Middleman Treatment Before and After Photos From the EA

Thanks to Matt Koehler for linking to the Middleman EA.  I briefly ran through the EA  and noted the photos.. they help a lot for us folks from California, Oregon, New Mexico or even North Carolina to understand what the forests and treatments look like in Region 1.  Shout-out to the Districts for the photos!  I copied them via screenshots from the EA, so to compare before and after,  you have to look at the figure # plus the before and after treatment description.

“Indirect containment” for San Juan wildfire

We’ve had some good discussion recently (which searches couldn’t find) of how to count acres burned by wildfires towards burning targets, and how to comply with project planning requirements (i.e. NEPA and ESA) for such actions.  An implication I got was that a national forest could count a lot of acres if it just let a wildfire burn, and there wouldn’t be any process requirements.

Well, this sounds like the opposite of that, and like what I think should be the proper way of doing this – a wildfire started in an area that had been “prepped” for a prescribed burn.  Assuming that “prepped” includes the usual public  participation and effects analysis.

Fire managers plan to expand the footprint of a 10-acre lightning-caused wildfire burning northeast of Dolores on the Haycamp Mesa next week, and could burn upward of 4,500 acres.

Last month, the Dolores Ranger District announced plans to burn 4,577 acres across Haycamp Mesa Units 5, 6 and 9. Fire managers plan to use existing roads as fire lines within which they would contain the blaze.

The Spruce Creek Fire started Tuesday afternoon along the northern perimeter of Unit 5.

“It’s all prepped and ready to go, conditions are ideal,” said Pat Seekins, prescribed fire and fuels program manager for the San Juan National Forest. “It’s low-intensity surface fire, it’s doing exactly what we need it to do.”

If the weather continues to cooperate, fire managers hope to burn between 4,000 and 5,000 acres. Seekins said crews have prepared around 5,600 acres to burn.

“With prescribed fire this spring, we’ve accomplished just shy of 4,000 acres, which is good – we’ve had a good spring,” Seekins said. “But we’re taking this opportunity to expand those acres.”

It’s not clear exactly how active they would be to “expand” those acres.  Interestingly,

Last year, fire managers used three natural blazes that began inside units already prepped for treatment to return fire to the landscape in the San Juan National Forest. With the help of firefighters, those three wildfires ultimately treated 4,000 acres of forest.

Is the San Juan just lucky, or well-prepared, or does this happen a lot?

Bitterroot Front Project draft

The Bitterroot National Forest is going to try out “condition-based” NEPA with the Bitterroot Front Project.

The project anticipates 54,046 acres of prescribed burning alone; 35,575 acres of non-commercial logging coupled with prescribed burning for whitebark pine restoration; 27,477 acres of commercial logging with prescribed burning; 16,019 acres of vegetation slashing and burning; and 3,163 acres of non-commercial logging and prescribed burning… It will take dozens of miles of roadwork to do all that.

The project is expected to take four years.  “Condition-based” means they don’t know where any of these things are going to happen until they get there.  From the EA, as the project proceeds …

Information about proposed activities, including maps, treatment unit tables, and the activities’ relationship to the Bitterroot Front project’s overall treatment thresholds, would be available on the Bitterroot National Forest website. The responsible official would finalize proposed activities only after field review of existing conditions. The responsible official would retain the authority to make final decisions about the location, extent, and types of activities planned and completed under the Bitterroot Front project.

Nothing said here about the process they’ll follow to evaluate and disclose that new information they find when they get there, in particular about site-specific effects. They seem to be taking the position that “this is it” for NEPA compliance:

By preparing this environmental assessment (EA), the Forest Service is fulfilling agency policy and direction to comply with the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) requirements and to determine whether the effects of the proposed action may be significant enough to require the preparation of an
environmental impact statement (EIS).  (EA, p. 1)

The EA says, “if an EIS is required, the Forest Service will prepare an EIS consistent with 40 CFR section 1501.9(e)(1).”  I know this is the theory, but how often does a draft EA get redone as a draft EIS after public comment makes the case for significant effects?  Usually the agency makes that call early enough to not create the extra step of an EA.   The agency has plenty of examples of timber sales much smaller than this that had “significant” environmental effects documented in an EIS, but they seem kind of committed to an EA.

