Forest Service crew plants trees. Michael Giagio, Colorado Springs Gazette
Thanks to NAFSR for their post about this. Does everyone think this proposed legislation is a good thing?
Off the top of my head, I can only think that the folks who are currently collecting the monies (if there are any such people) might not like it. Or perhaps that the difference currently goes into the Treasury which does need the funds. Still, it doesn’t seem like a lot of money, relatively speaking (a billion here and a billion there..).
Here are the introducers of the bill: Congressman Jimmy Panetta (D-CA), Congressman Mike Simpson (R-ID), Congresswoman Kim Schrier, M.D. (D-WA), and Congressman Doug LaMalfa (R-CA) introduced the Repairing Existing Public Land by Adding Necessary Trees Act or the REPLANT Act, legislation to expand funding for the U.S. I don’t know if it’s going anywhere but…
REPLANT Act
Repairing Existing Public Lands by Adding Necessary Trees
The REPLANT Act would:
• Remove the cap on the reforestation trust fund, so that the Forest Service would receive all the monies generated from imported wood products and lumber tariffs.
o The Forest Service currently receives $30 million/year for the Reforestation Trust Fund. The yearly authorization for the Reforestation Trust Fund has not increased since it was established 40 years ago.
o Monies are generated from imported wood products and lumber tariffs. The 10-year annual average amount of tariffs collected on those products is nearly $124 million per year ($309 million in 2019).
o The Reforestation Trust fund provides most of the funding for post-disturbance reforestation on national forests. Reforestation needs caused by wildfire, insects and disease, and weather events have increased and collectively account for 85% of reforestation needs on national forests.
o To address our current and anticipated reforestation needs over the next 10 years, it is estimated to cost approximately 1.8 billion, or $183 million annually.
o Raising or eliminating the cap on the reforestation trust fund would help to close the funding gap and enable the Agency to more fully address reforestation and stand improvement needs across the national forests.
• Require the Chief to work with the Regional Foresters to create a list of priority reforestation projects to promote effective reforestation following unplanned events;
• Emphasize using Stewardship contracting and Good Neighbor Agreement authorities to conduct reforestation activities and directs the Forest Service to quantify the backlog of
replanting needs; and
• Require an annual report to Congress on progress and number of acres in need of reforestation.
To read the full version of the Bill, click on this link –
Drone technology is being used for tree-planting in response to afforestation and carbon sequestration needs, including use after wildfires. How might this change national forest management?
To quickly plant around a trillion trees—a goal that some researchers have estimated could store more than 200 gigatons of carbon—Flash Forest argues that new technology is needed. In North America, trees need to grow 10-20 years before they efficiently store carbon, so to address climate change by midcentury, trees need to begin growing as quickly as possible now. “I think that drones are absolutely necessary to hit the kind of targets that we’re saying are necessary to achieve some of our carbon sequestration goals as a global society,” she says.
But to restore forests that have already been lost, the drones can work more quickly and cheaply than humans planting with shovels. Flash Forest’s tech can currently plant 10,000 to 20,000 seed pods a day; as the technology advances, a pair of pilots will be able to plant 100,000 trees in a day (by hand, someone might typically be able to plant around 1,500 trees in a day, Ahlstrom says.) The company aims to bring the cost down to 50 cents per tree, or around a fourth of the cost of some other tree restoration efforts.
This has obvious implications for tree-planting crews, but how about something like salvage logging? Other issues?
This article summarizes some recent research on the topic:
Among Stevens-Rumann,’s work was a 2017 study of nearly 1,500 sites charred by 52 wildfires in the U.S. Rocky Mountains. Her research found that lower elevation trees had a tough time naturally regenerating in areas that burned between 2000 and 2015 compared with sites affected between 1985 and 1999, largely due to drier weather conditions.
More recently, a 2019 study written by her colleague Kerry Kemp found that both Douglas fir and Ponderosa pine seedlings in the Idaho’s Rocky Mountains — just south of B.C. — were also struggling in low-lying burned areas due to warmer temperatures, leading to lower tree densities.
