I’m reposting this today because I’m surprised no one weighed in.. and other posts were published so maybe everyone didn’t see it?
If we had cash or non-cash awards on The Smokey Wire (and maybe we should), Sean would definitely deserve one for taking the time to dive into the mysterious world of FACTS. So a major thank-you to him!
From Sean:
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Here is a little workup of the FACTS data.
I downloaded the full FACTS dataset. Caveat – FACTS (like all huge, ongoing data projects…) is messy! I am working with it here pretending like it is perfect, but we all need to know that it is not and there are plenty of places with missing or incorrectly classified data.
I first filtered to remove anything earlier than 1905 (pre-FS – you may be surprised but some records go back to the mid-1800s, Forest Reserve days presumably) and later than 2026 (the future hasn’t happened yet as far as I’m aware). Then I filtered to include status “Accomplished” and “Completed”, but not status “Planned”.
I built this spreadsheet with the full list of Activity Names and my calls on whether they count as a clearcut. I did four versions: a strict interpretation and a liberal interpretation of what a clearcut is, one for all even-aged systems (including shelterwood and seed tree, for example), and one for all even-aged and two-aged systems (including what we would call variable retention harvest today, coded in FACTS as two-aged stand clearcut with reserves). You may disagree with my calls, in which case I invite you to propose something better.
I’m a bit stuck at the varieties of definitions and how they could add up to meaningful numbers of any kind. At the 30K level, there is only even-aged and uneven-aged management (or is there?), maybe we should ask a current silviculture prof? Uneven-aged in many places won’t get back intolerant species, which we would need for diversity; and tolerants by themselves are not resilient to wildfires and tend to be host to a variety of diseases and insects. At the same time, they tend to be fairly good (along with LPP) at reproducing themselves, while the intolerant may need more assistance.
Would concerns about NRV and fuels lead us instead to a different taxonomy of treatments, perhaps based on density reduction and ladder fuels? Or are our current definitions not exactly fit for current purposes, but not worth changing? How do these numbers crosswalk with fuels acres accomplished, or do they?
Meanwhile, what do you all think of the exercise of asking the same “why do you clearcut, if you do?” of all forests and seeing what the national story looks like?
The Flathead National Forest’s Round Star Project includes many silvicultural prescriptions, including regeneration harvest which reset forest stands to trend the conditions to a more fire and disease-resistant species dominance. This photo illustrates two different regeneration prescriptions: on the left, clearcut with reserves leaves varying density of 5-10 trees per acre, depending on natural variability, to maintain a reserve of existing desirable species, and on the right, shelterwood harvest leaves varying density of 15-25 trees per acre and maintains existing trees that provide shading and microsite protection for the next generation of trees. (Note: you can click on this photo and make it larger).
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Last week I asked the question “what are the reasons for choosing clearcutting as a prescription” and got a quick and well-written answer from the Flathead, so shout-out to their silviculture and communications folks!
The Flathead National Forest spokesperson answered the questions as follows:
What are the forestry reasons for clearcutting?
We have a diversity of tree species on the Flathead National Forest. Some are fire and disease-resistant while others are susceptible to root rot, bark beetles, and some are less adapted to survive wildfire. Active forest management on the Flathead targets areas with high densities of species that are less resistant to both diseases and fire, like lodgepole, grand fir, and subalpine fir), and resets the forest stand by harvesting those trees and replacing them with tree species (western larch, ponderosa pine, Douglas-fir) that are more likely to stay healthy through disturbance events like fire and disease.
Why does the Forest Service plant trees following a harvest?
When the forest managers reset a stand of grand fir and subalpine fir – shade tolerant species – with shade intolerant species like western larch, there are no naturally occurring seed sources so we plant seedlings of the species of tree that best aligns with the future desired condition of the forest. In other cases, we plant western white pine seedlings that have genetics for resistance to known diseases like blister rust.
Where does lodgepole pine fit into the picture?
Lodgepole pine is a fast growing, naturally regenerating tree species and does well after a disturbance event. However, these trees have a tendency to get bark beetle outbreaks once they achieve a certain age. Forest managers will identify areas with high levels of insect infestation and designate them for clearing to limit the infestation spread. Depending on the site conditions, some of the healthier lodgepole are left, but often times, in certain soils with certain wind patterns, lodgepole blow down after a treatment. Forest managers will plant western larch, ponderosa pine, western white pine, and Douglas-fir to add species diversity to the area.
How does the forest combat root disease with regeneration harvests?
Forest managers use “regeneration” harvest in areas with a high occurrence of root disease and plant tree species that are less susceptible to that disease. Sometimes, a previous treatment that released the midstory needs to be retreated with a regeneration due to the amount of disease that developed in that stand.
In other instances, forest managers use a “clearcut with reserves” that leaves individual trees or clumps of trees of western larch and doug fir scattered through the treatment area to meet objectives for both the future desired condition of the forest and for wildlife species that benefit from forest openings. These treatments usually leave 5-10 trees per acre.
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I will only add, as a person involved with the western white pine resistance program in the earlier days, that restoring WWP seems like a good idea, for ecological value, for Native Americans, for wildlife, because it is fire-adapted, and for biodiversity.
Firefighters monitor a 2018 prescribed burn on the Gus Pearson Natural Area north of Flagstaff.
Quote from Andrew Sánchez Meador:
If you were to manufacture or engineer a species of tree that is well suited for that, ponderosa pine would probably be at the top of the list of the thing that you created. It’s well suited for the future climate. What it is not well suited for is the current density and the way wildfires behave, and insects and disease behave.
Yes, this fits into the “I think we already knew that” category, but it’s great to hear someone officially in the research community say it. Here’s a link to more information on the Fort Valley Experimental Forest. From Arizona Public Radio:
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A new study from Northern Arizona University shows thinning and regular prescribed burns can help ponderosa pine forests survive both drought and wildfire. The work took place at a thirty-year-old research site on the Fort Valley Experimental Forest north of Flagstaff. KNAU’s Melissa Sevigny spoke with ecologist Andrew Sánchez Meador about the findings.
