Reforestation

For Tribes, Reforesting Means Reconnection to History, Culture: Pew Story on Tribal Nurseries

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ShiNaasha Pete, reforestation forester with the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, gestures at whitebark pine seedlings being grown in a greenhouse on the Flathead Indian Reservation in Montana. The tribes are working to restore whitebark pines, which are threatened by an invasive disease, because they serve as a crucial ecologic and cultural resource.
Alex Brown

 

Thanks to readers who sent in this article on Tribes and reforestation by Alex Brown of Pew. I didn’t know this but apparently they have a weekly newsletter called Stateline.

This is a generally good article IMHO, but I felt obliged to add context to this statement.

State-run and commercial nurseries often specialize in the species used for large-scale timber production, such as Douglas fir or loblolly pine. Some tribal programs similarly supply logging operations.

Many, though, have focused on species that are critical to ecosystems, and those that are woven into tribal history and culture.

A person might ask if Douglas-fir and ponderosa might also be critical to ecosystems, because they are predominant species in many places.  Also some species seem to do just fine with natural regeneration and others not so much.

Anyway,  I checked out my state’s nursery (which is closed this year for new orders).

Here’s what it says..

Covering Conservation

The seedling program allows farmers, ranchers, other landowners and land managers to obtain trees at a nominal cost to help achieve conservation goals, including:

  • Restoration after wildfire, flood and other natural disturbances

  • Growing shelterbelts, windbreaks and living snow fences

  • Creating and enhancing wildlife habitat

  • Protecting homes, cropland, livestock and highways

  • Increasing erosion control

  • Practicing “backyard” conservation that promotes clean air and water

You’ll note that trees for timber production aren’t mentioned..

OK, well perhaps Colorado isn’t a timber state, OK then, here’s Montana’s state nursery inventory. And Tennessee’s.   

Seems like each state nursery focuses on trees that grow there that people want to plant for whatever reasons.

The article doesn’t mention Forest Service nurseries, so here is their story.

 Over the last 15 years, the traditional role of the Forest Service nurseries has expanded to include the production of a wide variety of additional native plant species to meet the increasing needs of ecosystem restoration. These opportunities present new challenges to nursery managers because little is known about propagating many of these new species.

Anyway, that’s just a little context. Below are some excerpts from the Pew story.

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Pete oversees a program to restore whitebark pine trees to tribal lands and nearby forests. After identifying a handful of trees with genetic resistance to the blister rust, the team has collected enough seeds to repopulate the tribe’s entire 105,000 acres of whitebark pine habitat.

“It’s a keystone species,” Pete said. “It has over 100 different species that are reliant upon it. If we lose whitebark pine, it’s going to eliminate that ecosystem and habitat at the higher elevations, and that will have an effect on everything down below.”

The program has produced almost 11,000 seedlings, with plans to plant 4,300 of them next spring. Pete hopes to scale up to planting 50,000 seedlings a year. It will take 60 to 80 years before the trees she plants produce their own seeds.

Pete said she hopes to plant enough trees to reintroduce seeds as food for tribal winter ceremonies.

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State-run and commercial nurseries often specialize in the species used for large-scale timber production, such as Douglas fir or loblolly pine. Some tribal programs similarly supply logging operations.

Many, though, have focused on species that are critical to ecosystems, and those that are woven into tribal history and culture.

“Our forest management isn’t based on revenue. It’s based on restoration,” said Tony Incashola, Jr., head of forestry with the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes.

The tribes grow more than 1 million seedlings each year at nurseries on the reservation, and the operation has doubled its conifer production over the last five years. Roughly half of the plants are grown for restoration projects on tribal lands, while the remaining half are sold to partners, including state agencies and other tribes.

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In many tribal nations, nursery managers are growing tree species to help forests survive climate change, diseases and pests. The Mescalero Apache Tribe grows about 75,000 seedlings of ponderosa pine and Douglas fir each year.

“Our forest on the reservation is probably one of the healthiest in southern New Mexico,” said Smith, the nursery manager. “We cut out all the diseased trees and go back and replant in that area.”

Cut Douglas firs are used as lodgepoles for teepees, Smith said. Within the past five years, the tribe has grown more native plants to benefit wildlife using money from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service.

The Fort Belknap Indian Community, home to two Montana tribes, is seeking to restore subalpine fir, which a wildfire devastated in the 1930s. The tribes are in the first phase of their effort, conducting a study to see whether any remnant populations of the tree exist in its chain of mountains.

“If we do find some pockets of any remaining subalpine fir, we’re going to collect some seeds and possibly use them to grow and propagate and plant them back up in our mountains,” said Dennis Longknife Jr., the community’s climate change coordinator. “If we don’t have any, we have to find out where we can get some seed stock.”

Longknife, Jr. said the tree has cultural significance to the tribes, used for ceremonial purposes. The next steps in the restoration process will include identifying sites to grow the plants and areas for restoration. He noted that grant programs in the federal infrastructure bill may provide funding opportunities to support that work.

