Fire and Fuels

Coastal pine marten proposed for listing as a threatened species

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The U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service has proposed listing the coastal (Humboldt) marten, found in older forests in California and Oregon, as a threatened species.

“Martens are vulnerable to predation and increased competition in habitats that have been subject to either high–moderate severity fires or intensive logging in the last 40 years because both of these events remove the structural characteristics of the landscape that provide escape cover and are important to marten viability (canopy cover, shrub cover, etc.). These older forests have declined substantially from historical amounts…”

As a threatened species, the prohibitions in ESA against incidental take (§9) would not apply, but the FWS usually applies them using a special §4(d) regulation, which it is doing here. As is also common, they carve out exceptions to the prohibitions where take of the marten would be allowed; two of which would be relevant to national forest management:

(1) Forestry management activities for the purposes of reducing the risk or severity of wildfire, such as fuels reduction projects, fire breaks, and wildfire firefighting activities.

(3) Forestry management activities consistent with the conservation needs of the coastal marten. These include activities consistent with formal approved conservation plans or strategies, such as Federal or State plans and documents that include coastal marten conservation prescriptions or compliance, and for which the Service has determined that meeting such plans or strategies, or portions thereof, would be consistent with this proposed rule.

Here is the rationale:

“Although these management activities may result in some minimal level of harm or temporary disturbance to the coastal marten, overall, these activities benefit the subspecies by contributing to conservation and recovery. With adherence to the limitations described in the preceding paragraphs, these activities will have a net beneficial effect on the species by encouraging active forest management that creates and maintains the complex tree and shrub conditions needed to support the persistence of marten populations, which is essential to the species’ long-term viability and conservation.”

What this means is that forestry management activities that are not for the purpose of limiting fire or not consistent with the species’ needs would violate ESA if they harm any martens (unless they obtain an incidental take permit).

Regarding (1), I would ask whether all it takes to comply is for a project to say that it is for this purpose, or considering some of the discussions on this blog, does there have to be scientific support for the idea that a particular practice would actually have the intended effect.

Regarding (3), there is obviously a role for forest plans to include coastal marten conservation prescriptions. Presumably, plan components to create and maintain complex tree and shrub conditions for martens would be consistent with the NFMA requirement to provide ecological integrity and conditions needed for viability of at-risk species. What I haven’t seen before is a process by which the FWS reviews a forest plan for consistency with §4(d) criteria for a threatened species.

There could be future challenges to projects for violation of §9 because they do not meet these criteria.  The Center for Biological Diversity believes that “industrial logging” could meet these criteria and continue to occur in marten habitat.  At least (1) seems like it could be an exception that swallows the rule.  If it were dropped for fuel reduction projects, they could still occur if consistent with marten conservation under (3).

Zoning in the WUI

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Another example of someone doing something right.  But it’s not the Forest Service; the Deschutes National Forest was listed as an agency that “either had no comment or did not respond to the notice.”  (The forest plan management area for much of the adjacent national forest is something called “other ownership,” but I couldn’t find what that means.)

Developers said they’ll cap the number of homes in the new zone at no more than 187 units — 100 on the north property and 87 on the south. Lots would all be designed to prevent risks of wildfire spreading and protect wildlife habitat, said Myles Conway, an attorney for Rio Lobo investments. Plans also call for a 42-acre wildlife conservation area adjacent to Shevlin Park.

The environmental watchdog group Central Oregon LandWatch, which fought to keep Bend’s urban growth boundary from encompassing the affected areas, “strongly supports” the so-called transect zone, LandWatch staff attorney Carol Macbeth said.

“It’s critical to take a new approach to development in the wildland-urban interface, and the Westside Transect is that approach,” Macbeth said. “It will provide a 4.5-mile first line of defense against approaching fires for developments like Awbrey Glen as fires approach from the west and northwest.”

Prescribed smoke drops in on Missoula

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Missoula 2017

I think this is the way it should work.  We encountered the smoke as we drove into town Friday evening from the south.  We learned here that it was from some prescribed burns in Idaho.  It showed up red here as now the first yellow spot just inside Idaho west and slightly south of Missoula.  That lines up with the few thousand acre Kelly Creek area mentioned by the Forest Service.  Missoula’s air quality quickly went from “good” to “unhealthy” as shown here, and you can advance to “next day” to see that it was back to essentially “good” within 24 hours of when it got bad.  We slept with our windows closed in a warm house for one night.  To me, that’s a lot better than the days to weeks we did the same thing in a hotter August 2017 due to wildfires.  (But I wonder if doing Missoula a favor was really the reason, “Planned treatment areas on the North Fork and Lochsa Ranger Districts are located within remote, roadless areas or areas with very limited road access.”)