Okay, so this experimental area has places that have been thinned, places that have been thinned and routinely burned, and then some places that have been left alone.
Yeah. And in this study, the initial thinning was followed by repeated burning every four years. In fact, we’re going to burn it this fall. That repeated burning, that frequent fire interval, is key to the function of this ecosystem.
What did you find out?
We actually found that both young and old trees responded to the thinning and grew really fast. That’s not a surprise with young trees. When you open up and make resources available, young trees can tend to thrive and jump on that. But what we found was trees 500 years old had dramatic increases in growth rates, suggesting that if we treat, both young and old trees can increase their vigor, they can be more resilient to drought, insect and disease, and what we also found was that if we introduce fire into this system, we don’t increase the mortality in that.
So the trees in the treated area are more likely to be resilient to the drought?
Yes. And to increased fire or being exposed to fire. Which is an equally important thing. Because you see a lot of messaging now advocating for putting fire back into these systems. People are scared of fire, rightfully so. But what we do know is, putting fire back into the system, seems to have only positive benefits in a frequent fire, naturally functioning system.
How do you hope the information from this study will help inform forest management in this region?
First and foremost, as we work to translate this science, I hope it makes the public feel better about seeing reduction in forest density. These forests we all live in here in Arizona, they are the only forests we’ve ever seen, so when we come here and someone tells us that these forests are unhealthy and too dense, that’s hard for us to understand. But these type of studies repeatedly show these forests are degraded and if we open them up we can increase vigor and resilience and make them healthy…And I think the other piece of this is that we know a lot about this. I often get the question about: we’re experiencing increasing severity of fire, and frequency of fire. The burn year is getting longer and longer and longer. What we can do to counteract it? Well, we know that thinning followed by the reintroduction of prescribed burning, that can counteract it. It took us 150 years to get into this mess, it’s going to take us a long time to get out of it, but we know that thinning and burning is a way out of it, we just need to be able to do it at a landscape scale in order to get ahead of these wildfires that we’re experiencing.
We’re on two decades of drought and we know that our ponderosa pines are struggling. After doing this research are you feeling more optimistic about the future of ponderosas, or are you still worried?
That’s a great question. Because I often say that if I look forward to the future climate… We know that we’re getting warmer, and the availability of precipitation is becoming less for plants and trees. If you were to manufacture or engineer a species of tree that is well suited for that, ponderosa pine would probably be at the top of the list of the thing that you created. It’s well suited for the future climate. What it is not well suited for is the current density and the way wildfires behave, and insects and disease behave. I’m very optimistic that if we can do more restoration at the landscape scale, if we can create more continuous parts of the landscape that are restored, we’re setting our ponderosa pines forest up to have the best chance they can have.
This photo is from the Boulder County Colorado Strategic Fuels Mitigation Grant Program website. https://bouldercounty.gov/news/1-5-million-in-strategic-fuels-mitigation-grants-awarded-to-local-partners-and-agencies/
I’ve got some posts saved up about issues and concerns mostly outside our little forest world, but that may also impact our world. This one is about non-financial conflict of interest. The idea is that journal articles should include non-financial, as well as financial conflicts of interest, or what I call “ideological” conflicts of interest. It’s a difficult, but important issue in many biological/ecological disciplines. Even thirty or so years ago, politicians knew that asking Jerry Franklin to testify would likely give different results than asking Chad Oliver.
Or in climate and wildfire, there are scientists who are “climate, climate, climate” and ones who are “climate is one of many things.” It’s interesting which ones show up more frequently in media quotes. Those of us who follow these things know exactly what we likely to hear when the source is named. It seems to me that the identification and daylighting of ideological COI would just make clear to everyone reading what many of us already know.
But back to yesterday’s thinning paper.
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Some of these authors of are well-known in the California and Oregon world as having definite opinions about forest management. We can’t really ignore the fact that, for example, Hanson stated in an objection letter something we can see with our own eyes is not true.
As detailed in our EA comments and attachments, which we incorporate by reference here, the final EA violates NEPA, as amended by the Builder Act of 2023, by failing to take a hard look at the submitted science showing that no removal of trees–not even small trees–is needed before conducting burning, even in the densest and most long-unburned stands, and even in stands with high levels of dead wood. Fire behavior is fundamentally about fire weather, and burning can be safely conducted in any forest if burning is done in mild fire weather during the early or late part of fire season (June or Oct./Nov.).
At subregional to regional levels, roughly 1% of treatments (thinning, prescribed fires) experiences wildfire each year, and the effectiveness of treatments is only 10-20 year, so the treatments likely have little effect on wildfire (Campbell et al. 2012, Schoennagel et al. 2017).
This may be true, but again could be a framing issue. Thinning can make trees healthier, and if drought is getting worse, it would seem to be an important consideration. And shouldn’t we debate what the actual wildfire effectiveness measure should be? For example, we could ask “in how many cases per year did fuel treatment change fire behavior to reduce negative impacts or to assist suppression work?” Again, to the residents of communities impacted “treatments likely have little effect” doesn’t ring true. Choosing the framing of an issue is generally thought to be a policy choice. What knowledge is relevant is also a policy choice- and researchers have a tendency to claim their research is relevant without policy folks (or even management folks) to weigh in with “that’s not how we define the issue” “we already knew that, so what’s the point of your research” or “you state that your research is relevant, but we don’t think it is for the following reasons.”
It’s pretty clear that over time, some of the authors have an inclination against tree removal. Which is fine. But it does, as do the disciplines writing the paper compared to those which we think might have more direct knowledge, influence our expectations for the objectivity of the paper.
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Jessica Weinkle has studied conflict of interest in the climate community, which should probably be discussed more openly among the vegetation research community.
This is just your opinion, not research.
