The Sequoia suffers from many blockades to sensible forest management and protection. With the only mill within more than 100 miles away, teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, and being hamstrung by unreasonable diameters limits for harvestable timber, as well as having the Giant Sequoia National Monument to manage, they face a very long uphill battle to update their 24 year old Forest Plan.
Also opposing them is the Sierra Club, who continue to portray the Forest Service as loggers of ancient Giant Sequoias. They wish that all 300,000+ acres of the Giant Sequoia National Monument be free of all logging projects, despite there being only about 10,000 acres of already protected Giant Sequoia groves within the Monument. The McNally Fire nearly killed the world’s second largest tree, when it was allowed to burn for weeks. The Sierra Club is quite happy to let their followers think that the Forest Service will cut the sequoias down, and that clearcuts and the cutting of big trees will happen. The Sierra Club wants the Monument to be “un-managed”, just like the adjacent Sequoia National Park. They also don’t realize that the Park Service doesn’t follow the same rules on prescribed fires that the Forest Service does. You cannot solely use prescribed fires to manage the fuels build-ups of 80 years, on hundreds of thousands of acres. Besides, the California Board of Air Resources don’t have enough burn days, when prescribed fires would be “in prescription”. The Park Service is well known for losing their management fires, which can be set during high temperatures and dry conditions.
This may be one of the most contentious new Forest Plans under the new Planning Rule. I wonder how much it will change when the only lumber mill in southern California goes bankrupt.
This is an example of a “protected” nesting site for a northern spotted owl. It was never logged and will not be habitat for many decades, especially if a reburn occurs. It sure doesn’t look “natural and beneficial”, to me, OR the owls and goshawks.
Here are the kind of snags (the large orange-marked one) that were selected to be “saved”, within Biscuit cutting units. Of course, only 4% of the 500,000 acres of the Biscuit were salvaged, so there certainly is no lack of snags in the huge burn.
Here is a cutting unit where mortality was close to 100%, in unlogged old growth. Instead of thinning a green stand, we ended up “thinning” snags.
Here is some erosion, in a small gully. I wonder what the “cumulative impacts” of hundreds of similar gullies have upon salmon populations, and other aquatic organisms. Surely, some of these gullies experienced accelerated erosion in the 5+ years since I took this picture.
Steve Gage used to worry about his firefighters getting burned. Now the Type I incident commander wonders if they’ll be clubbed to death before they ever reach a forest fire.
The threat comes from the tiny mountain pine beetle, only not in the way most people think. Beetle-killed trees have undermined decades of fire behavior research – because before they burn, dead trees may silently topple. And an unburned falling tree will kill you just as surely as a burning one.
“Now my big concern is how do we approach the thing,” Gage said. “How do we get people into a fire that’s in the middle of beetle-kill safely? Hike them in? Fly them, or put heavy equipment in front of them? And if we can’t get people in safely, how do we engage when the fire comes out?”
Gage has spent 42 years fighting fire. In the last two or three years, he’s seen things that drain away the confidence he’s placed in his tactical handbooks. The reports from 2011’s Saddle and Salt fires in the southern Bitterroot Mountains told of beetle-killed stands on flat ground burning as if they were on steep hillsides or high winds. Colorado forests have seen more than 60 trees a minute blow down in winds of less than 15 mph.
“We’re always thinking about what-if?” Gage said. “If we’ve got an 80 percent chance of success, what does 20 percent failure look like?”
*****
The impact of mountain pine beetles looks very different for environmentalists like Matthew Koehler of the Wild West Institute. Koehler recently circulated a February 2012 Fire Science Digest report on bark beetles, highlighting the following summary:
“Are the beetles setting the stage for larger, more severe wildfires? And are fires bringing on beetle epidemics? Contrary to popular opinion, the answer to both questions seems to be ‘no.’ ”
“We feel as if a lot of the conventional wisdom about bark beetles and wildfire is incorrect,” Koehler said. “The latest science and research coming out seems to support the notion wildfire and beetles are critically important to forest health. We would encourage forest managers and politicians to embrace these natural processes, instead of fear-based rhetoric that leads to justification for more logging or road-building or resource development.”
One of the biggest recent timber sales on the Helena National Forest involves creating a 300-foot safety zone along most secondary roads through Forest Service lands. That sale was predicated on the risk of beetle-killed trees burning or falling on the roads more than on its potential timber value.
