost a no-brainer” that California had to spend more money on “vegetation management,” the term that refers to controlled burns, thinning forests and other means of reducing the fuel available to fires. He recalled that Cal Fire Director Ken Pimlott was asked at a hearing how much it would cost to make the wildlands safe. Pimlott couldn’t say.

“It’s such a big problem they never even thought they would conceivably have the resources to address it,” Wara said.

Assemblyman Jim Wood, a Santa Rosa Democrat who served on the committee, risked some political capital by stating he would not vote for the committee’s centerpiece bill without guaranteed annual funding for vegetation management, which he said should be $300 million a year.

That bill, SB 901, ultimately included just one new appropriation — $200 million a year for five years, or $1 billion — for vegetation management.

Wood, who also wrote five other fire-related bills, said he and Brian Dahle, the Assembly Republican leader from Lassen County, had been pushing a fire prevention plan for four years and the hazardous summer provided the right time to sell it.

“People have heard us, they’ve seen the catastrophic fires,” Wood said. “It was the perfect opportunity to make a big step toward protection in the future.”

“Jim Wood really lit a fire under the committee and the administration to get this done,” Dodd said.

“That was an accomplishment,” Wara said.

Cal Fire had dispensed $243 million in grants to local fire agencies and nonprofit organizations for controlled burns, forest thinning and other fire prevention programs over the past five years, according to Porter, the agency’s region chief.

“We’re super excited,” he said, referring to the $1 billion funding stream. “It’s an amazing investment the state is making in a proactive approach to controlling large, damaging fires.”

Wood’s other bills include AB 2551, which authorizes Cal Fire to collaborate with private landowners on prescribed burns, and AB 1919, which makes it a misdemeanor for a landlord to boost rent more than 10 percent in the wake of a disastrous wildfire.

Then there’s the Governor’s executive order, which specifically deals with streamlining the regulations for private landowners. This story is from CBS local San Francisco here.

SACRAMENTO (AP) — Gov. Jerry Brown signed an executive order on Thursday that aims to reduce the dangers of wildfires following some of the deadliest and most destructive blazes in state history.

The order calls for accelerating forest management procedures such as cutting back dense stands of trees and setting controlled fires to burn out thick brush. Brown wants to double the forest area managed by such practices to 500,000 acres (781 square miles) within five years.

Brown’s order also calls for streamlining the process of allowing private landowners to thin trees and encouraging the building industry to use more innovative wood products.

His office said a Forest Management Task Force will be convened in coming weeks to help implement the order.

The governor’s May budget revision, due for release on Friday, includes $96 million to support his order. That’s in addition to $160 million Brown already proposed for fire protection and forest work in the upcoming fiscal year.

Californians, please comment on what you’ve seen as the results of this new bill.

Defining “Logging”in the Fuel Treatment Context

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Burning piles to reduce fuels,, Dixie National Forest, Utah

Fuel treatments are one of those controversies in which there are dueling “ideas about things”. One of these is that “logging is bad from a fire standpoint, even in fuel treatment projects.” Those of us who work with things, and not “ideas about things,” see individual projects with individual prescriptions, and not necessarily through words like “logging.” It’s not clearly defined, and so it’s hard to say anything meaningful about it. I’m not so naive as to not think that people pick emotionally charged words specifically for their impact, but for the purposes of discussion, leaving things undefined often leads to us talking past each other.

When we worked on the Colorado Roadless Rule, we tried to clarify what people mean, and what they want and don’t want in terms of mechanical treatments. So we talked about “tree cutting” because there are so many possible activities after trees are cut.

Here are some. Readers can add as they have seen and worked on prescriptions.
1. Tree cutting. Simply felling trees and not removing or burning them. This prescription does not treat fuels, I just included it because people do it for non-fuel reasons.
2. Tree cutting and removal to piles to be burnt on site
a) small trees and brush only
b) large trees thinned and other ladder fuels cut
(these do not need roads per se, but may need equipment on site to move trees to piles. Of course, some people might define “land which is crossed by equipment” as “temporary roads.” Yes, there is a similar court case.) Once on a silviculture field trip in the 80’s to the Lake Tahoe Basin, I saw firewood-sized pieces removed via wheelbarrow.
3. Tree cutting with large trees sent to the mill and smaller trees and brush piled and burned.(Need temp roads to send logs to a mill)
4. Tree cutting with fuels chipped and left in understory or burned. See. for example, Fuel Bed Alterations by Thinning, Chipping, and Prescription Fire in a Sierra Nevada Mixed Conifer Stand
5. Others

You can imagine other variations and mixtures of these possibilities, all with different actual physical things happening on the ground. Environmental impacts are caused by physical alterations, and those absolutely site-specific. So when people say “logging causes…” it is a science “situation that shouts watch out!”