As nursery operations proliferate and expand, such efforts stand to benefit many other tribal programs, said Pinto, the Forest Service nursery specialist.

We’re #1! Reforestation as a Bipartisan Climate Solution: Matt Burgess (CU) Video with Some Ancient Wisdom

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I’m sure that many of you are suffering from the seasonal influx of Obnoxious Political Ads. Last week, I ran across this video by a Professor Matt Burgess at University of Colorado who is studying polarization, with an eye to understanding and decreasing it. I thought it was super that an academic was looking into this instead of fanning the flames (I do see quite a bit of that), so here’s a shout out to Matt!

Check out his video on climate change polarization and what people agree on. I took some screenshots of some slides. They looked at climate policies that people broadly agree on.

Here’s an important screenshot for forest folks:

It’s particularly interesting as in President Biden’s Executive Order has different prongs.. MOG, wildfire risk, reforestation and economic development.

Here’s the reforestation part.

(d)  The Secretaries, in coordination with the heads of other agencies as appropriate, shall within 1 year of the date of this order:

(i)    develop a Federal goal that charges agencies to meet agency-specific reforestation targets by 2030, including an assessment of reforestation opportunities on Federal lands and through existing Federal programs and partnerships;

(ii)   develop, in collaboration with Federal, State, Tribal, and private-sector partners, a climate-informed plan (building on existing efforts) to increase Federal cone and seed collection and to ensure seed and seedling nursery capacity is sufficient to meet anticipated reforestation demand; and

We haven’t heard as much about this part of the response to the EO. Perhaps because it’s not controversial. But shouldn’t we talk about the non-controversial parts just as much?  Perhaps controversy is interesting in a way that mutually moving forward in a positive direction is not?

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Discussing With Those Whom You Disagree… Burgess’s Take:

Here are a few of his slides about conversations with those people you disagree with.  Some old ideas and some new ones for us who have been doing this work. This discussion is about 45 minutes in.

Burgess explains that “steelmanning” instead of “strawmanning”  is that you want to understand the best argument for the other side before you argue for our own side.

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If this reminds you of Hillel and Shammai, as well as our friend, the author of the book of Kohelet in the Hebrew Bible – “there is nothing new under the sun,” well, maybe those ancient folks knew a thing or two.

[The law is in accord with the School of Hillel] because they were kindly and modest, because they studied not only their own rulings but also those of the School of Shammai, and because they taught the words of the School of Shammai before their own.  Eruvin 13b.

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Secretary and Chief Roll Out New FS Reforestation Strategy

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If the Old Growth comment period feels like Groundhog Day, this feels like Back to the Future.

WASHINGTON, July 25, 2022 — Today, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announced a strategy for how the Biden-Harris Administration, through the U.S. Department of Agriculture, will address a reforestation backlog of four million acres on national forests and plant more than one billion trees over the next decade.

With new resources made available through President Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, combined with support from state, local, and Tribal governments as well as other partners, the Forest Service aims to eliminate the backlog over the next 10 years and develop the infrastructure, such as nurseries, to keep up with increasing needs.

The Forest Service has invested more than $100 million in reforestation this year – more than three times the investment in previous years – thanks to the Repairing Existing Public Land by Adding Necessary Trees (REPLANT) Act made possible by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. These historic investments will help mitigate the impacts of climate change, rebuild in the aftermath of devastating wildfires and strengthen America’s forestlands.

“Forests are a powerful tool in the fight against climate change,” said Secretary Vilsack. “Nurturing their natural regeneration and planting in areas with the most need is critical to mitigating the worst effects of climate change while also making those forests more resilient to the threats they face from catastrophic wildfire, historic drought, disease outbreaks and pest infestation.”

Before the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and REPLANT, the Forest Service was only able to address about 6% of its post-wildfire reforestation needs. The REPLANT Act directs the Forest Service to plant more than a billion trees over the next decade, removes a cap of $30 million and is now expected to provide the agency significantly more resources every year to do so.

According to Forest Service Chief Randy Moore, the reforestation strategy (PDF, 7 MB) will serve as a framework to understand reforestation needs, develop shared priorities with partners, expand reforestation and nursery capacity, and ensure the trees planted grow to support healthy, resilient forests.

“Our reforestation efforts on national forests only increase through strong partnerships with other federal agencies, tribes, state and local governments, communities and organizations,” Moore said. “We recognize that successfully increasing reforestation on national forests is dependent on these strong partnerships.”

Secretary Vilsack and Chief Moore said that the strategy announced today is an important first step in realizing the goals laid out in President Biden’s direction to scale up climate-smart reforestation and also supports the Forest Service’s 10-year strategy to cut wildfire risk, protect communities and improve forest health.

In addition to the reforestation strategy, Secretary Vilsack announced 13 new USDA agency climate adaptation plans, which outline how each USDA agency will incorporate climate change into their operations and decisions to support communities, agriculture and forests nationwide.

“Our climate adaptation plans represent a blueprint for how we account for the risks our changing climate has on those groups most vulnerable to its effects – America’s farmers, ranchers, forest landowners and rural communities,” said Secretary Vilsack.

