People’s Database

The People’s Database (PALS Version) and Should the FS Use Legislative CEs and ESDs?

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Thanks to everyone, this has generally been a great discussion so far.  Some themes and topics have come out that deserve their own space. I’ll start with my favorite- the People’s Database.

I. This Should All Be Public and Easily Available

When we started the PALS Database in the Forest Service WO NEPA shop(part of the E-gov initiative)(probably the early 2000s), the acronym stood for Planning, Appeals and Litigation Database.  Our intention was to build out the NEPA piece, as well as appeals (and objections) and litigation, and after testing and refinement, make it publicly available.

Let’s go back to our Colorado health policy op-ed:

And far too often, our debates start from clashing assumptions instead of shared facts.

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And we need decisions rooted in shared, validated data rather than ideology or assumptions.

Perhaps if we are to figure out where we really disagree and what can be done about it, we should start with asking the Forest Service to provide us with validated, public data.  So I went through the comments from yesterday and pulled the questions that could be answered with the People’s Database.

1. Sam said “I haven’t seen a whole lot of litigation against thinning projects in the Sierra Nevada. The few lawsuits (against thinning) in the courts over the decades have not been very successful.”

Database would include project, purpose and need, litigation, plaintiffs, dates filed, dates appealed, date settled,data project began, link to court documents, (probably other info of interest to legal folks.)  Then we would know.

2. The Black Hills.  I vaguely remember an amendment to the Forest Plan being required as part of a settlement agreement. So there must have been some litigation?  Again, we would know from the People’s Database how many lawsuits had been brought on the Hills over time.

3. Dave said ” I would really like to see the stats of how many projects in the last year or two have been covered by Emergency Action Determination. I am going to guess that it is a majority. Maybe some lawsuits could be prevented if the Forest Service did a better job at resolving issues during the objection process.” We could easily see that if each project was entered and could be searched using that.  Probably PALS has that and we could ask.

Denise said “EADs cover well over one million acres at this point maybe two million” but we don’t know. And is that the acres impacted by actions or project areas?

4. Brett said:

The paper from the Breakthrough Institute found a 28% loss rate for NEPA. This compares to Fleischman et al. (2020. US Forest Service implementation of the national environmental policy act: Fast, variable, rarely litigated, and declining. Journal of Forestry, 118(4), pp.403-418) which states that; “Of the 241 resolved cases (the others are still outstanding), the USFS won 67 percent, lost 21 percent, and settled 12 percent.” The problem with these numbers is they don’t account for the documents that are withdrawn before going to court. So, the real odds of the Forest Service losing a case is perhaps close to 50:50. And remember all ties go to the Forest Service (we get deference).

So I think the two studies probably differed by timeframes, definitions and maybe kinds of projects. We should be able to do our own analyses (IMHO) and also be able to link to settlements.
Also, Brett, when I read Science at the Bar, I didn’t think Jasanoff said that the courts are the place to resolve conflicts. I’ll have to go back and look. It seems like the political process is where ox-goring is generally decided.

II. Is it Fair to Say “the FS is trying to cut the public out by using CEs?”

I think of the HFRA CEs, for example. Congress established them because they weighed the pros and cons and came up with a tool for the FS to use. Should the Executive Branch say “sorry gals and fellas, we don’t want to use this because we don’t agree with your judgment.” That’s an interesting separation of powers question. Or are we blaming Congress for not caring about public comment? ESD’s were part of the IIJA, Vilsack had one map, the current Sec. another. Again, if Congress comes up with something specifically to help with a problem that it sees, the FS should not use that tool.. because…???

I do think the tenor of this discussion is different, because it tends to blame FS employees (incompetent timber-lovers) instead of Congress or any given Admin or party.

The People’s Database Redux: New Admin, New Transparency?

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I couldn’t get the MS AI to remove the smoke from Smokey. Smokey looks puzzled and slightly disappointed. He must have tried to round up personnel data.