Both studies attribute climate change to be the lead cause of why the trees are struggling to grow back in certain fire-scarred areas.
As a result, some ecosystems will no longer be able to support tree species. Instead they may convert to grasslands, she said.
We’ve talked about this before (for example, here). But I would like to know how this kind of information is being incorporated into long-term planning for timber harvest levels. In accordance with the requirement for sustainability on national forests, we should be assuming forest growth consistent with the natural range of variation, which should reflect the effects of climate change on future forests. What I would expect to be seeing based on this kind of research is reduced area suitable for timber production because it would become too dry, and reduced volume resulting from reduced density, slower growth rates and more frequent fires. “Sustained yield” means that projections of lower future timber yields may lead to reduced near-term volume. I’ve looked at the timber volume documentation for a few forest plan revisions, and I haven’t found anything there about climate change (there’s usually an unconnected section on the effects of climate change somewhere). (Projected timber harvest volumes are not tending to go down in revised forest plans.) Maybe that just requires digging deeper than the public-facing documents or maybe it’s not happening. Does anyone know more about this?
For the first time in nearly three decades, the Shawnee National Forest in Illinois has proposed a commercial timber harvest of mostly native oaks and hickories. And environmental activists whose high-profile fight against logging in the 1990s led to a 17-year moratorium are once again raising alarms.
Lisa Helmig, acting forest supervisor with the Shawnee National Forest, said the plan is rooted in the best available science about how to maintain the keystone oak ecosystem that is native to the Shawnee foothills. “The oak ecosystem has been in place here in the central hardwood region for 5,000 years,” she said. But Helmig said the ecosystem is at risk due to a lack of natural or man-made disturbances, such as fire, storms and, yes, even logging. Without these disturbances, non-native, shade-tolerant sugar maple and beech trees sprout up and fill in the forest’s midstory, she said.
The activists have filed an objection, based largely on their past experience with timber harvest on the Forest.
The trees that have grown up to replace the harvested oaks and hickories are mostly 28-year-old stands of “undesirable” beeches and maples. “When you think about how many oaks were here, it’s heart-wrenching,” Wallace said “Had they not cut the oaks, we’d have oaks here,” Stearns added. In addition to the Farview site, in their letter they write that we also returned to the North End Ecological Restoration project logged in Pope County in the late 1990s. “Little to no oak and hickory have been visibly restored.” They cited other examples, as well.
This is the root of their concern: What the Shawnee National Forest’s leadership claims is happening isn’t.
Asked about their concerns, Helmig said that her “gut reaction” is that the Forest Service likely didn’t follow through with what should be a multiphase treatment. Helmig said she’s confident that the Forest Service is committed to seeing (this) project through… “We have a wonderful silviculturist on staff now,” Helmig said. “He’s been here five years and is absolutely fantastic.”
Hopefully we can assume that there has been a science-based determination that ecological integrity requires regenerating some young oaks and hickories. But implementation unfortunately still boils down to “trust us,” and “we’re different now.” (But then the Forest evicted the media from the objection meeting, wrongly according to the Washington Office.)
This is where the world could support new forests. The map excludes existing forests, urban areas, and agricultural lands. J. BASTIN, ET. AL., SCIENCE 365, 76, 2019
There was a new article in Science that caused a kerfuffle in the Twitterverse (is that a Twitterfuffle?), which may be of interest to us. The story is that Science published an article saying that “planting trees globally would be REALLY good for carbon”. Now you may say that that’s not really news, but the authors made lots of assumptions (!) and ran models (!) and came up with some big numbers (!) and made perhaps out-sized claims. What is of interest to me is the choice of scale, in this case, the world. It takes chutzpah, I think, to think you can model how people could plant trees all around the world, where, and what that would do for carbon, get meaningful results and not need to ground-truth your work.
