From Fire Suppression to Forplan to Carbon Sequestration: The Historical Advance of Grand/White/Hybrid Firs East of the Cascades in Oregon

https://forestpolicypub.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/39073908085_83128c2cde_h.jpg

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″  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.

And Then There Is This – Globally Wildfires Decreasing Since 2001

Italics and bolding added by Gil

#1)  WSJ ByBjorn Lomborg,

Climate Change Hasn’t Set the World on Fire

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

New research shows wildfires have decreased globally while media coverage has spiked 400%

More Federal Firefighters Moving On

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/firefighters-are-leaving-us-forest-service-better-pay-benefits-rcna93689

“The situation has grown so dire that the San Bernardino National Forest in Southern California saw 42 resignations in 48 hours in May, officials said.”

 

I guess we’ll see Congress extend the extra pay, but the firefighters want other issues addressed, too.

Court vacates Colville NF project and parts of its revised forest plan

This was going to be a “featured” case in a litigation summary post, but it turned out to be long enough for its own post.  Besides, forest plan litigation is rare, especially Forest Service losses, and this case covers a number of NFMA and NEPA issues that are frequent topics on this blog.  (And, full disclosure, I had something to do with it.)

  • Court decision in Kettle Range Conservation Group v. U. S. Forest Service (E.D. Wash):  Sanpoil clean

On the first day of summer, the district court vacated the decision for the Sanpoil Project on the Colville National Forest, and also vacated the relevant portions of the 2019 revised forest plan.  The portions of the revised plan at issue replaced the Eastside Screens 21-inch diameter limit with a guideline to protect large trees, but included many exceptions.  It also did not designate a minimum amount of old growth habitat to retain.

The court held that, “the agency failed to explain how the 2019 Forest Plan maintains the viability of old-growth-dependent species.”  More specifically, “the agency erred by failing to demonstrate that its data and methodology reliably and accurately supported its conclusions about the viability of old-growth dependent species under each planning alternative, and depicted the amount and quality of habitat.”  (Note that the Colville plan was revised under the 1982 planning regulations, which had somewhat different language describing wildlife viability.  However, this court did not rule on substantive compliance with the NFMA requirement, but rather found a failure to demonstrate compliance due to an inadequate administrative record based on the APA.)

The Forest stated that the selected alternative, Alternative P, provided a “high” viability outcome for these species and that the no-action alternative would not improve viability outcomes.  However, in the EIS, the data showed that “the No Action alternative provides more habitat than the selected alternative for three of the surrogate species,” and “creates the most late structure of any alternative.”  The Forest relied instead on an appendix in an associated Wildlife Report that employed a Bayesian belief model to assign letter grades to viability, which supported the rationale for selecting Alternative P.  The court explained:

Neither the EIS nor the Wildlife Report describe how the agency came to these scores for each species and action alternative. The agency did not define its methodology for assessing the letter grades, such as what factors it considered and the weight they were given. The grades assigned to each planning alternative lack explanation…  the agency acted arbitrarily and capriciously when it offered explanations that ran counter to the evidence before the agency and failed to satisfy the requirements of the NFMA.

The court also found that the Forest failed to discuss the amount and quality of habitat and population trends (a requirement of the 1982 regulations).

The court also held that the forest plan EIS violated NEPA by failing to meaningfully address the original Eastside Screens Report.  The Forest simply argued that it needed more flexibility to achieve the desired conditions, including avoiding numerous site-specific amendments to deviate from the diameter limit in the Eastside Screens.  The Forest failed to include the original Eastside Screens Report in its administrative record, and did not adequately respond to public comments about the Eastside Screens.  The court stated:

Its absence demonstrates that the agency failed consider the scientific rationale for adopting the 21-inch rule before deciding to discard it. The agency did not respond to viewpoints that directly challenged the scientific basis upon which the final EIS rests…  In doing so, the agency violated the NEPA. The absence of the Eastside Screens Report also demonstrates that the agency did not consider an important aspect of the issue, as required by the APA.