This critique originates from ambiguity about COI within the climate science community (a bit more on this below). It is worth noting that non-financial COI is a current, hotly debated issue in research ethics, and there is no clear criteria for non-financial COI. Some believe non-financial COI goes too far; people have a right to their personal activities, and these do not merit disclosure. However, there are activities that are far cry from volunteering for a local chapter of the Humane Society. These include,4
Being a board member to a political and research related NGO
Being a founder and/or director of a political and research related NGO
Serving as an advisor to political and research related NGOs
Serving as an advisor to an election campaign or partisan organization
Advising agencies on regulatory actions using your research/methodologies
Contributions to amicus briefs and witness testimony.
My co-author David Resnik has argued that uncertainty about non-financial COI calls for open discussion in professional communities:
the appropriate response to this problem is not to dismiss non-financial interests as an irrelevant distraction, but to define them more clearly and provide effective guidance.
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Again, it’s not that scientists shouldn’t participate in these kinds of activities. In our own small communities of interest we know about these conflicts and can take that into account when reading papers. Not so much for other people. For example, which of us, if we don’t follow Prof Weinkle would understand the close relationships between researchers, for-profit modeling entities, and insurance companies insofar as it affects wildfire risk modeling? Of course, those involve financial COI, and we need better definitions and guidance for non-financial COI. We also need scientists and scientific institutions to accept their responsibility for transparency around it. This could ultimately help all of us develop trust in research and research institutions.
At the risk of boring everyone else, we are having an interesting discussion about thinning, so continuing that… do people agree with the four propositions below, or have more to add?
1. The best thinning prescription is site-specific. It depends on purpose, stand structure, species, moisture regime, soils, bug and disease issues (incipient or existing in the stand), and a variety of other factors, as Jim Z. has pointed out from his experience across the country.
2. Many fuel treatment prescriptions include reducing ladder fuels and reducing overall stocking. To complete the prescription, the fuels intended to be removed have to be moved offsite, either by wheelbarrows (in fact, I’ve seen this about 30 years ago at Lake Tahoe, because the landowners didn’t want smoke), or other kinds of equipment or by pile or broadcast burning.
3. Many studies and experience show that time post-treatment can also influence outcomes. The involved mechanism seems to be.. plants grow back.
3. So structuring the question, we have a) is the prescribed treatment the right treatment for the site, given the purpose? b) was the prescribed treatment carried out as prescribed? c) was the removal of fuel, as described in the prescription, accomplished?
I think it’s fair, as well as self-evident, to say “fuel treatments don’t work if people don’t remove fuels”. And some wildfires get there before that happens but post-thinning. But as we can see by driving around or watching Forest’s Facebook or X feed, there are many folks working assiduously burning fuels.
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Lindenmeyer et al Perspective- Ecological Trade-offs
So let’s move on to the recent Lindenmeyer et al. paper. Now I called the “perspective” an “op-ed with citations.” Yes, it’s a literature review, and the 10 common questions paper was also a literature review, although it was categorized by the journal as an “invited feature.” In the abstract, the authors define “mechanical thinning” “as the partial removal of stand basal area using tracked or wheeled machines.” This doesn’t seem like a particularly precise definition to me, as my neighbor could be lifting bucked sections into a truck (wheeled) or folks could be using this gizmo. Is it about “how it gets to a landing” or “how it is moved from the landing” or just “when some thinned material is moved offsite?”
The title of their paper is “Ecological trade-offs of mechanical thinning in temperate forests.” As I said above, for me the ecological trade-offs, as well as any other trade-offs that might evidence themselves, are invariably functions of a specific site, and current and future expected site conditions and practices.
As in one of the images from the paper
There are many things of interest, even in this summary. If you think of thinning in terms of group selection, you might in fact create “important early successional environments” instead of degrading them. But fundamentally, all of the above elements except perhaps economics and water yields are specifically addressed in specific decision documents.
If we were going to look at thinning (within specific temperate forests), we would probably want to ask scientists with experience in thinning (silviculture or applied ecology of trees), fuels experts, and forest entomologists and pathologists. That is if our question was “when does thinning work and for what purposes?” with the purposes being improved tree health and wildfire resilience.
If we asked the question “are the benefits worth the environmental costs?” we would have to look, as the FS does in their environmental documents, at the impacts on air, carbon, soils, water and various species of wildlife and fish and ask the relevant disciplines (and comparing with the impacts of not thinning). Plus conceivably exactly how trees were removed and cut would make a difference to impacts. If my neighbors buck and carry material to their chipper, that would have different impacts than tractor logging with (later) ripped skid trails? Will any specific thinning lead to more invasives..? The answer is always, “it depends on the site and the prescription.”
If we asked the question “is the investment worth it economically?” we would have to ask.. economists, silviculturists, fuels and forest health practitioners in the west. What can we expect to happen with or without a specific thinning prescription?
But how about thinning and PF vs. wildfire in terms of public health (smoke, evacuation stress, and others)? We would probably need some kind of human health expert.
As it turns out, the backgrounds of all these folks is restricted to ecology (and fire behavior in Australia).
Lindemayer is a professor of ecology and conservation biology from Australia. DellaSala is a global biodiversity and climate change scientist. Elle Bowd a plant and fungal ecologist, Beverly Law has worked on forest carbon, Philip J. Burton is a botanist and plant ecologist, Chad Hanson is both a lawyer and an ecologist, with, shall we say, a well-known point of view, Philip Zylstra,a bushfire behavior modeler , William Ripple an ecologist whose expertise in in trophic cascades.
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The language in the abstract about trade-offs is interesting..
While the benefits of mechanical thinning for fire management and drought resilience have been extensively discussed (Chagnon et al., 2025; Davis et al., 2024; Kalies and Yocom Kent, 2016), the negative environmental and financial impacts of, and carbon emissions associated with thinning are often not fully appreciated.
This may mean that trade-offs among the ecological, climate change, and economic effects of thinning are not quantified or appropriately considered in policy and management debates. Given this, we discuss impacts associated with large-scale mechanical thinning in temperate forests and the degree to which they depend on intensity, scale, and frequency of removals as well as environmental context (Fig. 1).
Apparently, to fully appreciate environmental and financial impacts.. you can do it with only the aid of ecologists, one fire scientist and no economists at all. Count me skeptical.
