Fire and Fuels

New Age Forestry Project in California

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This is an example of what our thinning projects look like, when completed. As you can see, the stand is still well-stocked, and ladder fuels have been removed. You can also see that the stand will be resilient and that all the logging slash has been removed, as well. In looking closer, I’m not seeing any damaged trees, as well. Additionally, no large trees ( over 30″ dbh ) were cut, unless they could fall and hit the adjacent highway.

This logging was done during this season, and work is continuing in other units. The project is quite visual, being all along a major Sierra Nevada highway. We call this style of project “thinning from below”. Any thoughts?

Washington’s forests will lose stored carbon as area burned by wildfire increases

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this is a Forest Service photo, credit Tom Iraci.

Here’s the link and below is an excerpt:

A new study conducted by the U.S. Forest Service’s Pacific Northwest Research Station and the Climate Impacts Group at the University of Washington has found that, by 2040, parts of Washington State could lose as much as a third of their carbon stores, as an increasing area of the state’s forests is projected to be burned by wildfire. The study—published in the July 2012 issue of the journal Ecological Applications—is the first to use statistical models and publicly available Forest Inventory and Analysis data to estimate the effects of a warming climate on carbon storage and fluxes on Washington’s forests. “When considering the use of forests to store carbon, it will be critical to consider the increasing risk of wildfire,” said Crystal Raymond, a research biologist based at the station’s Pacific Wildland Fire Sciences Laboratory and lead author of the study. “Especially in the West, where climate-induced changes in fire are expected to be a key agent of change.” Trees remove and sequester carbon from the atmosphere, in the form of carbon dioxide, acting as important stores, or “sinks,” of carbon that help to offset its accumulation in the atmosphere. When trees and other woody material in the forest are burned by fire, they release carbon back to the atmosphere, mostly as carbon dioxide, where it may once again act as a greenhouse gas that promotes warming. This land-atmosphere exchange of carbon is increasingly of interest to land managers seeking ways to actively manage forests to store carbon and help mitigate greenhouse gases. To explore what effect climate-driven changes in wildfire might have on the ability of Washington’s forests to act as carbon sinks, Raymond and station research ecologist Don McKenzie used a novel approach. They combined published forest-inventory data, fire-history data, and statistical models of area burned to estimate historical and future carbon carrying capacity of three regions in Washington—the Western Cascades, the Eastern Cascades, and the Okanogan Highlands—based on potential forest productivity and projections of 21st century area burned. Ads by Google EHR Software Demo – Watch the EHR Demo Online Now Meaningful Use with Ease of Use! – AdvancedMD.com/Elec-Health-Record “Forests on both the eastern and western slopes of the Cascade Range will lose carbon stored in live biomass because area burned across the state is expected to increase,” Raymond said. “Even small increases in area burned can have large consequences for carbon stored in living and dead biomass.” The researchers looked at live biomass, which includes living trees and vegetation, as well as nonliving biomass in the form of coarse woody debris, which includes dead standing trees and downed logs. Both contribute to the carbon cycle, but in different ways—living biomass removes carbon from the atmosphere as vegetation grows, and coarse woody debris releases carbon over time as the material decomposes. Raymond and McKenzie projected forests of the Western Cascades to be most sensitive to climate-driven increases in fire, losing anywhere from 24 to 37 percent of their live biomass and from 15 to 25 percent of their coarse woody debris biomass by 2040. These forests store significant carbon and typically burn with high severity, killing many trees and consuming coarse woody debris. On the other side of the mountains, the researchers also projected a decrease in live biomass by 2040—of anywhere between 17 and 26 percent in the Eastern Cascades and in the Okanogan Highlands—but no change in coarse woody debris biomass, or possibly even an increase, because coarse woody debris biomass increases as trees are killed by fire and subsequent low-severity fires burn only a small portion of it. “Changes in fire regimes in a warming climate can limit our potential to use forests in the Pacific Northwest to store additional carbon and to reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide,” Raymond said. Understanding the possible effects of more area burned by fire can help managers decide whether forests need to be actively managed for their fire potential to minimize carbon loss. More information: To read more about the study, visit www.esajournals.org/doi/abs/10.1890/11-1851.1

from the summary…

Carbon sequestration in PNW forests will be highly sensitive to increases in fire, suggesting a cautious approach to managing these forests for C sequestration to mitigate anthropogenic CO2 emissions.

