Committee Hearing on Various Federal Lands Bills, and Root and Stem Bill Testimony from PERC

TSW could really use someone to report on legislation.. there was a Committee Hearing today on several bills that may be of interest. Here’s the FS testimony.

 

Here’s Hannah Downey’s written testimony.

The Root and Stem Project Authorization Act
The Root and Stem Project Authorization Act (H.R. 674) is a bipartisan proposal to add more resources to advance forest restoration projects through the often-cumbersome environmental review process. For projects on Forest Service or Bureau of Land Management land that have been collaboratively developed and meet local and rural community needs, a sponsor can front the funding for an approved outside contractor to complete the NEPA analysis for the project and be repaid through any receipts generated by the project that would otherwise go to the federal treasury.

The “A to Z” Project
The Root and Stem Project Authorization Act builds on the “A to Z” pilot project in the Colville National Forest in Washington.
This innovative project was highlighted in PERC’s 2021 Fix America’s Forests report as a way to leverage the value of timber to reduce bureaucratic burdens.
Several years ago, the Northeast Washington Forest Coalition, a collaborative group of public and private partners, was looking to advance a forest project, but the Colville National Forest did not have the financial or staff resources to complete environmental reviews for the project. The coalition proposed allowing timber contractors who would perform the harvesting and restoration work to also bear the costs of doing the NEPA analysis. This “A to Z” project—so named because the winning bidder would be responsible for the entire process from initiating the project, to environmental review, to implementation—presented the opportunity to use the commercial value of harvested timber to advance the project and fund forest restoration.

A local sawmill, Vaagen Brothers Lumber, won the 10-year Forest Service stewardship contract in 2013 to test the privately funded, publicly managed NEPA process. It subcontracted with a third party to plan and perform the environmental analysis. To avoid any conflict of interest, the subcontractor’s performance was overseen by agency personnel rather than Vaagen Brothers. The NEPA analysis was completed in 2016, and the Vaagen Brothers began commercial thinning operations on more than 4,500 acres of national forest lands that contain excess wildfire fuels.
With a mill that can process small-diameter trees and nearby processing facilities that can turn that timber into laminated building products, the contract provides Vaagen Brothers with a supply of merchantable wood products. In exchange, the terms of the stewardship contract also require that the private company rehabilitate streams, replace culverts, restore roads, and control noxious weeds, leaving the forest ecosystem more resilient to insects and disease, enhanced wildlife habitat, and a substantially reduced risk for severe wildfire.

How It Works
The Root and Stem Project Authorization Act establishes a formal process for a project sponsor to provide the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management upfront funding to hire an approved contractor to conduct the NEPA analysis for a collaboratively designed restoration project. It also adds the requirement that receipts generated by the project can be used to repay the sponsor instead of being deposited into the general fund of the treasury. Building on the success of the “A to Z” project, this approach could substantially speed up needed activities while freeing up agency resources and personnel for other projects.  The Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management can currently contract with non-federal parties for environmental analysis and accept outside funds to pay for that review, as demonstrated by the “A to Z” project.

The significant reform that the Root and Stem Project Authorization Act would make is to allow a project’s timber revenues to reimburse the party who funds the environmental review. This improvement would create more opportunity and motivation for forest collaboratives, conservation organizations, timber companies, and other entities who would benefit from the restoration project to provide the initial funding.
Under this proposal, the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management would maintain an approved list of non-federal, third-party contractors in each state that the agency can hire to complete NEPA analyses and any consultations required under the Endangered Species Act. For forest restoration projects that have been collaboratively developed on federal lands, a project sponsor could propose a stewardship contract and provide the federal land management agency with the funding to hire one of the approved contractors to conduct the necessary project analysis. Once the project was approved, the federal land manager would have to solicit bids to carry out the project and use any available receipts generated by the project to repay the sponsor.
Though outside parties would be providing upfront funding and completing the environmental review documents, the federal land management agency would still retain authority over the environmental review and the project. Additionally, the relevant secretary would still be required to determine the sufficiency of any documents and authorize the project to proceed.

Improving Forest Restoration
At a time of great need for more forest restoration activities, the Root and Stem Project Authorization Act would bring more resources to the table to get important work done. Bringing in outside funding will not only benefit the collaborative projects reviewed under the Root and Stem authority but will also allow limited Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management resources to be spent on other priorities. Ultimately, more needed forest restoration projects—both ones that do and do not generate revenues—will make it through the environmental review process so that work can begin on the ground to reduce fuel-loading and protect our forest ecosystems from catastrophic wildfires.