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Center for Western Priorities, in reporting on this,

The Biden administration plans to replant trees on millions of acres of forest affected by wildfires and other symptoms of climate change, like insects and drought. Warming temperatures and less rain mean hotter and bigger fires are taking out trees more rapidly than in the past, leading to a backlog of 4 million acres of forest in need of replanting. This comes on the heels of legislation passed last year requiring the Forest Service to plant 1.2 billion trees in national forests, called the REPLANT Act.

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But this replanting effort could be stymied by the very conditions that precipitated it, as many seedlings won’t be able to survive to adulthood due to climate change. That’s according to Joe Fargione, science director for North America at the Nature Conservancy.

“You’ve got to be smart about where you plant,” he said. “There are some places that the climate has already changed enough that it makes the probability of successfully reestablishing trees pretty low.”

If changes will be such that seedlings won’t be able to survive to adulthood due to climate change, one wonders how we would know whether such changes will affect young trees more than old (presumably less vigorous) trees. I actually don’t think that that’s known by anyone.

I’m also not sure that there are places on FS land where “the climate has changed enough that it makes the probability of successfully reestablishing trees pretty low.” Everywhere I look that has been burned (and where seed is available) I see the same species growing back (without being planted). What does it look like where you live?

Climate Change: Does “No Seedlings” Really Mean “No Future Forests”?

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Matthew posted a link to this Grist article before, and I think it’s worthy of its own discussion.

 

The driving force here is that the rising global temperature is wiping out seedlings. In many spots around the U.S. West, summer temperatures are already high enough to cook young trees before they can develop thick protective bark. Others have become so dry that seedlings shrivel before their roots can grow deep enough to reach groundwater. Both circumstances can thwart forest regeneration. Mature trees can survive in these areas long after they stop reproducing. But when fires wipe out these forests and seedings can’t get a foothold, they are replaced with grasses and dense brush.

Some of us remember reforestation problems on dry sites before climate change (I think people would say it was occurring then, we just didn’t know about it.)  Here is what we thought then… first you need seed.  And ponderosa pines have intermittent seed crops.  So grasses/forbs/shrubs may have reclaimed the site (sucked up the sun and soil moisture) by the time Mom and Dad ponderosa got together, not leaving any openings for baby trees to take hold.  Then there are seed predators of various kinds.  Then there’s soil moisture at the right time.  And critters that munch on seedlings.  You can go out to various sites today and see a range of  ponderosa (and in my hood, Doug fir, regeneration) from none to lots.

Back in those days, it was OK, and even desirable, to assist seedlings in “getting a foothold.”  As I’ve said numerous times, in the 80’s, we learned about seed collection, nursery practices, seedling treatment in transit, vermiculite slurries, vexar tubing, and so on.  We used to travel around and examine cone crops and numbers of filled seed to select good sites to produce seed. The whole thing as down to.. dare I say… a science.

What was interesting to me is how different conceptions and research methods can yield the same, or different conclusions.
Here are some concepts (not observations):

(1) if forests won’t grow back without help, then we must just get used to fewer forests.

(2) the absence of natural regeneration (over some time period)  means that trees won’t otherwise grow well if planted.

What physiologists and silviculturists (applied forest ecologists) used to tell us through logic and observation (seeds must come from somewhere), we now can validate via regression models.

 

While annual climate was an important driver of postfire regeneration, our findings also highlight that the nature of a fire event strongly influences postfire regeneration. For example, the combined relative influence of annual climate variables on tree recruitment in our boosted regression tree (BRT) models was 24% for ponderosa pine and 34% for Douglas-fir (SI Appendix, Fig. S3), while the relative influence of distance to seed source, which is largely determined by fire severity, was 32% for ponderosa pine and 21% for Douglas-fir (SI Appendix, Fig. S3). The importance of seed tree availability in determining postfire regeneration has been demonstrated across forest types in the western United States (e.g., refs. 17, 20, and 46),

TSW readers tend to be out and about in the woods. Take a look next time (in a place where there are parent trees producing seed) and check out whether there is natural regeneration. I did that in my neighborhood and came up with the above photo. I also live in the fringe of ponderosa pine habitat on the Front Range of Colorado.  In this photo you can see parent trees, cones on the ground, and many seedlings. It’s something we can pay attention to, and maybe learn something by sharing what we see in different parts of the west.

Science is clear: Catastrophic wildfire requires forest management

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“Science is clear: Catastrophic wildfire requires forest management” was written by Steve Ellis, Chair of the National Association of Forest Service Retirees (NAFSR), who is a former U.S. Forest Service Forest Supervisor and retired Bureau of Land Management Deputy Director for Operations—the senior career position in that agency’s Washington, D.C., headquarters.

I have extracted a few snippets (Emphasis added) from the above article published by the NAFSR:

1) Last year was a historically destructive wildfire season. While we haven’t yet seen the end of 2021, nationally 64 large fires have burned over 3 million acres. The economic damage caused by wildfire in 2020 is estimated at $150 billion. The loss of communities, loss of life, impacts on health, and untold environmental damage to our watersheds—not to mention the pumping of climate-changing carbon into the atmosphere—are devastating. This continuing disaster needs to be addressed like the catastrophe it is.

