salvage

Friday Round-up and Important Correction

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From NY Times virtual fencing story

Important Error Correction. I was gently reminded by a retiree that I was wrong about who made the appeals decisions, it was the DRF.  Also I didn’t mention that OGC was at the table.  I don’t know that every RO has an OGC office in the same building, but it was very important for our work to have them close at hand.  We had several acting RF’s through time, and they had different levels of interest/experience in the kinds of projects, legal requirements and potential pitfalls.  Again, also substantial variation in personalities. My memory is that if the Forest Supe (Appeal Reviewing Officer) and the RART Team came up with something and OGC raised concerns, the DRF would tend to go with what OGC said, because, after all Appeals were basically pre-litigation checks, in a sense.  I also didn’t point out that objections are different from appeals (or at least were intended to be) so I’m not sure how they are currently handled and whether that varies by Region.

A variety of interesting things..

1. F&AM Director to Stay On. The Hotshot Wakeup reported that the F&AM Director for the Forest Service, Sarah Fisher has agreed to stay on for the FY26 Fire Season to help with transition. According to THW, she is widely respected in the wildfire community.

2. Story in NY Times About PERC’s Virtual Fencing
Via PERC you can get the story for free. Great videos.

Virtual fencing is infinitely adjustable. Ranchers can set precise limits on pastures to keep cows away from sensitive areas like streams or sagebrush. They can move cows around more often to prevent overgrazing, which stresses ecosystems. It can also make cows eat less-palatable invasive species such as cheatgrass and medusahead.

The collars also let ranchers monitor where their cows are, which has many benefits. A big one is reducing conflict with predators. If a rancher sees on their phone that cows are bunched up, it could be a sign that a wolf or grizzly is lurking. Tracking also makes it easier to help a cow or calf that is injured. If ranch hands notice that an animal has died, they can remove the carcass before it attracts predators.

Wild animals can get stuck in wire fences and die, or they can just plow through. One season, Mr. Taylor replaced the same section of fence three times. Now, with virtual fences, he can simply leave gates open.

Mr. Graves is leveraging another perk of virtual fences: They can’t burn down. Last September, wildfire burned nearly 100,000 acres of the Bighorn Mountains, destroying thousands of miles of fence. He’s encouraging private landowners and the United States Forest Service to replace burned fences with virtual fences, and to use virtual fences to keep cattle off the burned landscape while it recovers.

3. Permitting Reform Current Drama
I thought Shawn Regan’s piece in City Journal on the current permitting reform efforts was well done. One of the current disagreements is over permit certainty..

To address those concerns, Westerman recently added an amendment addressing permit certainty. The provision would prohibit federal agencies from revoking, suspending, or otherwise interfering with already-approved permits. The amendment was a direct response to the Trump administration’s efforts to cancel previously permitted wind and solar projects, a campaign that has alarmed clean energy developers and their Democratic allies.

But permit certainty ought to appeal to Republicans too. Republicans have their own scars from the Obama and Biden years, when projects like the Keystone XL pipeline were approved, canceled, revived, and re-canceled again depending on who occupied the White House. A durable permitting regime that protects approved projects from the whims of future administrations should, in theory, attract bipartisan support. Yet some Republicans now worry that the provision too significantly hamstrings Trump’s ability to target disfavored renewable projects—illustrating just how difficult it is to build a coalition around neutral rules.

4. Podcast: Sara Ghafouri and the Legal Frontlines of Forestry
i always like Nick Smith’s interviews as he tends to ask the same questions I would ask, plus others that I would never think of, but have interesting answers.

AFRC General Counsel Sara Ghafouri provides an in depth look at the legal landscape shaping active forest management in the West. Sara shares what is new in AFRC’s Legal Program, recent legal wins, and the biggest challenges and opportunities facing forest management over the next year. She also breaks down how AFRC decides when to engage in litigation, how changes in the courts are influencing outcomes, and why it is essential to bring workers, local governments and community voices into the courtroom.

5. ABA podcasts on forest law.
Here’s a link, it sounds like it is going to be a series. I think their idea is that there are more laws for public forests than private ones, so started there.

We are pleased to be joined by Professor John Leshy, author of Our Common Ground and the preeminent scholar on the history of America’s public lands. Public land management is the cornerstone of forest law in the United States, and Professor Leshy’s insights into its scope and evolution are invaluable in helping to piece together the fundamentals of forest law.