This years-long project is being pursued under emergency authority, so there will be no administrative review.  So if the Forest stays this EA course here, the emergency determination would allow local officials to make the call on whether they think this EA would hold up in court.

The “implementation plan” in the EA says that the obligation during implementation is to “Demonstrate that the effects of implementation would be within the scope of activities and the range of effects described in the EA and authorized in the Decision Notice.”  This would be an effects analysis, which would trigger consideration of NEPA.  It could answer the question of whether the effects have become significant (triggering an EIS for the whole project), but apparently is not intended to address the question of whether the site-specific effects have been accounted for pursuant to NEPA after the locations and treatments are known, and whether they are “consequential” (in a NEPA sense).

Where courts have approved of approaches like this it has been where the “conditions” are very specifically defined in the initial decision so that there is not much flexibility in implementation and the site-specific effects can be determined and evaluated.  It doesn’t look to me like the Bitterroot Front is similar to the two favorable court examples I’ve read, but it does feel like the familiar pushing of the envelope to see how far they can take this approach.

So, while I think an EA (with no administrative review) in these circumstances seems like kind of an outrageous idea, I actually wanted to focus on another familiar issue this article brings up:

Critics of the proposal argue that the significant removal of vegetation — including live trees and brush and standing and downed dead timber — will actually promote wildfire spread by allowing uninhibited wind to whip flames through opened-up forest that’s been dried by more wind and sun penetration…

A body of science supports the idea that “forest treatments” — a regime of logging, thinning and burning — can reduce wildfire risk on a landscape and make firefighting efforts more successful. But critics of widespread forest treatments can point to other studies that cast doubt on their efficacy, and on the idea that forests in western Montana used to be dominated by spread-out Ponderosa pine with frequent low-severity fire.

I hope the EA has a good discussion of the science on both sides.  But that last point is a new one to me.  Several national forests in Montana with dry forest habitats have revised their forest plans, and included desired vegetation conditions, which are supposed to be derived from historic conditions.  I don’t think I’ve heard much disagreement with establishing “spread-out Ponderosa pine with frequent low-severity fire” as a desired condition for places similar to the Bitterroot.  Have I missed something?  (Or did the author misinterpret something?)

Here’s what I find in the EA (based on “a geospatial analysis of the Bitterroot Front project area to prioritize communities at risk from large wildland fire growth”):

Modeling results of the current conditions within the project area show that the forest is at extreme risk of a catastrophic fire. The modeled outputs from the present fuel arrangement conditions do not mimic the natural fire spread type for sustainable ecosystem management in the Bitterroot National Forest.

Part of the proposed action is:

Restoring and maintaining ecosystem health by continuing to move the fire regime condition class toward the desired future condition through continued treatments that create disturbance.

Most of the discussion in the EA seems to be about the existing fire risk rather than whether that risk is “natural fire spread type.”  According to the Vegetation Specialist Report, “Overall, the desired future condition includes forest structures, composition, and processes that would have been present historically.  It proceeds to offer a description of “warm/dry” and “cool/moist” vegetation types.   If there are truly disagreements about the desired condition of vegetation or fire regime for these types or areas, alternatives should be considered.  (Under the 2012 Planning Rule, these desired conditions should be found in the forest plan.)

Then there is the question of, “whether the forest plan should be amended for elk habitat objectives, snags, old growth, and coarse woody debris standards to accomplish the project objectives.”  This all comes off looking like they are revising their (very old) forest plan for half of the forest, with new desired conditions and standards, using a project EA.