Senator Bennet on Silverthorne Fuel Treatments- They Dodged a Bullet

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This 3D rendering shows the boundaries of the Buffalo Mountain Fire and surrounding neighborhoods. The red line indicates the approximate fire perimeter. Image courtesy Summit County.

I realize that groups of scientists can, and do, write that “fuel treatments don’t work.” But this is pretty much a hard sell around many communities in Colorado. Basically, the argument seems to be that you should believe this subset of scientists over your own experience (even if you aren’t familiar with the scientific literature that says otherwise, as we have looked at on this blog).

Below is an example from Colorado Politics (a valuable resource- wish that all states had this quality and attention of reporting!). We can see a successful fuel treatment, collaboration, and what success looks like in dollars. Note that Senator Bennet is a Democratic Senator from Colorado. #resistpartisanization

SILVERTHORNE • Looking west to California, where a wildfire just exploded into the largest in state history, Colorado forest officials and politicians had a “there but for the grace of God (and a lot of hard work)” moment on the flanks of Buffalo Mountain above Silverthorne on Tuesday.

U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet on Tuesday toured a 90-acre burn area on U.S. Forest Service land adjacent to two Silverthorne neighborhoods that very nearly erupted into a catastrophic loss of property June 12 before crews using slurry bombers, helicopters and boots on the ground beat back the flames. Nearly 1,400 homes were evacuated, but no properties were lost.

Bennet credits 900 acres of defensible space — basically tree clearing — that Forest Service officials completed in 2012 in conjunction with Summit County, Denver Water and the Colorado State Forest Service. The project cost more than $1 million and did not come without pushback.

“I was here in 2012, and this was very controversial to create this kind of firebreak, and you can see why,” Bennet said. “The community is used to living with trees right next to it, but there’s a safe way of doing it. This demonstrates that, and I hope everybody in this state and everybody in the West can see the benefits of this.”

Local and federal officials estimate that by spending $1 million on creating defensible space by clearing trees — an area where firefighters can safely work to combat a wildfire — more than $1 billion in property was saved in Silverthorne during the mid-June Buffalo fire.

“The Buffalo Fire may be the ultimate example of what our goals are when we do those fuel-reduction projects and those fuel breaks,” White River National Forest supervisor Scott Fitzwilliams said. “Sometimes they don’t work out perfectly, but this one did, and the importance can’t be underestimated.”

Over the last 10 years, more than 12,000 acres of national forest have been treated by thinning and clearing in the Dillon Ranger District at a cost of more than $12 million. About a quarter of that cost has been picked up by Denver Water through the Forests to Faucets partnership.

That’s because wildfires devastate watersheds, causing pollution and erosion, and Summit County is one of the most critical sources of water for the Denver metro area. Summit County also has contributed funding as Forest Service mitigation resources dwindled in recent years.

Perhaps this is a case of “economic interests” (homes, businesses, watersheds) triumphing over “ecological interests”- but I don’t think that that would fly as a narrative in Silverthorne.

Causes of Fire Worseness- Help Complete This List!

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In August and September 2007, a lightning strike sparked the 48,000-acre Castle Rock wildfire near Ketchum, Idaho. Cheatgrass helped fuel the fire. Photo © Kari Greer via U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Headquarters on Flickr

Before we start looking at press coverage, we need to list all the possible causes of worseness. Ideally, an article would say “fires are worse as defined by this criterion” and “causes for worseness are complex, and these are the factors that may be involved.” Right now I’d like to ask for help in making a complete list of these factors. Granted, it’s made more difficult by vagueness on what exactly is meant by “worseness” but still, I think we can take a stab at it. Here are a few that I’ve picked up:

Physical/Biological
1. Past Fire Suppression
2. Drought, and heat or combinations of the above (some proportion x, of which is climate change) both as they impact
a) fuel conditions
b) suppression activities

3. Increased length of fire season (some proportion x of which is climate change, but various 2nd order causes, including other climate patterns, more human ignitions, changes in species, and so on)
4. Non-native species with different fire-related characteristics than previous occupants of the landscape.
5. Changes in native fuels (e.g. more dead trees or changes in canopy structure or species composition??)