2) We are the National Association of Forest Service Retirees (NAFSR), an organization of dedicated natural resource professionals—field practitioners, firefighters, and scientists—with thousands of years of on the ground experience. Our membership lives in every state of the nation. We are dedicated to sustaining healthy National Forests and National Grasslands, the lands managed by the U.S. Forest Service, to provide clean water, quality outdoor recreation, wildlife and fish habitat, and carbon sequestration, and to be more resilient to catastrophic wildfire as our climate changes.

3) As some of us here on the Smokey Wire have been explaining for years, the NAFSR very clearly and succinctly states:
“Small treatment areas, scattered “random acts of restoration” across the landscape, are not large enough to make a meaningful difference. Decades of field observations and peer reviewed research both document the effectiveness of strategic landscape fuel treatments and support the pressing need to do more. The cost of necessary treatments is a fraction of the wildfire damage such treatments can prevent. Today’s wildfires in overstocked forests burn so hot and on such vast acreages that reforestation becomes difficult or next to impossible in some areas. Soil damage and erosion become extreme. Watersheds which supply vital domestic, industrial, and agricultural water are damaged or destroyed.”

4) This summer, America watched with great apprehension as the Caldor Fire approached South Lake Tahoe. In a community briefing, wildfire incident commander Rocky Oplinger described how active management of forestlands assisted firefighters. “When the fire spotted above Meyers, it reached a fuels treatment that helped reduce flame lengths from 150 feet to 15 feet, enabling firefighters to mount a direct attack and protect homes,” The Los Angeles Times quoted him.

5) And in a Sacramento Bee interview in which fire researcher Scott Stephens was asked how much consensus there is among fire scientists that fuels treatments do help, he answered “I’d say at least 99%. I’ll be honest with you, it’s that strong; it’s that strong. There’s at least 99% certainty that treated areas do moderate fire behavior. You will always have the ignition potential, but the fires will be much easier to manage.” I (Steve Ellis) don’t know if it’s 99% or not, but a wildfire commander with decades of experience recently told me this figure would be at least 90%. What is important here is that there is broad agreement among professionals that properly treated landscapes do moderate fire behavior.

6) During my career (Steve Ellis), I have personally witnessed fire dropping from tree crowns to the ground when it hit a thinned forest. So have many NAFSR members. This is an issue where scientist and practitioners agree. More strategic landscape treatments are necessary to help avoid increasingly disastrous wildfires. So, the next time you read or hear someone say that thinning and prescribed fire in the forest does not work, remember that nothing can be further from the truth.

Civilian Climate Corps and Western Reforestation and Mitigation: Rhetoric And/or Reality

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Fire crews carry a hose down a hill as the Caldor Fire burns on both sides of Highway 50 about 10 miles east of Kyburz, Calif., on Thursday, Aug. 26, 2021, as the fire pushes east prompting evacuation orders all the way to Echo Summit. The Caldor Fire, the nation’s top priority for firefighting resources, grew to more than 213 square miles (551 square kilometers) southwest of Lake Tahoe but containment remained at 12%, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. Climate change has made the West warmer and drier in the past 30 years and will continue to make the weather more extreme and wildfires more destructive, according to scientists. (Sara Nevis/The Sacramento Bee via AP) I used this photo because it was in the Climate Corp AP story.

 

I’d like to start a discussion on a topic I’ve been wondering about, and that Bob Zybach brought up peripherally in a previous discussion of reforestation history.

I know that there is a massive push for a Climate Corps.  It appears that they would plant trees, and do wildfire mitigation, among a host of other things.  But, as Bob pointed out, previously when the Forest Service had big reforestation programs, it went from native workers to undocumented immigrants (how much an artifact of not being desirable jobs/ FS contracting policy?).  The 80’s were really different from today, but then so were the 30s (original CCC). And working in the woods has probably not changed all that much (or has it?)

 

Then there’s the issue of our current low paid positions going unfilled AKA labor shortage.  Certainly it would be an adventure for those wanting to get away from home and not join the military. But the military has had the problem with recruits being overweight and out of shape, I wonder whether the new CCC might have the same problem?

In this AP story:

While the jobs should pay at least $15 an hour, those likely to join the climate corps “are not doing it for the compensation,″ Neguse said. “They know it’s important to connect to nature and do important work for their state and the nation.″

Details are still being worked out, but Neguse and other Democrats say the program should pay “a living wage″ while offering health care coverage and support for child care, housing, transportation and education.

 

It seems to me that those are fundamentally different conditions than during the Depression, the origin of the CCC.  Also perhaps more people then (raised on farms?) were used to hard physical labor?

Here’s what a professor at Syracuse says:

David Popp, a professor of public administration at Syracuse University, said a key distinction between the original Civilian Conservation Corps and the new climate contingent is that the U.S. economy is not in a depression — great or otherwise — as it was during Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency.

