Fire and Fuels

“Logging is Not the Answer”: But No One Said It Was

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Fig. 9. Left photo shows surviving trees in the half of Unit 46 that was thinned and burned. Right photo shows dead burned trees in the untreated area immediately adjacent to Unit 46. Both photos were taken back-to-back from same location on the treatment boundary. Photos: C.N. Skinner, USDA Forest Service, Pacific Southwest Research Station.

(photo from J.K. Agee, C.N. Skinner / Forest Ecology and Management 211 (2005) 83–96)

Everyone is entitled to their opinions. However, my concern is that when folks wrap their opinions in the cloak of “science”, especially when more than one scientific discipline is involved, we need to be especially careful. It’s often helpful to trace the claims made in the scientific paper, the conclusions of the scientific paper, the press releases related to the scientific paper, and the interviews with the authors of the scientific paper. Sometimes we see an observation mutate into a global pronouncement of what should be or should not be done.

I picked this E&E news report on the recent Schoennagel et al. paper. (Note that I posted on this, almost exactly the same topic (“logging in the backcountry”), on this blog here in 2010 called “Sleight of Science” in which people claim that folks are doing something they aren’t doing, and then say it won’t work- sort of a straw person argument.) Below are my italics and boldface.

But logging forests in an effort to reduce hazardous fuel loads is not the answer, the study says.

Between 2001 and 2015, these so-called mechanical fuels treatments have been applied across millions of acres of forestlands and rangelands, the study notes. And yet “the annual area burned [in the West] has continued to set records.”

The effort to reduce fuel loads on federal lands by “thinning” trees has value, but is expensive and does not do enough to reduce wildfire risks.

The study suggests using more prescribed fires as a way to reduce fuel loads, but also to help dry forests adapt to the warmer climate.

“We need adaptive approaches to wildfire now that will yield tremendous benefits later,” Schoennagel said. “Preparing now for adaptation to wildfire and climate change is a valuable investment in America’s residential communities and natural ecosystems.”

So this appears to be claiming that these scientists argue that the evidence for “mechanical fuel treatments not working” is that there are more acres burned in the West- not the sum of all the studies of fuel treatment effectiveness that we have seen here or can easily be googled. As these authors would be first to point out, there are a number of other reasons for acreage to increase (if it actually has), including people in forests, climate change, weather and so on. They also claim that it “does not do enough to reduce wildfire risks”- but to communities it certainly can- so why would a value judgment by scientists be more valuable than one by involved communities?

Oddly, according to this article, they suggest using more prescribed fires- which is of course exactly what you are supposed to do, if you can, following thinning to finish the task of “fuels treatment.” In fact, many use thinning to prepare a stand for prescribed burning. It seems kind of odd that that linkage isn’t made. Also not mentioned is mastication, another mechanical fuel treatment which is used with or without prescribed fire. But I haven’t gone back to the original article to check, so my quibbles might be with the writer of the article and not with the scientists at all.

Anyone can google “mastication effectiveness fuels” and get a variety of effectiveness papers. Having read a bunch of these, I have to say that I am impressed by the field knowledge and experience of the fuels folks involved..”this works in these conditions, but not so well under these conditions, has a good effect on helping suppression, but may increase intensity.”

Maybe the author of this article shaded the findings in the paper (and maybe didn’t or couldn’t read them with the keen eye that we would, knowing what we know?) Maybe the researchers who wrote the PNAS paper weren’t familiar with the effectiveness literature due to the proliferation of different scientific field and subfields? Or maybe fuels science and practice is not something they think they need to examine to make conclusions? Or are fuels practitioners’ experiences and reports, and fuels scientists’ findings – are they somehow invisible to some folks in the public/scientists? And why would that be?

It all seems a bit mysterious to me. I have no trouble saying “fuels, suppression, and affected communities need to work together for protection against negative environmental and social impacts of wildfires, and we should also all work together to get more prescribed burning on the landscape”. So who is doing what wrong, again?

The Summer of Fuel Treatments

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It’s the 50th anniversary of the “Summer of Love” and my project for this summer is to try to understand the differences between people who say “fuel treatments don’t work and people shouldn’t do them” and those who say “fuel treatments can work and people should do them”. What’s really behind that? On what observations do people base their claims?

We can’t expect journalists to do this (the whole thing is too complex). The scientific world doesn’t provide fora to jointly examine claims and counterclaims within a discipline, let alone across disciplines. I guess that leaves it up to us. We have the opportunity to lay out different claims and jointly examine them, and learn jointly what the different values, assumptions, and observations lie behind these points of view. We can even tell our own stories of fuel treatments we have seen that worked or did not, and we can hear from people with direct experience in suppression as well as people who publish scientific papers. We can ask questions and get answers from each other.