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The conclusions are not very surprising considering the authors..
Given there are ecological and financial costs associated with thinning and roads, it should be prohibited in high-conservation value forests because such forests: (1) act as “controls” in active management experiments; (2) provide habitat and/or climate and wildfire refugia for old forest and complex early seral forest species, especially imperilled ones; (3) can be managed as intact, connected blocks of unaltered forest that provide connectivity for climate-forced wildlife migrations and wildlife movements; and (4) can be managed in a manner consistent with climate mitigation (e.g., carbon stored mainly in large trees and soils) and water conservation goals involving reserves and protected area networks (Law et al., 2022) (especially roadless areas). Outside protected areas, thinning can impact larger trees, forest carbon storage and carbon emissions, soils, and water, and result in the accumulation of post-thinning debris. In those situations, assessing the costs of thinning and ways to mitigate those costs, is critical to comprehensive forest management. Assessments are also necessary to determine the extent of roads needed to access sites and other areas where road closure and road removal are needed for restoration purposes. Proper cost accounting would determine when thinning reaches a cost threshold and where it is infeasible or inadvisable ecologically and economically. Recognizing self-thinning as a natural and cost-free process that enhances both carbon storage and biodiversity can help redirect management investments toward restoration of degraded forests and protection of intact forests, while ensuring significant areas act as refugia where active management impacts are absent. We encourage land managers, decision makers, and conservation groups to incorporate comprehensive analyses of the effects of thinning operations before widespread adoption of practices that are otherwise inappropriate or ineffective in certain conditions.
Hmm. “proper cost accounting” as opposed to “improper?”..”Recognizing self-thinning as a natural and cost-free process that enhances both carbon storage and biodiversity can help redirect management investments toward restoration of degraded forests and protection of intact forests, while ensuring significant areas act as refugia where active management impacts are absent. ”
Considering that the conclusions mention roadless areas (is the roadless issue relevant to the timing of this piece?), it’s interesting that the 2001 Rule itself has no prohibition against thinning.
Fuel mitigation work, including thinning, is frequent in Colorado’s Front Range county open spaces. In answer to Denise’s comment “the only reason to cut trees is for lumber.” https://www.douglas.co.us/dawson-butte-open-space-closed-weekdays-for-fire-mitigation-work/
Apologies for the previous post that might have shown up in your inboxes.. I pressed the wrong button before I was done. This post is to engage with some of Denise’s comments.
Removing trees because of beetle kill also removes the trees that are the most resistant and therefore should not be removed. There is also evidence that logging has actually spread beetles from one area to another. Regardless, beetles are nature’s way of natural thinning of the forest. It’s a natural process. Thinning dries out the forest and does not help with drought. Lush forests retain water. Nothing will stop a wildfire under the right climate conditions and we are in the midst of a warming climate. Forests survived for millinea without “management” and looked a lot better than they do today.
The Black Hills was actually fairly successful at thinning and reducing beetle kill, and this paper suggests that it was successful in mitigating tree mortality due to MPB.
Many of us remember these kinds of conditions and photos from the early teens:
Dave Mertz can tell us whether these results held up over time.
But thinning doesn’t work for all tree/beetle combos and under all conditions. For example, back in the 80’s we thinned around our selected (for cones) trees in a massive MPB outbreak thinking that the vigor would protect them (they could pitch out the bugs). As it turned out, though, at that point in the outbreak the beetles were not to be fazed. That’s why I am hesitant to generalize about bark beetle management. On the other hand, if we remove the Timber Wars context (say for Colorado private landowners, who have a timber industry deficit) we can see on the Colorado State Forest Service website:
Large outbreaks of mountain pine beetles are difficult to control. One of the best ways to mitigate the effects of beetle outbreaks is to manage for overall forest health and resiliency. Thinning overly dense stands of trees to reduce competition and promote tree age and species diversity is the most successful forest management strategy to increase tree vigor.
Maybe there’s a difference between “thinning” and “logging”? It seems to me more likely that a FS timber contract would include provisions about timing to not move bugs around, rather than Amber the Homeowner who is taking it to the county slash pile. Maybe those terms (thinning vs. logging) are not all that helpful and we could talk about “thinning and burning piles” “thinning and chipping onsite” “thinning and transport to different places, including sawmills?” Then there’s the scientific consensus in the 10 Common Questions paper we’ve discussed partially here at TSW and is summarized in this fact sheet by Pritchard. I’m always up for discussing these, and I think the FS does fairly well in responding to these kinds of statements in their “response to comments” section of CE, EA and EIS documentation.
When I worked in R-2, we’d sometimes get appeals where the appellants hadn’t changed the project name since the last one. I’m thinking that AI might be very helpful in developing generic responses to generic literature cites. It could rummage through existing project docs and do quite well (and of course be edited by FS folks).
“Thinning dries out a forest and does not help with drought”. Studies and real-world experience show otherwise. Again, it’s all about the site, the species and the conditions. I don’t really see the need to generalize to the globe (???), as these 2025 authors did- since local silviculturists know the specifics. Like what species on what soil types are likely to blow over post-thinning.
Generating broad-scale conclusions to inform forest management decisions in the face of global change is highly challenging. Although our analyses showed that negative responses may occur, in general, thinning can be expected to increase the resilience and resistance of forests to multiple stressors across North America and Europe.
As the climate continues to warm, these sorts of ecological issues are going to happen more often. So we need to make sure that instead of only treating the symptoms of climate change, we are reducing the amount of carbon that is going into the atmosphere.
So according to some, beetle outbreaks have ceased to be “natural”. It seems to me people should pick a lane, natural or not? Of course, we’ve done many unnatural things like logged for railroads, the mining industry, and when trees grow back from that, suppressed fires so trees get old and maybe overstocked based on soil and climate conditions. Wouldn’t it be hard to tease apart the “natural” from the “unnatural”?