Read More: http://www.esajournals.org/doi/abs/10.1890/11-1851.1
Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2012-07-washington-forests-carbon-area-wildfire.html#jCp

Oregon Field Guide: Biscuit Fire 10 Years Later

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The most recent episode of Oregon Field Guide, produced by Oregon Public Broadcasting, takes a look at southwestern Oregon’s Biscuit Fire 10 years after the 2002 wildfire.  You can watch the ten minute program here and then offer your thoughts in the comments section.

Bernard Bormann, with the Pacific Northwest Research station, had been studying the forests’ of the Siskiyou mountains for years. When the 500,000 acre Biscuit fire burned through his research plots, he first thought all was lost. But in the 10 years since the fire, he’s been able to compare life before and after fire to reveal an amazing amount of new information about how life returns to the forest after fire.

Dousing the Claims: Extinguishing Republican Myths about Wildfire

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Democrats on the House Resources Committee released a new report on Tuesday.  Phil Taylor, a reporter with E&E, has a story out about the report and subsequent hearing.  Unfortunately, E&E doesn’t have a free link to the entire story, so some snips from the story are below.

Environmental groups over the past three years have appealed less than 5 percent of projects on federal lands designed to reduce the threat of catastrophic wildfire, and, of those, less than one out of five involved endangered species issues, according to a new report from Democrats on the House Natural Resources Committee….

“Environmental laws, land management agencies, litigation, endangered species and even immigrants share the Republican blame for this year’s devastating wildfires,” Markey said. “These accusations are just a smokescreen.”

Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management data obtained by committee Democrats seemed to back up his claim.

Out of 8,000 fuel reduction projects in federal forests over the last three, less than 1 percent of all of the work was affected by appeals, according to the Democrats’ report. Endangered Species Act challenges affected less than 0.05 percent of all hazardous fuels work on roughly 10 million acres of land, the report found.

“This report shows that political fact-checkers should create a new category called ‘pants on wildfire’ for the ill-informed Republican myths on forest fire prevention,” Markey said. “When climate change is baking the country in drought and actually increasing the risks of catastrophic wildfires, these half-baked ideas from Republicans do a disservice to the people who have suffered from wildfires.”….

Democrats said the findings are consistent with a Government Accountability Office report in 2010 that found less than 20 percent of the 1,191 fuel reduction projects on about 9 million acres from 2006 to 2008 were appealed. About 2 percent of all fuel reduction projects were litigated and those involved about 124,000 acres, the report says.

 

Bioenergy Markets, Fuel Treatments and EESI

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A reader sent in this link to an EESI report.Here’s a link, and below is an excerpt.

In a similar story in its June 27 edition, the Los Angeles Times reported on an interview with forestry expert Peter Fule of Northern Arizona University. “Firefighting technology has meant fewer fires. Fuel to feed massive blazes has built up. And, Fulé said, climate change has brought warming conditions over the last couple of decades — meaning longer fire seasons, starting early in the spring and extending late into the fall. Even if rain and snow mounts
remain the same, he said, warmer temperatures mean more evaporation, drying out the landscape. Individual drought years increase the risk of huge fires.”

Better forest management could help prevent and reduce such conflagrations in the future and make forests healthier and more resilient in the face of a changing climate. But federal and state forest management budgets are already stretched too thin. Steven Running says: “The single biggest factor is keeping forests thinned out, and dead trees removed. I really wish we had a forest bio-energy industry to use all this forest biomass and pay for the work by buying the material.”

The U.S. Forest Service (USFS) Four Forests Restoration Initiative in central Arizona may provide a model for intergovernmental and public/private partnerships to help restore forest health and reduce the risk of intensely destructive wildfires. This multi-year project is one of ten demonstration projects in the federal Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Program. According to the USFS web site, “The overall goal of the four-forest effort is to create landscape-scale restoration approaches that will provide for fuels reduction, forest health, and wildlife and plant diversity. A key objective is doing this while creating sustainable ecosystems in the long term. Appropriately-scaled businesses will likely play a key role in the effort by harvesting, processing, and selling wood products. This will reduce treatment costs and provide restoration-based work opportunities that will create good jobs.”