As you all know, I am a proponent of planting trees. I especially think that planting trees post-fire (where natural regeneration isn’t working), is something most people would support, not just for carbon reasons. I had heard at one time that the Forest Service was going to make a major push on its reforestation backlog, but never heard what happened to that effort. Anyone reading from the FS, please let us know! Anyway, here’s the free info on the paper and a link:. There’s also a science op-ed that has a firewall here.
The restoration of forested land at a global scale could help capture atmospheric carbon and mitigate climate change. Bastin et al. used direct measurements of forest cover to generate a model of forest restoration potential across the globe (see the Perspective by Chazdon and Brancalion). Their spatially explicit maps show how much additional tree cover could exist outside of existing forests and agricultural and urban land. Ecosystems could support an additional 0.9 billion hectares of continuous forest. This would represent a greater than 25% increase in forested area, including more than 500 billion trees and more than 200 gigatonnes of additional carbon at maturity. Such a change has the potential to cut the atmospheric carbon pool by about 25%.
Abstract
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 our most effective climate change solution 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 don’t know how anyone could model “forest loss due to climate change” since we don’t know how the climate will change, nor how trees will respond.
There is an interesting twitter discussion started by (Dr.) Pep Canadell linked here.
Replying to @pepcanadell
Some concerns on methods: only 10-13 factors determine tree cover potential globally – major local and regional-scale constraints missing, e.g. permafrost, subsoil constraints (ex. depth to bedrock), nutrient limitations, var. forms of soil degradation, seasonal inundation.
Replying to @EikeLuedeling @pepcanadell
Very relevant in high-potential areas! They also assume grazing areas and production forests can reach same tree cover as protected areas. In my view, a gross overestimate of actual potential! And a lesson on how machine-learning algorithms still need a reality check.
So I’m not the only person out there concerned about reality checks.
In a 6/13/18 article, David Atkins provides a critique of the assumptions behind the Law et al article titled: “Land use strategies to mitigate climate change in carbon dense temperate forests” and shows how hypothetical science can and has been used, without any caveat, to provide some groups with slogans that meet their messaging needs instead of waiting for validation of the hypothesis and thereby considering the holistic needs of the world.
I) BACKGROUND
The noble goal of Law et. al. is to determine the “effectiveness of forest strategies to mitigate climate change”. They state that their methodology “should integrate observations and mechanistic ecosystem process models with future climate, CO2, disturbances from fire, and management.”
A) The generally (ignoring any debate over the size of the percentage increase) UNCONTESTED points regarding locking up more carbon in the Law et. al. article are as follows:
1) Reforestation on appropriate sites – ‘Potential 5% improvement in carbon storage by 2100’
2) Afforestation on appropriate sites – ‘Potential 1.4% improvement in carbon storage by 2100′
B) The CONTESTED points regarding locking up 17% more carbon by 2100 in the Law et. al. article are as follows:
1) Lengthened harvest cycles on private lands
2) Restricting harvest on public lands
C) Atkins, at the 2018 International Mass Timber Conference protested by Oregon Wild, notes that: “Oregon Wild (OW) is advocating that storing more carbon in forests is better than using wood in buildings as a strategy to mitigate climate change.” OW’s first reference from Law et. al. states: “Increasing forest carbon on public lands reduced emissions compared with storage in wood products” (see Law et. al. abstract). Another reference quoted by OW from Law et. al. goes so far as to claim that: “Recent analysis suggests substitution benefits of using wood versus more fossil fuel-intensive materials have been overestimated by at least an order of magnitude.”
II) Law et. al. CAVEATS ignored by OW
A) They clearly acknowledge that their conclusions are based on computer simulations (modeling various scenarios using a specific set of assumptions subject to debate by other scientists).
B) In some instances, they use words like “probably”, “likely” and “appears” when describing some assumptions and outcomes rather than blindly declaring certainty.