Social/Economic
6. More people living in the WUI (so infrastructure needs protection)
7. Tourism is more important economically, but smoke and closures impact that.
8. More people living and visiting the woods means more human-caused ignitions.

Suppression Management and Policy
9. Changes in policy (WFU), strategies and tactics.

I became more aware of 4 recently due to an article in New Scientist here. But there are many other articles around.

INVASIVE species of grass are making wildfires in the US up to twice as large and three times as frequent.

One species, cheatgrass, is now widespread in California and was involved in last year’s Thomas Fire, the largest recorded in the state until the Mendocino Complex Fire now burning (see Converted 747 flies to the rescue in battling California’s giant fire).

Like cheatgrass, many of the invaders are finer than native species, and so ignite more easily, and occupy space within and between patches of native grass. Other invaders, such as silk reed, grow more than 3 metres high and can spread fire into trees.

Emily Fusco at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst presented preliminary results of her study last week in New Orleans at the annual meeting of the Ecological Society of America. She analysed the impact of nine widespread alien grasses in areas of the US they have invaded.

Fusco combined this information with ground and satellite fire records, comparing fire frequency and size in infested habitats versus comparable but uninvaded habitats. She found all the invasive species except one made fires more frequent, and all but two made fires larger.

There are also different potential causes for some of the factors listed above. For example, non-Native species extending the fire season as in this NPR story.

Jeanne Chambers of the U.S. Forest Service is another combatant in the war on cheatgrass. She says in Nevada, they’re seeing fires burning as late as November and as early as January.

“That really has never happened in the past. When we have dry conditions and we have cheatgrass in the understory, we have fuels that can allow those fires to burn almost any time of the year.”

But back to my list, does anyone have other “worseness causes” to add?

Forest Service: We need more fires

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An article in the Missoulian yesterday discussed “Toward Shared Stewardship Across Landscapes: An Outcome-based Investment Strategy,” a new Forest Service initiative that “rethinks the agency’s approach to wildfire, invasive species, drought and disease.”  It seeks a more coordinated and broader-scale approach with the states.  It seems to focus mostly on “systems that evolved with frequent fire.”

“Pre-settlement, 20 percent of California was on fire every year,” Phipps said. “That’s the scale of the problem. Lots of communities are doing wildfire protection planning, but they’ve been looking at, on average, 50 times less than the large landscapes we need to be concerned about.

“This is not about pruning trees,” Phipps continued. “Today, on average we’re treating about 1 to 2 percent of the area we need. We need to create conditions where 30 to 40 percent of that area can be treated with low-intensity ground fire before we get a significant reduction of risk.”

Rawlings also acknowledged that prescribed burning was a more inexpensive way of treating the forest than harvesting. And according to Forest Service research, more burning must happen for even productive timber land to stay healthy. Examinations of last year’s Rice Ridge and Lolo Peak fires near Missoula showed that even heavily logged timber stands had little effect on the big fires’ progress. But past burn scars and prescribed burn areas did slow or redirect the fires.

“We know in these fire-adapted systems, there’s no substitute for fire,” Phipps said. “Even in areas where there’s commercial value, if we want to reduce the fuel density of forests, we still have to bring fire back.”

That raises several challenges. The first is how to reshape public opinion about the need for fire. That means getting people used to having smoky air in the spring and fall, when prescribed burns can take place under safer conditions and release up to 10 times less toxic pollutants than mid-summer megafires.

“Prior planning opens up possibilities for us,” Phipps said. “In a year like this year, it’s not a good strategy to take risks and allow fire to roam on initial attack. But two or three years out of 10, we can allow fire to roam.”

“We need to mutually agree where the best places for investment are,” French said. “The way to get ahead of this is mutual, collaborative, cooperative work across the communities affected. We can’t do it alone.”

It looks like they missed an opportunity to promote the relevance of forest planning to making the strategic decisions about where we consider to be “fire-adapted systems” (or other areas) where active fuels management would be appropriate.

Wildfires, Non-Native Species, Hunting and Sage Grouse

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The Martin Fire burned 435,569 acres in Nevada.
Here’s an AP story that is really clear on the impacts of specific fires.
Folks quoted: Nevada State Wildlife specialists.
Worseness due to fires: reduction in habitat of threatened species and other habitat.
Future problems: non-native grasses change fire behavior AND are poor habitat. What to do? Here are some ideas.