Who knows? We could create one small space, where for one small topic, people could model civil disagreement, and gain a respite fromthis two pronged approach from Canada to defining fuel treatment effectiveness, but my search was fairly superficial and maybe others can help. Here are the two prongs:

1. Did the fire behavior change as a result of the treatment? Yes or no.
2. Did the treatment contribute to the control of the wildfire? Yes or no.

I found this in a discussion linked to this Canadian research group, that has a variety of interesting ongoing projects. Here’s a link to an “effectiveness of fuel treatments” write-up in Sasketchewan with interesting photos. Here’s some summary findings:

1. Weyakwin
• Fuel treatment increased visibility into the stand.
• Fuel treatment increased firefighter safety in terms of movement and visibility.
• Under the fire weather conditions the extreme fire behaviour took place, fire crews were able to control and suppress a spot fire that would have likely increased in size and intensity and spread into other values.
• Items located around homes can act as a receptive fuel for embers to fall into. Keeping these areas clean is a homeowner’s responsibility and can contribute to protection of one’s town.

2. Wadin Bay
• An active fire front moved into the community.
• The fire moved into the fuel treatments.
• People were able to safely suppress the fire within the treatment area.
• A permanent home and two seasonal cabins plus other values were lost, and there was potential for further losses.
The Wadin Bay area had very thick stands at pre-treatment, which would have made travel within the stand difficult and dangerous given the observed fire behaviour in untreated portions of the hamlet. The combination of increased visibility and decreased fire intensity enabled firefighters to bring the fire under control and ultimately save several structures from burning

And here’s a photo

Figure 18. A good example of fire damage on left side and the lack of fire damage on the right in block D
.

Inside the Firestorm

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This is for those who insist that we don’t need to use forest management to reduce the risk of catastrophic loss to wildfire. Several people have expressed unscientific views on this site to the effect that ‘Wildfire is climate driven and no amount of controlled burns and or thinning can have any impact on total acreage burned since it is all due to global warming (drought and high winds)’ Hopefully this will bring them to their senses and open their minds to the possibility that they are flat out wrong.

Several of us have tried to explain that global warming only makes the need for managing stand density even more important. We have also tried to explain that what many see as climate driven firestorms are instead micro climate created by the fire. Hence the need to use the appropriate forest management tools to reduce the risk of an ignition spreading at a rate that will create its own weather and to provide opportunities for crown fires to return to the ground in order to allow the fire to be controlled as is appropriate for the specific situation.

I have rightly or wrongly gotten the impression that some here don’t really respect the research done on wildfire for at least the last 80 years. My reason for saying this is the applause they afford to people who come up with conclusions contrary to the science but don’t bother to reconcile their suppositions/theories, based on cherry picked incidents, with the established and well replicated science.

So here is an article that should give you a better understanding of and respect for the work behind the real science and how it corroborates what some of us have repeatedly stated here and elsewhere so, obviously, the principles described here are not new – They are just getting a whole lot more attention as technology has advanced to the point where tools are now available to make precise measurements on what has only been repeatedly observed before. This is a pretty intense read and well worth reading in its entirety.

1) ‘“It looked,” says Kingsmill, “like a nuclear bomb.”
Undaunted, Kingsmill and the pilot decided to do what no research aircraft had done: Fly directly through the plume.’

2) ‘For decades, scientists have focused on the ways that topography and fuels, such as the trees, grass or houses consumed by flames, shape fire behavior, in part because these things can be studied even when a fire isn’t burning. But this line of inquiry has offered only partial answers to why certain blazes, like the Pioneer Fire, lash out in dangerous and unexpected ways — a problem magnified by severe drought, heat and decades of fire suppression.’

3) ‘“The plume is orders of magnitude harder to study than the stuff on the ground,” says Brian Potter, a meteorologist with the Pacific Wildland Fire Sciences Laboratory in Seattle who sometimes works with Clements. Indeed, it took a global conflagration much darker than any forest fire to even begin laying the foundations of this work. Kingsmill’s observation about the bomb, it turns out, isn’t far off.’
–> Here the article dives off into the beginning of fire study as it began in the early ’40’s in preparation for the British bombing of Hamburg, Germany on July 27, 1943 when ‘42,000 people died, and another 37,000 were injured’

4) ‘these old experiments, finished by 1970, are still a key source of knowledge about extreme fire behaviors. Until recently, technology was simply too limited to reveal much more about the specific mechanisms by which a fire plume might feed a firestorm, let alone how beasts like fire tornadoes and fireballs form.’