 

Flowers Grow in Openings in Ponderosa Pine Forests: Bees Like Flowers; Thinning Good for Biodiversity

This is an interesting and pretty comprehensive story from the Colorado Sun. Kind of a bee-centric take on desirable vegetation structures. Ecology is a funny thing in that there are all kinds of ecologists interested in all kinds of critters who may not prefer the same kinds of vegetation. So what is the “ecological work” that needs to be done- and what variety of ecologist decides?

The more-than-decadelong effort to thin Front Range forests to reduce fire danger has brought more bees, more flowers and increased resilience to climate change, new research shows.

The raw number and the diversity of bees and plants exploded a few years after ponderosa pine forests were restored to a “pre-European” state, researchers from Colorado State and Utah State universities found.

“We found that if you cut trees and open up the canopy, between three and 10 years later, you see a pretty good response,” said Seth Davis, associate professor of forest and rangeland stewardship at Colorado State University and co-author of a study recently published in “Ecological Applications.”

“Forest restoration and forest thinning is one of the ways that we can conserve our native communities.”

I like that reporter provided the historical context for how these particular forests came to be.

For thousands of years, natural fires have been an integral part of healthy forest ecosystems in the West. Small fires that clear out underbrush every five to 30 years as well as more devastating fires that can raze the forest to the ground every 50 to 100 or more years clear the way for new growth. Native Americans were known to set small fires to clear out undergrowth for better hunting and regeneration of valuable plants, but did not cause major changes in the ecosystem. Then, beginning in 1859, Euro-Americans flooded into Colorado seeking gold and silver.

I’m not sure that’s accurate; not sure that we can know whether larger pre-European fires were set intentionally. Larger fires did occur.

“Suddenly, in a span of decades, the Colorado Rockies were engulfed by this new, highly unpredictable world of commodity capitalism, of smelters and railroad investment, of boomtowns and sudden busts, of landscape changes so fundamental that they dwarfed the modest human impacts made over the prior 10 centuries,” historical geographer William Wyckoff wrote in his book “Creating Colorado.”

Vast swaths of the Front Range forests were cleared to obtain wood for mining, construction and railroads. Extensive fires also surged across the landscape, fueled by accidental and intentional fires.

To combat the rampant and unregulated logging of these forests, the federal government in the early years of the 20th century created the White River, Pike, and Arapaho and Roosevelt national forests along the Front Range and high into the Rockies. At about the same time, firefighters began trying to suppress all fires.

As a result, over the past century, dense forests with thick undergrowth have grown up across the Front Range and the entire West. Many of the plants that thrived in the pre-European forests disappeared from the now shady forest floor. And with them went many of the animals that ate and pollinated them. You end up with a rather homogeneous landscape that doesn’t have a lot of flowers in it,” Davis said. “You end up with a situation where you can’t have a lot of native bees there.”

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They found an impressively richer, more dense and resilient web of life. While the bee population roughly doubled, the number of interactions between bees and plants rose eightfold and there were five times as many unique connections between specific bee species and plant species.

The researchers illustrated the interactions in a diagram, which visually depicts a richer, more complex web of life.

“Yeah, it’s kind of mind-blowing,” Davis said. “You just see there’s just far more diversity or more complexity.

“You get the idea that if you lost one or two of the flowers or one or two of the bees out of this system, the whole network doesn’t just collapse and fall apart. Whereas on these control plots, if you remove one or two things, you just got a lot more vulnerable ecosystem.”

“This paper is a strong piece of evidence for the ecosystem benefits of forest thinning in areas where fire has been suppressed and the canopy is overgrown,” said Amy Yarger, director of horticulture at the Butterfly Pavilion. She was not involved in the research. “With climate change and biodiversity loss posing existential threats, mindful forest management is key for conservation and for preserving our way of life in Colorado.”

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“Here are some really key species for supporting a lot of biodiversity of pollinators, which in turn supports biodiversity of plants,” said Julian Resasco, assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Colorado. “Things that maintain the integrity and the diversity of these ecosystems make them more robust to other threats, like climate change.”