I think it’s interesting (I think we’ve seen it before) that you can still hunt species that are threatened, and have massive efforts by ranchers and feds on the habitat side.

The agency says the fire that started in Paradise Valley north of Winnemucca burned 689 square miles of mostly rangeland — the largest fire in Nevada history. Visible from a NASA satellite, it came on the heels of another wildfire last year that burned 267 square miles north of Battle Mountain.

“This fire negatively affected one of the few remaining stronghold habitats for greater sage-grouse and a myriad of other sagebrush obligate species in Nevada,” said Shawn Espinosa, an upland game staff specialist for the state agency.

“Although we have hopes that restoration efforts can be successful, there will be some areas that will likely convert to cheatgrass which will further reduce available habitat for sage-grouse into the future.”

Hunting units 051 and 066 will remain closed for sage grouse until further notice along the Idaho line from McDermitt in the west to Owyhee in the east and as far south as just west of Battle Mountain.

Another fire burning about 15 miles (north of Battle Mountain has charred more than 60 square miles.

Greater sage grouse, a ground-dwelling bird about the size of a chicken, once numbered in the millions across much of the West, but the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service now estimates the population at 200,000-500,000.

Experts blame energy development, along with wildfires, disease and livestock grazing.

Their range covers parts of 11 Western states and two Canadian provinces.

State wildlife officials say the two big Nevada fires not only burned grouse breeding sites but also destroyed priority winter habitat which will likely affect he bird’s annual production and survival rates.

No other states have implemented grouse hunting restrictions as a result of fires. Wildlife biologists have said in the past that hunting doesn’t generally threaten the survival of sage grouse populations.

Here’s another interesting story about innovative tactics used on the Martin fire from Wildfire Today here, and using non-native grasses for fuel treatments.

Yesterday, fire spread slowed significantly due to the hard work of the local Elko Task Force that hit the head of the fire early Sunday morning and throughout the day. The task force took advantage of the fire naturally slowing as it entered flatter terrain with lesser fuel loads. Operations personnel report that the fire is moving into patches of greener vegetation such as Siberian wheat grass, which was planted as part of the BLM’s rehabilitation and fuel treatment efforts on previous fires. Green fuels slow the fire’s advance, making it easier for bulldozers and engines, with the aggressive assistance of super scooper air tankers and heavy and light helicopters, to catch up and get containment lines in place.

The Wildfire Situation and Definitions of Worseness

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Yosemite National Park, California. Burning piles 2003 (NPS photo)

Lots of newspaper articles say that “wildfires are worse now than they used to be” and often say “the major part of that is due to climate change”. Logically, first we have to define “worse” before we can go on to ascribing causes. In other words, we need to be clear on “what aspects of them are worse, compared to what other time periods” before we can collect relevant data (assuming it exists) and be clear on attributing causes. So can we be more specific about what is worse? Through reading different articles and studies, we can come up with different variables possibly related to “worseness.” It should be noted that the value of the differences and the timeframe of comparison are both essential to clearly understanding the “worseness” question.

First, there are acres burned. I would argue that that does not tell us much, for at least two reasons. If we have WFU (wildland fire use) now and we didn’t used to do it, it seems logical that that this change in suppression policy would lead to increased acres burned by wildfires. Kevin and Andy have also brought up the question of whether burned area is currently accurately measured (a) and whether that can be compared to measurements from the past (in the US) (b). See Kevin’s comment here for links to the more recent data. In the last 150 years or so we have gone from (1) intentional and natural ignitions with no suppression (by Native Americans) in the western US to (2) serious attempts to get fires out all the time but perhaps without the greatest technology, to (3) great technology to put out fires, coupled with the concept of WFU to reduce fuels.

If wildfires can be good, and we are encouraging fire on the landscape through WFU, we would expect burned areas to go up. If that makes wildfires “worse” for purposes of attributing the increased acres to climate change (for example), that seems like it’s a logical problem. Burned area, in and of itself, seems like it would be a function of suppression strategies and tactics.