Koehler said he understood the reasoning behind clearing trees that threaten campgrounds at Georgetown Lake. But he worried the same reasoning might be used for backcountry logging where the beetle-kill might provide improved wildlife habitat.
Whether the question is tactical – how best to deploy a Hot Shot crew on a fire front? – or managerial (how to justify a timber sale), the mountain pine beetle has chewed its way through mounds of what we used to call normal.
“When people look across a landscape like Lookout Pass and see a lot of red needles, they think they’re looking at a tinderbox,” said fire ecologist Robert Keane at the Missoula Fire Science Laboratory.
*****
The factors he sees defy such simple assumptions.
Current research on beetle-killed trees depends a lot on time and space. Time-wise, it appears a lodgepole pine burns easier within three years of death by pine beetles – when its needles are still green or have turned red – than a live lodgepole. But it’s very hard to tell a dead-but-green “fader” tree from a live one, until it burns.
And Keane said dead trees with needles, regardless of color, appear to burst into dangerous crown fires much easier than live stands. And while firefighters used to simply measure the moisture content of dry wood to determine how fast it could catch fire, it turns out chemical factors like sugars are even more important.
Once the needles fall, after four or five years, the crown-fire hazard falls too. Except that around eight years after death, those “gray ghosts” start toppling. That’s the new problem incident commanders like Gage worry about. And it’s not just trees falling on firefighter’s heads. It’s the difference between having one ton of dry needles per acre on the ground or 100 tons of dry firewood.
“The issue is resistance to control.” Gage said. “When you have a lot of fuel on the ground, it’s like having many logs in your fireplace instead of one. It puts out more heat on the ground. It exponentially adds to the number of people you need. It takes more water. You need more saws to clear paths. It changes where you can put your safety zones.”
Space-wise, the question is where? Keane said a lot of research in fire behavior in Yellowstone National Park doesn’t apply elsewhere, because almost no other place has Yellowstone’s combination of high altitude and volcanic soils.
And those toppling trees? Keane said in parts of British Columbia, foresters have found whole stands of beetle-kill that collapsed into pick-up sticks just three years after infestation. You can’t cut and paste a study in one part of the Rocky Mountains to another and expect identical results.
Once the needles have fallen, sunlight and rain can foster low-growing shrubs. In some places, that provides new ladder fuels which can ignite the dead trees. In others, the moist shrubs lower the chance of a fire getting going.
Fire Sciences Laboratory program manager Colin Hardy said pine beetles have upended whole shelves of assumptions his researchers have depended on for decades.
“The models everybody uses on an operational basis were developed in 1972,” Hardy said. “They were designed for firefighter safety and fire suppression of surface fires.”
Those models don’t account for crown fires, climate change, population changes, backcountry subdivisions – let alone mountain pine beetle infestations.
Current studies of beetle effects have been running for 15 years, and they may need 15 more to reveal conclusive answers. It’s like being asked how many ears of corn will come from the kernel you planted yesterday.
And that’s just the beetle questions involving lodgepole pine. Conditions are different for ponderosa pine, or for stands of spruce and Douglas fir infested with spruce budworm. Then there are the new developments in physics that may explain why fires react to different wind conditions or terrain features.
In the corner of Hardy’s conference room stands a refrigerator-sized box with a label that reads “Unisys ES-7000.” It’s a mainframe computer with a once-whopping 32 gigabytes of memory. When it was installed, it chewed through fire behavior models that used to take 38 days of computing in just 17 hours.
“Now our new Cray supercomputer is two orders of magnitude faster,” Hardy said. “It can run that model in about an hour. It’s still not enough.”
Fire Science - The devastation of our forest lands by the pine-bark beetle has subjected vast regions to increased risk of castastrophic wild fire, especially west of the Continental Divide. Geoloigic maps are used to assess soil characteristics that might affect post-fire debris flows and intense erosion. This photo shows the northern Williams Range Mountains where beetles have killed more than 80 percent of mature lodgepole pine over many square kilometers.
Note: you may agree or disagree with the caption to this photo; I just copied it from a USGS science site (Central Mineral and Environmental Resources Science Center)here.
My fire colleagues alerted me that posting of the our previous post here, with simply the introductory paragraph, could have led to the wrong impression of the current scientific thinking.