 

 

Friday the 9th on the Flathead

On June 9th, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed an appeal in a lawsuit against its revised forest plan.  The appeal involved questions about ESA consultation on the plan’s effects on grizzly bears, and the proper environmental baseline for the amount of roads used in the consultation process.  After the district court opinion found flaws in the analysis conducted for consultation, the Forest reinitiated consultation with the Fish and Wildlife Service, which has now been completed.  The 9th Circuit held that the new biological opinion made that issue moot.  (A new lawsuit was filed against the new biological opinion, discussed here.)

However, Kurt Steele won’t be overseeing the Flathead Forest Management Plan. As of Friday, USFS Region 1 press officer Dan Hottle said Steele “was offered and accepted” a new post as deputy director at the regional office that involves “environmental planning,” according to the Flathead Beacon. It is unknown who will be Steele’s replacement.

This was also announced on June 9th, but I assume there is no connection between the Flathead Forest Plan and Steele’s move to the regional office forest planning staff (he wasn’t hired by the Flathead until after the plan was done).  However, there may be a connection to his work on Holland Lake (discussed most recently here), since it’s hard to imagine that a forest supervisor would consider a deputy position on a regional office planning staff to be a great career move.  That connection is denied by the Forest Service.

“There’s no correlation with this (personnel change) and Holland Lake,” Hottle said. However, he said he did not know whether Steele had initiated applying for the position or if the Forest Service offered it to him first. Hottle characterized the change in position as a “lateral move” with a salary that should stay the same.

This is interesting to me because the regional planning staff didn’t have a deputy director position when I left, and the current agency directory does not show that there is such a position to apply for.  It’s not unheard of for the agency to create a position to place someone where they will be out of the way, and I’ve observed that planning staffs tend to be seen as places to put people who need putting (and of course, anyone can be a planner).  Or maybe there is some kind of vindication going on because he will nominally be overseeing the revision of the Lolo National Forest Plan, and the Lolo is where a lot of the same people who oppose the Holland Lake development like to hang out.

 

 

 

 

 

Adopt-A-Project Volunteer Requested: South Plateau Landscape Treatment Project on Custer-Gallatin

Volunteer(s) Requested:

One of the things I try to do is attempt to tell the Forest Service side of the story. Sometimes news stories will tell only one side. I’m not blaming reporters nor the Forest Service for that state of affairs, it’s just the way the system is. However, I’ve found by reading the response to comments and response to objections you can usually figure out most of it. Sometimes FS or BLM employees will answer your questions. So I do have a project that could use a volunteer to Adopt the Project, specifically the South Plateau Area Landscape Treatment Project. on the Custer-Gallatin. Visiting the project area could make for a nice field trip, especially before tourist season (it’s around West Yellowstone). Here’s a news story. It’s a 142 page EA, and I don’t think response to objections are posted yet.

If you read the CENTER FOR BIOLOGICAL DIVERSITY SIERRA CLUB ● WILDEARTH GUARDIANS ALLIANCE FOR THE WILD ROCKIES NATIVE ECOSYSTEMS COUNCIL objection, you’ll find that these objectors are seriously not fans of condition-based management. It’s also over 15 years, so the commercial part, around 12000 acres, is less than 1000 acres per year. So it’s got that as well.. large sounding numbers because it’s so lengthy. We’ve discussed condition-based management before many times here, but a volunteer wouldn’t have to go through that aspect of the project.

When I see “clearcuts” I generally think LPP; sure enough…

Most of the project area (91% or 36,098 acres) is forested. Lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta) dominates most of the forested area, covering 33,000 acres. About 80% of the lodgepole pine (over 26,000 acres) is rated as highly susceptible to mountain pine beetle (Dendroctonus ponderosae)1. Mountain pine beetles often girdle and kill trees; large scale outbreaks result in high levels of host tree death. Currently, the South Plateau area is not only highly susceptible to a beetle outbreak, but also highly likely to experience (93% probability) a severe pine beetle outbreak.