III) Atkins’ CRITIQUE
Knowing that the modeling used in the Law et. al. study involves significant assumptions about each of the extremely complex components and their interactions, Atkins proceeds to investigate the assumptions which were used to integrate said models with the limited variables mentioned and shows how they overestimate the carbon cost of using wood, underestimate the carbon cost of storing carbon on the stump and underestimate the carbon cost of substituting non-renewable resources for wood. This allows Oregon Wild to tout unproven statements as quoted in item “I-C” above and treat them as fact and justification for policy changes instead of as an interesting but unproven hypothesis that needs to be validated in order to complete the scientific process.
Quotes from Atkins Critique:
A) Wood Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) Versus Non-renewable substitutes.
1) “The calculation used to justify doubling forest rotations assumes no leakage. Leakage is a carbon accounting term referring to the potential that if you delay cutting trees in one area, others might be cut somewhere else to replace the gap in wood production, reducing the supposed carbon benefit.”
2) “It assumes a 50-year half-life for buildings instead of the minimum 75 years the ASTM standard calls for, which reduces the researchers’ estimate of the carbon stored in buildings.”
3) “It assumes a decline of substitution benefits, which other LCA scientists consider as permanent.”
4) “analysis chooses to account for a form of fossil fuel leakage, but chooses not to model any wood harvest leakage.”
5) “A report published by the Athena Institute in 2004, looked at actual building demolition over a three-plus-year period in St. Paul, Minn. It indicated 51 percent of the buildings were older than 75 years. Only 2 percent were demolished in the first 25 years and only 12 percent in the first 50 years.”
6) “The Law paper assumes that the life of buildings will get shorter in the future rather than longer. In reality, architects and engineers are advocating the principle of designing and building for longer time spans – with eventual deconstruction and reuse of materials rather than disposal. Mass timber buildings substantially enhance this capacity. There are Chinese Pagoda temples made from wood that are 800 to 1,300 years old. Norwegian churches are over 800 years old. I visited at cathedral in Scotland with a roof truss system from the 1400s. Buildings made of wood can last for many centuries. If we follow the principle of designing and building for the long run, the carbon can be stored for hundreds of years.”
7) “The OSU scientists assumed wood energy production is for electricity production only. However, the most common energy systems in the wood products manufacturing sector are combined heat and power (CHP) or straight heat energy production (drying lumber or heat for processing energy) where the efficiency is often two to three times as great and thus provides much larger fossil fuel offsets than the modeling allows.”
8) “The peer reviewers did not include an LCA expert.”
9) The Dean of the OSU College of Forestry was asked how he reconciles the differences between two Doctorate faculty members when the LCA Specialist (who is also the director of CORRIM which is a non-profit that conducts and manages research on the environmental impacts of production, use, and disposal of forest products). The Dean’s answer was “It isn’t the role of the dean to resolve these differences, … Researchers often explore extremes of a subject on purpose, to help define the edges of our understanding … It is important to look at the whole array of research results around a subject rather than using those of a single study or publication as a conclusion to a field of study.”
10) Alan Organschi, a practicing architect, a professor at Yale stated his thought process as “There is a huge net carbon benefit [from using wood] and enormous variability in the specific calculations of substitution benefits … a ton of wood (which is half carbon) goes a lot farther than a ton of concrete, which releases significant amounts of carbon during a building’s construction”. He then paraphrased a NASA climate scientistfrom the late 1980’s who said ‘Quit using high fossil fuel materials and start using materials that sink carbon, that should be the principle for our decisions.’
11) The European Union, in 2017, based on “current literature”, called “for changes to almost double the mitigation effects by EU forests through Climate Smart Forestry (CSF). … It is derived from a more holistic and effective approach than one based solely on the goals of storing carbon in forest ecosystems”
12) Various CORRIM members stated:
a) “Law et al. does not meet the minimum elements of a Life Cycle Assessment: system boundary, inventory analysis, impact assessment and interpretation. All four are required by the international standards (ISO 14040 and 14044); therefore, Law et al. does not qualify as an LCA.”
b) “What little is shared in the article regarding inputs to the simulation model ignores the latest developments in wood life cycle assessment and sustainable building design, rendering the results at best inaccurate and most likely incorrect.”