So people maybe don’t mean “number of acres” when they say “worse”. Maybe there’s more damage to property, infrastructure, soils and watersheds? Or the latter damage is more visible? Of course, there wasn’t as much property around in the past (not in forests or shrublands, but maybe in grasslands). And no one was measuring soil and watershed damage. So how can we compare that to the past? What people might mean is that “nowadays in some cases (most notably in California, based on the news) people are unable to suppress wildfires until they burn up housing and other infrastructure.” And the scariest thing is that there are conditions under which fires become uncontrollable, even today. What could be the differences from the past? 20 years ago? 50 years ago?

There’s also “more frequent“. Since many are human-caused, this could be because of more people being around and/or more people around behaving unsafely. Across the West, there are powerline started fires, steam train started fires (apparently, I don’t think this has been found out for sure), and military training exercise started fires, plus clueless campers and shooters who start fires. At some point, does “more frequent” mean “less attention can be paid to each individual fire” which would also allow acreages to increase?

To understand all this, we really need to interview people working in fire suppression right now, in the past, and perhaps people who study their observations in some way. To readers: in your area, are fires “worse” than the past? When in the past? How do you define “worse”? What do you think the reasons are?

Validated Science versus Unproven Scientific Hypothesis – Which One Should We Choose?

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In a 6/13/18 article, David Atkins provides a critique of the assumptions behind the Law et al article titled: “Land use strategies to mitigate climate change in carbon dense temperate forests” and shows how hypothetical science can and has been used, without any caveat, to provide some groups with slogans that meet their messaging needs instead of waiting for validation of the hypothesis and thereby considering the holistic needs of the world.

I) BACKGROUND

The noble goal of Law et. al. is to determine the “effectiveness of forest strategies to mitigate climate change”. They state that their methodology “should integrate observations and mechanistic ecosystem process models with future climate, CO2, disturbances from fire, and management.”

A) The generally (ignoring any debate over the size of the percentage increase) UNCONTESTED points regarding locking up more carbon in the Law et. al. article are as follows:
1) Reforestation on appropriate sites – ‘Potential 5% improvement in carbon storage by 2100’
2) Afforestation on appropriate sites – ‘Potential 1.4% improvement in carbon storage by 2100′

B) The CONTESTED points regarding locking up 17% more carbon by 2100 in the Law et. al. article are as follows:
1) Lengthened harvest cycles on private lands
2) Restricting harvest on public lands

C) Atkins, at the 2018 International Mass Timber Conference protested by Oregon Wild, notes that: “Oregon Wild (OW) is advocating that storing more carbon in forests is better than using wood in buildings as a strategy to mitigate climate change.” OW’s first reference from Law et. al. states: “Increasing forest carbon on public lands reduced emissions compared with storage in wood products” (see Law et. al. abstract). Another reference quoted by OW from Law et. al. goes so far as to claim that: “Recent analysis suggests substitution benefits of using wood versus more fossil fuel-intensive materials have been overestimated by at least an order of magnitude.”

II) Law et. al. CAVEATS ignored by OW

A) They clearly acknowledge that their conclusions are based on computer simulations (modeling various scenarios using a specific set of assumptions subject to debate by other scientists).

B) In some instances, they use words like “probably”, “likely” and “appears” when describing some assumptions and outcomes rather than blindly declaring certainty.

III) Atkins’ CRITIQUE

Knowing that the modeling used in the Law et. al. study involves significant assumptions about each of the extremely complex components and their interactions, Atkins proceeds to investigate the assumptions which were used to integrate said models with the limited variables mentioned and shows how they overestimate the carbon cost of using wood, underestimate the carbon cost of storing carbon on the stump and underestimate the carbon cost of substituting non-renewable resources for wood. This allows Oregon Wild to tout unproven statements as quoted in item “I-C” above and treat them as fact and justification for policy changes instead of as an interesting but unproven hypothesis that needs to be validated in order to complete the scientific process.