While U.S. employers added just 235,000 jobs in August, the unemployment rate decreased slightly to 5.2% as the economy continues to recover from the coronavirus pandemic.

Most of those being targeted for the new climate corps “could find employment elsewhere,″ Popp said, noting a proliferation of help-wanted signs at retail businesses across the nation.

“I don’t know that an unemployed coal worker in West Virginia is going to move to Montana to take a minimum-wage job to restore streams,″ he said.

On the other hand, some of his own students are highly motivated by the climate crisis and may want to spend a year or two on an outdoor job that helps address an existential threat to the planet, Popp said.

“Many young people are very passionate about the environment, and they may see this as an opportunity to do something about the environment and still get paid for it,″ he said.

 

A bit puzzling is what Senator Markey of Massachusetts said:

Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., a prominent supporter of the climate corps, said such criticism overlooks important benefits.

The program will help communities recover from climate disasters such as Hurricane Ida and Western wildfires while creating “good-paying jobs that can turn into clean-economy careers,″

I’m not sure reforestation or cutting and burning trees have ever led to “clean-economy” careers, but I’m sure they are different kinds of jobs in other parts of the country.  Say, solar installation might have a completely different career path than tree planting. Perhaps they would go  to school afterwards (at the same schools they would otherwise attend)?  And perhaps we have a pathway that has led already to many land managers and park ranger careers-  wildland firefighting.

And also puzzling..

Rep. Joe Neguse, a Colorado Democrat who has co-sponsored a climate corps bill, said it’s important to train the next generation of U.S. land managers, park rangers and other stewards of our natural resources.

“This bold investment is a necessary response to the climate crisis and prioritizes the maintenance and upkeep of public lands,″ he said.

 

I’m not disagreeing with him, but there are places where this training occurs, or at least the training that qualifies people to do those jobs in the federal government.  We’d have to ask the folks, say at CSU (in Neguse’s district) if they have enough students in the pipeline to fill future jobs.  In our world, there has always tended to be more people than jobs.. perhaps this has changed and we need more people in the pipeline?

Like so many political ideas that sound so plausible in DC, I wonder if these concepts have been vetted by those with experience running these kinds of programs.  Or maybe a way forward would be to try it on a smaller scale in different parts of the country, doing different kinds of projects, and learn by doing. We know our wildfire folks have been having trouble with Covid in camps.. is this a good time to start camps, or wouldn’t there be camps? Then there’s the question of locational social justice (I just made up that term).. if these jobs are in underserved or poor communities, should local people have some kind of priority? Maybe those concerns are all addressed in the bill- I haven’t read it, hopefully someone out there is familiar with it.

So I’m raising the question here.. does anyone have recent experience on how this might work in practice? Do States, our laboratories of democracy, have successful examples? Do our friends who run Job Corps centers and fire camps have any relevant observations?  And, of course, the historical perspective on major reforestation efforts is always welcome.

 

Custer-Gallatin Forest Plan: On Climate Models and Planting Trees

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This is an interesting article in the Bozeman Chronicle about their forest plan.

A slash pile near Fairy Lake Road can be seen below a recently logged section of the Custer Gallatin National Forest in the Bridger Mountains on Wednesday, Sept. 29, 2021.
Samuel Wilson/ Chronicle/ Report for America

Many points of interest here.. but I’ll call one out. There’s also an interesting discussion with Dr. Phil Higuera of U of Montana on fuel treatments.

Areas where ponderosa pine forests burned years ago east of Livingston are showing little to no signs of recovery.

That’s according to Cathy Whitlock, Regents Professor Emerita of Earth sciences at Montana State University and co-lead on the newly released Greater Yellowstone Climate Assessment.

“There needs to be a seed-source for the forest to recover, and then those seeds need to become seedlings and develop into mature trees,” Whitlock said. “The concern is, at low elevations it’s just getting too dry for that to happen.”

Scientists predict that as drought and wildfire ramp up in the coming decades, forest ecosystems will change. In some parts of the Custer Gallatin National Forest, trees that die off may never grow back.

It’s interesting to me that when we were interested in reforesting dry ponderosa pine sites in the 80’s (that also had seed source, seed crop size, competition from other plants, munching by predators, mycorrhizae and all those associated variables)… we assumed we could overcome those things and worked on them by a considering it a technical challenge, messing with nursery practices, transportation practices, seedling storage, slurries, vexar and all that. As I’ve mentioned here before in Area 4 (then the Ochoco, Winema, Deschutes and Fremont) we hired a person just to work on that .. the Area Reforestation Specialist. On the west side, they had fewer challenges but even SW Oregon had a major investment in Fundamental Fir with OSU. I wonder how many academics and FS researchers specialize in reforestation nowadays?

Are we assuming that trees won’t live in the future because they’re not coming back naturally? Because in the past, we looked at “not coming back naturally” and said “guess we need to plant, they’re not coming back on their own”. The fact is that we don’t know how the climate of the future will affect the microclimates that trees experience, so my view would be “let’s not give up yet.” A few examples are that we know that aspect is important, as are soil type, competitors and so on. There’s a major scale differential between climate models and the environment relevant to a planting project or even a planting program. And local folks have knowledge of these local kinds of difference (where does the snow stay longest? what different soils are there?)