Mark Haggerty of Headwaters mentioned the need for the FS to produce information.. which reminded me of an earlier concept of “the People’s Database” in which an Admin could bring people together to prioritize information to be publicly available and develop formats, etc. So that IT and other folks wouldn’t have to guess. Could be a FACA committee (although establishing those is painful and long). As far as I can tell, transparency is an idea generally favored by both kinds of Admins, and yet our simple world with our few relatively simple requests seems to be overlooked.

Anyway, I’m reposting The People’s Database post below. For the previous comments, you can go here.  Also there’s a category for People’s Database which has several posts from 2012 on.

When I think about this now, I think perhaps we don’t need the Chief to get a FACA committee, some organization (Headwaters?) could organize a group to develop recommendations for what data should be public and in what format, similar to how AF&PA organized the Blue Ribbon Panels for FIA.

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Needed: Coalition for Public Access to Information on National Forests (AKA The People’s Database)

(originally posted

Recently, SAF signed on to an effort to get funding for FIA- forest inventory and analysis- which collects information about forests across the US. A couple of times I served on two “Blue Ribbon Panel” of users of the information who (excerpted from this):

The American Forest and Paper Association has organized two Blue Ribbon Panels (1991 and 1997) to review the national FIA program and provide recommendations to the Forest Service on needed changes to the content and capabilities of the program. The most recent panel recommended that the Forest Service should 1) elevate the priority of FIA in the Forest Service program, 2) convert the FIA program from a periodic inventory to an annual inventory, 3) fulfill the congressional mandate of reporting on all lands regardless of ownership, 4) concentrate on the core ecological and timber data, and 5) develop a strategic plan to implement the full FIA program.

FIA also has regular meetings with user groups to help guide their activities and generate support.

It seems to me that we are missing a group (Coalition) that can reach across different interest groups and ask for information that we might agree that we all need about National Forests. We don’t have an AF&PA to speak for us and get things started, so perhaps we have to organize ourselves.

We could ask the Chief to convene a panel of citizens representing different groups to ask 1) what information is important to be collected in a standard format across forests and regions? and 2) how best do we make that accessible to the public? For example, PALS has searches that internal folks can do but not external.. should it remain that way?

Stakeholders outside of the FS could lobby strongly for this information the same way that they lobby for FIA.

Some topics we’ve mentioned here are budgets and outputs, costs of environmental document developments, number of acres treated, etc., as in the “vegetation management” thread here and here. it seems to me that we could take advantage of having an Administration who promotes transparency to set such a framework of an advisory committee.

At first, I was thinking volunteers could find and enter the data, but then I thought “if the public wants this information, why doesn’t the agency just provide it?”. I’m sure that the agency could save some bucks by stopping collecting information on a variety of things that someone used to be interested in, and focus on things the public is currently interested in. The public could actually help the Forest Service prioritize information across silos, something that is problematic internally.

But we can’t ask poor Region 1 to do more work on their own.. when these are national forests, and data should be captured and made available consistently across regions. Besides, they appear to already be doing more work than some other regions, based on the GAO reports and Derek’s observations.

What do you think?

 

Let’s Review Some Forest Service NEPA Stats

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If you all have been following the California wildfires, you’ll discover that everyone tends to attach their favorite hobby horse to the disaster.

Politicians, climate change, patterns of housing, and even… vegetation treatments and permitting.   My pet peeve about coverage is how easily folks get into a forest discussion about what, in this case, was coastal scrub and grasslands.  Having said that, I think we need to engage with the permitting folks for many reasons,  not least because permitting reform of various kinds will be on the table in Congress again.  However we might disagree about what should be done, it seems to me that we should work together to get both facts and disagreements on the table.

I try to be hospitable to new people entering the space. Interestingly, permitting reform folks, who work on permitting infrastructure, renewables and so on, tend to use the Forest Service as an example. So we can help them out by adding value and/or questioning their observations.

I’m going to reprint Tom Hochman’s Substack post below.  Remember, we want to share our knowledge with a welcoming spirit. Also it doesn’t seem (as usual) that partisan-ness helps our policy discussions in any way. I’ve spent some time talking to DC folks in the last few weeks, and I think both sides needs to take a deep breath and try to move on past the acrimonious past (do politicians forgive?) so we all can move forward together.