Forest law presents a daunting barrier of entry to the uninitiated. Forest law is composed of and delimited by a broad swath of statutes, regulations, and norms, all shaped by a diverse array of stakeholders. The implications of forest management decisions are vast and varied, ranging from the hyperlocal—with decisions concerning timber harvest and wildfire mitigation bearing directly on the continued prosperity and existence of some rural communities—to the planetary, as climate change intensifies and the health of the world’s forests grows ever further imperative to slow its most devastating effects. Complicating things further, today, forest law in the United States is undergoing rapid changes at the federal level.

6. Salvage Speed Record in Idaho

“This was a collective effort,” said Kyle Laven, Supervisory Forester and GNA Program Manager for the USFS, Boise National Forest. “From start to finish, this sale was prepared and awarded in six weeks; immediately after the categorical exclusion was signed, which was an immense turnaround in itself.”

On Oct. 22, just 22 days after the fire was contained, the GNA Rock Fire Salvage sale on the Boise National Forest sold 224,000 board feet to Tamarack Resort. Harvest work on both the IDL sale and the complementary GNA sale is wrapping up this week and will resume in the spring.

Sierra At Tahoe Ski Area Re-opens

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After the Caldor Fire seriously impacted the ski area, Sierra At Tahoe is open again. As you can see, it was a high intensity portion of the fire, with the previous forest being highly flammable and loaded with decades of heavy dead fuels. After several droughts, the area did not have any salvage operations. The area is also known to have nesting pairs of goshawks around.

As you can see, snow sports people will be enjoying a new experience of skiing and boarding, without so many trees ‘hindering their personal snow freedoms’. *smirk*

California wildfire fallout: Timber industry confronted by too many dead trees, warns of damaged forests- San Francisco Chronicle

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Sawdust pours out of the Collins Pine lumber mill in Chester.
Max Whittaker/Special to The Chronicle

This is a really interesting article. I like the fact that the reporter spoke to a researcher at Oregon State University, and then circled back to the California FS employees working directly with the problem.

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At ground level, three family-held timber companies say the increasingly ferocious wildfires are transforming their businesses.

California’s first million-acre wildfire, the August Complex in 2020, burned through about 40,000 acres of Crane Mills holdings in the Mendocino National Forest. About 42% of those burned acres experienced total losses among young and old trees alike, meaning they will have to be wholly reforested or risk being overtaken by shrubs, Chief Financial Officer Drew Crane said.

The 2020 CZU Lightning Complex fires burned about two-thirds of Big Creek Lumber’s 8,000 acres of mixed redwood forests in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Company President Janet McCrary Webb — whose family members lost 16 homes — said though redwood trees have thick bark built to withstand wildfires, she remains unsure how many will succumb to fire damage and die.

The Dixie Fire burned through about half of Collins Pine’s 95,300 acres around Lake Almanor in Plumas and Tehama counties. The company has found signs the fire was beneficial to some areas, but “about 30,000 acres is gone, black,” said Niel Fischer, Collins Pine western resources manager. More than 64,000 old-growth trees, the kind expected to survive wildfires, are probably dead, he said.

“I don’t want to use the word catastrophic, but it was catastrophic in terms of what it means to the business and what we have to do to recover,” Fischer said. “It shook us as foresters to our core.”

Wildfires are expected disturbances for California’s timber industry and are natural and restorative to these ecosystems. But the severity of fires in 2020 and 2021 is expected to result in significant destruction.

And they have to move fast to harvest the charred trees. Dead and dying trees can be milled for lumber, but it has to be done within about two years before they rot or become infested with insects.

Crane Mills, based in Corning on the western side of Tehama County, is running its mill at full tilt. But the company lost a key buyer of Ponderosa pine in March — there is simply too much wood.

“There aren’t enough loggers, there aren’t enough trucks, there aren’t enough foresters,” Crane said. “A lot of it will go to waste.”

Fischer said it’s not like losing one year’s tomato crop — rather Collins Pine has 10 or 15 years worth of resources “dead on the stump.”

“Dead trees do have value in the forest as long as you don’t have too many,” Fischer said. “We are careful to conserve trees that have died so they’re naturally incorporated into soil and become habitat … but there has to be balance.”

George Gentry, senior vice president of the California Forestry Association, said salvage logging operations can offer an economic boost in the immediate aftermath of a wildfire, but not enough to compensate for the long-term impact he expects will dampen timber harvests “for decades to come.” Gentry estimated 1.6 billion board feet burned this year — more than the 1.5 billion board feet produced each year across the state.

“They’ll do some initial salvage, they’ll do some initial rehabilitation, then they’ll have to pull back,” Gentry said. “If they reduce mill employment, if they reduce purchases, if they reduce anything they’d buy locally, that impact is really significant in rural economies.”