Now we have arrived in a puzzling philosophical eddy between “leave it alone because that’s natural” and “climate change isn’t natural so should we open up manipulation for various reasons?”
Certainly ESA, even without climate change, has led to an array of manipulations including captive breeding, reintroductions and so on. So perhaps the question isn’t “should we manipulate?” but “what’s a good enough reason?”. Which is definitely a values question, not a science question.

Do we want trees back? For wildlife, people, watersheds, carbon etc.
If so, what are we willing to do about it?

If we take the longer timescale view, the infrastructure that supported large and successful planting programs in the 80’s has gone away, and the people who were involved in these efforts are mostly long retired. And one of the Forest Service’s and partners’ current challenges is to crank back up to reforest after large fires. That time gap of infrastructure availability and knowledge transmission will also make new planting efforts almost starting from scratch again. My point being that I hope people don’t point to some lack of success and assume the reason is climate change. If we’d assumed that in the 80’s, there’d be a lot fewer ponderosa pine trees out there sucking up carbon. It was hard enough to reforest dry sites when we assumed we could, but hadn’t yet figured out how.

Happy Arbor Day! And The Satellite Ping-Pong of Planting Trees

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I’m not sure that this photo is of the planted forest, but part of the Bessey Ranger District on the Nebraska National Forest is from a 20,000-acre (80.9 km2) planting, the largest human-planted forest in the United States. It is greatly enjoyed by critters and people.

Arbor Day. It’s good thing, right? We can trust experts at Extension, NRCS, State Forestry and the Forest Service to help people plant trees where it’s a good idea, and not plant trees where it’s not, right? Well, thanks to climate change and the Satellite Gaze, some have gotten the opposite impression.  Tree planting has become controversial through what I call “Satellite Ping-Pong.” It’s an infinite game of discussing different assumptions about enormous and global questions by volleying between specific places and concerns. But the people directly involved in making decisions, including landowners and communities, are never involved in the game. Others claim to speak for them with varying degrees of accuracy.

First, someone does a study on what tree planting might do around the world. This involves innumerable assumptions and pretty much no input from people as to whether they want trees or not. Or whether trees would live. Or get eaten by ungulates, livestock, insects, fall prey to disease, or get burned up, or any of the (to paraphrase Hamlet) “the thousand natural shocks that arboreal life is heir to.”

This was in Science in 2019:

The restoration of trees remains among the most effective strategies for climate change mitigation. We mapped the global potential tree coverage to show that 4.4 billion hectares of canopy cover could exist under the current climate. Excluding existing trees and agricultural and urban areas, we found that there is room for an extra 0.9 billion hectares of canopy cover, which could store 205 gigatonnes of carbon in areas that would naturally support woodlands and forests. This highlights global tree restoration as one of the most effective carbon drawdown solutions to date. However, climate change will alter this potential tree coverage. We estimate that if we cannot deviate from the current trajectory, the global potential canopy cover may shrink by ~223 million hectares by 2050, with the vast majority of losses occurring in the tropics. Our results highlight the opportunity of climate change mitigation through global tree restoration but also the urgent need for action.

I have to give them credit, they did admit “we really don’t have a clue if trees will live or not due to climate change,” so at least one source of tree death was taken into account. They also say “one of the most effective,”  not “let’s keep emitting fossil carbon.”

You might call this the “serve” in Satellite Ping Pong. Then there started a vast array of critiques. What fascinates me is the way that the stories talk about the real places I know, and who has the authority to speak. For example, this by the Yale 360 pub (well, it’s kind of Yale’s, but kind of separate).

Because of climate change, forests are increasingly vulnerable to destruction by drought, fire, insects, diseases, and storms, which releases carbon back into the atmosphere. Recent research shows that large areas of the American West may have permanently lost their forest cover. Droughts, wildfire, and insect and disease outbreaks are becoming more frequent, and forests are being replaced by grassy shrublands after these disturbances, mostly because it’s now too hot and dry for new generations of saplings to survive. A review paper published in Science last year shows that these threats, although significant and intensifying, aren’t always well understood and are difficult to compensate for. It’s hard to predict how many trees they’ll kill in the near future and how much carbon that will put into the atmosphere, but it’s likely to be considerable.

Not only might tree planting fail to reliably sequester carbon, trees can also heat the atmosphere more than many other habitat types. Kathleen Smart, a post-doctoral researcher at Rhodes University in South Africa, says that replacing surfaces like grasslands or deserts —which, being pale, reflect more solar radiation into outer space — with relatively dark-colored tree plantations can have a heating effect on a local level, and that regional-scale land-use changes have been shown to affect climate and rainfall patterns

As a veteran of efforts to reforest dry areas in the 80’s,  I’m surprised that the solution to not getting trees back is now “give up, it must be climate change.”  Before we thought “it’s a coincidence of not having a good seed year when the soil is still exposed.”