5) ‘His instrument towers, deployed in carefully controlled fires, provided yet more unprecedented and precise measurements: how winds accelerate and draft into an advancing flame front, the heat and turbulence above the flames, and the speed of the rising hot air.’

6) ‘Clements wanted to capture the whole phenomenon — to look inside the opaque mass of an entire fire plume from a distance, and see all of its parts swirling at once. In 2011, he found his lens: a technology called Doppler lidar.’

7) ‘The team’s insight about the Bald and Eiler fires has implications for predicting smoke and air quality — a constant concern for communities near large fires. It also impacted the fires themselves. Even though both fires existed in the same atmospheric environment of pressures and winds, and burned across similar terrain, they were spreading in opposite directions that day — Bald to the south, and Eiler to the north. This denser current of cold air and smoke was actually pulling the Bald Fire in the opposite direction of what was predicted based on wind alone.’

8) ‘Coen works at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, where she studies fire’s inner workings. In September 1998, she spent several hours aboard a Hercules C-130 aircraft as it circled over Glacier National Park. The McDonald Creek Fire was marching up a steep slope at roughly three feet per second. Its smoke obscured the advancing flames, but infrared video cameras mounted outside the plane recorded what was happening underneath. It was only later, as Coen looked through individual frames of that video, that she noticed something strange: At one point, a jet of flame seemed to shoot ahead of the fire. It lasted only a second or two, but left a trail of newly ignited vegetation in front of the fire. Not until Coen calculated the size of the pixels and the time between frames could she appreciate its true significance.
The jet had surged 100 yards ahead of the fire’s front, advancing 100 mph — “like a flamethrower,” she says. It was 10 times faster than the local wind — generated, somehow, by the fire’s own internal tumult.
Coen called it the “finger of death,” and for her it brought to mind the unconfirmed reports of fireballs that occasionally circulated among firefighters.
She had never seen such a thing, but as she examined footage of other fires, she was surprised to find fire jets again and again.’

9) ‘Finney’s slow-motion videos show that these rolling eddies exist in pairs within the fire. They roll in opposite directions, coupled like interlocking gears. Their combined motion periodically pushes down on the advancing front of the fire, causing flames to lick downward and forward, ahead of the fire.
Finney believes that these forward flame-licks are scaled-down versions of the “fingers of death” that Coen has seen in wildfires — possibly even related to the fireballs said to have shot out of buildings during the 1943 Hamburg firestorm.
Coen has actually documented similar flame-rollers in real wildfires using infrared video. But she believes that the finger of death also requires another factor. As bushes and trees are heated by an approaching fire, their decomposing cellulose releases hydrogen, methane, carbon monoxide and other flammable gases in a process called pyrolysis.
Coen and Shankar Mahalingam, a fluid-dynamics engineer at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, believe that rolling currents can mix these flammable gases with oxygen-rich air. “The dangerous situation is when the fire is going up on a hill,” says Mahalingam. “Maybe there are pyrolysis products that have accumulated” in front of the fire and mixed with fire-boosting oxygen. As the flame licks forward into this invisible tinderbox, it ignites a blowtorch. … These same buoyant gases also supply the momentum that drives a fire whirl to spin once it is triggered. And on a much larger scale, they are what pushes a fire plume ever higher in the sky, powering the in-drafts that keep the fire burning below.’

10) ‘what drew Potter’s interest was the water. Concentrations of water vapor rose 10 to 20 times higher than the surrounding air.
Water is a major product of combustion, second only to carbon dioxide. It forms as oxygen binds to the hydrogen atoms in wood, gasoline or just about any other fuel — creating hydrogen oxide, otherwise known as H2O. Burning four pounds of perfectly dry wood releases a pound or two of water. …
And yet water vapor fuels the strongest updrafts in nature, says Potter, from thunderstorms to tornadoes to hurricanes. As moist air rises during these storms, the water vapor condenses into cloud droplets, releasing a small amount of heat that keeps the air slightly warmer than its surroundings, so it continues to rise. “Water,” he says, “is the difference between a weak updraft and a really powerful updraft.”’

11) ‘He believes that water was pivotal in fueling the firestorm that swept through the suburbs of Canberra, the Australian capital, on Jan. 18, 2003.
The fire consumed 200,000 acres of drought-stricken territory that day, isolating the city under a glowing haze of Halloween orange. Remote infrared scans suggest that during a single 10-minute period, it released heat equivalent to 22,000 tons of TNT — 50 percent more than the energy unleashed by the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.’