The proposed treatment actions are estimated to increase stand resistance to insects by reducing the area rated as highly susceptible to pine beetle from over 26,000 acres to under 16,000 acres, and reduce the likelihood of a high severity outbreak from 93% to 61% or less. The proposed treatments will also reduce the rate of spread and impacts of dwarf mistletoe 1 . Landscape resilience in the context of forest management means that an ecosystem and its component parts can absorb or recover from the effects of disturbances. Silvicultural treatments designed to create age, size, and species mosaics will increase landscape heterogeneity. At the landscape level, a heterogeneous landscape is thought to be more resistant and resilient to insect damage than a homogenous landscape (Larson, Stover and Keyes 2012).

Then purpose and need 3 is treating hazardous fuels according to the EA -51% of the project area is within the 2020 Gallatin County Wildfire Protection Plan3 defined Wildland Urban Interface.

It seems to me that there are all kinds of interesting questions about this project. If you have mature LPP old enough to be beetle fodder, should you wait until it gets killed (we all know what that looks like). Or do we want to get some new LPP stands started so there is age diversity at the landscape scale? Wouldn’t that be good for carbon? But for now, the LPP are not dead, so how preemptive should the FS be?

Anyway, I think there are many interesting aspects to this project from the non-legal side that might be worth exploring. If you are interested, please contact me. Email is on the donate widget to the right of this post.

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.

How to get rid of non-native fish in wilderness

Utah Division of Wildlife

Since we had such fun discussing use of chainsaws in wilderness and eliminating wolves from wilderness, here’s another example of challenges to managing under the Wilderness Act. The Lolo National Forest is seeking comments on the North Fork Blackfoot River Native Fish Restoration Project which is located in the Scapegoat Wilderness.  They have prepared an Environmental Assessment.

The project would authorize Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks (FWP) to implement fish management and stocking actions within the wilderness that would establish a secure population of native trout, replacing an existing hybrid population.

To restore and secure this population, the project proposes the following actions; application of a piscicide, rotenone, to eradicate the non-native fish species; use of motorized equipment such as a boat motor, generator, and a helicopter to transport equipment, supplies, and fish for stocking; temporary development of structures or installations; and use of chemicals (pesticides or herbicides). Additionally, public access in the area would be closed for 7-10 days during the late summer of 2021 to reduce user conflicts with management actions.

The Forest Service has assessed the suitability of the proposed activities in the Scapegoat Wilderness through a process called a “minimum requirements analysis.” This is a process used to identify, analyze, and recommend management actions that are the minimum necessary for wilderness administration, as directed by the Wilderness Act of 1964.

From the linked article:

Opponents challenged the plan’s use of motorized equipment in a federal wilderness area where such machinery is typically prohibited, the idea of stocking otherwise fishless waters in wilderness, use of fish poison and the potential of harming non-target fish in the area.

There doesn’t seem to be much disagreement with the project purpose, but resistance to how they would do it.  The exception where “mechanical transport” and “structure or installation” would be allowed by the Wilderness Act is:  “except as necessary to meet minimum requirements for the administration of the area for the purpose of this Act.”  It seems like their argument that they need motorized access is weak (see photo), but if chemicals are the only way to remove the non-native species, should they not do it?

Then there is the requirement to maintain viable populations of native species on national forests, which might for some species (maybe amphibians that evolved without fish predators) require them to do it.

 

Hundreds of Giant Sequoias Considered Dead From Wildfires

It appears that rumors of ‘natural and beneficial’ wildfires in the southern Sierra Nevada have been ‘greatly exaggerated’. Even the Alder Creek grove, which was recently bought by Save the Redwoods, was decimated. Of course, this eventuality has been long-predicted.

https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2020-11-16/sierra-nevada-giant-sequoias-killed-castle-fire

Good news for wildlife on two national forests

Here are two different kinds of success stories about restoring wildlife species that have been missing from national forests.