Denise also said:
Nothing will stop a wildfire under the right climate conditions
I’d say that perhaps “weather” conditions is more accurate. Like high winds. In my part of the country we get frequent wind-driven wildfires in the winter, and the strategy is rapid initial attack. So, yes, most of the time fire suppression works, and developing PODs and fuelbreaks can help with fire suppression in addition to reducing fuels in other areas and helping trees be more resilient.
The FS has butchered our National Forests and you don’t have to be any kind of natural resource expert to see it.
Last fall, my family and I visited California on a road trip. I lived there in the 80’s and worked for the Eldorado. What I noticed (coming west on US50 was major removal of trees due to… wildfire. Then drove up to the coast via 299 again massive wildfire area. Then to the redwoods, which I had forgotten (from my forestry education at Cal) are fire-adapted.
Save the Redwoods League views wildfire as a top priority in our larger effort to protect and restore California’s redwood forests. We’re moving quickly to ensure that the properties we manage are prepared for a future with more extreme wildfire, and we’re encouraging state and federal land managers to ramp up efforts to make their coast redwood and giant sequoia landscapes more fire resilient
Up through Grants Pass, to Shasta and then to Lassen and to Reno, more landscapes (not devastated but definitely de-treed) by wildfire. So no, the FS has not “butchered” the NFs. Maybe climate change causes “more extreme” fires and fuel loadings and dead trees have nothing to do with it.
It seems to me that most of us agree on what makes forests resilient. Most of us agree on the need to protect communities, because fires running even through hardened and evacuated communities is not good. Not to speak of the fact that evacuation is difficult and stressful. Some of us would like more timber or other industry using our thinned material. For example, Douglas County just opened a county-operated biochar facility.
Reducing the risk of wildfire devastation in the Sierra Nevada is a daunting and multi-faceted task. Much of the effort is focused on reducing fuel load in the forest so that fires that do flare up don’t turn into catastrophes like the Caldor Fire of 2021.
One sticking point in this effort for the Tahoe region has been the lack of a nearby sawmill. The further away a sawmill is from the logs, the more expensive they are to transport, which can make necessary tree thinning operations prohibitively expensive.
If most of us agree on the need for fuel treatments or some kind of management for wildfire and/or climate resilience, with zones of agreement and forest collaboratives, perhaps in places like the Sierra Nevada or Colorado the Timber Wars can be declared over. And as Jack Ward Thomas said in 2001:
One of my favorite JWT observations came in 2001, five years after he’d left his Forest Service post. He was urging conservation peace and progress after environmental groups had turned the tide on overcutting on the national forests.
“Fierce in battle, many of the eco-warriors have been unable to come to grips with the consequences of victory and are now reduced to wandering about the old battlefields ‘bayoneting the wounded.’ Their counterparts from the resource extraction community, likewise, cannot come to terms with defeat and hold ‘ghost dances’ to bring back the good old days when they were the undisputed Kings of the West.”
Now that’s a clearcut ! Illustration for Climate Forest Campaign’s writeup on the Timber EO. forest in the Oregon Coast Range. Photo credit: David Herasimtschuk
Our definition clearing up effort does not seem to be successful, so I’ll try to clarify that there seem to be four choices. 1. Clearcut (standard) the definition fuzzy as it is, in the handbook and the dictionary definitions. 2. Clearcut (L) Looks like one, so any seed tree or shelterwood after overstory removal. 3. Clearcut (O) Any opening. 4. Clearcut (P) used in polemics, could mean anything writer wants.
Some Habitat Requires Openings (1993 to today)
I had a vague memory that our social scientist friends used to study what people think about clearcutting. I looked around and found a study on Google Scholar study from 1993
In the 1993 monitoring report for the White Mountain National Forest, forest supervisor Rick Cables wrote that “there is a wide and increasing interest in the concepts of ecosystem management, a principle which we believe is well addressed in the existing plan although subject to change as our monitoring efforts continue. The growing question, though, is the ‘place’ of the Forest in the wider landscape” (Cables, 1993, p. xi). One of the Forest’s goals in response to this issue of ‘place’ is to conduct all management activities with full recognition of the effect on Forest appearance. The foundation of this sensitivity to scenic value is “realizing the importance to society of a natural (appearing) landscape distinct from the man-made environments otherwise dominant in the East (USA).” As a result, project plans are frequently adjusted. “This is especially true for those areas that have experienced residential development since completion of the original (forest plan) inventory. Awareness of the concern over clearcutting has led to reduced clearcut acreage or identification of alternative prescriptions for many projects” (Kokx, 1993, pp. 52–53).
Irrespective of its effect on harvesting volume, Rick Cables observes that “with respect to clearcutting, the problem boils down to this: Of the 339 inland animal species in New England, 257 of them have a primary or secondary dependence on a forested habitat. Of these 257 species 90% (233) of them have a primary or secondary dependence on forest vegetation in the regeneration (0–10 years old) or young (from 10 up to 69 years for some species) age classes. Clearcutting is the vegetative management practice that produces these various age classes of the Forest. It is difficult to provide enough of this habitat when the means of doing so is one that so many people find objectionable — clearcutting” (Cables, 1993, p. v).
Looking back, Rick’s argument was that openings are needed for certain wildlife species. I would say that seedtree and shelterwood also produce those age classes. And here we are having the same discussion about openings pretty much 30 years later. I think we made a detour to “openings are OK if they fit NRV” but as it turns out, the same groups that were against cutting trees before that detour, are still against cutting trees!
How Many, How Spatially Distributed, Under What Conditions?
How many openings should there be, distributed how, with what characteristics? Should humans make openings directly, or guide wildfire in making openings?
I think the idea of NRV was (perhaps descended from coarse-filter/ fine-filter thinking) that if you had the distribution of ecological characteristics as sometime in the past, then you would be providing habitat for critters as in the past. I remember when these ideas first came to the WO.. we’ll cut trees to “restore”, who could be against that? It turns out the same people.