Another example of collaborative ecosystem management is occurring in the Flathead National Forest in Montana. This project is also supported through the federal Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Program. See this recent news story from the Missoulian on how diverse stakeholders came together to develop and implement this landscape management plan.

Forest fuel reduction activities have already generated positive results in terms of reducing the intensity of wildfires and protecting property. See this recent report from USFS, How Fuel Treatments Saved Homes from the 2011 Wallow Fire in Arizona. Will forest thinning and fuel reduction increase greenhouse gas emissions? Research has
shown that forest fuel reduction efforts can result in a net reduction in greenhouse gas emissions and provide other environmental benefits compared to business as usual (namely unmanaged, over-stocked forests with intense wildfires) when the woody materials that are removed are used for building materials, other wood products, and bioenergy. See for
example the October/November 2011 special edition of the Journal of Forestry, entitled “Managing Forests Because Carbon Matters: Integrating Energy, Products, and Land Management Policy”. Section 2 on “Forest Carbon Stocks and Flows” surveys the recent literature on carbon accounting for various forest management approaches.

More, intense, highly destructive forest fires need not be the future of the American west. The federal government has a critical role to play both in managing its forests better and in building successful collaborations among diverse stakeholders on the ground to help restore resilient and healthy ecosystems across public and private lands. Allowing and encouraging the development of local biomass energy markets can be an important part of this. By creating economic value for fuel reduction and restoration activities, more forest acreage can be treated and scarce public dollars can be conserved for other purposes. This could be a win-win for public safety, public lands, climate change mitigation and adaptation, ecosystem health, local economies, and local and regional energy security.
Congress could help. In addition to sustaining investments in public and private forest health initiatives, reauthorizing and funding the Forest Biomass for Energy Program (which would provide competitive grants for research and development on the use of low-value forest biomass for energy, among other priorities) and the Community Wood Energy
Program (which would provide grants to state and local governments to develop community wood energy plans and systems) would be a step in the right direction. The House version of the Farm Bill (see Title IX in this summary), which is scheduled to be marked up by the Committee on Agriculture July 11, would repeal the Forest Biomass for Energy Program and reduce funding for the Community Wood Energy Program from $5 million per year to $2 million per year.

So who is EESI? Do they have an axe to grind (so to speak ;))? They don’t appear to be any of the usual suspects…here’s the Board of Directors. Here are their funders.
Here’s a link to their forest initiative.

WSJ analysis: 80% of wood-burning biomass plants generate violations

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Today’s Wall Street Journal includes this very detailed article, from Justin Scheck and IantheJeanne Dugan, about wood-burning biomass plants in the United States.
…biomass plants nationwide [have] together have received at least $700 million in federal and state green-energy subsidies since 2009, a calculation by The Wall Street Journal shows.

Yet of 107 U.S. biomass plants that the Journal could confirm were operating at the start of this year, the Journal analysis shows that 85 have been cited by state or federal regulators for violating air-pollution or water-pollution standards at some time during the past five years, including minor infractions.

Historical Vegetation Ecologists Duke it Out: Does It Matter?

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This Tuesday, June 26, 2012 photo provided by the U.S. Forest Service shows the Fontenelle Fire burning in the Bridger-Teton National Forest, Wyo.

I saw this study a couple of days ago but didn’t have time to do it justice. However a thoughtful reader suggested it so here goes..
Here’s a link to the AP story. Below are some excerpts:

Researchers at the University of Wyoming studied historical fire patterns across millions of acres of dry Western forests. Their findings challenge the current operating protocol of the U.S. Forest Service and other agencies that today’s fires are burning hotter and more frequently than in the past.

Combing through 13,000 firsthand descriptions of forests and retracing steps covering more than 250 miles in three states, where teams of government land surveyors first set out in the mid-1800s to map the nation’s wild lands, the researchers said they found evidence forests then were much denser than previously believed.