12) ‘When N2UW flew through the plume of the Pioneer Fire in 2016, its instruments registered updrafts of 80 to 100 miles per hour. Yet at that elevation, 8,000 feet above the flames, the interior of the plume was only 3 to 6 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the surrounding air, meaning that its buoyant stampede through the atmosphere was powered by a density difference of just about 1 percent.
In other words, given the right atmospheric conditions, a few degrees of warmth and extra buoyancy could spell the difference between a plume that pushes 40,000 feet up, into the stratosphere, powering a vicious blaze on the ground — as Pioneer did — and one whose smoke never escapes the top of the boundary layer at 3,000 feet, leaving the fire stunted, like a weather-beaten dwarf tree gasping for life at timberline.’

13) ‘Clements’s trained eye began to pick out some basic structures: a 40 mph downdraft next to a 60 mph updraft signified a turbulent eddy on the edge of the plume. Hot air pushing up past cooler, stationary air had set in motion a tumbling, horizontal vortex — the sort of thing that could easily have accounted for the plane’s brief freefall. Those blotchy radar pictures may finally allow us to see through wildfire’s impulsive, chaotic veneer’

Yes, professional wildfire researchers, the in air observations of pilots of spotters and retardant dropping planes and the on the ground observations of fire crews that point the researchers in various directions all deserve our respect. They actually put their lives on the line as opposed to those who disdain their commitment and repeatedly validated science.

Contact the author if you want references or check back in some previous postings on this site for some related references. I post this without references because it jives with the known and validated science that I have critically studied since I first started my forestry education in 1963.

Introduction to the Landscape of Fire Sciences

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From Olson et al.

Jon asked an excellent question in our previous discussion: “who counts as a wildfire expert?”. It seems to me that with the recent March for “Science” it’s probably a good time to dig deeper into some aspects of how the science business works in reality. So a simple question, like “who is a wildfire expert” is a great entry into looking at the landscape of scientific disciplines.

So let’s start thinking about different pieces of the wildfire puzzle. One piece is obviously suppression, as in large groups of people and equipment who manage wildfires. Well, there’s the behavioral psychology of groups, there are the modelers who work on the models wildland firefighters use, there are people who test those models through experience (but may not publish on the results themselves). There are people who make observations (the fire went to the ground in that strip). Within that bunch of sciences, I don’t know all the subfields but I’d like to hear from someone who can explain it. Here are a few from the Missoula Fire Science Laboratory:

Physical Fire ProcessesThe factors that determine fire behavior (fuel, weather, and topography) do so through the requirements for combustion (fuel, heat, and oxygen).
Fuel DynamicsResearch on fuel dynamics helps managers describe live and dead fuels that burn during wildland fires.
Smoke Emissions & DispersionScientists use field observations, satellite data, and models to describe smoke’s chemical composition, its movement within a fire’s heat plume, and its movement through the layers of the atmosphere.
Fire EcologyThis research contributes to improved conservation, restoration of burned areas, and reduction of fire hazard.
Fire & Fuel Management StrategiesHistorical patterns of wildland fire are combined with information about climate and vegetation to predict fire occurrence and vegetation patterns.
Science Synthesis & DeliveryScientific publications form the foundation for science delivery.

 

Here’s a list of interesting pubs from the Joint Fire Science Program, you can see the variety of kinds of studies.

Given these approaches to fire science, only one of which is fire ecology, we can then review the backgrounds of the researchers in the PNAS study. I have looked at them all and produced the attached document here that describes their backgrounds.  We can see that most have a background in fire ecology, but not so much in fuel and fire modeling.  Could seeing things through the lens of “ecology” affect the way their perspectives? It being a focus on “natural” processes and maintaining them? More on this in the next post.

Summary of fire debate points

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The latest from Headwaters lays out their point of view on several topics that have been discussed a lot on this blog (with cites).  The 2016 paper is posted in full and is pretty short and sweet.  The key points:

1. Fire size and frequency will increase under a warmer and drier climate

2. Fuel reduction on federal lands will do little to reduce acreage burned and homes lost

3. Not all forests need restoration

4. High severity fires often have ecological benefits

5. Insect outbreaks do not necessarily make fires worse

6. Land-use planning can reduce wildfire risk

7. Managing more fires to burn safely can reduce risk and increase ecological benefit

Case closed?