The researchers recommended that forest managers seed ponderosa pine forests with these plants to promote a robust pollinator network. They also could be good plants for people to plant in their gardens. “These are good choices for planting because they’re going to support the bee-flower interaction network,” Davis said.

He believes the environmental benefits extend beyond bees and plants. “We’re sort of measuring one little component of the overall food web here,” Davis said. “By bolstering their abundances, you’re also bolstering the abundances of things which prey upon them, like predators, which could be birds and other animals.” Another study from 2020 suggests that the thinned forests also benefited bird populations.

Not every scientific paper reminds me of an old pop song.. birds, bees, flowers, trees, this paper has it all.

The Department of the Interior Goes All in on “Nature-Based Solutions”

There are many new readers to TSW, so I will tell this story again.  After I retired from the Forest Service, I spent a few months working as the Catholic Channel administrator for a for-profit company called Patheos.  My job was to post snippets of blogs written by our writers .  As part of that job, we had training that it was important to tie the blog topics to current events, even if it was quite a stretch, so that they would get more clicks and hence revenue.

Well, we definitely see that with the COP.. there’s been a plethora of what I call COPaganda and COProphilia.  I see that as the context for this Interior Department press release. I have to wonder about 70K people traveling using fossil fuels, to a meeting in a country that produces fossil fuels, to decry fossil fuels.

The announcement comes as Assistant Secretary for Fish and Wildlife and Parks Shannon Estenoz wraps up her trip to the 28th Conference of the Parties (COP28) in Dubai,

I wonder how many people the US Government sent to this meeting from how many different departments and agencies?

Anyway, the Department is going to go with “nature-based solutions”:

“Investing in nature is investing in ourselves. By employing nature-based solutions, land managers and decision makers can restore and sustain healthy ecosystems that in turn support healthy communities and economies,” said Assistant Secretary Estenoz.

Nature-based solutions use or mimic natural features or processes to improve biodiversity, strengthen resilience for disaster and hazard-risk management, support climate adaptation, and address carbon management to offset greenhouse gas emissions, while also benefitting both people and nature. These can include green infrastructure, natural infrastructure, and natural climate solutions.

The Department today also announced a new policy that will strengthen the Department’s ability to meet its mission in the face of a changing climate by prioritizing nature-based solutions across bureaus and offices. The policy will provide land managers and decision makers with guidance on using nature-based climate solutions, and will center collaborative partnerships, equity, environmental justice, and the use of the best available evidence. This new policy compliments the announcement in September 2023 of new policies to strengthen climate adaptation and resilience efforts, including the first-ever effort to factor the climate crisis into all operations.

The Department is prioritizing high return nature-based investments that connect lands and waters, promote cross-bureau collaboration, and leverage partnerships. By implementing these innovative strategies, our efforts also aim to ensure climate security, improve equity and address environmental justice, incorporate Indigenous Knowledge into decision making, and apply evidence-based scientific approaches to predict, monitor, and assess implementation effectiveness.

It sounds like all the great things that they were already doing, but now they are “innovative strategies”.

Now some of us have been through “sustainability” and the Montreal Process; “ecosystem health”; biodiversity; ecosystem management, ecosystem services, ecological integrity, climate resilience and probably other abstractions over time. In my paid career, each one of these had their own cadre of experts, and we would attend meetings and listen to them. At the end of the day, though, for federal land management agencies (and noted that Interior does many other useful things), we are discussing the exact same things that we were 50 years ago- grazing, the timber industry, how to manage wildfires, infrastructure projects (renewable or other energy, transmission) and mining. We have a mass of interlocking disciplines that work with each of these kinds of uses- wildlife biologists, fisheries folks, hydrologists, foresters, fuels folks, economists, social scientists, NEPA practitioners and so on.

I’m a bit leery of the USG going to outside sources (including NGOs and universities) when they usually have more experts in-house, but OK, let’s look at the forest section. I think, to be fair, that the NBS idea makes more sense for riparian and coastal management; maybe it’s just same-old for forests.
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Forest restoration is the process of returning a forest to its healthy state; this can include a variety of actions such as prescribed burns, reforestation, controlling invasive species, and pruning competing underbrush (American Forests 2023). Forest conservation as a management practice is the maintenance of forested areas for both people and the environment. Both
conservation and restoration are essential to forest management (Pawar and Rothkar, 2015).