… the agency did not consider negative impacts, if any, from (1) elimination of the 21-inch rule or (2) retention of the exceptions in the new guideline. The NEPA requires the agency to discuss and not improperly minimize negative effects of a proposed action…  In this case, the EIS did not assess how often the new guideline’s exceptions will be invoked and how the exceptions may impact the agency’s conclusions about the environmental effects and species viability.”

The Sanpoil Project also violated NEPA.  The EA simply assumed that the new forest plan guideline would protect old-growth trees.  The court held:

This conclusion was contrary to the evidence. The Sanpoil Project EA did not specify the frequency of which the new guideline’s exceptions would be invoked, despite the 2019 Forest Plan’s stated objective of preserving old-growth trees. The agency is not required to catalogue specific trees that will be removed, but in this case, the agency was required to provide site-specific details at the project planning stage to provide a sufficient picture of the Sanpoil Project’s cumulative effects… Without sufficiently specific information about site impacts, the Sanpoil Project’s impact to old-growth trees and their dependent species is speculative.”

(This overlaps to some degree the issues surrounding “condition-based NEPA.”  The court even cites the Forest Service Handbook: “If the Agency does not know where or when an activity will occur or if it will occur at all[,] then the effects of that action cannot be meaningfully evaluated.”  It also is difficult to demonstrate consistency with the forest plan if the project documentation does not provide information about how a project is meeting forest plan requirements.)

The project also violated NEPA and NFMA by conducting “cursory analysis” of the effects of the project on gray wolves, wolverine, sensitive bat species, northern goshawk, and the western bumblebee.  Finally, the court found that NEPA requires an EIS for the Sanpoil Project because it “creates uncertain risks to old-growth forests and the wildlife dependent on them, and “sets a precedent for future actions that utilize the new old-growth guideline, each of which may be individually insignificant, but create a cumulatively significant impact when applying the new guideline.”  Moreover, the lack of quantified or detailed information about the Sanpoil Project’s impacts in this respect “is also highly controversial due to the same questions about its size and nature and effect of the action on old-growth dependent species.”

The court found that this “case” was ripe for judicial review “when the agency issued RODs for both agency actions” “because the Sanpoil Project is a site-specific action governed by the 2019 Forest Plan.”  The plaintiff had argued that forest plan decision challenge was ripe because it dealt with a forest-wide viability requirement rather than timber sale requirements found not ripe by the Supreme Court in its Ohio Forestry decision.  However, the plaintiff also argued that ripeness of forest plan issues could be based on this project decision implementing the plan.  It is not completely clear which rationale the court is employing.  The court also found that the plaintiff had exhausted administrative remedies by identifying large, old trees, wildlife viability and the Eastside Screens “thoroughly and consistently during the public comment process.”

DxP

 

Indianapolis Indiana Dead Tree Removal 317-783-2518

One of the threads of this discussion went off on a topic of how much discretion loggers should have in deciding what trees to cut down.  “Tricky Dick” offered that, “The USFS in its office attired lazyness doesn’t want to have to cruise the forest landscape piece by piece and thru honest Forestry discretion , uninhibited by profit motives, mark the bigger trees as ” leave or cut…”  Larry replied with regard to marked trees, but what if they are not marked?  I think there’s a name for that – “designation by prescription,” or DxP.  Here is how the Colville National Forest explains it (2020):

The Colville National Forest in Washington began using Designation by Prescription (DxP) in 2009 in order to become more efficient in timber sale preparation. Marking individual trees with paint in a sale area can be a time-consuming and costly process. DxP saves time preparing a timber sale and money spent on paint by allowing the logger to select which trees to harvest based on a timber stand prescription, which defines the desired condition after harvest.