I think fire managers would like to know better how bark beetle killed or otherwise dead and dry
trees affect fire behavior. But I don;t think that historic vegetation ecology is going to tell folks that. It seems as if some people think that “science” can prove that fires are no different with dead trees, then we wouldn’t have to do fuel treatments. But that doesn’t make sense, since we still do fuel treatments with live trees. Is it about investing more in live tree fuels treatments?
Here is how I frame the question:
Should we, in the interior west, manage tree vegetation outside the WUI (assuming we have agreement in the WUI, some days I am not so sure) to provide possible fire lines, help in some way with suppression of large fires, or to protect other resources?
Framed that way, many more disciplines that fire behavior modeling or historic vegetation ecology might have something to say. Plus of course “should” is a normative (value), and not a science (empirical) question.
And let’s involve a couple of other disciplines right now: hydrologists and fish people don’t seem to be as sanguine about the effects of fire as some vegetation ecologists are; for example, this quote in the JFSP article (pg. 13).
Schnackenberg would like to see much more
operational burning on the Medicine Bow-Routt. “My
opinion as a hydrologist is, I would rather see all that
dead stuff burn right now. It’s standing, and if we wait
for it to fall there may be places where it will burn a
little hot, and you’ll get hydrophobic soils and erosion.
And if you have heavy fuel loads on the ground in 15
years and a fire comes, what happens to the hydrology
then?”
I do agree with the statement at the end of the JFSP piece:
That is a big “how.” And, as with most knotty
management problems, the science can guide, but it
cannot direct. Wildfires and bark beetles don’t lend
themselves to controlled studies, and the findings don’t
usually point to neat, out-of-the-box solutions.
More than that, even the most undisputed
ecological knowledge is inflected by political,
economic, and social considerations. A set of findings
like Simard’s, however accurate and useful in theory,
may or may not govern management response at the
level of stand, forest, or watershed. Any prescription
will also rely on other research and on-the-ground
experience, and any action will hinge on local
constraints and opportunities.
As JZ posted in his/her comments, I think this piece by Keeley in 2009 explains better why people seem to be partially confused just by the terminology.
In the same set of comments, Larry said:
Additionally, the fire folks don’t like to address the issues of re-burn, which often results in more actual damage than a fire burning in green lodgepole. The damages totaled up for fires burning in green trees often doesn’t include the probability of a re-burn. In dry forests, the remaining fuels from a fire just sit there, until the next inevitable fire incinerates everything in its path. Even fire-adapted species have their limits of fire survival.
I, too, have seen this; near Hells Canyon, burned area with jack-strawed dead lodgepole and lodgepole coming back through the dead trees, another burn of the jack-strawed dead, and the young lodgepole are toast, with few or no nearby seed trees.
But for those who just can’t help getting involved in the fires and bb’s debate, here is another paper that recently came out that specifically examines the areas of agreement and disagreement.
Here’s the abstract
Abstract:
Millions of trees killed by bark beetles in western North America have raised concerns about subsequent
wildfire, but studies have reported a range of conclusions, often seemingly contradictory, about effects on fuels and wildfire. In this study, we reviewed and synthesized the published literature on modifications to fuels and fire characteristics following beetle-caused tree mortality. We found 39 studies addressing this topic with a variety of methods including fuels measurements, fire behavior simulations, an experiment, and observations of fire occurrence, severity, or frequency. From these publications, we developed a conceptual framework describing expected changes of fuels and fire behavior. Some characteristics of fuels and fire are enhanced following outbreaks and others are unchanged or diminished, with time since outbreak a key factor influencing changes. We also quantified areas of higher and lower confidence in our framework based on the number of studies addressing a particular area as well as agreement among studies. The published literature agrees about responses in many conditions, including fuels measurements and changes in stands with longer times since outbreak, and so we assigned higher confidence to our conceptual framework for these conditions. Disagreement or gaps in knowledge exist in several conditions, particularly in early post outbreak phases and crown fire behavior responses, leading to low confidence in our framework in these areas and highlighting the need for future research. Our findings resolved some of the controversy about effects of bark beetles on fire through more specificity about time since outbreak and fuels or fire characteristic. Recognition of the type of study question was also important in resolving controversy: some publications assessed whether beetle-caused tree mortality caused differences relative to unattacked locations, whereas other publications assessed differences relative to other drivers of wildfire such as climate. However, some disagreement among studies remained. Given the large areas of recent bark beetle and wildfire disturbances and expected effects of climate change, land and fire managers need more confidence in key areas when making decisions about treatments to reduce future fire hazard and when fighting fires.