“More highly intense fire is not occurring now than historically in dry forests,” said William Baker, who teaches fire ecology and landscape ecology in Laramie, Wyo., where he’s been doing research more than 20 years. “These forests were much more diverse and experienced a much wider mixture of fire than we thought in the past, including substantial amounts of high-severity fire.”

If he’s right, he and others say it means fuel-reduction programs aimed at removing trees and shrubs in the name of easing fire threats are creating artificial conditions that likely make dry forests less resilient.

“It means we need to rethink our management of Western dry forests,” said Baker, a member of a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service working group that is developing plans to help bolster northern spotted owl populations in dry forests.

Baker’s conclusions have drawn sharp criticism from other longtime researchers who believe that decades of fire suppression have led to more densely tangled forests and more intense fires, the position advanced by the Forest Service.

“I have yet to hear any knowledgeable forest or fire ecologist or forest manager say they are convinced by the main interpretations in that (Wyoming) paper,” said Thomas Swetnam, a professor of dendrochronology and director of the Laboratory of Tree Ring Research at the University of Arizona. “I doubt it will gain much traction in the scientific or management communities.”

And..

Williams said the Wyoming studies have significant implications for wildlife that depends on post-fire habitat, such as the black-backed woodpecker, which has survived for millions of years by eating beetle larvae in burned trees.

Four conservation groups filed a petition with the U.S. Interior Department in May seeking Endangered Species Act protection for the bird in the Sierra Nevada, Oregon’s Eastern Cascades and the Black Hills of eastern Wyoming and western South Dakota.

The new studies provide the first “real, direct data'” showing that more forests burned historically, creating more post-fire forest habitat, said Chad Hanson, a forest ecologist and director of the John Muir Project who is helping lead the listing effort and suing the Forest Service to block post-fire logging in woodpecker habitat near Lake Tahoe.

“It indicates the woodpeckers had more habitat historically than they do now,'” Hanson said.

Note from Sharon: A couple of points

1. OK, so I have worked in central Oregon, the Sierra, and Colorado and Wyoming. I don’t think I would use data from one to make judgments about the other. In fact, the Blue Mountains were very different from the east side of the Cascades. Yes they all have “ponderosa pine” but to me that says more about the wondrousness and adaptability of PPine than it says about any similarity of environment. Just look at their co-trees in the overstory and the understory.

2. If climate change means more and larger fires (can’t remember if the researchers who said this also said said “more intense”) what relevance does the historical data possess? Are the authors saying that we should manage to keep fires smaller than we might expect given the climate change future, or should we manage for more acres than the fire suppression past? What is the goal for the amount of post-fire habitat (same as what, 900 AD? 1560?). Or perhaps more habitat than the past for the woodpecker is OK to woodpecker watchers, but what if that’s less habitat for everything else?

3. My favorite leap in this article is :

If he’s right, he and others say it means fuel-reduction programs aimed at removing trees and shrubs in the name of easing fire threats are creating artificial conditions that likely make dry forests less resilient.

“It means we need to rethink our management of Western dry forests,” said Baker, a member of a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service working group that is developing plans to help bolster northern spotted owl populations in dry forests.

Unless you assume that historical data are “what we should manage for” why would thinning make a forest “less resilient”? Is there a proposed specific mechanism for that “less resilience”? We know that trees grow more slowly and lose vigor when they are dense and droughts occur. Are they saying that if fuel treatments are deemed to be “unnatural” then we shouldn’t do them? It’s all very confusing.

Then there’s

Now, he believes thinning and post-fire salvage operations should be re-examined and emphasis placed on maintaining high-density stands in certain circumstances that would not threaten people or homes.

“We shouldn’t be managing just for low-density forests,” he said. “We should not be unhappy with — or perhaps even manage for — higher severity fires in the forests.”

Are these folks aware that most stands are (and have to be, it costs money to manage) things left alone? This goes back to Derek’s percentage of acres in treatment question.. if we are treating <5%, isn't 95% managed that way enough? Further, it is an odd world where there is plenty of bucks to go back and examine conditions two hundred years ago, but there doesn't seem to be any to answer Derek's question.