With DxP, the operator may need to know tree species, how to measure tree diameters, forest health indicators, or how to achieve desired stocking level. This has the potential to initially slow operations. However, the flexibility that DxP provides (the contractor needs only to meet the prescription and that outcome can be accomplished in different ways) can create efficiencies for both the USDA Forest Service and the contractor

Is Tricky right?  But wouldn’t “allowing a logger to select which trees to harvest” allow them to do whatever they want within the broad confines of a “desired condition” in the “timber stand prescription?”  I have lots of questions about this.  How common is this?  Is the “timber stand prescription” part of the NEPA disclosure process in a way that all possible effects of the loggers’ decisions are accounted for?  If they only have to achieve the desired condition, could they do that in a way that is inconsistent with standards or guidelines in a forest plan?  Those aren’t included in the Colville’s “need to know” list above.

Asking for a friend.  Thanks.

Science Friday: Yale Forest School Scientists on “Proforestation”

When I first heard about the concept of proforestation, it seemed like an East Coast phenomenon. I thought “So what? Some of the usual suspects wrote an op-ed in Nature and various other outletsl their usual ideological beverage with a carbon twist?” Perhaps it’s timed to be part of a media campaign hoping to affect the Mature and Old Growth initiative of Forest Service and BLM.

Since I’ve worked on letters to the Forest Service about MOG, when I ran across a letter on proforestation by a bunch of scientists from The Forest School at the Yale School of the Environment I could recognize both excellent writing and a host of useful references. The themes that the authors touch on are also found in MOG. What’s particularly interesting to me about this letter is that Connecticut has no National Forests, and isn’t a dry forest/wildfire area. They don’t see forests go up in smoke, with associated carbon emissions. And they are talking about state and private land. So it’s interesting to see what they have to say.

Proforestation, on which the working group recommendations are based, is a recent political movement that aims to prevent forest management in the United States under the assumption that excluding humans from forests will serve as a climate change mitigation tool [4, 14, 15]. It also omits important aspects of forest carbon science [16]. It appears to be premised on a single opinion article published in an academic journal last year [14]. The reality is that forest carbon science is complex [17]. Excluding silviculture from Connecticut’s forests could result in them sequestering less atmospheric carbon over time, due to future losses from catastrophic disturbances (such as windstorms, invasive species, and fire) and lack of carbon benefits derived from forest products.
We lack a clear scientific answer to major questions related to forest carbon. These include:
• How do forest carbon dynamics change with forest succession, species composition, climate, and site characteristics? Disturbance events make future forest carbon dynamics, and the longevity of carbon stored in today’s forests, unpredictable [16, 18-23]. These events, which release vast amounts of forest carbon, are predicted to increase with climate change [24]. Appropriate and even optimized forest management can mitigate the risk of disturbance and reduce forest carbon lost in those events [25, 26].
• What is the lifecycle of carbon in forest soils and how does this relate to disturbance, climate, species composition, forest succession, and human activity [18, 22, 27-32]?
• Under what circumstances might unmanaged forests store more carbon than managed forests, and how do time and natural disturbances factor in to this comparison?
• How do methane emissions from forests differ between sites, species composition, and age structure [33-35]?
• What are the climate implications of multiple-use forest management which includes harvested forest products, compared to proforestation? Storage of carbon in forests and/or wood products are climate mitigation components, and wood can also serve as a fossil fuel reduction mechanism [1, 16, 36-38]. System level forest carbon accounting is complex and dynamic which highlights a need for comprehensive, and product specific, wood life cycle analyses and comparisons with non-renewable alternatives and market forces [39]. Woody biomass generated in forest management activities can bring additional climate benefits by either storing carbon in forest products [37] and/or replacing fossil-based counterparts [40].

Proforestation does not account for system level carbon dynamics related to forest products and misleads us to conclude that its adoption would be the most carbon positive of all forest policy choices. Given such questions, proforestation is an undemonstrated, unwise approach as a climate solution while active management provides a suite of approaches that can be tailored to find solutions to known and emerging threats to forest carbon storage and health. The proforestation movement misleads us to believe that people are not part of natural forests, a belief based on a dichotomy of nature and culture that has been shown to promote environmental degradation instead of conservation [41]. Indeed, for thousands of years before European colonists arrived, Indigenous peoples stewarded and actively managed Connecticut’s forests, through prescribed fire and harvesting of wood for a variety of uses. This active management by people still influences the forests we see today. The myth of a “pristine” unmanaged forest being the natural state of Connecticut’s forests is just not accurate or necessarily desirable for carbon sequestration, biodiversity, or other ecosystem services. Active forest management has been crucial through time for ensuring that our forests are healthy and resilient while meeting society’s needs.