Here’s the paper. I do like the fact that they attempt to make sense out of the different studies and approaches, from a scientific point of view. But I am not so clear on the utility of any of it toward management or policy other than improving fire behavior models. Perhaps we could discuss this further here?
NICK WOLCOTT/CHRONICLE Now that an administrative appeal filed by conservation groups has been denied, the Bozeman Municipal Watershed Project, which calls for fuels reduction in the Hyalite and Bozeman Creek drainages, will move forward.
Thanks to Derek for this link.
Bozeman Municipal Watershed Project to move forward
CARLY FLANDRO, Chronicle Staff Writer | Posted: Tuesday, March 13, 2012 12:15 am
A controversial plan to thin part of the Gallatin National Forest south of Bozeman is set to move forward — for now, anyway.
The Bozeman Municipal Watershed Project calls for burning, harvesting and thinning 4,800 acres in the Hyalite and Bozeman Creek drainages. Those drainages supply more than 80 percent of the Bozeman area’s water, and thinning efforts there are intended to reduce the extent of any potential wildfires.
A severe wildfire could put so much sediment and ash in the creeks, officials have said, that intakes for the water utility could clog and the city could be cut off from its water.
“The city of Bozeman and the Gallatin National Forest remain committed to maintaining a high-quality, predictable water supply for Bozeman’s residents,” said Debbie Arkell, director of public services for the city of Bozeman.
A trio of conservation groups – Alliance for the Wild Rockies, Montana Ecosystem Defense Council and Native Ecosystems Council – had a number of concerns with the plan, including that it would harm habitat for wildlife species such as lynx and grizzly bears.
They presented their concerns via administrative appeal to Jane L. Cottrell, the region 1 deputy regional forester, who recently upheld the watershed plan.
“I find the forest supervisor has made a reasoned decision and has complied with all laws, regulations, and policy,” Cottrell wrote in a letter to Michael Garrity, executive director of Alliance for the Wild Rockies. “Your requested relief is denied.”
It was the third time conservation groups have challenged the proposal.
Garrity said the next step “would be to file a lawsuit in federal district court.” He said his organization will consult with its attorney about whether to take that action.
Thinning activities are anticipated to begin by late fall of 2012. Some of the fuels reduction will take place along road corridors to provide safer conditions for firefighters and the public and reduce the risk of wildfire spreading between national forest lands and private lands.
“The forest is looking forward to continuing to work with the city and the Bozeman community to implement this project,” said Lisa Stoeffler, Bozeman district ranger. “We are grateful for the continued community and partner support for this important project.”
Here’s the story..there’s even a video of brush piles burning there somewhere. My point being that this seems like strong evidence that fuel treatments are not excuses for “industrial logging” as sometimes portrayed. At least not all of them.
Forest crews may begin burning brush and debris piles next week when weather permits north of Banning, Beaumont, and near Oak Glen, a spokesman for the San Bernardino National Forest announced Friday.
The pile burning locations are:
Cal Fire Oak Glen Conservation Camp
Cherry Canyon Truck trail between Oak Glen camp and Mile High Ranch
West of Pisgah Peak along the 1S07 Pisgah Peak Road
Above Pilgrim Pines near the old helispot
Banning Bench at the top of Bluff Street
“The Forest Service has been working closely with the community, the Oak Glen Fire Safe Council and local agencies developing and implementing the Oak Glen/Banning Hazardous Fuel Reduction Project,” John Miller of the Forest Service in San Bernardino said in a statement.
“Over the spring and summer months, crews have been thinning and stacking piles of dense brush as part of the fuels reduction project,” Miller said. “Pile burning is now one of the tools planned for use as part of the project work underway in the community.”
Firefighters are planning to burn about 200 brush piles in the national forest near the Oak Glen community this spring as weather and conditions permit, Miller said.
