This article from the Ravalli Republic, “Bitterroot Forest looking for resolution on timber project,” notes that “Once that project is completed, nearly all of the national forest lands that border private ground on the west side of the Bitterroot Valley will have been thinned.” That sounds like the Bitterroot NF folks have been successful in planing and carrying out other projects.

The FONSI says:

I have decided to authorize commercial and non-commercial forest treatments, including prescribed
burning, on approximately 2,327 acres of National Forest in the Westside project area. My decision
includes the construction of approximately 3.8 miles of permanent National Forest System road and
3.8 miles of temporary road, treatments in the Selway-Bitterroot Inventoried Roadless Area (IRA), the
application of design features and best management practices (Table DN-4, Appendix A), and Forest
Plan amendments for elk habitat effectiveness, coarse woody debris, and visual quality (Appendix B).
The new permanent road will be closed year-long to motorized travel and the temporary roads will be
reclaimed following use. These treatments will improve forest conditions and long-term
administrative access in the project area.

Commercial harvest would occur on 1,349 acres:
· 506 acres would be treated with improvement cuts (22 acres in the Selway-Bitterroot IRA)
· 799 acres would be treated with irregular harvest cuts
· commercial volume would be removed from 44 of the 92 acres of aspen treatment

Non-commercial timber would be removed from about 978 acres:
· understory ponderosa pine and Douglas-fir would be removed from 666 acres of forest (139
· 206 acres of ponderosa pine plantation
· 58 acres for meadow restoration

Some comments on my charts showing the results of national forest non-management have contended that I’ve placed too much emphasis on reduced tangible and material outputs (renewable energy, wood and paper products) and on adverse economic and social impacts (jobs lost, stressed families,
communities and local governments) . Critics claimed that the non-material results of “hands off” management were being ignored.

In an attempt to remedy this imbalance I offer the following .The ruffed grouse (Bonasa umbellus) is widely used by wildlife biologists, both in the eastern and western U.S., as an indicator species for assessing the status of wildlife habitat and the ecological diversity of upland forests. The chart demonstrates the effect of virtual non-management of the timber resource on this key species in the Nantahala-Pisgah National Forest,(N-P), the mountain national forest in North Carolina. According to the N.C.Wildlife Resources Commission 2015 annual report, “By all measures, grouse hunting during the 2014-15 season was the poorest on record”.

The U.S. Forest Service is currently creating about 500 acres per year of early successional habitat through regeneration cuts (clearcut, shelterwood, and group selection). This comprises about .06% of the 908,700 acres of unreserved timberland found on the forest. An additional + 100 acres is thinned annually with varying beneficial impacts on ground cover. The acreage of prescribed burn has increased steadily since 1995 and now averages about 10,000 acres annually. While this treatment promotes the development of early successional habitat, its aggregate impact is difficult to assess as effects vary widely with fire intensity, ambient temperature, stand density, season of year, timber type, and ground cover.

Good quality early successional habitat can best be produced by well-designed regeneration harvests. Current management of the N-P produces about 500 acres annually of this habitat. Maintenance of suitable grouse habitat and the age class diversity essential to forest health requires, at a minimum, treatment of ~.5 % (about 4500 acres for the N-P) of the forested area annually. While the report focuses on grouse, be aware that  the decline of early succession habitat is adversely affecting not only grouse, but of other game and non-game species such as woodcock, white-tailed deer, wild turkey, golden-winged, prairie, and cerulean warblers, Bewick’s wren, yellow-breasted chat and a host of others (See Hunter et al, Wildlife Society Bulletin 29(2) 440-445)

The summer 2001 edition of the Wildlife Society Bulletin, a peer-reviewed journal of the professional organization of American wildlife biologists, contained a series of 8 articles. These examined in depth the changes in habitat and wildlife populations that are resulting from current non-management of wildlands in the eastern United States. The authors reached the unanimous conclusion that, considering both game and non-game species, more intensive management is urgently needed and that the continuation of the current “hands-off” policies would result in “the loss of some of the most interesting and diverse natural communities in eastern North America”. The habitat-population chart suggests that this prognosis is becoming a reality.

It should be noted that the Nantahala-Pisgah N.F. has 105,000 acres of Wilderness and Wilderness Study areas and the neighboring Great Smoky Mountain National Park has 522,000 acres of forest land on which timber harvesting is prohibited.  

Mac McConnell

May, 2016

A new report from the Swan View Coalition in Montana gives a thorough rundown on how the Flathead National Forest in particular – and the Forest Service and Congress in general – are using the Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Program (CFLRP) and other collaboration and “restoration” initiatives to keep its bloated road system and fool the public into thinking the problem in America’s forests is too many trees and not too many roads.

For those involved in bull trout and water quality issues, the report also documents ongoing road-related travesties in Bunker, Sullivan, Coal, and other key watersheds on the Flathead National Forest. The report also describes how the Flathead National Forest is trying to cheat its way out of road decommissioning and begin to instead rebuild roads decommissioned previously.

Read the full report here.

Executive Summary

In order to protect water quality and fish, the Flathead National Forest is required to either remove or monitor annually all culverts and bridges in roads closed in threatened bull trout habitat. Similarly, the Flathead is required to develop a monitoring plan for each road it chooses to simply close in providing Security Core habitat for threatened grizzly bear, rather than conducting the preferred reclamation by removing all stream-crossing structures.