So, from what you know, do these observations make sense and track with your experience? Here’s Hochman’s piece.

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By now, everyone has heard about the wildfires sweeping through the Los Angeles area. The sheer scale of destruction is hard to make sense of. My cousin, aunt, and uncle in Pasadena spent days anxiously packed, ready to evacuate at any moment. Their friends lost their homes; the local elementary school is rubble.

It’s tough to pinpoint a single cause for any given wildfire—and wildfires sometimes happen regardless of human activity or government policy. But there’s no doubt that forest management and wildfire-prevention policies can reduce both the probability and severity of wildfires. In California and at the federal level, those policies have often fallen disastrously short.

With that, here’s a wildfire-focused edition of NEPAstats. I’ve compiled data (all cited at the bottom) on how NEPA and similar review processes intersect with wildfire prevention, and I’ve pulled together a number of specific case studies.

Case Studies

Jimtown Project (Helena National Forest)
  • Proposed thinning/underburning across 900 acres + underburning 220 more
  • EIS and Decision Notice released in May 2001
  • Project appealed despite support from 12 of 22 local landowners, county disaster services, and a tri-county fire group
  • By July 2003: ~45% of the proposed project area had already burned in a wildfire (Kimbell, 2005)

Six Rivers National Forest

  • December 1995: A storm topples trees across 35,000 acres
    • Fuel loads reach 300–400 tons per acre—10x normal
  • 1996–1999: Only 1,600 acres treated while “wrestling through analytical and procedural requirements”
  • September 1999: The Megram and Fawn Fires consume the remaining blowdown area plus 90,000 additional acres
  • Seven years later: The project remains in limbo after a court injunction (USFS, 2002)

Berry Creek (California)

  • Critical thinning projects were delayed by CEQA reviews
  • The North Complex Fire hit in 2020 before completion, resulting in 16 fatalities (Regan, 2025)

Grizzly Flats (California)

  • A forest-restoration project was held up for nearly a decade by NEPA and other environmental reviews
  • In 2021, two-thirds of the community burned before the project was completed (Regan, 2025)

Timing and Delays

Average time before treatments under NEPA
  • 3.6 years to start a mechanical treatment once the Forest Service initiates review
  • 4.7 years to start a prescribed burn under the same conditions
  • For projects requiring an EIS:
    • 5.3 years on average for mechanical treatments
    • 7.2 years for prescribed burns (Edwards & Sutherland, 2022)

Forest Service resource allocation

  • The Forest Service manages 192 million acres—8.5% of U.S. land area—but spends ~40% of direct work hours (>$250 million/year) on planning/assessment rather than active project work (USFS, 2002)
    • An estimated $100 million annually could shift from “unnecessary planning” to on-the-ground treatments with improved procedures
  • Annually, the Forest Service completes:
    • ~5,000 EAs,
    • ~120 project-level EISs
    • 15,000 CEs per year (USFS, 2002)

Litigation Patterns and Impact

  • Sierra Club v. Bosworth (2007) invalidated the Forest Service’s attempt to create a CE for fuel-reduction projects, meaning prescribed burns require a full EA/EIS
  • For NEPA-Related Appellate Court Cases:
    • Fuel-treatment projects that face legal challenges see an additional 1+ year of delay on average
    • Agencies prevail in 93% of NEPA fuel-reduction appeals, with 96% of these challenges brought by NGOs
    • An average of 3 years elapses between permit issuance and final resolution in these cases (Chiappa et al., 2024)

The Human and Environmental Costs

  • Forest density: Parts of the Sierra Nevada are now 6–7x denser than a century ago, fueling more intense megafires
  • GHG impacts: California’s 2020 wildfire emissions wiped out nearly two decades of the state’s greenhouse gas reduction progress
  • Species: Giant sequoias are dying in megafires; conifer forests are sometimes replaced by shrubland in the aftermath (Regan, 2025)