“Burning of these brush piles needs to occur in order to further reduce the threat of wildfire to mountain communities,” Miller said. “Firefighters will remain on scene of burning piles as long as the piles have the potential to be active. If conditions change to make burning unfavorable or dangerous, burning will cease.”
The Oak Glen-Banning Hazardous Fuel Reduction Project will reduce fire risk to communities and improve forest health on national forest lands surrounding the communities of Yucaipa, Oak Glen, Banning, Forest Falls, and Mountain Home Village, forest officials said.
Fuel reduction and pile burning help decrease potential for high intensity, stand-replacing wildfires and the threat to nearby communities.
The project also increases firefighter safety in the area, and helps improve forest health, Miller said.
Creation of a system of fuel breaks are underway on the approximately 511-acre project area.
“This project began with the community based Fireshed meeting in April 2005 and is a great example of a collaborative partnership CALFIRE, the Oak Glen Fire Safe Council, Urban Conservation Corps and AmeriCorps and the community,” District Ranger Gabe Garcia said. “I want to thank everyone that has supported the project, and their understanding of the necessity to burn the slash and debris piles.”
If citizens see smoke in the air in the general vicinity of Oak Glen and would like to find out what is happening, they are asked to call the San Bernardino National Forest at (909) 382-2851 or visit the forest’s “alerts” page on the web at: www.fs.usda.gov/alerts/sbnf/alerts-notices.
Oak Glen/Banning Hazardous Fuel Reduction Project documents are available on-line at: data.ecosystem-management.org/nepaweb.
The 10,000-plus South Shore fuels project could begin in 2012. Photo/LTN file
An interesting thing that happens on this blog is that we get “into the weeds” or snags (?) of projects in different parts of the country, so we can compare the different approaches and concerns. We also have readers with on-the-ground experience in many of these areas. Thanks to Derek for submitting these articles about the South Shore Fuel Reduction in California. It’s interesting for a number of reasons, the size, the cost ($40 million), the ICW (Index of Comparative WUI-ness), and the fact it used the objection process. The three projects we are currently discussing are Colt Summit (Montana), Goose (Oregon) and now this one. In the past, we’ve examined a host of others.
10,000-acre thinning project may start in 2012 on S. Shore
Posted By admin On October 11, 2011
By Kathryn Reed
With parts of the forest near developed areas being in prime condition for a wildland fire much like in June 2007 when the Angora Fire consumed more than 3,000 acres, the U.S. Forest Service is ready to do something about that land.
Once the long-awaited South Shore Fuel Reduction and Healthy Forest Restoration Project gets under way – which could be next summer — 10,112 acres will be treated.
The 10,000-plus South Shore fuels project could begin in 2012. Photo/LTN file [1]
The 10,000-plus South Shore fuels project could begin in 2012. Photo/LTN file
Duncan Leao, U.S. Forest Service forester, calls the wildland urban interface (this is where the forest abuts development) on the South Shore one of the areas in the basin that most needs treatment.
“It’s important work to do. We don’t want another Angora Fire. The conditions we are looking at in many places on the South Shore are conditions we saw in Angora before the fire,” Leao told Lake Tahoe News.
It will take about four years to thin the trees, with another four years for follow-up treatments. In all, it is roughly estimated to cost $40 million. The U.S. Forest Service, mostly through the Southern Nevada Public Lands Management Act, has secured three-quarters of that figure.
Before a single branch is limbed or tree felled, comments on the project will be taken until Oct. 28 from anyone who submitted a comment when the environmental impact statement was first released. If anyone files an objection to the final EIS, it triggers a 30-day resolution period.
Ultimately it is up to the forest supervisor to sign off on the document, allowing the project to go forward.
Then comes the process to obtain the necessary permits. The one from the Lahontan Regional Water Quality Control Board is the biggie.
However, Lauri Kemper, No. 2 at the regional water board, said the draft of the permit has been on hold since February 2010. But it takes more than a signature to make it valid.
California Environmental Quality Act regs are what Lahontan is going by. Lahontan officials must certify the EIS addresses CEQA concerns.
The project will involve working in stream environmental zones – that’s a main sticking point for the water board. It doesn’t mean no permit; it means a thorough review and not just taking the Forest Service at its word that the EIS is complete and addresses those concerns.
“We’re all for fuels reduction,” Kemper said.