The Impact of Sound Forest Management Practices on Wildfire Smoke and Human Health

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– Some would have us turn our forests back to a time before any of mankind inhabited North America.
– Some suggest that we should limit our management of forests to that done by native Americans pre European times.
– Some of us see a problem with limiting ourselves to these past practices because of the current population level.
– Some of us even see that properly validated forest science carried out in environmentally sound ways can improve the sustainability of our forest ecosystems and all of the species that depend on them for habitat, store carbon and reduce our dependence on the use of non-renewable, environmentally unfriendly resources which are being extracted from their long term, safe, natural storage underground.

This article (J. For. 115(●):000–000 http://dx.doi.org/10.5849/jof.16-042
Copyright © 2017 Society of American Foresters) “fire & fuels management Aligning Smoke Management with Ecological and Public Health Goals” seems to me to be a good starting point for a much neglected discussion on why mankind has to manage our federal forest better just from the point of protecting human health.

A) Motivation for the study comes from:
1) “mismatches between the scale of benefits and risks make it difficult to proactively manage wildland fires to promote both ecological and public health.”
2) “A recent update to wildfire smoke policy proposed by the US Environmental Protection Agency (US EPA) recognized the need to restore and maintain more frequent fire regimes through intentional use of fire, while asserting that protecting human health remained the agency’s “highest priority” (Office of the Federal Register 2015). Therefore, addressing both forest restoration and air quality objectives remains a central challenge.”
3) “Hurteau et al. (2014) found that under a business-as-usual climate scenario, this escalation in fire potential is likely to increase wildfire emissions in California by 50% by the end of this century unless agencies take a more proactive approach to fire use.”
4) “… current policies have permitted regulators to curtail fires intentionally managed for resource objectives in response to nuisance complaints by a few individuals, despite the potential for such
fires to have long-term collective benefits (Engel 2013). Because the impact and likelihood of smoke increase the longer that fire is kept out of the system, extensive fire suppression can result in a vicious cycle that becomes more and more costly to escape until the system fails, as represented by extreme
wildfires (Calkin et al. 2015).”
5) “Smoke and wildfires can impact public health in ways other than particulate pollution, including ozone pollution, increased stress during and after wildfires, and strains on medical services and communication systems (Fowler 2003, Kumagai et al. 2004, Finlay et al. 2012). Despite these broader
considerations, public health regulations for smoke typically focus on a 24-hour average of PM2.5. Values that exceed 35ug/m3 are considered unhealthy for sensitive groups, which include pregnant women, young children, elderly individuals, smokers, and people with chronic respiratory problems such as asthma (Delfino et al. 2009, Kochi et al. 2010, Moeltner et al. 2013).”

Please note that this study was not offered as a be all and end all study. In my opinion, the main objective was achieved. That objective being to give order of magnitude numbers to justify further research and further stimulate the process of rethinking current regulations and forest management policies.

B) Known Facts:
1) California: “The wildfire emissions in 2008 represented 68% of all PM2.5 emissions in the state, and they caused notable public health impacts (Wegesser et al. 2009, Preisler et al. 2015)”
2) “An important spatial mismatch results from the fact that large wildfires can create smoke impacts on distant urban populations. The risk to urban populations from regional-scale smoke impacts has increased as California became the most urbanized state in the United States, with 90% of its population residing within cities that have more than 50,000 people and another 5% living in smaller urban clusters (US Census Bureau 2015). Many of those urban areas are situated in valleys or basins that have poor air quality due to human activities as well as natural conditions that often trap pollutants (Ngo et al. 2010, Nakayama Wong et al. 2011). For example, the four metropolitan areas in the United States with the highest levels of particle pollution are all located in California’s Central Valley (American Lung Association 2015). Because many urban populations already experience poor air quality during the summer, they are particularly vulnerable to health impacts from wildfires (Delfino et al. 2009, Cisneros et al. 2014)”
3) “Within the study area, daily emissions from both prescribed burns and resource objective wildfires remained well below 500 tons PM2.5 , whereas the Rim Fire had 20 days exceeding that threshold (nearly half of its entire period of active fire growth) and peaked at nearly 11,000 tons PM2.5 /day on Aug. 26, 2013 (Figure 2). During the late summer, air quality is already problematic in downwind areas such as the Lake Tahoe Basin and San Joaquin Valley”
4) “Ground-level monitoring indicated that these large smoke plumes coincided with highly polluted days in Reno, which occurred on August 23–25 and again on August 28–29, when PM2.5 values exceeded the “unhealthy for all populations” standard (55.5ug/m3) (Figure 4F). Such high levels are such a serious health concern that people are advised to avoid going outdoors. Navarro et al. (2016) reported that very unhealthy and unhealthy days occurred at 10 air monitoring sites in the central Sierras, northern Sierras, and Nevada during the Rim Fire.”