What the proforestation movement gets right is that poor land management can decimate the biodiversity and ecosystem services of forests. Just as sound management has conserved our contemporary forest after a period of destructive agriculture in the 18th and 19th centuries, we now need to rely on ongoing management to steward these forests through multiple threats, including more frequent and intense weather events such as droughts and storms, and losses due to invasive pathogens. These increasing threats reflect the fact that Connecticut’s forests are human influenced, they have been for millennia and this is even more true today due to climate and other environmental changes. Keeping forests healthy and growing under conditions of multiplying and intensifying threats will require the ongoing human intervention that management offers. Management allows us to maintain growing forests, and growing forests sequester carbon.

Silviculture enables us to facilitate successional trajectories that will make forests more resilient to ongoing and emerging threats from global change, while supporting rural livelihoods and sustaining biodiversity. The science of silviculture in Connecticut is not about cutting primary forests, planting monocultures, or other such extractive practices which deliver only short-term gain. Outdated caricatures of forestry professionals are detrimental and threaten the resiliency of our state’s forests. Silviculture is about sustaining healthy forestlands, which involves anticipating and responding to disturbances that threaten long-term forest health, through science- and practice-informed strategies.

There are also broader issues at play here relating to sustainable rural economies and environmental justice and responsibility. For example, ‘preservation’ of a wealthy society’s resources leads to greater exploitation of forest resources in places where less regulation and scientific knowledge exist to ensure sustainable management. This concept has been described as the illusion of preservation [42]. We are loath to be drawn into the nuances of these arguments, but suffice to say that meeting energy and wood demands must involve globally-coordinated initiatives with consideration to the differences between biogenic carbon emissions and fossilized carbon emissions [17, 37, 43, 44]. In Connecticut, we have restored our state forestland through management which can continue to maintain – and even enhance – the carbon, other environmental, and rural community benefits of our forestlands. Exporting demands for forest products to regions without our rich scientific and practitioner expertise is damaging to both our state and the planet. Connecticut needs to support the DEEP Forestry Division by providing them with enough resources to fully, and appropriately, steward our State forestlands.

We end by stating that we are ProForests, ProBiodiversity, ProClimate and ProRuralCommunities. In Connecticut, that necessitates being ProManagement.

Attached is the letter with the references and the names of the signatories. My bold on the first sentence.

“Proforestation” It Aint What It Claims To Be

‘Proforestation’ separates people from forests

AKA: Ignorance and Arrogance Still Reign Supreme at the Sierra Club.

I picked this up from Nick Smith’s Newsletter (sign up here)
Emphasis added by myself as follows:
1)  Brown Text for items NOT SUPPORTED by science with long term and geographically extensive validation.                                                                                                                                                        2) Bold Green Text for items SUPPORTED by science with long term and geographically extensive validation.
3) >>>Bracketed Italics for my added thoughts based on 59 years of experience and review of a vast range of literature going back to way before the internet.<<<

“Proforestation” is a relatively new term in the environmental community. The Sierra Club defines it as: “extending protections so as to allow areas of previously-logged forest to mature, removing vast amounts of atmospheric carbon and recovering their ecological and carbon storage potential.”          >>>Apparently, after 130 years of existence, the Sierra Club still doesn’t know much about plant physiology, the carbon cycle or the increased risk of calamitous wild fire spread caused by the close proximity of stems and competition driven mortality in unmanged stands (i.e. the science of plant physiology regarding competition, limited resources and fire spread physics). Nor have they thought out the real risk of permanent destruction of the desired ecosystems nor the resulting impact on climate change.<<<