 

 

Grizzly bears – Lolo National Forest.

Current efforts on the Lolo National Forest demonstrate one way that forest plans can improve conditions for at-risk species; in this case the plan is contributing to conservation of the federally threatened grizzly bear. Grizzly bears have been sighted in recent years in this part of the Forest, but none are females or considered to be residents.

In 2011, the forest plan was amended to include what is commonly referred to as the Access Amendment (similar amendments also applied to the Kootenai and Idaho Panhandle national forests, prior to the revision of their forest plans).  The amendment established “standards” for motorized road and trail density in grizzly bear management units (BMUs, there is one on the Lolo).  In many cases, the current conditions did not meet these standards, so in the terminology of the 2012 Planning Rule, these would be desired conditions or objectives to be achieved.  In addition, their achievement was assumed in the biological opinion on the effects of the forest plan on grizzly bears prepared by the Fish and Wildlife Service, and failure to achieve them would likely trigger the need to reinitiate consultation on the forest plan (which had happened on the Flathead National Forest).  So there is a little added incentive, but here is what they are doing now.

The Forest has completed the “BMU 22 Compliance Environmental Assessment.”  In it they have proposed to formally close some roads that are effectively closed already and 21 trail miles currently open to motorized use.  In response to public comments, they are also considering an alternative that would close fewer trails, and instead close some roads currently open to motorized use.  In addition to other closures included with some prior vegetation management projects both alternatives “would bring the Forest into compliance with the Forest Plan motorized access management standards for the Cabinet-Yaak grizzly bear recovery zone.”

Brown-headed nuthatch – Mark Twain National Forest

The nuthatch is not at-risk range-wide, but they have not been found in Missouri for at least a century.  The species requires shortleaf pine and oak woodland forests, which have been greatly reduced from historic levels.  The loss of these forests has prompted an ecosystem restoration effort across Missouri, Arkansas and Oklahoma (notably using the Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Program).  Restoration of such forests is a desired outcome of the Mark Twain forest plan.  Curiously, there is no mention of the brown-headed nuthatch in the 2005 forest plan, although it does address other species using the same habitat:

Objective 1.4a Improve open woodland conditions on at least 10,500 acres to provide habitat for summer tanager, northern bobwhite, Bachman’s sparrow, and eastern red bat.

The EIS states that the nuthatch is a Management Indicator Species for forest plan monitoring, but that doesn’t seem to be in the plan itself.  Of course, a species that is absent from a national forest would not make a good MIS.  In any case, it looks like there was no interest by the Mark Twain in reestablishing a species that was not present on the forest under that rules applicable to forest planning in 2005.

However, Forest Service, state and university researchers came to the rescue of the species, determining that sufficient woodlands now exist in Missouri to support a population of Brown-headed Nuthatches, that populations in Arkansas were robust enough to supply birds to Missouri, but that nuthatches are not likely to make the return on their own because of the distance and habitat fragmentation.  The Mark Twain National Forest site was chosen for the release of 100 birds because it is the largest area of open pine woodlands in the state.

Under the 2012 Planning Rule, the Forest Service would probably argue that this species is not “known to occur” in the plan area, so the requirement to provide ecological conditions for it (as a species of conservation concern) would not apply.  However, the separate requirement for ecological integrity requires “species composition and diversity” to occur within the natural range of variation.  That should make the Forest Service more proactive in reestablishing species that historically occurred there.  (The forest plan also omits the listed red-cockaded woodpecker, which also uses these habitats, is also absent, but must be conserved and recovered.)

(For a look at how the natural range of variation might work under the 2012 Planning Rule see Table A-2, “Desired conditions for natural community types.”)

Stanislaus spotted owl plan amendment

Photo of female and juvenile California spotted owl courtesy of University of California Cooperative Extension (http://ucanr.org/sites/spottedowl/).