C) Data – Smoke Plume data was used to “compare differences in smoke impacts between resource objective wildfires and full-suppression wildfires within the San Joaquin River watershed in California’s Sierra Nevada, the Sierras that burned between 2002 and 2013, including 10 resource objective wildfires (totaling 20,494 acres), 17 prescribed fires (totaling 6,636 acres), 4 small wildfires (totaling 12,025 acres), and the exceptionally large Rim Fire (257,314 acres). … the limited availability of smoke monitoring data, particularly before 2007, requires a focus on modeled emissions.”

D) Findings: Reasonable Expectations from the use of increased forest management to reduce the impact on human health of catastrophic wildfires include:
1) “Our results indicate that the 257,314-acre Rim Fire of 2013 probably resulted in 7 million person-days of smoke impact across California and Nevada, which was greater than 5 times the impact per burned unit area than two earlier wildfires, Grouse and Harden of 2009, that were intentionally managed for resource objectives within the same airshed.”
2) “The combination of a warming climate and accumulation of forest fuels ensures a future with more large fires and smoke in dry western US forests. We have outlined framework to more directly account for regional-scale smoke impacts from these events using surface monitoring and satellite observations of smoke. Managing large fires for resource objectives can shift the release of inevitable emissions to conditions that minimize large-scale smoke impacts, by controlling fire spread based on available dispersion and monitored impacts and creating anchors for containing future hazardous fires. When well supported by firefighting, air quality monitoring and modeling, and public communications resources, this approach can overcome existing disincentives for achieving ecological and public health goals.”
3) “August 31 … Altogether, medium- and high-density HMS smoke from the Rim Fire on that day covered a large area (251,691 mi2) with a population of 2.8 million people, more than 2 million of whom resided below high-density smoke … In contrast, the Grouse and Harden Fires burned slowly over the early summer of 2009, with very modest emissions until the last week of June … Our analysis of HMS maps indicated that there were only 2 days when medium-density plumes overlaid substantial populations in California and Nevada, amounting to 25,000 person-days”
4) “the Rim Fire burned 55 times more area (257,213 acres) than the combined footprint of the Grouse and Harden Fires (4,695 acres), but our analysis suggests that it had at least 275 times greater impact in terms of persondays, or 5.5 times greater impact relative to area burned.”
5) “Our analyses help to illustrate and begin to quantify many of the potential benefits of resource objective wildfires compared with those of extreme fires:
– 1. Reduced fuels and reduced consumption. … We accounted for this effect within the 10,385 acres of the Rim Fire’s footprint that had experienced prescribed fires or resource objective wildfires since 2002 by changing “typical” fuel loads to “light,” which reduced estimated emissions in those areas by 53%.
– 2. More favorable dispersion and potential for less ozone. As maintenance burns reduce fuel levels over time, managers may be able to burn more safely earlier in the summer and or later in the fall, when dispersion is often more favorable and ozone concentrations are lower (Jaffe et al. 2013). Fires managed for resource objectives are less likely to result in the greater lofting and concentrations of smoke reported from extreme fires, which often deliver pollution to distant, large urban populations in lower-elevation valleys (Colarco et al. 2004, Peterson et al. 2015).
– 3. Greater ability to regulate fire spread. Because wildfires would be managed for resource objectives when weather and fire behavior conditions are more moderate than under extreme wildfires, their slower fire spread can curb daily emissions. In addition, managers can employ the push-pull tactics burn described for the Grouse Fire to regulate daily emissions based on monitored concentrations fire will become increasingly important for reducing the likelihood and extent of large-scale, extreme fires like the Rim Fire (Westerling et al. 2015).”

Humans sparked 84 percent of US wildfires, increased fire season over two decades

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How should we deal with the new math on forest fires?

If this article published in the February Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is not a fluke then it would seem to me that our expanding population dictates the need for more forest management not less. The less desireable alternative would be to severely restrict access to our federal forests. The main conclusion of the article is that humans sparked 84 percent of US wildfires and caused nearly half of the acreage lost to wildfire. This number excludes intentionally set controlled burns.

From the above, I would deduce that human initiated fires caused proportionally less acreage loss because they were closer to civilization and to forest access points and therefore closer to and more easily accessed by suppression resources. The fact that nearly half of the wildfire acres lost occur in these areas suggests that we would get more bang for our tax dollars if we increased and focused federal sustainable forest management around high traffic areas easily accessible to humans.