Not only must we preserve untouched forests, proponents argue, but we must also walk away from previously-managed forests too. People should be entirely separate from forest ecology and succession. >>>More abject ignorance and arrogant woke policy based only on vacuous wishful thinking.<<<

Except humans have managed forests for millennia. In North America, Indigenous communities managed forests and sustained its resources for at least 8,000 years prior to European settlement. It is true people have not always managed forests sustainably. Forest practices of the late 19th century are a good example.                                                                                                                                                 >>>Yes, and the political solution pushed on us by the Sierra Club and other faux conservationists beginning with false assumptions about the Northern Spotted Owl was to throw out the continuously improving science (i.e. Continuous Process Improvement [CPI]).  The concept of using the science to create sustainable practices and laws that regulated the bad practices driven by greed and arrogance wasn’t even considered seriously.  As always, the politicians listened to the well heeled squeaky voters.  Now, their arrogant ignorance has given us National Ashtrays, destruction of soils, and an ever increasing probability that great acreages of forest ecosystems will be lost to the generations that follow who will also have to cope with the exacerbated climate change.  So here we are, in 30+/- years the Faux Conservationists have made things worse than the greedy timber barons ever could have.  And the willfully blind can’t seem to see what they have done. Talk about arrogance.<<<

Forest management provides tools to correct past mistakes and restore ecosystems. But Proforestation even seems to reject forest restoration that helps return a forest to a healthy state, including controlling invasive species, maintaining tree diversity, returning forest composition and structure to a more natural state.

Proforestation is not just a philosophical exercise. The goal is to ban active forest management on public lands. It has real policy implications for the future management (or non-management) of forests and how we deal with wildfires, climate change and other disturbances.

We’ve written before about how this concept applies to so-called “carbon reserves.” Now, powerful and well-funded anti-forestry groups are pressuring the Biden Administration to set-aside national forests and other federally-owned lands under the guise of “protecting mature and old-growth” trees.

In its recent white paper on Proforestation (read more here), the Society of American Foresters writes that “preservation can be appropriate for unique protected areas, but it has not been demonstrated as a solution for carbon storage or climate change across all forested landscapes.”

Proforestation doesn’t work when forests convert from carbon sinks into carbon sources. A United Nations report pointed out that at least 10 World Heritage sites – the places with the highest formal environmental protections on the planet – are net sources of carbon pollution. This includes the iconic Yosemite National Park.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recognizes active forest management will yield the highest carbon benefits over the long term because of its ability to mitigate carbon emitting disturbance events and store carbon in harvested wood products. Beyond carbon, forest management ensures forests continue to provide assets like clean water, wildlife habitat, recreation, and economic activity.
>>>(i.e. TRUE SUSTAINABILITY)<<<

Forest management offers strategies to manage forests for carbon sequestration and long-term storage.Proforestation rejects active stewardship that can not only help cool the planet, but help meet the needs of people, wildlife and ecosystems. You can expect to see this debate intensify in 2023.

Science Friday: Reducing Tree Density in Dry Forests Can Help Drought and Insect Resistance- Bradford et al. Paper


If you click on this figure twice you can see it more clearly.

I have often observed that in Oregon, dry forest management tends to be seen through a wet forest filter due to the location of most scientists, interest groups, and politicians on the West Side. So I am in no way, shape or form, suggesting that this study is applicable to wetter forests than those studied (all east of Cascades and SW Or and NW Cal). The idea is that basically in a dry forest in drought, reducing BA and competition for water will keep trees healthier. Many of us have observed this effect in the field after thinning projects and some might say that this is old news, but the authors use large datasets to come to some interesting conclusions.

This seems to be  the opposite of the Williamette project in the previous post; lots of ecological reasons but no industry. In fact if you look at figure 3d, it appears that the areas that could use thinning the most (yellow) are least likely to have forest industry of any size.  Do the maps make sense in the areas you know?

Here are the conclusions of this study.