Quotes from Atkins Critique:

A) Wood Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) Versus Non-renewable substitutes.
1) “The calculation used to justify doubling forest rotations assumes no leakage. Leakage is a carbon accounting term referring to the potential that if you delay cutting trees in one area, others might be cut somewhere else to replace the gap in wood production, reducing the supposed carbon benefit.”
2) “It assumes a 50-year half-life for buildings instead of the minimum 75 years the ASTM standard calls for, which reduces the researchers’ estimate of the carbon stored in buildings.”
3) “It assumes a decline of substitution benefits, which other LCA scientists consider as permanent.”
4) “analysis chooses to account for a form of fossil fuel leakage, but chooses not to model any wood harvest leakage.”
5) “A report published by the Athena Institute in 2004, looked at actual building demolition over a three-plus-year period in St. Paul, Minn. It indicated 51 percent of the buildings were older than 75 years. Only 2 percent were demolished in the first 25 years and only 12 percent in the first 50 years.”
6) “The Law paper assumes that the life of buildings will get shorter in the future rather than longer. In reality, architects and engineers are advocating the principle of designing and building for longer time spans – with eventual deconstruction and reuse of materials rather than disposal. Mass timber buildings substantially enhance this capacity. There are Chinese Pagoda temples made from wood that are 800 to 1,300 years old. Norwegian churches are over 800 years old. I visited at cathedral in Scotland with a roof truss system from the 1400s. Buildings made of wood can last for many centuries. If we follow the principle of designing and building for the long run, the carbon can be stored for hundreds of years.”
7) “The OSU scientists assumed wood energy production is for electricity production only. However, the most common energy systems in the wood products manufacturing sector are combined heat and power (CHP) or straight heat energy production (drying lumber or heat for processing energy) where the efficiency is often two to three times as great and thus provides much larger fossil fuel offsets than the modeling allows.”
8) “The peer reviewers did not include an LCA expert.”
9) The Dean of the OSU College of Forestry was asked how he reconciles the differences between two Doctorate faculty members when the LCA Specialist (who is also the director of CORRIM which is a non-profit that conducts and manages research on the environmental impacts of production, use, and disposal of forest products). The Dean’s answer was “It isn’t the role of the dean to resolve these differences, … Researchers often explore extremes of a subject on purpose, to help define the edges of our understanding … It is important to look at the whole array of research results around a subject rather than using those of a single study or publication as a conclusion to a field of study.”
10) Alan Organschi, a practicing architect, a professor at Yale stated his thought process as “There is a huge net carbon benefit [from using wood] and enormous variability in the specific calculations of substitution benefits … a ton of wood (which is half carbon) goes a lot farther than a ton of concrete, which releases significant amounts of carbon during a building’s construction”. He then paraphrased a NASA climate scientistfrom the late 1980’s who said ‘Quit using high fossil fuel materials and start using materials that sink carbon, that should be the principle for our decisions.’
11) The European Union, in 2017, based on “current literature”, called “for changes to almost double the mitigation effects by EU forests through Climate Smart Forestry (CSF). … It is derived from a more holistic and effective approach than one based solely on the goals of storing carbon in forest ecosystems”
12) Various CORRIM members stated:
a) “Law et al. does not meet the minimum elements of a Life Cycle Assessment: system boundary, inventory analysis, impact assessment and interpretation. All four are required by the international standards (ISO 14040 and 14044); therefore, Law et al. does not qualify as an LCA.”
b) “What little is shared in the article regarding inputs to the simulation model ignores the latest developments in wood life cycle assessment and sustainable building design, rendering the results at best inaccurate and most likely incorrect.”
c) “The PNAS paper, which asserts that growing our PNW forests indefinitely would reduce the global carbon footprint, ignores that at best there would 100 percent leakage to other areas with lower productivity … which will result in 2 to 3.5 times more acres harvested for the same amount of building materials. Alternatively, all those buildings will be built from materials with a higher carbon footprint, so the substitution impact of using fossil-intensive products in place of renewable low carbon would result in >100 percent leakage.”
d) More on leakage: “In 2001, seven years after implementation, Jack Ward Thomas, one of the architects of the plan and former chief of the U.S. Forest Service, said: “The drop in the cut in the Pacific Northwest was essentially replaced by imports from Canada, Scandinavia and Chile … but we haven’t reduced our per-capita consumption of wood. We have only shifted the source.”
e) “Bruce Lippke, professor emeritus at the University of Washington and former executive director of CORRIM said, “The substitution benefits of wood in place of steel or concrete are immediate, permanent and cumulative.””