And I  can only speak for the grasslands and deserts I know, but they are not likely to grow trees except along streams (why not replace dying cottonwoods if they aren’t reproducing themselves?) and for windbreaks. Windbreaks help reduce energy use, produce wildlife habitat, and so on. But not at any scale to help with climate change. And that’s OK.

Forrest Fleischman was quoted in this one:

To be clear, critics of the campaign are still fans of trees. They still think forests play a role in solving the climate crisis — their skepticism mostly centers around efforts to plant trees in places they weren’t before, or to plant large swaths of a single species to essentially create “tree plantations” instead of real forests. Another big concern surrounding the call for planting a trillion trees is that it could distract from other efforts to slow down climate change, like stopping fossil fuel pollution and deforestation in the first place.

“You don’t need to plant a tree to regenerate a forest,” Fleischman tells The Verge. Forests can heal on their own if they’re allowed to, he says, and these forests end up being more resilient and more helpful in the climate fight than newly planted plots of trees. He argues that the best way to ensure there are enough trees standing to trap the carbon dioxide heating up the planet is to secure the political rights of people who depend on forests — primarily indigenous peoples whose lands are frequently encroached upon by industry and governments.

There is research backing him up. The world’s leading authority on climate science, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has recognized that when local communities’ land rights are jeopardized, it poses risks to both people and the planet.

I disagree with Forrest on “forests can heal on their own”. If we take a place like the Hayman, where the nearest seed sources are far away, I think it’s better to have tree cover sooner- not just for climate, but for wildlife, watershed (holding soils) and so on. Sidenote: there are exactly the same “local people” arguments questioning another international initiative, 30 x 30.

And I guess the argument that planting trees (as described in the Ping Pong discourse) distracts from stopping fossil fuel pollution is strange. You could say that about any non-energy interventions. So let’s just let the land-use types bow out… including the anti-pastoralist crowd, 30 x 30 and so on.  We’ll just work on resilience, thank you. Whoops, I guess we need to plant some trees for that..

 

Trillion Trees and Natural Carbon Storage Act

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We’ve been talking about developing an actual carbon policy for forest management.  Republicans have been willing to concede that planting trees would be beneficial, but others say that is not enough.  We now have a more comprehensive bipartisan legislative proposal that is getting some attention – The Trillion Trees and Natural Carbon Storage Act.  According to the Washington Post, “The forestry proposal is the first to emerge from the Climate Solutions Caucus, which Coons and Braun launched a little more than a year ago.”  It “directs the U.S. Forest Service to set goals for how much carbon the forests, grasslands, wetlands and some coastal areas should sequester from the atmosphere.”

According to sponsor Senator Young (R-IN), among the things it would do is:

  • Requires that USDA establish objectives for increasing the net carbon stock of American forests, grasslands, wetlands, and coastal blue carbon habitats.

Young’s website provides a link to the bill.  The specific language applicable to the Forest Service is to establish within two years, “objectives for increased net carbon stock for the forest, grassland, wetland, and coastal blue carbon habitat ecosystems of the United States that are owned or managed by the Federal Government.” The objectives “shall be established at levels that assist in achieving (A) the optimally feasible and ecologically appropriate increase in the total net carbon stock.” Those objectives, “shall be based on information relating to the maintenance or restoration of the ecological integrity of the ecosystems described in subsection (a), including maintaining or restoring ecologically appropriate forest, grassland, wetland, and blue carbon habitat structure, function, composition, and connectivity…”  That sounds like it is straight out of the 2012 Planning Rule.  There is no mention of national forest planning per se in the bill, but it is hard to see any other vehicle for implementing this policy and these objectives on national forests.

Young’s website also states that, “This legislation is supported by The Nature Conservancy, National Wildlife Federation, Environmental Defense Fund, World Wildlife Fund, National Audubon Society, Bipartisan Policy Center, American Forest Foundation, American Conservation Coalition, National Association of State Foresters, Conservation International, and Citizens for Responsible Energy Solutions.”

According the Environmental Defense Fund, it “follows recommendations from climate scientists and nonprofit organizations to focus on measuring climate impact instead of number of trees planted.”  EDF’s summary:

  • Expand existing U.S. Forest Service carbon accounting to include grasslands, wetlands and coastal ecosystems, in addition to forests.
  • Ensure that forests and other ecosystems will be valued not only for harvested materials, but also for important climate mitigation functions.
  • Measure progress using “net carbon stock,” a metric that reflects the dynamic nature of ecosystems and how carbon stores can grow or shrink over time.
  • Direct the Forest Service to share expertise, including technical capacity to increase carbon stored in urban forests, with states and recipients of U.S. foreign aid.
  • Provide funding to alleviate the nation’s 1.3-million-acre backlog of reforestation projects.

One section of the bill intends to provide financing “to facilitate the sale of credits in the voluntary carbon market or other recognized environmental market…”  However (as described in the same Washington Post article linked above), carbon offsets have become an issue in relation to the nomination of Mary Nichols, the longtime head of the California Air Resources Board, to be the new director of the Environmental Protection Agency.