Just because high severity fires occurred in the past, doesn't seem to me that we would necessarily "manage for them" in the future, as they can have negative impacts to soils.

I guess I’m with Wally on this one..

Wallace Covington, the director of the Ecological Restoration Institute at Northern Arizona University, takes no issue with the Wyoming duo’s data collection or statistical analysis but said some of Baker’s conclusions don’t follow from his data. Covington first testified before Congress in 2002 about the urgent need to thin forests to guard against catastrophic wildfires and insists it’s still necessary.

The Impact of Catastrophic Forest Fires and Litigation on People and Endangered Species: Time for Rational Management of our Nation’s Forests

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Thanks to Bob Berwyn for finding this in time for some of us to watch..here’s the link to the site.. they may post the video later.

Observing this, I think we need to move beyond partisan blathering, snarkiness and grandstanding to do good public policy. I’m simply embarrassed by our elected leadership on both sides. There really is middle and common ground- but the 4FRI people spent the time to figure it out. It looks like all national pols want to do is use the latest public problem to bash the “other side,” in my opinion simply defaulting on their true responsibilities as elected officials.

PS I can’t believe they asked Joe Romm to talk about climate bark beetles, forest and wildfire. If you follow the climate debates, you might want to check on some of what he says and of course, how careful he is about what he says. Here’s a link to one debate. We have people who actually spend their lives studying these things..I don’t agree always agree with their perspectives (and they disagree with each other), but at least they are studying our situation here.

What we should agree to do about the situation we’re in is a different question than what caused it..we may never know the percentage of the situation caused by fire suppression, non climate change droughts, and climate change. Markey seems to be arguing that westerners should not be concerned about what’s happening in their backyards, and how that is influenced by federal land policy, because other people have problems also..???

Joe Romm and applied silviculture assessments in HFRA in the same hearing… Gaia must be smiling somewhere at our antics!
Mary Wagner is a class act, IMHO.

Just wanted to point out that Massachusetts got $41.5 million in 2010 to deal with Asian Longhorned Beetle, which I believe was more than the new money all of Region 2 (Wyoming, Colorado, S. Dakota, Nebraska) received to deal with bark beetle. Here’s the link. But perhaps ALB is not affected by climate change, so that’s OK.

Praise the Dead: The Ecological Value of Dead Trees

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The following is a guest post from George Wuerthner. 

Dead. Death. These are words that we don’t often use to describe anything positive.  We hear phases like the walking dead. Death warmed over. Nothing is certain but death and taxes. The Grateful Dead. These are words that do not engender smiles, except among Grateful Dead fans.  We bring these pejorative perspectives to our thinking about forests. In particular, some tend to view dead trees as a missed opportunity to make lumber. But this really represents an economic value, not a biological value.

From an ecological perspective dead trees are the biological capital critical to the long-term health of the forest ecosystem.  It may seem counter-intuitive, but in many ways the health of a forest is measured more by its dead trees than live ones. Dead trees are a necessary component of present forests and an investment in the future forest.

I had a good lesson in the value of dead trees last summer while hiking in Yellowstone. I was walking along a trail that passes through a forest dominated by even-aged lodgepole pine. Judging by the size of the trees, I would estimate the forest stand had its start in a stand-replacement blaze, perhaps 60-70 years before.  Strewn along the forest floor were numerous large logs that had fallen since the last fire. Fallen logs are an important home for forest-dwelling ants. Pull apart any of those old pulpy rotted logs and you would find them loaded with ants.  Nearly every log I pass along the trail had been clawed apart by a grizzly feasting on ants. It may be difficult to believe that something as small as ants could feed an animal as large as a grizzly.  Yet one study in British Columbia found that ants were a major part of the grizzly’s diet in summer, especially in years when berry crop fails.

Who could have foreseen immediately after the forest had burned 60 years before that the dead trees created by the wildfire would someday be feeding grizzly bears? But dead trees are a biological legacy passed on to the next generation of forest dwellers including future generations of ants and grizzly bears.