Knowing that humans who cause wildfires are, by definition, either careless or malicious, we might deduce that they are generally not inclined to put great effort into getting to their ignition set points. This would lead us to consider that human caused fires might prove to be in less difficult terrain areas with high human traffic. Fires like the Rim fire being the exception. That, if true, would suggest that forest management for risk reduction on these sites could be done at lower costs per acre than other less accessible forest acreage. Focusing forest management efforts on these high benefit to cost areas would have the biggest bang per tax dollar expended in order to lower the total cost of federal wildfire control. If my thinking is correct, this should play a large part in setting the priorities as to where we should: 1) apply controlled burns to reduce ground and other low fuels, 2) utilize commercial thinnings to reduce ladder and proximity fuels or 3) use commercial regeneration harvests to create greater variation in tree heights between stands in order to provide fire breaks for crown fires when appropriate for the site and species. The net effect would be positive for all species including endangered and threatened species. There would still be plenty of lightning caused wildfire, controlled burn hotspots/breakouts and a significantly reduced acreage of human caused fires to satisfy those who don’t mind national ashtrays. Reducing the number and size of human caused fires would also free resources to attack lightning fires earlier and harder when allowing the fire to burn was not an option.

Pertinent Quotes:

  1. “After analyzing two decades’ worth of U.S. government agency wildfire records spanning 1992-2012, the researchers found that human-ignited wildfires accounted for 84 percent of all wildfires, tripling the length of the average fire season and accounting for nearly half of the total acreage burned.” Italics added
  2. “”These findings do not discount the ongoing role of climate change, but instead suggest we should be most concerned about where it overlaps with human impact,” said Balch. “Climate change is making our fields, forests and grasslands drier and hotter for longer periods, creating a greater window of opportunity for human-related ignitions to start wildfires.”” Italics added
  3. “”Not all fire is bad, but humans are intentionally and unintentionally adding ignitions to the landscape in areas and seasons when natural ignitions are sparse,” … “We can’t easily control how dry fuels get, or lightning, but we do have some control over human started ignitions.””

Custer-Gallatin wins salvage logging lawsuit

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On Feb. 6, Judge Molloy in the Montana District Court upheld the Custer National Forest’s  use of the categorical exclusion applicable to projects not exceeding 250 acres for the Whitetail Salvage Project.  In Native Ecosystems Council v. Weldon he found that even though it was the third project in the area affected by the 2012 Ash Creek Fire, the record showed that it was not reasonably foreseeable when the 2013 and 2015 projects were planned, and so the agency had not illegally “segmented” the projects to keep the acreages below the threshold for using the CE.

The court also found that effects on black-backed woodpeckers would be minimal because “the combined area of the Whitetail, Phoenix, and roadside hazard projects affect less than 2% of the highly suitable black-backed woodpecker habitat within the 90-kilometer cumulative effects area,” and “Abundant nesting and foraging habitat for black-backed woodpeckers will remain in the project area and cumulative effects area.”  This level of effects did not require an EA.  Plaintiffs had based much of their case on declarations they submitted by Chad Hanson.  However, the court refused to consider the declarations because documents that “challenge the underlying science and data used by the agency” can’t be submitted outside of the administrative record (meaning they should have been submitted to the agency prior to the project decision).  The judge found compliance with the 2012 Planning Rule requirement for using the best available scientific information for the woodpeckers (which is odd because the Planning Rule is not supposed to apply to projects).

The court also found that the project is consistent with the forest plan.  The project is in a wildlife management area, but the plan had selected mule deer for emphasis in this area, and it was proper under the forest plan for the Forest Service to balance the needs of black-backed woodpeckers and other species in determining to conduct the salvage harvest.

Resilient forests require change in “default” response to fire

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Here is the key conclusion in an article published by the Ecological Society of America (the article specifically addresses “dry forests”):

One of the most important and fundamental challenges to revising forest fire policy is the fact that agency organizations and decision making processes are not structured in ways to ensure that fire management is thoroughly considered in management decisions. There are insufficient bureaucratic or political incentives for agency leaders to manage for long-term forest resilience; thus, fire suppression continues to be the main management paradigm. Current resource-specific policies and procedures are so focused on individual concerns that they may be missing the fact that there are “endangered landscapes” that are threatened by changing climate and fire…. Without forest resilience, all other ecosystem components and values are not sustainable, at least over the long-term. It is therefore necessary to create incentives and agency structures that facilitate restoration of wildland fire and ecologically based fuel treatment to forest landscapes.