State-Level Barriers: CEQA and CalVTP

  • In 2020, California pledged to treat 500,000 acres per year by 2025—but remains far off due to lengthy reviews, public comment periods, and litigation (Regan, 2025)
  • California Vegetation Program aka CalVTP:
    • Projected 45,000 acres of treatments in the first year, but zero completed after 2+ years
    • 28,000 acres approved but not implemented
    • Project managers cite “unfamiliar and burdensome” documentation, multiple CalFire unit boundaries, and a pending lawsuit from the California Chaparral Institute and Endangered Habitats League (Friedman, 2022)
The CalVTP “fast-track” workflow

Recent Reform Efforts

  • California SB1159 (2024)
    • Would have exempted roadside vegetation clearing within 30 feet from CEQA
    • Died in committee
  • Federal TORCH Act
    • Would expand NEPA Categorical Exclusions for forest thinning and post-fire recovery, limit repeated ESA re-consultations for new species listings, and create larger “CLEAR Zones” for power line vegetation management (Regan, 2025)
    • Didn’t make it to the Senate floor
  • Fix Our Forests Act (2024)
    • Would expand NEPA Categorical Exclusions for certain forest management projects
    • Passed the House, didn’t make it through the Senate

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What are your thoughts?

Repost From the Past: Time for the People’s Database?

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from a presentation at the 2019 FIA User Meeting https://www.ncasi.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Prisley1.pdf

 

Yesterday’s discussion of all the possible information about fires and datasets that might be useful for different reasons reminded me of  a post from 10 years  ago  (April 27, 2013, to be exact).. Needed: Coalition for Public Access to Information on National Forests (AKA The People’s Database)

In the past, TSW had a category called “the People’s Database” that talked about how the way the FS produces information could be more helpful to the kinds of questions the public is asking. If you’re interested, you can click on the category way down among the widgets on the right hand side.  It’s probably easiest to do this on a computer rather than a phone.

A colleague of mine when we worked in the now-defunct RPA Program, Terry Tipple, used to give me on-the-job training in his field, public administration. He always said “policy is like a merry-go-round, you keep going around and at some point stars will align such that you can grab the brass ring.” It’s in the spirit of potential brass-ring-grabbing that I repost the below piece from 2013.

Anyone who is writing a comment letter for the Forest Service ANPR (that I used to call the MOG ANPR, but I’ve been told more recently that it is really about improving procedures and practices) can add ideas like this.. .

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Volunteering for SAF gives me many opportunities for insight and opportunities to compare private and public forests, and regions of the country.

Recently, SAF signed on to an effort to get funding for FIA- forest inventory and analysis- which collects information about forests across the US. A couple of times I served on two “Blue Ribbon Panel” of users of the information who (excerpted from this):

The American Forest and Paper Association has organized two Blue Ribbon Panels (1991 and 1997) to review the national FIA program and provide recommendations to the Forest Service on needed changes to the content and capabilities of the program. The most recent panel recommended that the Forest Service should 1) elevate the priority of FIA in the Forest Service program, 2) convert the FIA program from a periodic inventory to an annual inventory, 3) fulfill the congressional mandate of reporting on all lands regardless of ownership, 4) concentrate on the core ecological and timber data, and 5) develop a strategic plan to implement the full FIA program.

FIA also has regular meetings with user groups to help guide their activities and generate support.

It seems to me that we are missing a group (a Peoples’ Coalition) that can reach across different interest groups and ask for information that we might agree that we all need about National Forests. We don’t have an AF&PA to speak for us and get things started, so perhaps we have to organize ourselves.

We could ask the Chief to convene a panel of citizens representing different groups to ask 1) what information is important to be collected in a standard format across forests and regions? and 2) how best do we make that accessible to the public? For example, PALS has searches that internal folks can do but not external.. should it remain that way?

Stakeholders outside of the FS could then lobby strongly for this information the same way that groups (very successfully) lobby for FIA.

Some topics we’ve mentioned here are budgets and outputs, costs of environmental document developments, number of acres treated, etc., as in the “vegetation management” thread here and here. it seems to me that we could take advantage of having an Administration which promotes transparency to set such a framework of an advisory committee.