c) “The PNAS paper, which asserts that growing our PNW forests indefinitely would reduce the global carbon footprint, ignores that at best there would 100 percent leakage to other areas with lower productivity … which will result in 2 to 3.5 times more acres harvested for the same amount of building materials. Alternatively, all those buildings will be built from materials with a higher carbon footprint, so the substitution impact of using fossil-intensive products in place of renewable low carbon would result in >100 percent leakage.”
d) More on leakage: “In 2001, seven years after implementation, Jack Ward Thomas, one of the architects of the plan and former chief of the U.S. Forest Service, said: “The drop in the cut in the Pacific Northwest was essentially replaced by imports from Canada, Scandinavia and Chile … but we haven’t reduced our per-capita consumption of wood. We have only shifted the source.”
e) “Bruce Lippke, professor emeritus at the University of Washington and former executive director of CORRIM said, “The substitution benefits of wood in place of steel or concrete are immediate, permanent and cumulative.””
B) Risks Resulting from High Densities of Standing Timber
1) “The paper underestimates the amount of wildfire in the past and chose not to model increases in the amount of fire in the future driven by climate change.”
2) “The authors chose to treat the largest fire in their 25-year calibration period, the Biscuit Fire (2003), as an anomaly. Yet 2017 provided a similar number of acres burned. … the model also significantly underestimated five of the six other larger fire years ”
3) “The paper also assumed no increase in fires in the future”
4) Atkins comments/quotes support what some of us here on the NCFP blog have been saying for years regarding storing more timber on the stump. There is certainty that a highly significant increase in carbon loss to fire, insects and disease will result from increased stand densities as a result of storing more carbon on the stump on federal lands. Well documented, validated and fundamental plant physiology and fire science can only lead us to that conclusion. Increases in drought caused by global warming will only increase the stress on already stressed, overly dense forests and thereby further decrease their viability/health by decreasing the availability of already limited resources such as access to minerals, moisture and sunlight while providing closer proximity between trees to ease the ability and rate of spread of fire, insects and disease between adjacent trees.
Footnote:
In their conclusion, Law et. al. state that“GHG reduction must happen quickly to avoid surpassing a 2°C increase in temperature since preindustrial times.” This emphasis leads them to focus on strategies which, IMHO, will only exacerbate the long-term problem.
→ For perspective, consider the “Failed Prognostications of Climate Alarm”
Back when I was reading about the IPCC scenarios and what they included in this post, I thought “uh-oh, reforestation and afforestation, no one told us!”. As far as I know, though, the IPCC scenarios only include GHG based (I don’t know if they include other GHGs besides carbon), but not landscape changes that influence climate.
Here’s one 2000 paper by Betts of the UK on this topic. This paper is one of those that covers the whole world, uses remote sensing, uses a variety of datasets, makes a variety of assumptions, and may not relate well to more local studies, or even observations. For example, on soils like the Hayman, green trees vs bare soil post-fire may well impact albedo.. how much, is another question. Perhaps there are more recent and/or more local papers on this?
Still, it raises an interesting point. If you want to move from the general idea of afforestation (or changing crop back to forest lands, e.g. the Williamette Valley) how would the potential carbon sequestration and landscape change relate to each other? In the 2003 Marland et al. paper cited below (coauthored by several forest scientists), the authors consider a more holistic form of accounting for climate impacts beyond carbon.
It might even be appropriate to think of carbon management in the biosphere in terms of adjustment factors, or suitability factors, that capture other objectives of land surface change as well as carbon sequestration. These could include carbon leakage, other impacts on climate, ecosystem composition and structure, other impacts on hydrology and the environment, sustainability, and social and cultural objectives. Although this paper discusses changes in land surface entirely within the context of climate change, it is clear that changes in land surface have important considerations within other social and environmental contexts and within other international conventions. The Kyoto Protocol, for example, specifically notes that achieving mitigation objectives for climate change should be accomplished while
taking into account “relevant international environmental agreements; promotion of sustainable forest management practices;” and promotion of sustainable development. Relevant international agreements include the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, the UN Convention to Combat Desertification, and the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands (
IPCC, 2000 , p. 114). Alternatives for carbon management, whether protection of existing ecosystems or encouragement of more carbon intensive ecosystems, can have particularly important implications for biodiversity (Huston and Marland, 2003).