The authors have recognized the problem that fire planning is not well-integrated with planning for other resources on national forest lands.  A key recommendation is to, “Make forest resilience a stand-alone, top land management priority and connect it to managing long-term for endangered species.” It criticizes the continued emphasis on fire suppression, including the strategy of suppressing fires to protect at-risk species.   The article strangely omits any specific references to the 2012 Planning Rule’s ecological sustainability requirements, which I think has incorporated resilience, and its relationship to species diversity, as a policy about as well as we could expect. The question is what will forest plans actually do to avoid the alleged “tunnel vision.” The authors credit the southern Sierra revision forests as “pioneering some of these efforts.”

The authors do offer one recommendation that I think should receive more attention in the planning process: “analyze long-term impacts of continued suppression.” I would expand the recommendation to more clearly recognize that forest plans are the place where overall fire management strategies will be adopted, including identification of resources and areas deemed in need of protection from fire. Desired ecological conditions based in these needs must then be a consideration in fire management decisions, which must by law be consistent with the forest plan. Decisions in a forest plan about or affecting fire management, including those that promote fire suppression, will have effects on ecosystems that must be evaluated and disclosed during the planning process.

IN SEARCH OF COMMON GROUND

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It seems like an exercise in futility for the “New Century of Forest Planning” group to be discussing and cussing forest planning &/ policy when we haven’t even agreed to the scientific fundamentals that serve as the cornerstone and foundation for any such discussions.

Below, I have developed a tentative outline of the high level fundamentals which any Forest Plan or Policy must incorporate in order to have a reasonable chance of meeting the desired goals. Until we can come up with a version of these “Forestry Fundamentals” that we generally agree to, we are pushing on a rope and wasting each other’s time unless our objective here is simply to snap our suspenders and vent on each other.

In your comments, please note the outline Item that you are responding to. Maybe we can revise my initial effort and come to some common ground. In doing so we would perform a service and make a step forward that would be useful outside of this circle instead of just chasing our tails. Coming to such an agreement would be a step towards developing a priority hierarchy and eliminating the internal conflicts which make current federal forest policy and law ambiguous and self-contradictory. Until we reach common ground, the current obviously unworkable policies will continue to doom our forests to poor health and consequentially increase the risk of catastrophic loss of those forests and the species that depend on them for survival.

– FORESTRY FUNDAMENTALS – 1st Draft 12/15/16

ESTABLISHED SCIENCE WHICH MUST BE INCORPORATED IN PLANNING FOR

THE SUSTAINABILITY OF FOREST DEPENDENT SPECIES

I) The Fundamental Laws of Forest Science which have been repeatedly validated over time, location, and species. They include:
— A) plant physiology dictating the impact of competition on plant health,
— B) fire science dictating the physics of ignition and spread of fire and
— C) insects and pathogens and their propensity to target based on proximity and their probability of success being inversely proportional to the health of the target.

— D) Species suitability for a specific site is based on the interaction between the following items, those listed above and others not mentioned:

— — 1) hydrology, the underlying geology and availability of nutrients in the soil.

— — 2) latitude, longitude, elevation, aspect and adjacent geography.

— — 3) weather including local &/ global pattern changes.

 

II) The Fundamental Laws controlling the success of endangered, threatened and other species dependent on niche forest types (ecosystems):

— A) Nesting habitat availability.

— B) Foraging habitat availability.

— C) Competition management.

— D) Sustainability depends on maintaining a fairly uniform continuum of the necessary niches which, in turn, requires a balanced mix of age classes within each forest type to avoid species extinguishing gaps.

— E) Risk of catastrophic loss must be reduced where possible in order to minimize the chance of creating species extinguishing gaps in the stages of succession.

 

III) The role of Economics:

— A) Growing existing markets and developing new markets in order to provide revenue to more efficiently maintain healthy forests and thence their dependent species.

— B) Wise investment in the resources necessary to accomplish the goals.

— C) Efficient allocation of existing resources.

 

IV) The role of Forest Management:

— A) Convert the desires/goals of the controlling parties into objectives and thence into the actionable plans necessary to achieve the desired objectives.

— B) Properly execute the plans in accordance with the intent of: governing laws/regulations and best management practices considering any economies.

— C) Acquire independent third party audits and make adjustments in management practices where dictated in order to provide continuous improvement in the means used to achieve goals.

— D) Adjust plans as required by changes: in the goals, as required by the forces of nature and as indicated by on the ground results.

— E) Use GIS software to maintain the spatial and associated temporal data necessary for Scheduling software to find and project feasible alternatives and recommend the “best” alternative to meet the goals set by the controlling parties.

What did I miss, what is wrong, what is right, what would improve this list of Forest Fundamentals?