Interactions between competition and drought provide information for near-term forest management. In particular, the response of mortality to drought-density interactions reinforces the climate adaptation benefits of ongoing forest landscape restoration (Stoddard et al., 2021) that is increasingly widespread in ponderosa pine forests (Figure 1a). Increasing BA in the late 20th century over many forests in the western U.S. (Rautiainen et al., 2011), particularly in ponderosa pine forests (Covington & Moore, 1994; Reynolds et al., 2013), prompted restoration projects designed to reduce forest density, promote structural conditions consistent with the historical range of variability, and mitigate the risk of catastrophic wildfires that lead to rapid loss of forest cover and ecosystem carbon (McCauley et al., 2019). The interactions demonstrated here between competition and hot drought provide quantitative information about how density reduction enabled by these restoration projects, initially designed for other purposes, will also help buffer forests against heat- and drought-driven tree mortality that is increasing in forests around the world (Allen et al., 2010). In addition, these results identify areas where BA reduction may be most useful for enhancing dry forest sustainability. Geographical patterns in estimated benefits of reducing current BA (Figure 3c,d) and in overall climate-driven sensitivity of mortality to basal area (Figure 3e) may be useful for prioritizing future restoration projects. Our results suggest that substantial reduction in BA may be necessary to moderate drought-induced mortality (Figure S4c). These treatments would alter forest structure, and the impact of those changes need to be weighed against the benefits of imposing treatments. Although severe mortality events driven by hot droughts and insects would also reduce BA, restoration treatments may include benefits like selecting the trees to removed or retain, and avoiding rapid increases in fuel loads after mortality.

Although our focus was assessing how BA and drought combine to influence tree mortality, our data include the effects of insect activity. Tree mortality is often elevated by the combination of both drought and insects (Anderegg et al., 2015). Mortality events driven by these drought–insect combinations have been demonstrated in many areas, including in ponderosa pine forests within our study area and sampling period (Fettig et al., 2019; Stephenson et al., 2019). Including these recent insect outbreaks in the data we examined ensures that our results about how mortality responds to drought type and basal area are relevant even in the context of substantial insect activity. Specifically, the potential for reducing BA to decrease tree mortality encompasses the influence of both drought (whose effects may be exacerbated by high BA due to competition) and insect dynamics (whose effects may be exacerbated by BA due to insect population dynamics not directly related to tree competition). Unlike insects, we attempted to avoid including other mortality agents by excluding plots with wildfire or harvesting. As a result, our overall average mortality rate of ~0.8% per year (5th–95th percentile = 0.14% and 1.8% per year) is an estimate of background mortality and may be less than other studies of ponderosa pine mortality (Ganey & Vojta, 2011). Drought contributes to wildfire activity (Hicke et al., 2016), underscoring the need to untangle the interacting influences of these multiple mortality agents. In addition, our results may not fully account for the consequences of actual temporal changes in climate and/or forest because we utilized a space-for-time substitution, which has recognized limitations in modelling climate-induced changes in tree mortality with a single remeasurement of FIA plots (Dietze & Moorcroft, 2011).

Forest managers have relatively few proven strategies to enhance near-term drought resistance of intact dry forests to rising temperatures and more extreme droughts. Long-term forest management strategies for climate adaptation include harvesting and/or planting to shift composition towards tree species with higher drought tolerance (Paz-Kagan et al., 2017) or to promote forests with higher diversity in species composition or functional traits (Anderegg et al., 2016). Reducing BA in existing forests is a complementary and feasible strategy that our results suggest will have long-term benefits. The interactions identified here provide insight into the types of drought that most influence tree mortality, and how those drought conditions can be minimized by moderating competitive intensity. Specifically, BA reduction can enhance resistance to hot conditions and to multiyear drought events, whose frequency and severity are also expected to be increased as a result of elevated hydro-climatic variability (Swain et al., 2018). This elevated hydro-climate variability may create more multiyear wet periods that could enhance mortality in subsequent droughts by promoting structural overshoot (Jump et al., 2017), further highlighting the benefits of density reduction. Predictions of multiyear wet periods (Liu & Di Lorenzo, 2018) may represent important opportunities for intensive management (e.g. thinning) to promote forest structural conditions with high resilience to hot droughts (Bradford et al., 2018). Our findings that basal area interacts strongly with multiyear drought, and that 3-year wet periods partially mitigate ponderosa pine mortality, provide evidence that both the interactions and the occurrence of wet periods may be useful focal points for additional synthesis and analysis.