TECHNICAL APPROACH
Forest conservation and restoration approaches vary based on the goals of the particular manager or management agency. Goals typically include both ecosystem and socioeconomic outcomes (Stanturf et al. 2017). When considering forest conservation and restoration, it is crucial to evaluate the trade-offs of timber production and ecosystem values (University of Cambridge 2022). Some primary forest conservation and restoration methods are as follows:
• Fuels management: Fuels management is a priority for many forests as a method to mitigate the harmful effects of wildfires, invasive species, and other disturbances. Within forests, fuels management often consists of prescribed burning and mechanical thinning (USFS 2021).
• Reforestation: Reforestation is one of the main practices for forest restoration.
There are three main reforestation methods: natural regeneration, assisted natural regeneration, and planting (USFS 2022).
• Natural regeneration: Natural regeneration allows regrowth to occur naturally. Depending on the project, natural regeneration can provide the most cost-effective reforestation method. It is essential to be aware of the species that will likely grow in these areas to ensure they will meet project goals (Chazdon 2017).
• Assisted natural regeneration (ANR): ANR is a method requiring less labor and funding than planting, but aims to accelerate a forest’s natural regeneration process. ANR can be achieved by improving soil, removing competing species, and mitigating disturbances (Ciccarese et al. 2012).
• Planting: Some forest restoration projects require systematic planting of native species, with the best results coming from species-diverse planting projects (Ciccarese et al. 2012).
• Controlling invasive species: Another crucial management approach to forest restoration is invasive species management, including prevention, early detection and rapid response, long-term control, and monitoring. In long-term, large-scale forest conservation and restoration projects, prioritization is critical to ensure cost-effective management. Native tree species resistant to invasive pests can be planted to aid in stand reestablishment (NPS 2022).

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Here are some forest examples (I circled the lessons learned that I thought we already knew, plus the AS duration is perhaps incorrect (if not, please let us know more!):

So I guess they are saying that all these things (BAU) can be put under the new umbrella of “nature-based solutions.”

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Several barriers are common across many of the nature-based solutions strategies; these are described in more detail in Section 1 of the Roadmap. Additional notes about the barriers specific to forest conservation and restoration are included here.
Expense: Lack of funding is the primary obstacle forest restoration practitioners report (Cook-Patton et al. 2020). Forest restoration costs on a landscape-scale level can be in the billions of dollars. While the economic investment is high, forest conservation and restoration should be considered socioeconomic and environmental investments for the future (Wu et al. 2011).
Capacity: Certain methods of forest restoration have high labor requirements, which can be a constraint in implementing these projects (Ciccarese et al. 2012).
Public opinion: Public support is crucial for forest conservation and restoration on public lands. It is important to educate about the importance of the conservation and restoration work (USFS 2012).
Conflict with other land uses: Forest land conversion is one of the primary causes of forest loss. This land is typically converted into development or agriculture. With the growing population, deforestation is estimated to exceed 50 million ac by 2050. Forest land conversion has lasting socioeconomic and ecological effects, and it is important to find integrated ways to sustain the growing population while still prioritizing forest conservation and restoration (Alig et al.)
Regulation: Forest restoration projects can be delayed by regulatory requirementssuch as fulfilling National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and endangered species consultation requirements. However, in some cases, categorical exclusions can exempt a particular project from NEPA requirements (Fretwell and Wood 2021).
Community
Legal and administrative constraints: Forest restoration is not currently occurring at the desired rate, often because of funding, legal, and organizational constraints and barriers (Jones et al. 2021).
Species-poor plantations: Forest conservation and restoration may create singlespecies tree plantations, which do not provide the same ecological benefits as speciesdiverse forests (Aerts and Honnay 2011).

San Carlos Apaches and Forest Service Sign Contract for Restoration

San Carlos Tribe Chairman Terry Rambler (right) signs an agreement with Kurt Davis, deputy forest Supervisor for the Coronado National Forest, to allow the tribe to contract with the federal government to to allow the tribe to take part in large-scale restoration efforts on the Apache-Sitgreaves, Tonto and Coronado national forests and other ancestral lands in order to return them to a natural and historic state.

San Carlos Apache Tribe finalizes restoration agreement with Forest Service

“The U.S. Forest Service and the San Carlos Apache Tribe have forged an agreement to allow the tribe to take part in large-scale restoration efforts.