At first, I was thinking volunteers could find and enter the data, but then I thought “if the public wants this information, why doesn’t the agency just provide it?”. I’m sure that the agency could save some bucks by stopping collecting information on a variety of things that someone used to be interested in, and focus on things the public is currently interested in. The public could actually help the Forest Service prioritize information across silos, something that is problematic internally.

But we can’t ask poor Region 1 to do more work on their own.. when these are national forests, and data should be captured and made available consistently across regions. Besides, they appear to already be doing more work than some other regions, based on the GAO reports and Derek’s observations.

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Collecting information based on what the public perceives as a need (the vacuum approach) and involving the public in how the information is developed has many advantages in terms of building trust in the information. Sometimes it seems as if some science folks and NGOs use the blower approach for information- they put out what they already have or what they think is useful which may or may not be. And perhaps don’t ground truth the data with the public.. which doesn’t increase trust.  If anything needs more trust, it would be prescribed burning and WFU, IMHO.

 

 

Vegetation Change and Vegetation Management: A Potential New National Forest Report Format

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I remember Chris Iverson, noted expert in wildlife and forest planning, saying something once about forest plans like “if you don’t do much, you shouldn’t spend as much time planning.” As I recall, he was talking about the Chugach compared to the Tongass forest plans. But what exactly is “doing much”? What seems to be most controversial and widespread is vegetation management for forest management.

I thought it would be interesting to see where the Rio Grande (with a recent plan revision) fell on that scale, and many thanks to them for their help in collecting this information. I think it would be great to have this information available for all forests. First, the total acres of the Rio Grande is 1.83 million acres to give context. You could easily do this table with percentages and be able to compare the acres impacted by management across different National Forests, as well as vegetation changes due to human and other factors.

What we got from the Forest was total acres of all vegetation treatments, not duplicating the same acres with different treatments (double counting).

According to the forest, the average timber harvest has been around 3100 acres per year. All of that has been insect salvage except for 120 acres in 2017. So that’s about 2% of the forest per year. Of course, salvaging spruce beetle trees that are dead may have different impacts than green sales, but this table is about all acres impacted by vegetation management and other vegetation change.

After collecting this information, I realized that a 10 year timespan may have been better. In 2013, the West Fork Complex Fire burned 87,662 acres of the Rio Grande. Then there’s the spruce beetle outbreak itself over time, accumulating to 617,000 acres. I didn’t fill in that row in the table, but the information is available from the aerial survey folks.

It would be interesting to see at least 10 years with the acreage by type plotted over time, including large events like bug and fire acres, for each National Forest. I think it would be very informative to compare forests, both in total acres of different kinds of human and other vegetation changes, and percentages of the total acres impacted.

I’m not saying that this is the perfect formulation for people to get a grasp of “relative vegetation management” I’m just asking “doesn’t this way of looking at it tell us something of value”?

What would you add or change?

Also circling back to the forest planning question, if some forests, say in R5, have had up to 80 % of their forest affected by wildfires over the past 5 to 10 years, should everyone else stop planning so that they can go into revision? And if “fires are going to get larger due to some combination of fire suppression, increased ignitions and climate change” should then the amount of vegetation modeling done during plan revision be scaled back for fire-prone Forests as not a great investment? Perhaps less energy on modeling and more energy on responding to fire and other changes via amendment?

Needed: Coalition for Public Access to Information on National Forests (AKA The People’s Database)

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FIA(formerly known as “the People’s Database”)

Volunteering for SAF gives me many opportunities for insight and opportunities to compare private and public forests, and regions of the country.

Recently, SAF signed on to an effort to get funding for FIA- forest inventory and analysis- which collects information about forests across the US. A couple of times I served on two “Blue Ribbon Panel” of users of the information who (excerpted from this):

The American Forest and Paper Association has organized two Blue Ribbon Panels (1991 and 1997) to review the national FIA program and provide recommendations to the Forest Service on needed changes to the content and capabilities of the program. The most recent panel recommended that the Forest Service should 1) elevate the priority of FIA in the Forest Service program, 2) convert the FIA program from a periodic inventory to an annual inventory, 3) fulfill the congressional mandate of reporting on all lands regardless of ownership, 4) concentrate on the core ecological and timber data, and 5) develop a strategic plan to implement the full FIA program.