Some Groups Don’t Want Human-Initiated (or for Salvage, post Natural- Initiated Disturbance, Human- Assisted) Openings
And we still have folks like WEG and other members of the Climate Forest Campaign who think no cutting (or just commercial?) should occur in stands over 80 years old. It seems like some people and groups are either “anti-opening” or “anti-opening if it involves commercial wood products.” Or perhaps it’s OK to have openings in under 80 years old stands, just recycle the same sites as they grow in. However, this runs against thinking like “the process of stand development is important”. as per this work by Swanson et al. (note that Beschta and DellaSalla are coauthors)
Early-successional forest ecosystems that develop after stand-replacing or partial disturbances are diverse in species, processes, and structure. Post-disturbance ecosystems are also often rich in biological legacies, including surviving organisms and organically derived structures, such as woody debris. These legacies and postdisturbance plant communities provide resources that attract and sustain high species diversity, including numerous early-successional obligates, such as certain woodpeckers and arthropods. Early succession is the only period when tree canopies do not dominate the forest site, and so this stage can be characterized by high productivity of plant species (including herbs and shrubs), complex food webs, large nutrient fluxes, and high structural and spatial complexity. Different disturbances contrast markedly in terms of biological legacies, and this will influence the resultant physical and biological conditions, thus affecting successional pathways. Management activities, such as postdisturbance logging and dense tree planting, can reduce the richness within and the duration of early-successional ecosystems. Where maintenance of biodiversity is an objective, the importance and value of these natural early-successional ecosystems are underappreciated.
So early-successional communities are important for biodiversity, but only if you don’t log post-disturbance, and don’t plant trees “too” densely.
It doesn’t appear to me that there is any scientific answer to the correct amount of openings and what they should or should not contain. I guess I could understand the idea of only allowing “natural” disturbances. Except that we’re told by many of the same groups that today’s disturbances are caused by climate change and are therefore unnatural.
It’s very confusing. Plus we can’t go back in time in terms of population, past practices and so on.
I do think the idea that openings are created by others in a mixed landscape, and therefore the FS should consider that, does have some merit. However if people want to observe early-successional wildlife and conditions, they can’t do that on private land. Plus private landowners tend to have different management objectives and practices, and may not want to encourage biodiversity the same way the FS does. Then there are species that prefer wildfire.. which leads to openings. Fire is more likely to be managed on federal lands than on private.
Sometimes Clearcutting is Used For Any Cutting by Interest Groups (P)
I should also note that some groups seem to use the term clearcutting for any cutting at all, including what we might imagine to be commercial and non-commercial thinning. From the Climate Forests Campaign on the Expansion of American Timber Production Executive Order:
Clearcutting our public lands for private profit will destroy mature and old-growth forests, pollute our air and water, and in bypassing the Endangered Species Act, actively drive vulnerable wildlife to extinction.”
Removing large trees and reducing overstory canopy opens the forest to more sunlight, hot, dry winds and higher temperatures, which can encourage growth of flammable shrubs and increase wildfire risk.
The problem I have with this is that the FS really does clearcut (S) and if we want to understand why, we need to focus on those prescriptions in those units.
Conditions That Lead Landowners to Clearcut (S) in Minnesota
I thought that this 2020 JFor paper by Windmiller-Campione et al. of landowner changes over time in Minnesota was fairly interesting. Similar studies would be of interest in the West, perhaps they exist and I haven’t found them. The FS does not always tell us clearly in NEPA documents why clearcutting (S) was chosen.
In the Minnesota study, National Forests, industry and small landowners were surveyed. One gets the impression of clearcutting being used when a species is having trouble with native or invasive insects or diseases. It’s interesting that clearcutting went up from 2008 to 2017 for dealing with a couple of these problems.
A variable retention site with 23% retention illustrates the impact of aggregate size on the amount of forest influence. Sites with smaller aggregates have higher levels of calculated forest influence. However smaller aggregates are more edge-affected and susceptible to windthrow and regeneration burn impact. Figure produced by Robyn Scott. I think it’s from this paper.
What if.. we agreed on a definition of clearcutting? It seems like originally it meant a practice used in even-aged regeneration of forests used (and still used in the SE) by timber industry. The impression was big openings, removal of all trees, burning broadcast or piles and replanting. During the 80’s I remember an economist from Oregon State on a field trip to Weyco’s Klamath Tree Farm, telling us that we needed to move from “pick and pluck” or Keen classification to clearcutting because it was more efficient. Yes, that was apparently the best available science at the time.
Then as I recall, (and others remember more) it was important to retain wildlife trees and snags. Then there was an effort to make clearcuts smaller. Then there was the suggestion of “Big Messy Clearcuts”. Well, I couldn’t find those words when I searched in Duck Duck Go, but I do remember them. Some Region 6 retiree should probably write a history of silvicultural terminology and practices through time.
I did find something when I searched Google Scholar. It was from a 1991 (35 ish years ago) Focus on Forestry, put out by OSU.
Franklin sees New Forestry as an alternative “to the stark choice between tree farms and total preservation”a way for real multiple-use management to occur on the same parcel of forest at the same time. “It’s a way we can integrate, not allocate, the resource among interest groups,” he says.
However, New Forestry has drawn fire from both the timber industry and environmentalist groups. Industry managers point to a host of problems associated with leaving green trees and snags fire hazard, logger safety, difficulties in regeneration, high costs, and plain ugliness”these places look like messy clearcuts,” says one critic.
Environmentalists, for their part, are suspicious of any scheme that asks them to modify a fundamental tenet: preservation of intact forests. There’s no guarantee, they say, that New Forestry will really do the job of protecting the ecosystem over the long haul.
So now folks are talking about variable retention harvesting, which apparently allows openings (clumps and openings?). We know that some species require openings to regenerate. No openings means true fir success, which can compete with ponderosa and die off from bugs leaving material for a wildfire, which indeed makes openings.
I was surprised when I read that the BLM was proposing (according to Oregon Wild):
a massive logging proposal that would clearcut thousands of acres of public forest, including mature and old-growth trees.”