To fully consider the climatic effect of changing land surface and/or managing carbon stocks in the biosphere would require complex modeling of the interactions between the atmosphere and the land surface, Option 4. An international consensus would need to consider climate impacts that are both global and regional (multinational) in scale. Effects on the climate system could be expressed in quantifiable energy units such as joule or watt/m2 , perhaps normalized for the area affected (
Pielke et al., 2002 ). Both increases and decreases in energy flows would be recognized as impacts on the larger system. Such an accounting system could be equally rigorous, but would inevitably be more complex, than the evolving system based on tons of carbon equivalent.
I wrote one of the leaders in the field, Roger Pielke, Sr. and asked for a set of papers that would be helpful for readers to introduce them to this topic area. So here they are.they are accessible without a firewall (others are on his research website -https://cires.colorado.edu/research/research-groups/roger-pielke-sr-group)
Pielke Sr., R.A., R. Mahmood, and C. McAlpine, 2016: Land’s complex role in climate change. Physics Today, 69(11), 40. https://pielkeclimatesci.files.wordpress.com/2016/11/r-384.pdf
Mahmood, R., R.A. Pielke Sr., T.R. Loveland, and C.A. McAlpine, 2016: Climate relevant land use and land cover change policies. Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc. 195-202,
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/BAMS-D-14-00221.1
Marland, G., R.A. Pielke, Sr., M. Apps, R. Avissar, R.A. Betts, K.J. Davis, P.C. Frumhoff, S.T. Jackson, L. Joyce, P. Kauppi, J. Katzenberger, K.G. MacDicken, R. Neilson, J.O. Niles, D. dutta S. Niyogi, R.J. Norby, N. Pena, N. Sampson, and Y. Xue, 2003: The climatic impacts of land surface change and carbon management, and the
implications for climate-change mitigation policy. Climate Policy, 3, 149-157. http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/files/2009/10/r-267.pdf
Mahmood, R., R.A. Pielke Sr., K. Hubbard, D. Niyogi, P. Dirmeyer, C. McAlpine, A. Carleton, R. Hale, S. Gameda, A. Beltrán-Przekurat, B. Baker, R. McNider, D. Legates, J. Shepherd, J. Du, P. Blanken, O.Frauenfeld, U. Nair, S. Fall, 2013: Land cover changes and their biogeophysical effects on climate. Int. J. Climatol., DOI:
10.1002/joc.3736. http://pielkeclimatesci.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/r-374.pdf
Hossain, F., and R.A. Pielke Sr., 2012: A two-way street. Intl. Water Power & Dam Construction, 64:11, 26-28. http://pielkeclimatesci.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/r-373.pdf
Hossain, F., J. Arnold, E. Beighley, C. Brown, S. Burian, J. Chen, S.Madadgar, A. Mitra, D. Niyogi, R.A. Pielke Sr., V. Tidwell, and D. Wegner, 2015: Local-to-regional landscape drivers of extreme weather and climate: Implications for water infrastructure resilience. J. Hydrol. Eng., 10.1061/(ASCE)HE.1943-5584.0001210 , 02515002.
https://pielkeclimatesci.files.wordpress.com/2015/04/r-380.pdf”
If you’re interested in this topic, you can also sign up for Dr. Pielke’s Twitter feed. There’s an interesting current study on the effects of irrigation in Nebraska going on right now.
Katy Hofmeister obtains soil samples for a carbon inventory by digging a soil pit and getting specimens from various layers.
Having read a few of the “what should we do with carbon in forests” papers, and leaving aside for now the “should we use forest products” discussion, I am thinking that by looking more broadly at forests, carbon, land use change, and other environmental and social factors, we can come back to that discussion with a better sense of context for a variety of climate and carbon interventions.