What could hold up the project is the Lahontan board may not grant a permit until its May meeting. The Forest Service cannot go out to bid until all the permits are in place. This could delay work in what is already a limited season for thinning because dirt in the basin, per TRPA rules, can only be disturbed between May 1-Oct. 15.
A combination of mechanical and hand treatments are likely to be used.
Whether hand thinning could begin without the Lahontan permit depends on what type of permit Lahontan decides to issue. There are three possible ways it can permit the project.
Trees 16-inches and less in diameter are likely to be felled by hand, while those up to 30 inches would be taken out by machines. Most likely the process will be similar to what is being done in the Angora area [2] in terms of the machines used. The forest pattern will be different because Angora is mostly about removing dead trees.
“A lot of hand work goes pretty quick. Then (people) would see piles. Those may last a couple years,” Leao explained. “With the mechanical you do not see as many piles because most of it is removed.”
Trails used by recreationists will either be off-limits at times or rerouted to ensure no one is hurt as the work is being done.
“It will be a combo of biomass and merchantable material — stuff that could go to a mill will depend if there is a mill nearby. The market is very difficult to predict,” Leao said. “If no sawmill is open, then contractors would have to determine what to do with that. It’s very helpful to have both biomass and saw log markets.”
The USFS decides which trees to thin first based on size – taking out the smallest at the get-go. Then the health of the tree and species are determining factors.
Jeffery and sugar pine, incense cedar and larger trees are ones Leao said the Forest Service wants to keep.
Diseased trees, including ones with mistletoe, will be on the chopping block.
“Ideally, you want a forest with multiple sizes and age classes. You can’t do that with thinning alone,” Leao said. “As we get the WUI stuff done, the forest still has an even age to it. Fire and planting trees, and other methods could be used to get it into a healthier condition. That is more long term.”
To view the South Shore final EIS, go online. [3]
The comments are interesting also as they suggest a charitable firewood program for the elderly.
So I looked up the Southern Nevada Public Lands Management Act, which will provide the funding
About SNPLMA
The Southern Nevada Public Land Management Act (SNPLMA) became law in October 1998. It allows the Bureau of Land Management to sell public land within a specific boundary around Las Vegas, Nevada. The revenue derived from land sales is split between the State of Nevada General Education Fund (5%), the Southern Nevada Water Authority (10%), and a special account available to the Secretary of the Interior for:
Parks, Trails, and Natural Areas
Capital Improvements
Conservation Initiatives
Multi-Species Habitat Conservation Plans (MSHCP)
Environmentally Sensitive Land Acquisitions
Hazardous Fuels Reduction and Wildfire Prevention
Eastern Nevada Landscape Restoration Act
Lake Tahoe Restoration Act Projects
Other provisions in the SNPLMA direct certain land sale and acquisition procedures, direct the BLM to convey title of land in the McCarran Airport noise zone to Clark County, and provide for the sale of land for affordable housing.
January, 13 2012
Staff Report
SOUTH LAKE TAHOE, Calif. — The U.S. Forest Service Lake Tahoe Basin Management Unit has approved a more than 10,000 acre project to reduce wildfire risk to communities at Lake Tahoe’s South Shore and restore the health of the area’s forests, according to a Friday statement.
The South Shore Fuel Reduction and Healthy Forest Restoration Project will thin trees and brush on national forest system land from Cascade Lake to the Nevada stateline. The project will take approximately eight years.
The project is designed to provide defensible space, reduce the risk of high intensity fire and create forests better able to resist drought, insects and disease, while restoring stream environment zones, meadows and aspen stands, according to the statement.
Thinning by crews with chain saws, removing trees using tracked and rubber-tired equipment and prescribed fire are included in the project.
The Forest Service plans to move forward with hand thinning as soon as conditions allow. Mechanical thinning will undergo permitting through the Lahontan Regional Water Quality Control Board before starting.
“The fuel reduction efforts outlined in the South Shore project are critical to protecting our communities from wildfire,” said LTBMU Forest Supervisor Nancy Gibson in the statement. “We will continue to work closely with the Lahontan Regional Water Quality Control Board, and our goal is to begin implementing the project this summer.”
The Forest Service has coordinated with other public land management agencies and local fire protection districts to ensure the fuels reduction work will complement local Community Wildfire Protection Plans, according to the statement.