Upcoming public lands regulatory actions

On December 10, 2021, the Biden Administration released the Fall 2021 Unified Agenda of Regulatory and Deregulatory Actions, which is a semi-annual compilation of information concerning regulations and policy under development by federal agencies.  I’ve pulled out the Forest Service and BLM entries below.

This link was provided in this blog post focused primarily on the Endangered Species Act and “the regulated community” (and on undoing Trump administration regulatory changes).  The one individual species proposal that may affect (eastern) national forests concerns the northern long-eared bat, and possible critical habitat designation (it is currently listed as threatened).  It also notes proposed rules by the Council on Environmental Quality revising National Environmental Policy Act implementing regulations (targeting climate change).

USDA/FSProposed Rule StageSpecial Uses–Cost Recovery0596-AD35
USDA/FSProposed Rule StageCommunications Uses–Programmatic Administrative Fee0596-AD44
USDA/FSProposed Rule StageLaw Enforcement; Orders; Enforcement of Public Health and Safety Measures0596-AD50
USDA/FSProposed Rule StageAlaska Roadless Rule Revision0596-AD51
USDA/FSProposed Rule StageChattooga Wild and Scenic River0596-AD52
USDA/FSProposed Rule StageWeeks Act Reviews0596-AD53
USDA/FSFinal Rule StageRange Management–Excess Use/Unauthorized Use0596-AD45
DOI/BLMProposed Rule StageRights-of-Way for Communications Including Broadband1004-AE60
DOI/BLMProposed Rule StageBonding1004-AE68
DOI/BLMProposed Rule StageRights-of-Way, Leasing and Operations for Renewable Energy and Transmission Lines1004-AE78
DOI/BLMProposed Rule StageWaste Prevention, Production Subject to Royalties, and Resource Conservation1004-AE79
DOI/BLMProposed Rule StageRevision of Existing Regulations Pertaining to Fossil Fuel Leases and Leasing Process 43 CFR Parts 3100 and 34001004-AE80
DOI/BLMProposed Rule StagePart 4100-Grazing Administration-Exclusive of Alaska1004-AE82
DOI/BLMProposed Rule StageRegulations for the Protection, Management, and Control of Wild Horses and Burros1004-AE83
DOI/BLMProposed Rule StageRegulations Pertaining to Leasing and Operations for Geothermal1004-AE84
DOI/BLMFinal Rule StageMinerals Management: Adjustment of Cost Recovery Fees1004-AE81
DOI/BLMFinal Rule StageOnshore Oil and Gas Operations-Annual Civil Penalties Inflation Adjustments1004-AE85

Possible Salvage Strategy for Dixie and Caldor Fires

Since a battle for salvage projects is brewing, I think the Forest Service and the timber industry should consider my idea to get the work done, as soon as possible, under the rules, laws and policies, currently in force. It would be a good thing to ‘preempt’ the expected litigation before it goes to Appeals Court.

 

The Forest Service should quickly get their plans together, making sure that the project will survive the lower court battles. It is likely that such plans that were upheld by lower courts, in the past, would survive the inevitable lower court battles. Once the lower court allows the project(s), the timber industry should get all the fallers they can find, and get every snag designated for harvest on the ground. Don’t worry too much about skidding until the felling gets done. That way, when the case is appealed, most of Chad Hanson’s issues would now be rendered ‘moot’. It sure seems like the Hanson folks’ entire case is dependent on having standing snags. If this idea is successful, I’m sure that Hanson will try to block the skidding and transport of logs to the mill. The Appeals Court would have to decide if skidding operations and log hauling are harmful to spotted owls and black-backed woodpeckers.

 

It seems worth a try, to thin out snags over HUGE areas, while minimizing the legal wranglings.