This was surprising to me, as in my definition, it wasn’t clearcutting. So I asked Victoria Wingell (the author) what she meant by clearcutting. I appreciate her response, as many folks do not respond to my emails.
The 42 Divide Draft EA indicates that as many as 1,040 acres would receive Variable Retention Harvest (VRH). Although BLM does not call this clearcutting, from a practical standpoint it is the equivalent, leaving behind a very small number or percentage of trees in a given stand. The 42 Divide Draft EA also indicates BLM could authorize as much as 3,919 acres of commercial thinning with up to 25% gap creation (mini-clearcuts). 25% of 3,919 is nearly 980 acres. 1,040 acres of VRH plus 980 acres of gaps is over 2,000 acres.
In other documents, BLM has acknowledged that VRH and “group selection openings” (gaps) are the equivalent of clearcutting from a watershed analysis. For example, see the Last Chance EA , pp. 86-87, found here:
I’m not sure about her math, if 1040 acres receive VRH, conceivably it’s not all openings. So a person could claim if a “very small number” is left, it’s the “equivalent” of clearcutting. And if gaps are “mini-clearcuts” then how much of a gap is a mini-clearcut?
If we were going to develop a shared definition of clearcutting, it seems to me it should have some characteristics, like:
1. The trees were alive before being cut down (is cutting a dead stand of lodgepole with some dead leave trees really a “clearcut”?)
2. The size of openings
3. The spatial relationship of openings
Let’s imagine a a 1 acre opening. It seems to me the impact would be different if another 1 acre opening were 20 feet away versus two miles. That’s what the literature on variable retention shows. So for me, you can’t add openings across space and by doing so call it a clearcut.
It’s perfectly fine to say “we don’t want openings larger than….”. Or “over this 1000 acre block, we only want 50 openings less than 1 acre.”
I think using the term “clearcut” without defining it by some kind of mutual agreement leads to unnecessary disagreement and confusion.
In my view, we have enough necessary disagreements (and apparently have had the same ones since the 80s’s) without having unnecessary ones!
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For those who want to philosophize, I also found this quote that seems, in retrospect, somewhat sanguine about the power of research to resolve disputes. I’ve always found it curious that forest science has always been so resistant to the sociology of science work directed at understanding when more science helps or doesn’t. From Focus on Forestry Winter 1991.
Crucial to resolving the disagreements surrounding New Forestry and the other contentious issues posed by natural-resource management today is good science leading to new knowledge, says Dean George Brown. “We are fully equipped to be the center for that science. We have hundreds of studies going on, looking at everything from the biological processes of forest soils, to manipulating the vegetation to get better growth from seedlings, to finding more-efficient ways to use the wood we have. “This kind of effort is what it’s going to take.”
The above photo is from 2007, by R6 State and Private Forestry of western spruce budworm defoliation. It wasn’t identified to location as far as I could see.
This one is on the Deschutes. For those interested, there is an extensive historical record of photos about various spruce budworm projects here. If you worked on any of those projects you might find a photo of yourself!
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I think we’re having a great discussion about the East-Side screens and the 21- inch diameter rule. Here I’d like to throw in an Old Person observation from my time on the Ochoco during the 80’s. It’s an Old Person observation about what seems to have changed and what has not changed in 40 years. I worked for four forests (the Fremont, Winema, Ochoco and Deschutes), but I’ll focus on the Ochoco.
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Historical aside: The Ochoco Supervisor’s Office at the time was a large open, cubicle puzzle space. I sat in the silviculture zone, next to the irrepressible Duane Ecker, the forest silviculturist, Don Wood and our boss, the Timber Staff, Chuck Downen. But thanks to the wonders of the cubicle environment, I often heard conversations of the Law Enforcement Officer (finding that particularly interesting things were said when he lowered his voice.. “the perpetrator…”). We all had Data Generals (DG’s). Unfortunately, but sometimes entertainingly, our Public Affairs Officer, Joe Meade (who was visually impaired), had a DG that read his email out loud .. in a tinny.. monotonous.. slow… voice. Apparently headphones were too technically or financially difficult to procure.
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At the time, people were running Forplan, and somehow we were involved in the tree-growing part. It could have been John Cissel, our Forplan soothsayer or Bill Anthony, his Deschutes counterpart , who told us “Forplan tells us to cut the ponderosa pine and grow grand fir, because they grow faster and ultimately produce more volume.” Or something like that. I know there are folks here who know more about what Forplan was supposed to be doing than I do.
So we silviculture folks explained why we thought that that was not a good idea. White fir/grand fir/ hybrid (WGH) firs aren’t fire resistant. They have a tendency to get spruce budworm, Doug-fir tussock moth, fir engraver, and a variety of root and other diseases.
So flash forward to today.. now “growing faster” is good idea-wise due to carbon.In this story about a study that Anonymous referred to:
“This is why specifically letting large trees grow larger is so important for climate change because it maintains the carbon stores in the trees and accumulates more carbon out of the atmosphere at a very low cost.”
The study highlights the importance of protecting existing large trees and strengthening the 21-inch rule so that additional carbon is accumulated as 21-30″ diameter trees are allowed to continue to grow to their ecological potential.
As a former silviculture worker, this feels pretty much the same as the Forplan idea of 40 years ago. Assume- no fires, bugs, diseases, drought (conceivably made worse by climate change) and the firs will do fine by themselves! No openings for establishment of PP or WL necessary.
But silviculturists, forest pathologists and entomologists, and fuels practitioners are dealing with the same biophysical realities- that trees don’t grow- whether to be cut as in Forplan, or to sequester carbon- if they’re dead and /or burned. It’s interesting to see that the body of resource professionals’ knowledge haven’t changed much over time (the interaction of trees, bugs, diseases and fire), while ideas about what practitioners should be doing from Forplan to carbon..seem to come from, and have the imprimatur of, people (however well-meaning) generally from elsewhere; places, apparently where fire, bugs, diseases and drought are not a big thing.
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If you want to see how much people already knew in 1994, there’s an excellent round-up, at least as far as the Blue Mountains go, by by the Malheur Forest Silviculturist, David C. Powell, in 1994- 30 years ago now. Same old..