FIA also has regular meetings with user groups to help guide their activities and generate support.

It seems to me that we are missing a group (Coalition) that can reach across different interest groups and ask for information that we might agree that we all need about National Forests. We don’t have an AF&PA to speak for us and get things started, so perhaps we have to organize ourselves.

We could ask the Chief to convene a panel of citizens representing different groups to ask 1) what information is important to be collected in a standard format across forests and regions? and 2) how best do we make that accessible to the public? For example, PALS has searches that internal folks can do but not external.. should it remain that way?

Stakeholders outside of the FS could lobby strongly for this information the same way that they lobby for FIA.

Some topics we’ve mentioned here are budgets and outputs, costs of environmental document developments, number of acres treated, etc., as in the “vegetation management” thread here and here. it seems to me that we could take advantage of having an Administration who promotes transparency to set such a framework of an advisory committee.

At first, I was thinking volunteers could find and enter the data, but then I thought “if the public wants this information, why doesn’t the agency just provide it?”. I’m sure that the agency could save some bucks by stopping collecting information on a variety of things that someone used to be interested in, and focus on things the public is currently interested in. The public could actually help the Forest Service prioritize information across silos, something that is problematic internally.

But we can’t ask poor Region 1 to do more work on their own.. when these are national forests, and data should be captured and made available consistently across regions. Besides, they appear to already be doing more work than some other regions, based on the GAO reports and Derek’s observations.

What do you think?

Restoration by the Numbers.. What Are They?

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One more post before I leave..also if you sent me something to post and I forgot, please email [email protected] and I will get to it after my Solstice break.

___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

If this article is correct…

Forest Service Failing to Create Jobs, Stimulate Economy in Forest Management Practices

Crystal Feldman House Natural Resources Committee

During the height of this year’s record-breaking fire season, the Subcommittee on National Parks, Forests and Public Lands held a legislative hearing on bills to address forest health and reduce the risk of catastrophic forest fire. Following a Forest Service report on the need for restoration on 65-82 million acres of National Forest land, the Forest Service testified that it had restored 3.7 million acres in 2011. Restoration is the process of assisting recovery of an ecosystem that has been degraded, damaged, or destroyed. Following the hearing, we submitted a series of questions to get further detail on what methods the agency used to “restore” these lands.

In its response, the Forest Service explained that of those 3.7 million acres, over 1.4 million – nearly 40% of the total – were “restored” through a combination of prescribed fire (fire intentionally set and monitored by the agency) and wildland-use fire (fire allowed to burn to achieve resource objectives). Meanwhile, commercial harvest was only allowed on 195,477 acres – 5% of the total work for 2011 and only .1% of the 193 million acres managed by the Forest Service.

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The .1 % seems to answer one of Derek’s questions. in the People’s Database.but does it agree with the below? It would be nice to see a table that shows prescribed fire, fire use, non-commercial and commercial thinnings and mechanical treatments by acre (like how many acres were touched by different treatments in a given year). Of course, if it’s a service contract, wood might still go to mills, not sure how that is considered in the numbers either..

Like this:

x acres commercial harvest fuels reduction thinning followed by prescribed burning
y acres commercial harvest fuels reduction thinning alone
z acres prescribed burning only forest in WUI
a acres prescribed burning only grasslands and shrublands
b acres prescribed burning only forest outside WUI
c acres fuels reduction could have gone to mill but we don’t know for sure
etc.

Also A little birdie told me that some of the figures in the report below are not accurate.

http://www.nature.org/ourinitiatives/habitats/forests/newsroom/us-forest-service-program-reports-welcome-christmas-news.xml

U.S. Forest Service Program Reports Welcome Christmas News

Third Year of Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Program Reveals Big Benefits for People, Water, and Wildlife

http://www.nature.org/ourinitiatives/habitats/forests/newsroom/us-forest-service-program-reports-welcome-christmas-news.xml

Arlington, Virginia | December 19, 2012

An annual report was released today on the performance of a U.S. Forest Service program, called Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration (CFLR), revealing impressive returns for forests, jobs, water, and wildlife. The three-year old program invested $40 million in forest restoration at 23 forested landscapes across the country in 2012.