Dead trees have many other important roles to play in the forest ecosystem. It is obvious to many people that woodpeckers depend on dead trees for food and shelter. In fact, black-backed woodpeckers absolutely require forests that have burned.  Yet woodpeckers are just the tip of the iceberg so to speak. In total 45% of all bird species depend on dead trees for some important part of their life cycle.  Whether it’s the wood duck that nests in a tree cavity; the eagle that constructs a nest in a broken top snag; or the nuthatch that forages for insects on the bark, dead trees and birds go together like peanut butter and jelly.  Birds aren’t the only animals that depend on dead trees. Many bats roost in the flaky bark of old dead snags and/or in cavities.

When a dead tree falls to the ground, the trunk is important habitat for many mammal species. For instance, one study in Wyoming found that without big dead trees, you don’t have marten. Why?  Marten are thin animals and as a consequence lose a lot of heat to the environment, especially when it’s cold. They can’t survive extended periods with temperatures below freezing without some shelter. In frigid weather, marten dig out burrows in the pulpy interiors of large fallen trees to provide thermal protection. They may only need such trees once a winter, but if there are no dead fallen trees in its territory, there may not be any marten.

Many amphibians depend on dead trees. Several studies have documented the close association between abundance of dead fallen logs and salamanders. Eliminate dead trees by logging and you eliminate salamanders.  Even fish depend on dead trees. As any fisherman can tell you, a log sticking out into the water is a sure place to find a trout lying in wait to grab insects.  If you talk to fish biologists they will tell you there is no amount of fallen woody debris or logs in a stream that is too much. The more logs, the more fish.

Even lichens and fungi are dependent on dead trees. Some 40% of all lichen species in the Pacific Northwest are dependent on dead trees and many are dead tree obligates, meaning they don’t grow anyplace else.

Dead trees fill other physical roles as well. As long as they are standing, they create “snow fences” that slows wind-driven snow. The snow that is trapped, melts in place, and helps to saturate the ground providing additional moisture to regrowing trees.  Dead trees that fall into streams stabilize and armor the bank, slowing water, and reducing erosion.  Dead trees create hiding cover and thermal cover for big game as well.

I was once on a tour with a Forest Service District Ranger who wanted to conduct a post fire logging operation. We were standing near the open barren landscape of a recent clearcut that was adjacent to the newly burnt forest.  I pointed out to him that the black snags still had value. He couldn’t see anything but snags waiting to be turned into lumber. I said the snags were still valuable for big game hiding cover. He dismissed my idea out of hand.  So I challenged him. I said I have a rifle and you have two minutes to get away from me. Where are you going to run? He didn’t have to ponder the point very long.

Even more counter-intuitive is that dead trees may reduce fire hazard. Once the small twigs and needles fall off in winter storms their flammability is greatly reduced.  By contrast, green trees, due to the flammable resins contained in their needles and bark, are actually more likely to burn than snags under conditions of extreme drought, high winds and low humidity. Under such extreme fire-weather conditions, I have seen trees like subalpine fir explode into flame as if they contained gasoline.  Fine fuels are what drive fires, not large tree trunks. Anyone who has fiddled around trying to get campfire going knows you gather small twigs, and fine fuels. You don’t try light a twenty inch log on fire.

Dead trees are the biological capital for the forest. Just as floods rejuvenate the river floodplain’s plant communities with periodic deposits of sediment, episodic events like major beetle kill and wildfire are the only way a forest can recruit the massive amounts of dead wood required for a healthy forest ecosystem.  Such infrequent, but periodic events may provide the bulk of a forest’s dead wood for a hundred years or more.

All of the above benefits of dead trees are reduced or eliminated by our common forest management practices.  Sanitizing a forest by “thinning” to promote so-called “forest health”, post-fire logging of burnt trees , or removal of beetle-killed tree bankrupts the forest ecosystem.  And even our mostly ineffective efforts to suppress wildfires and/or feeble attempts to halt beetle-kill reduce the future production of dead wood and leads to biological impoverishment of the forest ecosystem.  Creation and recruitment of dead trees is not a loss, rather it is an investment in future forests.

If you love birds, you have to love dead trees. If you love fishing, you have to love dead trees. If you want grizzlies to persist for another hundred years, you have to love dead trees.
More importantly you have to love or at least tolerate the ecological processes like beetle-kill or wildfire. These are the major factors that contribute dead trees to the forest.