It was made official earlier this week at a signing ceremony on the reservation.

The tribe now has the legal authority to contract with the federal government to work on the Apache-Sitgreaves, Coronado and Tonto national forests and adjacent ancestral lands while tapping $24 million in infrastructure funding.

The treatments will include fuels reduction and use prescribed fire to return the landscape to a historical and natural state in a culturally sensitive way while emphasizing clean water, medicinal plants and traditional food sources like acorns, berries and wildlife. Initial projects have already begun.”

This seems like a great idea and much easier than “conservation leasing”.. just sign a contract, figure out the projects, and get them done..

“Proforestation” It Aint What It Claims To Be

‘Proforestation’ separates people from forests

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Science is clear: Catastrophic wildfire requires forest management

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.

Out of the Ashes: Landscape Recovery in the Forest Service Pacific Southwest Region

This is a very interesting, eye-catching, and technologically splendid (IMHO) presentation by Region 5 on what they are doing post-fire. As an old person who worked at Placerville Nursery during its heyday (at a genetics lab then located in the seed extractory, to be specific) I’m not surprised to see that the spiral of learning has circled back to the need to plant trees. This spiral tends to recur almost predictably when everyone with expensively obtained experience has retired, and the infrastructure dispersed (remember Region 6 tree coolers?). And so it goes..

There’s many possible discussion topics but these caught my eye..

Critical Reforestation Needs

Over half the landscape burned at moderate to high severity.
500,000 acres prioritized for reforestation.
Estimated cost of 2020 of revegetation/site prep is over $585M.

Strategic Reforestation Investment

Long term reforestation strategy.
Modernizing our nursery.
Adapting tree species and revegetation to climate change.
~$2M Placerville CIP request.
$3.5M in grants, proposals and match.

Wildfires necessitate long-term repairs to trails, roads & streams.

Trail restoration – 1,600 mi
Estimated costs $9M
Road restoration & bridge reconstruction – 5,894 mi
Estimated costs $874M
Approved ERFO $10M
Watershed Restoration & improvement – 8,600 miles
Estimated costs $138M

Facility Replacement

Additional infrastructure recovery accounts for admin sites, recreation facilities, and bridges.
Estimated costs administrative sites – $15M
Estimated costs recreation sites – $19M
Estimated costs infrastructure design & contract admin – $298M


Strength Through Partnership

Trillion Trees & Expansion of Placerville Nursery.
CalTrans agreement for roadside salvage.
Matching dollars from NFWF, CAL FIRE, BLM.
State proposing $2B for wildfire and forest resilience.

And where there is fire and trees (and markets), there is salvage (both public and private, although private does not seem to be controversial).

Burned Timber

Burned timber from 2020 wildfires – 20x more than R5’s timber target.

Not all can be salvaged due to access and terrain
Mill & biomass facility capacity is limited and variable
Potential for saturated salvage market

Carbon in the Atmosphere

More than 112M metric tons of CO2 were emitted into the atmosphere due to 2020 wildfires.
25% more CO2 than the average annual fossil fuel emissions.

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I wonder whether both Oregon and California have the potential for a saturated salvage market, who will get in before saturation, and what will happen to the rest of the material. How the FS will determine priorities beyond hazard trees? What will happen to all the material that is removed but doesn’t find a market?

Anyway, great job, Region 5!

I. Woody Restoration Residuals- ENGOs in Agreement : Background and Sierra Letter

I mentioned that I was working on a project to find areas of agreement between environmental groups of various kinds (ENGOs) and others on a variety of topics related to restoration, fuels management and wildfires. I looked at the Climate Smart Agriculture and Forestry public comment letters that USDA requested earlier this year.

Previously we’ve discussed the question of “fuel treatment vs. restoration” because sometimes they are lumped (in reality, and in discussion and writing) and sometimes they are split; and there are enough disagreements around this set of questions (IMHO) without different definitions clouding the picture.  And some ENGO’s are against fuel treatments (“excuse for logging”) but not restoration.  I also agree with Susan Jane Brown who gave some examples in this comment of what we can accomplish without being in agreement:

And I personally think that we can disagree about it and still move forward with treatments on the land: many collaboratives do this regularly. For example, there may not be agreement on anthropogenic climate change, but there is agreement that losing structures in a wildfire is an undesirable outcome and that community preparedness and landscape RESILIENCE are things we can take steps to accomplish.