When we were working on the Colorado Roadless Rule, “logging” was just not specific enough for us to get a mental image of what people wanted or did not want. In fact, if we think about the western US with different soils, climate, and so on, it would be impossible to generalize about what is best for fuel treatment, or even what is economically feasible. When people use the term “logging,” I think they’re talking about 3) mostly, but if the choice is burning or selling thinned trees, why wouldn’t we sell them? Especially since we use (lots of) them, and import them from other countries (thank you, Canadians!). Especially since burning in place gives off particulates without scrubbers, can only be done at certain times of the year, and sends carbon into the atmosphere more quickly than if the log gets turned into products. All of these possibilities can only be prescribed based on local conditions.

Most folks I know, and whose work I have posted, have identified smaller-sized material in California as unsalable anyway, leading to needing lotsa bucks to do fuel treatments. So if we can sell some trees, somewhere, why not? What are folks afraid of? That the FS will permit forest industry do cutting that isn’t helpful for fuel treatment? Can we talk about how reasonable that fear is in 2018?

If you want to get an idea of how different fuels can be, check out this interactive photo digital series map put out by the Forest Service.

Don’t Feed the Dragon: Trump Tweets, Forest Fires and a Few Responses

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Cranston Fire Nighttime

Forest fires that kill people and destroy communities are bad. Simply and absolutely. What interests me is watching the Trump/California blame game and how it’s covered. In case you haven’t been following this, President Trump said that poor State forest management practices are at least partially to blame. Here’s the argument as depicted by the WaPo:

President Trump has alternated between offering sympathy for displaced people and firefighters, and lashing out at California’s leaders over what he deemed poor forest management.

“With proper Forest Management, we can stop the devastation constantly going on in California. Get Smart!” he tweeted Sunday morning, echoing a refrain that he has frequently leveled at California officials and threatening to withhold federal money.

Officials shot back that increasingly destructive fires are a result of global warming, which dry out vegetation and turn large swaths of grassland into a tinderbox.

A spokesman for Gov. Brown said that more federal forest land has burned than state land, adding that the state has expanded its forestry budget while the Trump administration has cut its budget for forest services.

My question: why respond to/take seriously Trump tweets? All of us know “it’s more complicated than either side depicts.” In fact, are “sides” a function of Trump or a function of media coverage?

Also, I think we need to look at when forest fires are blamed on climate change and what happens when it is framed that way. It sounds like “there’s nothing we can do about it except ideas for decreasing climate change.” Which seems kind of silly since we had wildfires and fuel treatments and prescribed burning way before climate change was an issue. And it’s confusing too because if people want to sue power companies over sparks starting wildfires, or people are in jail for starting wildfires, should they get a pass because it’s really climate change? How best to apportion blame, and what might be the results?

As to climate, I like to do a thought experiment. What if it was 0%, 50%, or 100% caused by humans? Would that matter? Even if it were 100% caused by humans (which we absolutely don’t and can’t know), and we stopped doing all the carbon, land use and so on activities, it would not turn around on a dime. Which means. regardless of our beliefs and/or uncertainties, that we are stuck with the current situation, and we need to work with each other to do what needs to be done to protect communities. Trump isn’t helping, but let’s not feed the dragon.

In my Twitter feed, I ran across a few tweets from this very reasonable sounding Canadian fellow, good for an outside- US perspective. Here’s a link. He has a series of tweets, hope you can read all of them.

Finally, Stephen Pyne has a piece in Slate.. here.. Worth reading, here’s a quote:

“Too often the extremes command attention: the threat of bad fires to cities, the need to restore good fire in wilderness. It’s the intermediate buffer lands that offer an alternative. Here are occasions for active management, not to serve crude commodity production but to enhance ecological goods and services.” I don’t know exactly what he mean by “crude commodity production” perhaps as opposed to “sophisticated commodity production”?
Are fuel treatments to change fire behavior an “ecological good and service” when protecting communities? Or maybe just when protecting species habitat? I guess I can’t see the forest for the abstractions…

Choo-Choo To the Rescue: The Rio Grande National Forest, Spruce Beetle Kill and the Union Pacific

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Spruce beetle damage from Colorado State Forest Service
This story is interesting because of the creativity of the people involved, and the unusual partnership with the railroad, from a reporter at the Colorado Springs Gazette. Kudos to Dan Dallas,the Rio Grande folks, and the cooperators!Also there are more great spruce beetle photos at the Colorado State Forest Service site here.