McCrary Webb with Big Creek Lumber said the volume of dead, dying and drying trees throughout Northern California forests should be a concern for all — and she hopes to see more solutions, like an increase in demand for wood biomass energy production.

“That’s one of the issues we see that really the whole state has to grapple with: How can you effectively deal with all this wood?” McCrary Webb said. “A lot of this wood, there’s no place to take it. Some were taking it to landfills. There’s no place for it to go.”

Collins Pine has been a pioneer in uneven-age harvesting, a way to manage commercial forests so they have a diversity of tree species and ages, as in natural ecosystems, Fischer said.

He said that while some portions of the land will rebound, they expect a lot of it will have to be wholly replanted. That “zeroes out the clock” for a forest meant to have both old and young trees, he said. Decades later, portions with same-age trees would be harvested at once — essentially clear-cut, a major shift away from their efforts to steward timber to more closely resemble natural forest ecosystems.

Crane said the August Complex fires were a “seminal event” for his family’s company, forcing it to rewrite its 100-year business plan. It too is facing a shift from uneven age reforestation practices to tree plantations, he said.

“You’re planting an even-aged forest — and I’m not sure how fire-resilient that is,” Crane said.

In 2020 alone, about 1 million acres changed from living forest to dead forest because of wildfires, said Joe Sherlock, regional silviculturist for the U.S. Forest Service in California. The Forest Service manages 8 million acres in California, roughly one-quarter of the state’s forestland.

Salvage timber sales are critical to funding reforestation and preventing dangerous fuel loads from building up and providing tinder for the next fire, Sherlock said. But the sheer scale of severe, tree-killing fires is adding pressure to an already overburdened system. There simply aren’t enough mills to process the trees or buyers to take the lumber.

“I worry about that a tremendous amount,” Sherlock said. “It will be expensive to gather that material up and create a hospitable environment for seedlings. I don’t know whose checkbook we can use.”

Brad Seaberg, who manages timber sales in California for the Forest Service, said this year’s fires are “testing the market” for whether the agency can find enough purchasers for the amount of lumber available on federal land. And a significant number of smaller-scale landowners affected by wildfires have also entered the timber market, he said.

“The scope of what’s going on is overwhelming,” Seaberg said.

But not everyone sees salvage logging as a boon to forest health or the best defense against the next fire.

Ernie Niemi, an Oregon forest economist who has studied timber practices for decades, said salvage logging on Forest Service land comes with steep costs, both financial and environmental. Niemi said dead trees hold greater benefit in the environment as crucial storage for climate-warming carbon dioxide and habitat for woodpeckers, insects and other species.

“Those dead and dying trees out on the landscape are not suddenly worthless from an ecological perspective,” Niemi said. “That big trunk still holds an awful lot of carbon.”

Sherlock said that is true for areas with a smattering of dead trees amid a rebounding forest. But he said large areas of mostly dead forests are less likely to naturally reseed and risk conversion from forest to shrubland. Harvesting dead or dying trees is necessary work, he said.

“You can imagine what it would be like to ignore all of those standing (dead) trees,” Sherlock said. “As the years go by, more and more of those trees will snap off or tip over, all on the ground. Can you imagine a forest with tons of tons of dry wood ready to burn in the next fire?”

An earlier version of this story misstated the volume of timber burned this year and produced annually on average in California. It is in billions of board feet.

Possible Salvage Strategy for Dixie and Caldor Fires

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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.

Wildfire and Roadside Hazard Trees in Oregon- Info From Region 6

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Previously Steve posted this story from OPB that mostly focused on concerns about ODOT’s management of hazard tree removal. There was a link to a letter from a variety of groups which talked about the Forest Service.

There are a number of stories at OPB about ODOT’s efforts and management of hazard tree removal, including hearings with the state legislature.

There was one place in the article in which people agreed:

Law, Till, Ford and Allen all agreed it can take years for burned trees to become hazardous, but the state doesn’t plan to wait that long to see which trees need to be removed.

Andersen said arborists are monitoring trees for a few months to see if they become less hazardous over time but the state is sensitive to the risks involved in leaving potentially hazardous trees standing.

“We wouldn’t monitor for years with safety being the top concern if that tree dies,” he said. “I don’t think anybody wants the unfortunate job of going and telling the family that someone died on the roadway because we were monitoring that tree that inevitably fell during an ice storm.”

But leaving ODOT and going back to “what is the Forest Service doing?”, here’s the Region 6 reply to our questions about roadside salvage.