As identified in the report, the 23 landscapes cumulatively provided the following 2012 results:

• Created and maintained 4,574 full- and part-time jobs;
• Generated nearly $320 million in labor income;
• Reduced the risk of megafire on 612,000 acres;
• Enhanced clean water supplies by remediating 6,000 miles of eroding roads;
• Sold 95.1 million cubic feet of timber;
• Improved 537,000 acres of wildlife habitat;
• Restored nearly 400 miles of fish habitat.

In addition to these on-the-ground results, CFLR also highlighted the opportunity to leverage matching investments in forest restoration. All told, CFLR leveraged an additional $45.4 million dollars towards collaborative actions in 2012.

Beyond the beauty they offer, forests are critical to life and livelihood across the nation. Americans forests cover one-third of the United States; store and filter half the nation’s water supply; provide jobs to more than a million wood products workers; absorb nearly 20% of U.S. carbon emissions; offer 650 million acres of recreational lands that generate well over $13 billion a year in economic activity; and provide habitat for thousands of species across the country.

Observers say the program is bucking the larger downward funding trend because restoration of National Forests is the new ‘zone of agreement’ where traditional adversaries in the timber industry, conservation, and local county governments are working to advance common goals. .

The collaborative results of the report were heralded by companies, community groups, and conservation organizations around the nation.

“The Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration program is bringing communities from around the country together to create jobs, to restore forest and watershed health, and to reduce the costs of wildfire suppression at impressive scales,” offered Laura McCarthy of The Nature Conservancy. “The program and its many supporters are charting a successful path forward for National Forest management.”

“This is an outstanding program because it simultaneously helps forests, water, and jobs,” said Kelsey Delaney of the Society of American Foresters.

“Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration projects are cost efficient, mostly because of their long time frame and larger scale,” added Scott Brennan of The Wilderness Society. “Selected projects are assured funding as long as appropriations are available until 2019, which provided certainty for businesses their banks and other investors, time for workers to be trained and become skilled, and for product markets to be developed and expanded.”

“Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration has shown that the critical importance of healthy and thriving forests can be a unifying force,” said Rebecca Turner of American Forests. “Our organization is proud to be collaborating with such a diverse collective of partners on a program that received bipartisan support from Congress to improve the health of our forests, as well as creating needed jobs.”

Dylan Kruse of Sustainable Northwest said, “Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration is about boots on the ground, creating jobs in rural communities. Now is the time to invest in rural communities and restore the health of our National Forests. CFLR does exactly that.”

CFLR is particularly valuable now, on the heels of the nation recording its third-largest wildfire year. A century of suppressing natural wildfires has resulted in unhealthy forests choked with small trees and brush that can lead to destructive megafires. Over the last 50 years the United States has had only 6 years with more than 8 million acres burned— all have occurred in the last 8 years (including 2012).

The conditions of our forests are further enflamed by pest and diseases, as well as climate change. All told, The Nature Conservancy estimates 120 million acres of America’s forests – an area bigger than the state of California – are in immediate need of restoration due to this “perfect storm” of threats.