Detailed project information is available online at: www.fs.usda.gov/goto/ltbmu/SouthShoreFuelReduction.
If my reading of thew website (with this url: http://www.fs.fed.us/nepa/nepa_project_exp.php?project=31441) is correct, this is the current action that is in litigation. If not, hopefully someone kmore knowledgeable will let me know.
We have discussed the Colt Summit project here before, here and the Cone of Silence post here. There may be more, you can just use the search box to the right and type in “Colt Summit.”
It might be interesting to imagine that we were using objections instead of appeals and see whether you think this would have changed the dynamics at all.
Here’s a link to all the documents, which I got by typing in “colt summit project” into Google.
.. we have ringside seats to see how this litigation process goes. At this step, some conservation organizations are filing supporting briefs. Here’s a link to the news story.
Conservationists oppose logging lawsuit in Lolo National Forest
Story
By EVE BYRON Independent Record
HELENA – A proposed project that includes logging, roadwork and weed spraying on national forest land north of Seeley Lake is pitting a wide-ranging array of organizations against four environmental groups that filed a lawsuit opposing the work.
On Monday, organizations including the Seeley Lake fire department, the National Wildlife Federation, the Montana Wilderness Association, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Lewis and Clark, Missoula and Powell counties all filed legal briefs supporting the five-year project on 4,330 acres of the Lolo National Forest.
Representatives of those groups said that the “unprecedented interest in the case marks the first time such a large and diverse number of groups and individuals have ever assembled to defend a forest restoration project in the court of law.”
“We decided to get involved because this is a science-based decision and we had our staff truth-test it,” said Jean Curtiss, a Missoula County commissioner. “This area is such a unique, intact ecosystem, with all the plants and animals there that were there when Lewis and Clark came through.”
During a news conference Tuesday, representatives from some of those groups said the logging, burning and road treatments are direly needed to restore forest health and create a better habitat for wild animals that include endangered lynx, bull trout and grizzly bear, while at the same time lessening the threat of wildfires near communities.
“In the summer of 2007, we had the Jocko Lakes fire that covered 31,000 acres and cost $40 million,” said Frank Maradeo, the Seeley Lake fire chief. “We evacuated 85 percent of the community during that fire. This project, the Colt Summit, is at the north end of our fire district.”
They also pointed out that the project is a collaborative effort among a wide range of interests, including loggers, timber mills, environmental groups, community members and local, state and federal officials.
“What we are focused on doing is what’s best for the ground,” said Megan Birzell with the Wilderness Society. “There may be some cases where the best thing to do is to try to stop a project, but we think a better approach and one that’s more successful, rewarding and fulfilling is to seek positive solutions on the ground, recognizing there are places where active management is needed and is appropriate.”
But Michael Garrity, executive director of the Helena-based Alliance for the Wild Rockies, disagrees. That’s why his organization, along with the Friends of the Wild Swan, Montana Ecosystems Defense Council and the Native Ecosystems Council filed a lawsuit in federal court in November to try to stop the work.
“It’s not the right place for a timber sale,” Garrity said. “It’s critical lynx habitat. And if the whole idea is to protect the wildland-urban interface – it’s 10 miles north of Seeley Lake and there’s no community there. There are plenty of places around Seeley Lake where they could do logging, but this is just the wrong location.”
He added that they believe the environmental assessment done on the project violated the Endangered Species Act, the National Environmental Policy Act and the National Forest Management Act.
The project calls for logging and burning on about 2,038 acres; decommissioning or storing 25 miles of road; restoring four miles of streamside road and rerouting the access; reconstructing five miles of road; and conducting noxious weed herbicide treatments along 34 miles of national forest roads and on six acres of existing infestations.
In a brief filed by Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks, the state agency said the project will have clear benefits for fish and wildlife.
“The Colt Summit Project will significantly increase the amount of secure lynx and grizzly habitat within an important riparian corridor, will remove roads that are sending sediment into a native trout stream, and will maintain sufficient cover to allow a variety of wildlife species to continue to move through the area,” said Jay Kolbe, an FWP wildlife biologist. “This project is thoughtfully planned out, grounded in good science and long overdue.”
Colorado State University researchers examine a stand of dead and dying aspen trees in southwestern Colorado in 2006.