So for now, I’ll just be on the lookout to see how each group defines “restoration.” To cut to the chase, I found that a surprising number of ENGOs support commercial use of restoration residuals, which I’ll cite in this and later posts. But there is a main underlying political question.. who decides what counts as restoration? We can imagine an international FSC-like certification system, a USDA organic labelling kind of thing, something at the state level, all the way to what a local collaborative agrees on.  Each choice invests different actors, at different spatial levels, with power to wield the lever of what’s in and what’s out, with associated concerns of diversity, equity and inclusion.

But let’s start with the Statement on Removal and Use of Forest Biomass, which is actually not from the Climate Smart Letters at all.  It was signed by the ENGO’s in the image at the top of the post.  The whole statement is well thought out and comprehensive IMHO and worth a read. Below are a few excerpts.

Statement on Removal and Use of Forest Biomass
● Bioenergy facilities utilizing forest biomass waste include a range of different technologies and energy production scales, ranging from small scale bioenergy for heat (e.g., thermal-only installations), to cogenerating community scale biomass (1-5MW), to medium scale facilities (5-20MW), to larger scale facilities (> 20MW) co-located with wood processing and other light industrial facilities that can make use of waste heat and generated energy.
● The removal of forest biomass for bioenergy purposes should follow the guidelines below to ensure environmental standards are being met:
o The demand for power generation or value-added wood products at any facility should never drive removal of biomass from the forest.
o Biomass facilities should be sized according to the availability of fuel in the surrounding landscape and an ecologically appropriate removal rate, in      accordance  with restoration plans. To mitigate trucking and transportation costs and greenhouse gas emissions, it is desirable that supply areas be in relatively close proximity to the facility.
o The availability of fuel should be determined by landscape-level ecological restoration plans that provide for the ecological integrity and biodiversity of the target landscape.
o Any biomass facility should utilize woody biomass at an annual rate and for a period of time that is ecologically appropriate for the surrounding forested landscape. In order to attract private investment and encourage public private partnerships, supply agreements should be guaranteed across all lands and among all land restoration partners for a minimum of 10-20 years. These two conditions should be harmonized when developing commercial uses for forest
biomass.

● Our groups are dedicated to ensuring clean air and clean water for all. With this goal central to our organizations, we believe that siting biomass facilities in California Clean Air Act non-compliant air basins should be avoided to reduce pollution burdens on disadvantaged communities, unless those facilities can be shown to reduce emissions from other sources of burning. Facilities should generally be located in air quality basins in compliance with federal and state standards and should incorporate emissions control technologies to ensure they remain within state, federal, or tribal standards. This precludes the siting and building of additional biomass facilities in noncompliant air basins, like the Central Valley, unless a net reduction in emissions can be achieved.


I also liked how they touched upon marketing and keeping productions within forested communities where possible or practicable..

● Marketing and branding approaches for restoration byproducts such as energy, pellets, bio briquettes, biochar, fire resistant building materials, etc., that include triple bottom
line impact statements and reinvest a portion of proceeds for charitable purposes aligning with long term restoration and maintenance of fire resilient landscapes is an additional value-added economic stacking tool that will help to reduce the taxpayer burden in the long run.

● Facilities and uses should be sited either within or as close as possible or practicable to forested communities to capture economic and social benefits in the communities of origin of the biomass materials. Previously used mill sites may be ideal in many locations and can leverage federal funding for clean-up.

The landscape level planning idea still makes me wonder.. would it be possible to do one giant NEPA document, perhaps at the 4FRI scale?

Which parts do you agree and disagree with?

The Puzzle of Restoration/Fuels Priorities: Some National ENGO Views

I mentioned that I was working on a project to find areas of agreement between environmental groups of various kinds (ENGOs) and others on a variety of topics related to restoration, fuels management and wildfires. I looked at the Climate Smart Agriculture and Forestry public comment letters that USDA requested earlier this year.

Most, but not all, of the ENGOs agreed on the general concept of increasing the pace and scale of “ecological restoration.” This is a striking level of agreement, given the extensive history of disagreements around federal land management that we see here regularly on TSW.  There are also those groups whose letters said thing like “it’s a ruse to continue logging,” but it seemed more difficult or impossible to incorporate those views into an area of agreement.