B) Risks Resulting from High Densities of Standing Timber
1) “The paper underestimates the amount of wildfire in the past and chose not to model increases in the amount of fire in the future driven by climate change.”
2) “The authors chose to treat the largest fire in their 25-year calibration period, the Biscuit Fire (2003), as an anomaly. Yet 2017 provided a similar number of acres burned. … the model also significantly underestimated five of the six other larger fire years ”
3) “The paper also assumed no increase in fires in the future”
4) Atkins comments/quotes support what some of us here on the NCFP blog have been saying for years regarding storing more timber on the stump. There is certainty that a highly significant increase in carbon loss to fire, insects and disease will result from increased stand densities as a result of storing more carbon on the stump on federal lands. Well documented, validated and fundamental plant physiology and fire science can only lead us to that conclusion. Increases in drought caused by global warming will only increase the stress on already stressed, overly dense forests and thereby further decrease their viability/health by decreasing the availability of already limited resources such as access to minerals, moisture and sunlight while providing closer proximity between trees to ease the ability and rate of spread of fire, insects and disease between adjacent trees.

Footnote:
In their conclusion, Law et. al. state that“GHG reduction must happen quickly to avoid surpassing a 2°C increase in temperature since preindustrial times.” This emphasis leads them to focus on strategies which, IMHO, will only exacerbate the long-term problem.
→ For perspective, consider the “Failed Prognostications of Climate Alarm”

You say “logging,” we say “thinning,” “mechanical treatment” or “stand improvement”

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And Trump says “tree clear.”  This article got my attention for a number of reasons.  It’s a follow-up to the story about the Trump tweet regarding forest fires.  It is another case of “upping the cut” under the Trump administration (doubling in this case on the Los Padres).  And it looks like the Forest is trying to disguise what it is actually doing with this project.  And using a questionable categorical exclusion to boot.

Critics contend the proposed logging in the Los Padres is a signal that the balance of power in national forests is shifting under the Trump administration. Such projects could open the door to commercial logging in other public forests currently managed as watersheds rather than timberlands, such as the Angeles, San Bernardino and Cleveland national forests.

Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue raised annual timber production targets for the Los Padres National Forest from 200,000 cubic feet of wood in 2017 to 400,000 cubic feet this year.

“We are witnessing a historical change unfolding in the national forests in our own backyard,” said Richard Halsey, founder of the nonprofit Chaparral Institute in Escondido, Calif. “Timber was never part of the equation, until now.”

Here’s the way the article introduced the project:

The federal government is moving to allow commercial logging of healthy green pine trees for the first time in decades in the Los Padres National Forest north of Los Angeles, a tactic the U.S. Forest Services says will reduce fire risk.

The scoping letter described the project as a “shaded fuelbreak.”

Treatments would include a combination of mechanical thinning, mastication of brush/smaller trees, and hand treatments such as hand thinning, brush cutting, pruning and piling of material.

That sounds fairly benign, but the proposed action sheds a little more light on it:

Mixed conifer and pinyon juniper stands would be thinned to a range of 40 to 60 square feet basal area per acre…  Trees would be removed throughout all diameter classes and would include the removal of commercial trees. Residual trees would be selected for vigor; however, larger Jeffrey pine would be retained per Forest Plan direction unless they pose a hazard or are infected with dwarf mistletoe. All black oak would be left unless they pose a hazard.

But the scoping letter states an intent to use this categorical exclusion:

(6) Timber stand and/or wildlife habitat improvement activities that do not include the use of herbicides or do not require more than 1 mile of low standard road construction. Examples include, but are not limited to:

(i) Girdling trees to create snags;

(ii) Thinning or brush control to improve growth or to reduce fire hazard including the opening of an existing road to a dense timber stand;

(iii) Prescribed burning to control understory hardwoods in stands of southern pine; and

(iv) Prescribed burning to reduce natural fuel build-up and improve plant vigor.

And then there’s this:

Ashley McConnell, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, said her agency plans to work with the Forest Service to help protect active California condor nest sites or roosting areas. Logging, she said, could “benefit California condor habitat because the larger and older trees where condors typically roost are preserved.”

That’s what “thinning” means, right?

So has it been so long since the Los Padres has had a timber sale that they don’t know what to call it?  Or is this an attempt at sneaking by the NEPA requirements that go along with it?  Maybe you can technically call it “thinning” if you leave any residual trees, but that is clearly not what this CE was intended to cover.  There is another CE for hazardous fuel reduction, but it’s limited to 1000 acres of “mechanical treatments.”  And another for “harvest of live trees” (limited to 70 acres).  Is this the kind of misleading corner cutting the Forest Service is going to go back to when it is under pressure to “get the cut out?”