One central point of contention is her achievement of California’s cap-and-trade program for greenhouse gas emissions. The program allows companies to offset harmful emissions by paying for forestation or other projects that decrease gases elsewhere. But opponents say it amounts to a license to pollute with poor and minority communities bearing the brunt of environmental harms.

Carbon has also come up in relation to the nomination of Tom Vilsack to be USDA Secretary.  The chance to work on Biden’s climate agenda may have made the job more attractive for Vilsack to return.  Carbon seems to offer an interesting opportunity for the USDA to actually unite its agricultural and forestry forces behind a common goal.

Planting Aspen Trees in Ski Country: Tiny Effort Provokes Maximal Skepticism

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Part of video from Vail Daily News story

In the Sunday Denver Post was a reprint of a story from the Vail Daily. The headline was “should aspen replace lodgepole in local forests?”.

This is about a partnership to plant aspen in Summit County, described by TNC this way:

The partners are testing the potential for increases in aspen trees to act as natural fuel breaks for wildfire at the 46-acre Barney Ford open space site, just outside of downtown Breckenridge. Since aspens are less flammable and have a higher moisture content than conifers, they may act to reduce fire severity. Adding more aspen in forests also has wildlife benefits, as it increases insect and plant biodiversity and creates valuable habitat for elk, moose and deer.

Seems like a small, innocuous project, right?

Back to the news story:

“We were very intrigued with the idea of how can we help establish aspens in Summit County,” Lorch said. “One of the issues we see is that as we do the buffers around our communities for wildfire purposes, most of what’s growing back is the same lodgepole thicket that we had before. So in a short period of time, 20 years or so, we’ll have the same issues with fire concerns as we had prior to the cutting. We’ve done some places where we’ve thinned things in order to try to avoid having such a fuels load, but really aspens, and having a more diverse forest, is a much better plan in the long run.”

One interesting thing was this take (drive-by?) on The Nature Conservancy by Tom Veblen, a professor at the University of Colorado.

It’s true that aspens are less flammable than pine trees. And trying to populate former lodgepole zones with aspens can be a worthwhile cause, says forest ecologist Thomas Veblen with the University of Colorado.

“If the financial resources are available to spend a lot of money on forest management, that’s a worthy goal, to increase the area of aspen, and that’s likely to decrease the spread of fires in the future,” Veblen said.

But The Nature Conservancy’s studies on fire fuels reduction, which includes examining aspen repopulation in areas clear cut of lodgepole pine, may end up helping, most of all, The Nature Conservancy, Veblen says.

“They have a structure of people and resources that can do fire mitigation, they’ve got to keep it funded, so there’s a self interest there,” Veblen said. “They have contracts with the Forest Service to do a lot of forest management, so The Nature Conservancy, from that perspective, has a self interest in promoting fuels reduction.”

I called the folks at TNC about this, and while they were interviewed by Mr. LaConte about the project, they were not asked to comment on Veblen’s assertion, and say that it is incorrect.

University of Montana fire ecologist Richard L. Hutto is skeptical of The Nature Conservancy’s efforts.

“I don’t see wholesale conversion of something to something else in the name of fire safety,” he said. “The thing that determines fire behavior and whether it’s going to get crazy is temperature, humidity and wind, not fuels.”

We’ve gotten from diversifying the forest to “wholesale conversion”. I guess that’s building a straw person. We fans of the robust and resilient Pinus contorta know how unlikely that result would be under any scenario. It’s a fairly strong statement to say that fuels don’t “determine fire behavior”.. maybe that’s Hutto’s careful use of language but certainly fuels impact fire behavior.

Another fire ecologist (Baker) says that they should spend money instead on adapting the community and should work with Fire Adapted Colorado (I think it’s likely that they are already doing this). But are fire ecologists good sources of info on what communities “should” spend money on?
Baker also uses the “it doesn’t always work” argument – “in aspen stands many, but not all fires hit the ground.” I’d take “many but not all” over “none” myself.

If Fire Adapted Colorado sounds familiar, it works closely (according to its webpage) with FAC Net, which is of course, a partnership with … The Nature Conservancy.

Fire Adapted Colorado is an independent non-profit organization closely associated and born out of the Fire Adapted Community Learning Network (FAC Net). FAC Net is a national network of people working to build wildfire resilience capacity in wildfire-prone communities. It is supported through a partnership among The Nature Conservancy, the Watershed Research and Training Center and the USDA Forest Service. FAC Net’s purpose is to connect and support people and communities who are striving to live more safely with wildfire. A fire adapted community is a knowledgeable, engaged community that is taking actions that will enable them to safely accept fire as part of the surrounding landscape. For more information about FAC Net, visit www.fireadaptednetwork.org.

I’ve always thought that it is interesting when people get together and do something they think is good, and how these stories are reported. For example, how many inches are devoted to description of the actions compared to critics (in the Denver Post reprint, it was almost 50/50). And why people from elsewhere (Steamboat, Boulder, Wyoming, Montana), academics and not, are thought to be experts on managing areas around Breckinridge. And when the doers get a chance to respond to critics.