To restore historic conditions in ponderosa pine and mixed conifer forests, thinning and prescribed burning are generally accepted tools. Conveniently, these same treatments provide opportunities for changing wildfire behavior.  Strategically placing restoration treatments on the landscape as described in the POD (Potential Operational Delineation)[1] process that combines local expertise and modeling to specifically support incident management can blend concern for appropriate suppression and the perceived need for restoration in these systems.

There seemed to be a difference between the Environmental Defense Fund, The Nature Conservancy and Defenders of Wildlife, all powerful political actors on the national scene.

Defenders of Wildlife (Defenders) state in their letter[2]Rather than characterizing wildfire management as a matter solely of risk reduction, we recommend that a USDA climate-smart policy be based upon the bedrock principles of the Cohesive Strategy and seek to maintain and restore the ecological integrity of fire adapted landscapes; develop fire adapted human communities; and improve effective wildfire response.”

The Cohesive Strategy (2014)[3] never uses those words; the actual wording is: “Landscapes across all jurisdictions are resilient to fire-related disturbances in accordance with management objectives.” (p.3.) A search of the document did not yield the term “integrity.”

Now as you all know, I am a fan of using the term “resilience,” and not so much “integrity”, so I won’t further belabor the point.

Defenders later recommend (p. 17): “Develop planning and decision-making structures and processes that ensure that the highest priority areas within mixed ownership landscapes are addressed first; this would include areas around communities as well as areas that are most degraded and departed from desired reference conditions. “

It’s not clear but it sounds like they would prioritize areas most “departed from reference conditions” before PODs (these might not be “around” communities).  We could call this the “departure first” view.

On the other hand, the Environmental Defense Fund has a detailed prescription[4], with perhaps different priorities than  Defenders.  We might call this one “safety first.”

“Our national wildfire strategy should have two priorities: 1) Protect communities in the line of fire; and 2) Reestablish natural fire patterns to protect ecosystem values and sustainably manage fuel loads. Reestablishing natural fire regimes can only be realized when fuel loads, particularly in the West, are greatly reduced using both mechanical treatments and prescribed and managed fire. Implementation will require an updated wildfire triage approach to ensure that we address the most pressing threats to communities and human lives, first.”

Similarly, The Nature Conservancy (TNC)[5] (p. 13) supports “highest priority fuels management.”

“Like the Forest Service, the Department of the Interior investments focused on highest-priority fuels management would result in boots on the ground, restored landscapes and safer communities and water supplies while providing substantial rural and tribal jobs. There are both climate mitigation and adaptation benefits to all this work.”

Perhaps they are all saying the same thing, and the different staff authors just use different words.

To me,  the key question would be what exactly would need to be done, and how far away, to protect communities? Would that look like PODs? Who would be involved in prioritizing and designing the treatments, and what would be the role of “restoration” driven by historic vegetation ecologists and desired reference conditions, compared to “treatments designed to help manage fire” driven by fuels and suppression practitioners? One of the criticisms that led to PODs on the Arapaho Roosevelt, at least in the story I heard, was that the they seemed to be “random acts of restoration”.  But with landscape fuels and fire knowledge, these same treatments might have been placed in a pattern to also have landscape fire management benefits. There’s also the issue of what if a community wants some fuel breaks, and they’re surrounded by tree species that aren’t adapted to fire, or are adapted to stand-replacing fire, so the whole “restoration to reference conditions” may not work for them.

And maybe this (safety first vs. departure first) doesn’t matter, as the collaborative groups whose “zones of agreement” I’ve viewed either don’t seem to see this as a dichotomy or have resolved it. That’s why I’d like to hear from others, especially those from collaborative groups, on how these two maybe different sets of priorities are worked out in practice, or if it’s even an issue on the ground.

 

[1] https://forestpolicypub.com/2021/05/13/changing-the-game-using-potential-wildfire-operational-delineation-pods-for-a-better-future-with-fire/; https://cfri.colostate.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/22/2021/06/CameronPeakFirePODsReport.pdf

[2] https://www.regulations.gov/comment/USDA-2021-0003-1246

[3] https://www.forestsandrangelands.gov/strategy/

[4] https://www.regulations.gov/comment/USDA-2021-0003-0949

[5] https://www.regulations.gov/comment/USDA-2021-0003-1303