So when you see fire-blackened trees or the red needles associated with a beetle kill, try to view these events in a different light-praise the dead: the forests, the wildlife, the fish– all will be pleased by your change of heart.

Wilkinson on 4FRI

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I thought it was interesting that High Country News published this piece, by Charles Wilkinson, a law professor at University of Colorado. Here’s a link to his bio. Historical note: yes, the same person who was on the Committee of “Scientists” for the 2000 Planning Rule, so he’s been following these issues for some time.

Below is an excerpt of the piece. You can also find it at here at the Summit Daily News (thanks, Bob Berwyn) and other papers where Writers on the Range is syndicated. Because HCN and the syndication reach many readers who are not following this issue, I think it’s important to take a look at what Wilkinson says- what most people (outside the area) will read about what’s going on. The stakes are high for a landscape scale collaboration, so it is interesting to follow this, even for those of us far removed. What is interesting to me is the continuing story/question that the FS is screwing up with its choice of contractor, or about to screw up (before the EIS is released..??). Do people really think that the FS would go back on the general agreements that they worked so hard, for so many years, to get?? Or is this about something else entirely?

This blog is one of the few places that we could actually have this discussion with the details and knowledgeable people involved, so I am hoping when the EIS comes out we can track it here. Also, I think it’s the proposed action we’re interested in and not the EIS, but I guess I’m being pedantic again. I like to keep those separate in my head because I think it helps clarity.

We have discussed the 4FRI selection of contractor before here on this blog. including here, here and here.

The first link discusses the FS reasons for selecting the contractor. Like I said in that post, there is plenty of wood around the SW and Interior West, if folks have a good business plan maybe they could take it and develop 4FRI II elsewhere?

But a red flag has gone up: On May 18, the Forest Service announced its choice of contractor for the 4FRI process — Pioneer Associates, whose representative for the project just recently worked for the Forest Service. This was the largest stewardship contract awarded in the agency’s history, and yet the agency bypassed the contractor most deeply involved in 4FRI, the one whose business plan was closely tied to the project’s unique provisions.

Several 4FRI organizations have strongly criticized the choice of Pioneer Associates, citing the inadequacy of its business plan. The Eastern Arizona Counties Organization, for example, detailed “glaring deficiencies” in Pioneer’s bid and concluded that the award was “not based on either economic or ecological merit.” What’s troubling to many observers is that the choice of contractor may indicate that traditional attitudes are tearing away at the agency’s support of 4FRI.

The Forest Service, with its long and rich history, has run into trouble with the public and Congress in modern times over two main issues: Its timber harvests for far too long were set way too high, and far too often the agency insisted on doing things its own way. This approach — “we are the experts” — persisted in spite of contrary public opinion.

Both problems have been alleviated over the past decade or so. The timber cut is way down. The Forest Service now touts its commitment to collaboration with citizen groups, an approach that is widely agreed to be preferable to litigation and top-down, federal decision-making.

Doubters in Arizona, however, see the recent selection of Pioneer Associates as a bad sign. Tommie Cline Martin, a Gila County supervisor, predicts that, given the chosen contractor, the Forest Service will follow the same path as in the past, and that means “cutting big trees before getting to the small stuff, which is the threat to our remaining sickly forests.”

In the next few months, the Forest Service will face a major test on 4FRI, perhaps the agency’s most ambitious and carefully prepared collaboration effort. The regional office in Albuquerque will release — probably in July or August — the draft environmental impact statement for the collaborative effort. Does the choice of contractor suggest a lesser Forest Service commitment to 4FRI? Will the draft EIS weaken 4FRI’s environmental safeguards?

An immediate sign of trouble ahead is the news that Pioneer failed to include in its bid any funding for the regular monitoring of restoration efforts, an essential activity for good public land management. Will the draft EIS insist upon monitoring that will meet the standard set by the collaborative effort? Another hallmark of 4FRI’s approach is its commitment to thinning small-diameter trees because they, and not the large-growth trees, constitute the fire hazard. Will the draft EIS continue that emphasis?