The 23 sites to receive investment in 2012 were:
• Ozark Highlands Ecosystem Restoration, Arkansas, $959,000
• Shortleaf-Bluestem Community Project, Arkansas and Oklahoma, $342,000
• Four Forest Restoration Initiative, Arizona, $2 million
• Amador-Calaveras Consensus Group Cornerstone Project, California, $730,000
• Burney-Hat Creek Basins Project, California, $605,000
• Dinkey Landscape Restoration Project, California, $829,900
• Front Range Landscape Restoration Initiative, Colorado, $1 million
• Uncompahgre Plateau, Colorado, $446,000
• Accelerating Longleaf Pine Restoration, Florida, $1.17 million
• Kootenai Valley Resource Initiative, Idaho, $324,000
• Selway-Middle Fork Clearwater, Idaho, $1 million
• Weiser-Little Salmon Headwaters Project, Idaho, $2.45 million
• Longleaf Pine Ecosystem Restoration and Hazardous Fuels Reduction, Mississippi, $2.71 million
• Pine-Oak Woodlands Restoration Project, Missouri, $617,000
• Southwestern Crown of the Continent, Montana, $1.03 million
• Southwest Jemez Mountains, New Mexico, $392,000
• Zuni Mountain Project, New Mexico, $400,000
• Grandfather Restoration Project, North Carolina, $605,000
• Deschutes Collaborative Forest, Oregon, $500,000
• Lakeview Stewardship Project, Oregon, $3.5 million
• Southern Blues Restoration Coalition, Oregon, $2.5 million
• Northeast Washington Forest Vision 2020, Washington, $968,000
• Tapash Sustainable Forest Collaborative, Washington, $1.63 million

The CFLR annual report was produced by the CFLR Coalition, which is comprised of 145 member organizations that include private businesses, communities, counties, tribes, water suppliers, associations, and non-governmental organizations.

Copies of the 2012 CFLRP Annual Report can be requested from Jon Schwedler of the CFLR Coalition at [email protected].

Information on CFLRP can be found at the U.S. Forest Service’s website: http://www.fs.fed.us/restoration/CFLR/

President’s Transparency and Open Government Memo

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Given our recent discussions of the People’s Database, CREATE, and federal regulation development procedures, I thought reminding all of the below document would be good. It’s the beginning of the second term. What could we achieve if we put our citizen and agency energies to it? I italicized where it appears that the President called for a People’s Database!

Here’s the link.

Transparency and Open Government
Memorandum for the Heads of Executive Departments and Agencies

SUBJECT: Transparency and Open Government

My Administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government. We will work together to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration. Openness will strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in Government.

Government should be transparent. Transparency promotes accountability and provides information for citizens about what their Government is doing. Information maintained by the Federal Government is a national asset. My Administration will take appropriate action, consistent with law and policy, to disclose information rapidly in forms that the public can readily find and use. Executive departments and agencies should harness new technologies to put information about their operations and decisions online and readily available to the public. Executive departments and agencies should also solicit public feedback to identify information of greatest use to the public.

Government should be participatory. Public engagement enhances the Government’s effectiveness and improves the quality of its decisions. Knowledge is widely dispersed in society, and public officials benefit from having access to that dispersed knowledge. Executive departments and agencies should offer Americans increased opportunities to participate in policymaking and to provide their Government with the benefits of their collective expertise and information. Executive departments and agencies should also solicit public input on how we can increase and improve opportunities for public participation in Government.

Government should be collaborative. Collaboration actively engages Americans in the work of their Government. Executive departments and agencies should use innovative tools, methods, and systems to cooperateamong themselves, across all levels of Government, and with nonprofit organizations, businesses, and individuals in the private sector. Executive departments and agencies should solicit public feedback to assess and improve their level of collaboration and to identify new opportunities for cooperation.

I direct the Chief Technology Officer, in coordination with the Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the Administrator of General Services, to coordinate the development by appropriate executive departments and agencies, within 120 days, of recommendations for an Open Government Directive, to be issued by the Director of OMB, that instructs executive departments and agencies to take specific actions implementing the principles set forth in this memorandum. The independent agencies should comply with the Open Government Directive.

This memorandum is not intended to, and does not, create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity by a party against the United States, its departments, agencies, or entities, its officers, employees, or agents, or any other person.

This memorandum shall be published in the Federal Register.

BARACK OBAMA

Budget Information For Forests- Do You Like This White River NF Format?

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Following our discussion of forest budget figures, I remembered a forest (the White River) which produced an annual report with budget figures. So here it is from 2010white river annual report 9. It is on page 9 of the annual report.

I extracted it from the annual report and converted to a jpg for the image above.
Here is the pdf of the extracted page.

What do you think of the amount of information and the way it’s portrayed? Would you like to see more or less? Or a different format?

Here is a link to the complete White River 2010 Report.