We recently looked at the Biological Assessment of Northwest Forests, and the options for proceeding with revising forest plans currently governed by the Northwest Forest Plan. Some of those options involved amendments to existing plans prior to plan revision. I voiced support for amendments that would provide the ecological conditions needed for at-risk species. I thought this might be an example to look at for how that might go.

The Stanislaus National Forest is not in the area covered by this assessment. Its forest plan was originally completed in 1991, but it was amended by the Sierra Nevada Forest Plan Amendment (or Framework) in 2004, which is roughly analogous to the Northwest Forest Plan in that it had its origins in the work done to protect the California spotted owl (it has its own complicated political and legal history). Now the Stanislaus is proposing an amendment for a part of the Forest in conjunction with what it calls the Social and Ecological Resilience Across the Landscape (SERAL) project.

The Forest has identified a need to change the forest plan based on new information about the California spotted owl, as published in 2019 by the Forest Service in the “Conservation Strategy for the California Spotted Owl in the Sierra Nevada.”

In order to fully adopt and implement the management direction described in the Conservation Strategy and increase landscape resiliency as guided by NRV the Stanislaus National Forest’s forest LRMP must be amended. The proposed forest plan amendments would allow the SERAL project’s proposed landscape restoration treatments to best meet the purpose and need of the project and implement the guiding principles of the 2019 California Spotted Owl Conservation Strategy. The proposed amendments include standards and guidelines which will provide some immediate stability for individual owls while allowing forest management the ability to conduct treatments designed to help develop resilient habitat conditions that provide CSO conservation in the long term.

Unfortunately, the CSO Conservation Strategy was apparently written for a narrower purpose than its name implies:

The California spotted owl (Strix occidentalis occidentalis) Conservation Strategy is a strategic framework for active conservation of the California spotted owl on National Forest System lands in the Sierra Nevada.

It appears to be something less than a scientific strategy. By limiting the focus to “active conservation” it has failed to address the central debate about managing spotted owl habitat regarding when active management should even be used. Passive management is one obvious alternative to this amendment that the Forest is going to have to address in its amendment process. But I looked at some of the proposed changes in the forest plan.

The current plan designates spotted owl Protected Activity Centers (PACs) as management areas in the forest plan (which could be changed only by amending the forest plan). This proposed amendment would replace current management areas with guidelines to designate PACs later “in advance of any management activities that would reduce CSO nesting and roosting habitat quality.” The guidelines include criteria for delineating and changing PAC boundaries.

My opinion: This is not a coarse filter management strategy based on vegetation because it depends on actual owl presence based on surveys, or one might call it “condition-based.”  If owl presence is the kind of thing that changes frequently, this may be a reason to not designate permanent management areas at the plan level.  However, this creates the risk of cutting the public out of the part of the process that actually determines the locations for management.  The plan is no longer saying, “here is where we’ll manage for owls,” but instead, “we’ll manage for owls where we think we need to manage for owls, trust us.”  The criteria must be explicit and objective enough to fully evaluate at the plan level, and the decisions about whether and how to apply them at the project level must include the public. Given the importance that surveying would take on, there is no excuse for these being guidelines rather than standards. It seems to me that the certainty of owl protection, and therefore the viability of the species, is going to be reduced.

There are a lot of new plan components in the amendment, and the CSO Conservation Strategy is page-referenced for most of them. That’s how any conservation strategy should be used, so maybe this is a good example of that. Except that it strikes me that this “conservation strategy” may have actually been written as a “drop-in” amendment to be used this way (which makes that kind of cross-referencing a lot easier). This is similar to what would happen if plan amendments were developed that could be later “dropped in” to forest plan revisions. The problem is that if the “conservation strategy” is already a management-influenced document and not a science document, there would still need to be a reference to the actual scientific basis for these conservation recommendations that are being adopted.

Anyway, this project/amendment will be worth watching as it applies the 2012 Planning Rule diversity requirements to California spotted owls. And it may be setting some precedents for what could happen regarding how to plan for management of spotted owl habitat on other national forests.