Last summer’s wildfires burned more than 1.2 million acres across Oregon on federal, state, local, and private lands. In September we stood up a regional Operation Care and Recovery team to coordinate efforts to help our employees, the public and communities impacted, and the lands we manage recover. We have been focused on emergency safety and stabilization actions, including working with ODOT and FEMA to remove dead or fire-weakened hazard trees along roadways and near recreation areas to address safety risks to the public and our employees.

We have been completing this work under emergency response provisions and categorical exclusions.

 Below are the links for the danger tree and hazard tree guides. We’re using these along with environmental protection plans and the ODOT protection agreement to guide overall criteria.

 

You can find any Forest Service salvage (or other) projects by going to the forest’s webpage, going to land management on the sidebar and then projects.

Practice of Litigation Friday: Fire in Pacific Fisher Habitat

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U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service

This recently filed case (the complaint is at the end of the article) hasn’t generated a lot of news coverage, but it directly raises some of the questions we have discussed at length about the effects of fuel reduction activities.

On March 26, 2021, three California conservation groups filed a complaint for declaratory judgment and injunctive relief against the Forest Service and Fish and Wildlife Service in the federal district court for the Eastern District of California (Unite the Parks v. U. S. Forest Service).  They are challenging, “the failure … to adequately evaluate, protect, and conserve the critically endangered Southern Sierra Nevada Pacific fisher … on the Sierra, Sequoia, and Stanislaus National Forests …” after a substantial reduction in habitat since 2011 resulting from a multi-year draught, significant wildfires and Forest Service vegetation management.  Many of the variables considered in a prior 2011 analysis have been adversely affected by these changes. The plaintiffs implicate 45 individual Forest Service projects.

This fisher population was listed as an endangered species on May 15, 2020, and the agencies conducted “programmatic” consultation at that time on 40 already-approved projects.  The agencies reinitiated consultation because of the 2020 wildfires, but did not modify any of the projects.  The purported rationale is that the short-term effects of the vegetation management projects are outweighed by long-term benefits, but plaintiffs assert, “There is no evidence-based science to support this theory…,” and “the agencies ignored a deep body of scientific evidence concluding that commercial thinning, post-fire logging, and other logging activities conducted under the rubric of ‘fuel reduction’ more often tend to increase, not decrease, fire severity (citing several sources, emphasis in original).  The complaint challenges the adequacy of the ESA consultation on these projects, and the failure to “prepare landscape-level supplemental environmental review of the cumulative impacts to the SSN fisher…” as required by NEPA.

Not mentioned in the lawsuit is the status or relevance of forest plans for these national forests, two of which (Sierra and Sequoia) are nearing completion of plan revision.  However, the linked article refers to an earlier explanation by the Forest Service that they would not be making any changes in the revised plans based on the 2020 fires because they had already considered such fires likely to happen and had accounted for them.  ESA consultation will also be required on the revised forest plans, and should be expected to address the same scientific questions, arguably at a more appropriate scale.  Reinitiation of consultation on the existing plans based on the changed conditions should have also occurred under ESA.  (This is another area where legislation has been proposed to excuse the Forest Service from reinitiating consultation on forest plans, similar to the “Cottonwood” legislation that removed that requirement for new listings or critical habitat designation.)

(And in relation to another topic that is popular on this blog, Unite the Parks also supports the establishment of the Range of Light National Monument in the affected area.)

Samo-Samo for CASPO

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No Threatened Status for the California Spotted Owl. Current protections remain. The article is a good read, with some of the “usual suspects”.

http://www.calaverasenterprise.com/news/article_a866d476-14d2-11ea-b7e0-7b830918c726.html

“Landscape-level” Utah Project

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The Salt Lake Tribune has this story on “a landscape-level program of salvage logging, thinning, prescribed burns and reseeding in a 171,000-acre project area along the crest of the Wasatch Plateau.”

Since 2000, bark-boring beetles have killed nearly 90% of the Engelmann spruce on the plateau separating Sanpete and Emery counties, according to Ryan Nehl, supervisor of the Manti-La Sal National Forest. Other areas have become overrun with subalpine fir, crowding out aspen.

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Currently spruce occupies 5% of this forest, while fir makes up 85%. The Forest Service’s goal is get that species mix to the 60%-30% range favoring spruce, but it could take decades. Nehl also wants to see aspen stands revitalized because of their importance to watershed health and wildlife and their ability to slow big fires.

“While this project is couched as a timber sale, it’s primarily a hazardous fuels-reduction project to try to stem the risk of uncharacteristic wildfire. It’s overstocked right now,” Nehl said. “Another primary purpose of this is to reduce risk to communities and firefighters, particularly culinary and irrigation water supplies, as well as water supply to the [Huntington Power] Plant.”