Note from Sharon.. I wasn’t around to post this earlier today. To restate what I’ve said before,
it’s not what used to happen that matters (vegetation fire histories). It can’t matter if climate change is really “unprecedented” as per climate scientists. Assuming that they are correct, we can’t go back- we need to move forward carefully and respectfully of the people and the land.
That’s why I think fire ecologists can debate what used to happen till the cows come home (or their permits have been bought out by conservation organizations;)) but we should be more concerned about managing for the future. Vegetation ecologists think that past vegetation ecology should drive the future (after careful study of past vegetation ecology). Other people might frame the question differently.
Should we, in the interior west, manage tree vegetation outside the WUI for defensible space?
Framed that way, many more disciplines might have something to say. Plus of course “should” is a normative (value), and not a science (empirical) question.
Academic tiff over wildfires rekindled
CYNDY COLE Sun Staff Reporter | Posted: Tuesday, February 21, 2012 6:00 am | (0) Comments
An academic tiff over whether catastrophic wildfires can be prevented has broken out anew just as a broad-based northern Arizona coalition is getting set to try to do just that.
Two researchers at the University of Wyoming contend that stand-replacing crown fires on the order of 2002’s Rodeo-Chediski fire and last year’s Wallow fire were once the norm on the Mogollon Rim.
“It’s probably not going to be the case that you can prevent these high-severity fires,” said Bill Baker, a researcher in ecology and geography there.
Local researchers wasted no time in terming the paper “fringe” research far outside the mainstream.
“The overwhelming evidence from decades of research by scores of scientists is that ponderosa pine forests over evolutionary time have been shaped by frequent, low-intensity fires, not stand-replacing fires,” wrote Wally Covington, director of Ecological Restoration Institute at Northern Arizona University, in an e-mail. “Further, fires on the scale of the Rodeo-Chediski and the Wallow Fire are an unprecedented threat not only to plant and animal communities, but also to watershed stability and to the human communities that depend on frequent fire forests for natural resource values and jobs.”
BIG PUSH TO THIN
Covington and other local researchers contend that wildfires are bigger than normal now, and it’s due to unhealthy forests that have grown abnormally dense because of factors like fire suppression, logging and grazing.
The University of Wyoming researchers find otherwise, saying that thick forests and big fires are a norm here.
This is significant because the Coconino, Kaibab, Apache-Sitgreaves and Tonto national forests are now on the brink of a major push — the largest in the country — to get commercial outfits to thin about 30,000 acres per year of smaller-diameter trees as a proposal to make the forest healthier.
A decade-long contract will likely be granted in a few months with support of loggers and conservationists to begin some of this work near Flagstaff and Williams.
EVIDENCE FOR THINNING INCOMPLETE
Baker and a second researcher used data from early surveyors working in the 1880s to determine that the forest here, along the Mogollon Rim, was once a mix of wide-open parks and about two-thirds dense stands of trees.
“They actually have a little booklet that they carried with them. And they wrote as they walked along the lines … they described how dense the forests were, and they recorded information at the corners about the trees that were there,” Baker said.
The researchers appear to oppose some of the planned forest thinning.
“These efforts are expensive and have some negative ecological impacts, and evidence to support them is spatially and temporally incomplete,” Baker and researcher Mark Williams wrote in their research. “…Common management practices today include extensive, rather uniform reduction in tree density, removal of understory shrubs and small trees, and other fuel modifications to lower fire severity. Our reconstructions show that these common practices, if widespread, will move most dry forests outside their historical range of variability, rather than restore them, probably with negative consequences for biological diversity.”
APPLES VS. ORANGES
But Pete Fule, a professor and expert in fire ecology at Northern Arizona University, said the research out of Wyoming could be problematic because it groups together forests that have different fire regimes and is “not consistent with the findings of literally hundreds of other researchers.”
What used to be considered a “severe” fire is measured much differently today, he said, so to compare the two is to weigh apples against oranges.
“It is almost certainly not a straight comparison,” Fule said.
Added Covington:
“The weight of the scientific evidence coupled with the current outlook for increasingly severe fire seasons are a call to action. These facts coupled with the historic increases in size and severity of crown-fires throughout the West, but especially in Arizona and New Mexico, point to the need for redoubling our efforts to restore landscapes on the scale of the Four Forest Restoration Initiative. We have already wasted too much time with bickering over fringe ideas,” he wrote.