I’ve found that afforestation and reforestation are on everyone’s list of what can be done that are good for carbon sequestration. Afforestation has a couple of problems. It is land use change, and in many places there are no trees due to the climatic conditions, so it wouldn’t actually work in practice. But in some areas we do have a track record of success..say in the plains states, we could have a 21st century equivalent of shelterbelts (some of the ones from the 1930’s are starting to look pretty ratty).
But back to reforestation (that is, planting trees on forested land post some form of disturbance). We know how to do it in most currently forested places, and used to do it not that long ago (1980’s). In my career, I was fortunate to be involved in the Great Region 6 Reforestation Campaign during which nurseries, infrastructure, technology improvement and so on, were all aligned toward the goal of reforestation. Even Oregon State University had the Fundamental Fir Program. Most people agree with the idea and it is not disruptive to current economic and social structures (such as converting agricultural land to forest). But here’s an angle on it I hadn’t heard before with regard to soil carbon.
Here are some quotes from this Cornell University press release:
The study examined the potential to expand the soil carbon sequestration in reforested areas.
“The ability of U.S. forestlands to offset our emissions of greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, is decreasing,” said Hofmeister, who conducts research in natural resources and hydrology. “This is partly due to a backlog in reforestation projects on public lands that has been increasing for several decades.
“Nationwide, since 2000, less than 10 percent of forests are replanted after disturbances that eliminate forest cover. Reforestation would increase the soil carbon sink and go a long way to mitigating climate change.”
..
Sequestering carbon should be a strong component in fighting climate change, according to Hofmeister. “And, unlike other biospheric sinks, such as trees themselves – which can burn up in fires – soil carbon is quite stable,” she said.
Here is a link to the PNAS paper. You’ll note that the paper is national in scope and used remote sensing. Looking out at your neighboring forest, you would be able to imagine that the numbers for increasing soil carbon locally (over what would happen without intervention) depend greatly on the soils themselves, climate and water availability, the kind of disturbance (think volcano, fire, logging) and how easily (or if) the forest would naturally regenerate. If one were to look at reforesting as a carbon investment and prioritize the areas where you would get the biggest carbon bang for the buck. Still, it’s interesting to think about.
I found an LA Times article regarding the Rim Fire, as well as the future of forest management within the Sierra Nevada. Of course, Chad Hanson re-affirms his preference to end all logging, everywhere. There’s a lot of seemingly balanced reporting but, there is no mention of the Sierra Nevada Framework, and its diameter limits. There is also the fact that any change to the SNF will take years to amend. There was also no mention that only about 20,000 Federal acres of the Rim Fire was salvaged, with some of that being in 40-year old plantations.
There might also be another ‘PictureGate“, involving Chad Hanson displaying supposed Forest Service clearcut salvage logging. His folks have already displayed their inability to locate themselves on a map. If he really had solid evidence, he SURELY would have brought it into court
Additionally, the comments are a gold mine for the misinformation and polarization of the supposedly ‘progressive’ community of readers.
Trump “demands” more logging. Really? Does he ever request, suggest or ask for information? I’m tired of hearing of Trump’s “demands.” It could be that some logging would be beneficial but the minute Trump “demands” it, it is suspect. One of his friends will be making millions on the logging and probably giving a kickback to a Trump business. Trump is the destructor of all things beautiful or sacred, the King Midas of the GOP.
A tiny increase in logging of small trees is very unlikely to generate “millions”.
You have no idea what “forest management” is. You want to clearcut all of the old growth forests and then turn them into Christmas tree lots and pine plantations. That is industrial tree farming, not forest management. That is the dumb dogma, speaking, not actual management of the forests.
Most people in southern California don’t know that Forest Service clearcutting and old growth harvesting in the Sierra Nevada has been banned since 1993. The article makes no mention of that.
Riddle me this, Lou. How did the forests manage before we spent $2.5 billion dollars a year on fire suppression? Are we the problem or the cure? Is this just another out of control bureaucracy with a life of its own?