Here’s the simple framing of the way the reporter reported it: 1)There are lots of dead trees 2) to change fire behavior, and reduce fuels you need to do something, with at least some with them 3) it’s better to do something useful with them than to burn them in piles, or not do fuel treatments at all. If it doesn’t work out for energy, there are still many potential uses for forest products. I think sometimes when folks hear “biomass” nowadays they get into the “biomass burning for energy” controversy and may unintentionally think right past other, less high-tech, and possibly less controversial, uses.

The ‘perfect lab’
When Phil Seligman looked at the Rio Grande National Forest in early 2013, he saw land that was ripe for wildfire.

“This place was ready to pop,” said the president of Wood Source Fuels, noting that intense drought and beetle kill facilitated the explosion of the 109,615-acre West Fork Complex fire later that summer.

In Colorado, more than half a million acres of trees were impacted by insects and diseases in 2017, Colorado state Forest Service reported. For the sixth year in a row, spruce beetle was the state’s most widespread and damaging forest insect pest, with 206,000 acres of active infestations detected, about 67,000 of which were new.

Since 2002, 617,000 acres of high and midelevation forests in the Rio Grande have been infested by spruce beetles. Although spruce beetle activity has decreased dramatically (from 93,000 acres in 2016 to 47,000 acres in 2017).

Seligman has shipped timber with Union Pacific Railroad for more than 10 years, building a network of partners in the logging industry across the country. In 2010, he became involved with biomass after Tri-State Generation & Transmission asked him and Nate Anderson, a research forester with the Rocky Mountain Research Station, to conduct a study on the viability of generating electricity from biomass at the Nucla Station power plant. He estimated that biomass was almost as cheap as coal.

Although Tri-State passed on the opportunity to adopt biomass as a fuel source, the study planted the seed of cooperative forest management in Seligman’s mind. Seligman then arrived in the San Luis Valley and found a “perfect lab” to continue the work on biomass utilization that he and Anderson had started in Nucla. In addition to biomass, other end uses can include everything from landscape chips to animal bedding, with companies already expressing interest.

Unlike in most laboratories, though, Seligman’s work in the Rio Grande National Forest could alter its wildfire conditions for generations to come.

An unprecedented partnership Seligman met Dallas, and the two began the uphill battle to form a cooperative that engages every player in the biomass market: buyers in the across the county and overseas, Union Pacific Railroad, an insurance company, tire distributor and forestry equipment dealer, among others.

After years of arduous negotiations, Seligman secured a $231,700 Wood Innovations Grant from the U.S. Forest Service in 2017 to create the cooperative — Forest Management & Marketing Limited — and invest in market expansion.

“The co-op represents people who see potential in our forests to be healthier and a resource,” Dallas said. “All you have to do is look at a map of the Union Pacific Railroad and see that it has tracks that go through other forests and almost any of those forests have a large scale die-off for one reason or another.”

Seligman said, “This was a tool built for the Forest Service. We feel that working with an entity like this that gives the Forest Service necessary contracts that they need but have historically had trouble getting.”

A critical collaborator is the Union Pacific, which will transport the biomass to processors and producers.

The cooperative plans to start construction as early as December on a chip plant in Antonito that would employ six to seven people and pull wood from the Carson and Rio Grande national forests.

If Seligman’s biomass estimations add up, they could build a larger biomass conversion plant that would employ about 200 people and source from the Carson, Rio Grande, San Juan and San Isabel national forests.

In the Rio Grande National Forest, 3,208 acres (and growing) are available for biomass harvest.

“We have a continental-scale problem, so if we can involve four forests, that’s a big deal,” Seligman said.

The extra jobs from the chip and conversion plant, the railroad, on-the-ground logging, and other related operations could bring economic help to one of Colorado’s most distressed counties. Between 2016 and 2017, Rio Grande County lost 11.5 percent of its businesses and 10.9 percent of its employment. Its poverty rate is 19.2 percent at a time when the state as a whole added 14.3 percent more jobs and expanded its business sector 7.2 percent.