White fir, the favorite food of spruce budworm, has flourished in the fir stands that have encroached on ponderosa pine sites over the last 80 years. By controlling natural underburns, land managers were inadvertently swapping ponderosa pines and western larches for white firs and Douglas-firs. (p. 5)
Ponderosa pine depends on fire to clear away accumulations of needles and twigs so its seeds can find moist mineral soil, and to kill encroaching firs that prevent seedlings from getting
the unobstructed sunlight they need.
By controlling natural underburns, land managers allowed fire-resistant pines and larches to be replaced with shade-tolerant, late-successional species. Many of the replacement species are susceptible to the effects of western spruce budworm, Douglas-fir tussock moth, Indian paint fungus, Armillaria root disease, and other insects and pathogens. (p. 19)
And there’s an interesting section on Native American burning practices:
Although some of the underburns were started by lightning storms in mid or late summer (Plummer 1912), many others were ignited by native Americans (Cooper 1961, Johnston 1970, Robbins and Wolf 1994). When analyzing early journals from the western U.S., Gruell (1985) found that over 40 percent of the fires were described as being started by native Americans.
Two major factors led to conversion of pine stands with underburning to laddered stands with shade-tolerant species. One was fire suppression:
Many land managers would agree that wildfire suppression was a policy with good intentions, but it was a policy that failed to consider the ecological implications of a major shift in species composition. White firs and Douglas-firs can get established under ponderosa pines in the absence of underburning, but they may not have enough resiliency to make it over the long run, let alone survive the next drought. This means that many of the mixed-conifer stands that have replaced ponderosa pine are destined to become weak, and weak forests are susceptible to insect and disease outbreaks (Hessburg and others 1994).
By controlling natural underburns, land managers allowed fire-resistant pines and larches to be replaced with shade-tolerant, late-successional species. Many of the replacement species are susceptible to the effects of western spruce budworm, Douglas-fir tussock moth, Indian paint fungus, Armillaria root disease, and other insects and pathogens. (p. 19)
The other reason was the attraction of cutting pine and leaving the GWH firs. Powell provides some detailed explanations of why that seemed like a good idea at the time (mo clearcutting, no expensive tree planting)(p. 27) . And there were interactions between controlling underburns and reducing tree vigor due to competition, so then they would want to take these stressed pines.
Since old pines often have low vigor and little resistance to insect attack, they were harvested before being attacked and killed by western pine beetle or mountain pine beetle. One reason for low vigor in oldgrowth pine trees was competition from a dense understory, an understory that would not have been present if underburning had been allowed to play its natural role.
In 1994 folks were thinking about climate change:
Reestablishing ponderosa pine and western larch on sites that are suitable for their survival and growth, and a thinning or prescribed fire program to keep those stands open and vigorous, would probably do much to address global warming concerns. Using a plan like that one would not only restore much of the pine and larch that was removed by partial cutting (see fig. 21), but it could also create healthy forests with an increased resistance to a variety of insects and pathogens.
And they were also thinking about (healthy=preEuro times) (p. 34)
Perhaps an appropriate yardstick of ecosystem health is natural variation: are the changes caused by budworm consistent with the historical range of variation for similar ecosystems and vegetation conditions? For the mixed conifer forests of the southern Blue Mountains, the answer is probably “no.” It seems that 80 years of fire suppression and 50 years of selective harvesting have resulted in vegetation conditions that differ significantly from those of presettlement times (Table 3).
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If some think that the FS wants to cut larger GWH fir unnecessarily, why would they want to do that?
Foster (1907) White fir, though occasionally used for fuel when no better species are available, makes poor fuel wood, while for saw timber it is all but valueless owing to the fact that nearly all mature trees are badly rotted by a prevalent polyporus, and the wood season-checks badly. (p.30)
Forest Service employees have sometimes been called p— firs due to the “badly rotted” characteristics of white fir.
a) It turns out the percentage of the globe that burns each year has been declining since 2001.
b) For more than two decades, satellites have recorded fires across the planet’s surface. The data are unequivocal: Since the early 2000s, when 3% of the world’s land caught fire, the area burned annually has trended downward.
c) In 2022, the last year for which there are complete data, the world hit a new record-low of 2.2% burned area. Yet you’ll struggle to find that reported anywhere.
d) Yet the latest report by the United Nations’ climate panel doesn’t attribute the area burned globally by wildfires to climate change. Instead, it vaguely suggests the weather conditions that promote wildfires are becoming more common in some places. Still, the report finds that the change in these weather conditions won’t be detectable above the natural noise even by the end of the century.
e)Take the Canadian wildfires this summer. While the complete data aren’t in for 2023, global tracking up to July 29 by the Global Wildfire Information System shows that more land has burned in the Americas than usual. But much of the rest of the world has seen lower burning—Africa and especially Europe. Globally, the GWIS shows that burned area is slightly below the average between 2012 and 2022, a period that already saw some of the lowest rates of burned area.
f) The thick smoke from the Canadian fires that blanketed New York City and elsewhere was serious but only part of the story. Across the world, fewer acres burning each year has led to overall lower levels of smoke, which today likely prevents almost 100,000 infant deaths annually, according to a recent study by researchers at Stanford and Stockholm University.
g) Likewise, while Australia’s wildfires in 2019-20 earned media headlines such as “Apocalypse Now” and “Australia Burns,” the satellite data shows this was a selective narrative. The burning was extraordinary in two states but extraordinarily small in the rest of the country. Since the early 2000s, when 8% of Australia caught fire, the area of the country torched each year has declined. The 2019-20 fires scorched 4% of Australian land, and this year the burned area will likely be even less.
h) In the case of American fires, most of the problem is bad land management. A century of fire suppression has left more fuel for stronger fires. Even so, last year U.S. fires burned less than one-fifth of the average burn in the 1930s and likely only one-tenth of what caught fire in the early 20th century.
#2) The Canadian Take by LIFESITE News,Thu Aug 31, 2023