Here’s the Canyons HFRA Project Environmental Assessment FONSI.

The Forest Service proposes to salvage dense dead standing and down Engelmann spruce (Picea engelmannii) and implement fuel reduction treatments under the Healthy Forest Restoration Act (HFRA). These actions are proposed to be implemented on the Ferron-Price and Sanpete Ranger Districts, Manti-La Sal National Forest, in Sanpete, Carbon, Emery, and Sevier Counties, Utah (Figure 2). The project area where treatments are being considered is approximately 171,000 acres.

Sequoia ForestKeepers Weigh in on HUD Grant for Stanislaus National Forest Salvage

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Volunteer from Tuolumne River Trust working on Rim Fire restoration.
Ara Mardosarian of Sequoia ForestKeeper posted this as a comment on an earlier thread. Since it is specific and about something new, I am posting it here to get more discussion.

On 31 May 2019, the Sierra Nevada Conservancy held a field trip regarding a U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Redevelopment (HUD) funding application by Stanislaus National Forest for $70 million, through the National Disaster Resilience Competition, to salvage log burned areas of the 2013 Rim Fire FOR BIOMASS BURNING – A DESTRUCTIVE CLEARCUTS-FOR-KILOWATTS SCHEME. This field trip was attended by 80 persons, including members of more than 20 environmental organizations in opposition to post-fire salvage logging, including Sierra Club and Sequoia ForestKeeper. Dr. Chad Hanson, John Muir Project Fire Ecologist, and Dr. Dominick DellaSala, Geos Institute Director, lead the effort to defend the position to not salvage log recovering burned forest habitats. Brandon Collins, USFS Pacific Southwest Research Station, said there was little to no conifer regeneration within the Rim Fire. We saw seedling regeneration at multiple sites. And the Forest Service saw the seedlings growing in the Rim Fire snag forest habitats as fuel, when we see this as biodiverse habitat. Besides providing habitat for Black-backed woodpeckers and other cavity nesting species, standing burned dead trees/snags provide cooling shade that helps hold the moisture in the ground for the already-growing, natural tree seedling regeneration and for eventual delivery of that retained drinking water to communities below the forest. At no time did the Forest Service acknowledge the value of the standing burned dead trees/snags for sequestering carbon in the forest or counteracting the climate crisis. The agencies would not even address the repeated queries about the emissions from biomass power generation that the project would cause. The blatant climate science denial and antipathy toward nature by the Forest Service and its supporters (John Buckley, Central Sierra Environmental Resource Center), (David Edelson, The Nature Conservancy), and (Craig Thomas, Fire Restoration Group) of this clearcuts-for-kilowatts scheme was stunning. Why is $70 million in U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Redevelopment (HUD) disaster funds going to log federal forests (creating unnatural flammable conditions) when those funds should be spent on community disaster relief? This $70 million of HUD funding should, instead, be applied to the real disaster of the Camp Fire in Butte County, to help the victims in Paradise, California who lost everything.

Note: I think we should be consistent about calling people Drs. or not.. it appears that Brandon Collins is arguably just as much of a Dr. as Hanson and Della Salla, plus his research is equally, or more, relevant, depending on your point of view. Here’s a link to his papers.

Mardosarian makes several claims in this comment that are interesting and worthy of discussion:

1. Collins said there was little or no regeneration (did he say this? is the first question and “is it true?” is the second question).
2. The Forest Service saw seedlings as fuel (in my history with the Forest Service we didn’t think this way, but perhaps times have changed).
3. Standing dead provide shade and reduce moisture loss. I don’t know if this is true but it sounds plausible. But of course dead trees ultimately fall down and dry out, and when burning can potentially damage soil.
4. The shade of standing dead treese provide better microenvironments for seedling establishment and/or growth than open areas.
5. Standing dead sequester carbon in the forest (is that better than being turned into wood products? I think this depends on assumptions)

I am interested in the mechanisms by which people think that standing and fallen dead trees “counteract the climate crisis.”

6. Emissions. If Californians are worried about emissions from biomass energy (unclear whether particulates or CO2), then the obvious answer would be to sell the material to other markets, like our friends in BC, or for CLT, or to turn into biochar or …? To what extent does the ultimate use matter.

In my own experience with a broad range of individuals in the FS and TNC, as we worked on climate change and other issues, they were not “climate deniers” nor have an “antipathy to nature”. Certainly, as Dr. Tom Mills used to say, “reasonable people could disagree” about salvage logging in a specific place at a specific time.

This seems to be the agenda for the tour. If someone has a photo