Our investigation finds the Flathead has developed none of the required stream-crossing monitoring plans for roads closed to provide Security Core. Nor has it annually monitored stream-crossing structures on closed roads in bull trout habitat. Though the Forest Service set forth these requirements and the need for them, the Flathead has failed to implement them. Rather than correct the problem, it has instead set upon a course to do away with such requirements – as culverts and bridges continue to fail on roads both open and closed to motor vehicles.

This report will discuss how the Flathead tracks its roads and stream-crossing structures, discuss how it does and does not monitor them, and provide examples of the consequences when it fails to adequately manage them. It will conclude with recommendations on how to get the effort back on track rather than abandon it to the detriment of fish, wildlife and taxpayers.

Subscribers here, I thought, might be interested to know that the documentary video titled, “Counties in Crisis – final cut,” is now available at YouTube, here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-7vAAUaPio.   Incidentally, the full text of the video’s script is also available at the Not Without a Fight! blog, here:  https://countieswithnationalforests.wordpress.com/2015/12/15/the-script-counties-in-crisis/.  Thanks!  Ron Roizen

Here’s an interesting article on federal hiring processes. This sounds familiar:

“Federal government job seekers feel like their resumes go into a black hole. Hiring can take months. The most talented people don’t make the cut.”

Why is it so hard to get a federal job? Here’s one reason.

I applied for a federal job a few years ago, for which I think I was highly qualified, but I never got a call or any indication that I was being considered.

I’ve taught several “career skills” classes for forestry and wildlife-management students. One of the most important bits of advice is to seek out and speak with the people (at the USFS, BLM, or any other federal, state, or private employer) doing the hiring, which takes time and effort, but can help a great deal.

Wow! Imagine that. Oregon Public Broadcasting has the story.

Old-growth forests in the Northwest have the potential to make the extremes of climate change less damaging for wildlife. New research out of Oregon State University shows complex forests do a surprisingly good job of regulating temperature on the ground – even compared to fully mature tree plantations.

“On a sunny day, if you were sitting underneath them, you’d get a similar amount of shade,” says study co-author Matt Betts, an Ecologist at OSU.

But the kind of forest makes a big difference on temperature.

“The more structurally complex the forest, the more big trees, the more vertical layers – the cooler it was,” he says.

The research showed differences as much as 4.5 degrees on warm days. Old growth forests also held in heat during cold weather. Overall, these forests have a moderating effect on temperature extremes.

One reason, researchers suspect, is that tree plantations, even mature ones, don’t have nearly the understory material – small trees, shrubs, ground cover – as more complex stands. Nor do these single-age plantations have a lot of big trees – unlike old growth stands.

“We think one of the mechanisms causing this is thermal inertia,” Betts says. “That takes these trees longer to warm up and longer to cool down. And that could be providing some of the buffering capacity of these older forests.”

Betts says these stands of old growth could provide refuges for temperature-sensitive wildlife in the face of climate change.

“It gives us some hope that how we actually manage our forest, can influence positively those species that are declining,” he says.

The study was published Friday in Science Advances.

[The following is a press release from Friends of the Wild Swan and Alliance for the Wild Rockies. -mk]

Conservation groups Friends of the Wild Swan and Alliance for the Wild Rockies filed a lawsuit in the Portland federal district court challenging the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s bull trout recovery plan.

The Plan fails to ensure the long-term survival and recovery of the species, ignores the best available science, ignores its own previous findings about the status of bull trout and what they need for recovery and instead relies on novel and inadequate criteria for recovery devoid of any objective population criteria.

For example, the plan allows an arbitrary 25% of bull trout local populations in the Coastal, Mid-Columbia, Upper Snake and Columbia Headwaters Units to be extirpated without consideration of whether those populations are significant genetically or essential to achieve recovery. This is a total reversal of the Service’s 2010 designation of bull trout critical habitat that identified unoccupied habitat that is essential for expanding, not contracting the range of bull trout.

At the time of listing (1998-1999) bull trout numbers had already been reduced by 60%; under this plan bull trout local populations can be lost yet bull trout will be “recovered”.

“This plan allows bull trout populations to decline even further and doesn’t address the looming threat of climate change,” said Arlene Montgomery, Program Director for Friends of the Wild Swan. “Our detailed comments that included relevant science and threats facing bull trout were ignored and the Service is continuing on a path that will lead to less fish than when they were listed. That’s not recovery.”

The focus of the recovery plan is to “effectively manage and ameliorate the primary threats in each of the six recovery units at the core area scale such that bull trout will persist in the foreseeable future.” However the plan does not contain habitat standards or population criteria so it is not possible to gauge whether threats are being “managed” and bull trout numbers are increasing.

Mike Garrity, Executive Director of the Alliance for the Wild Rockies said, “The Obama administration’s Fish and Wildlife Service needs to come up with a real recovery plan that addresses global warming instead of just saying climate change is going to cause a lot of bull trout to die and there is nothing we can do about it. Their plan is an extinction plan, not a recovery plan. The Fish and Wildlife Service also needs to address the other main threats to bull trout, habitat degradation caused by logging, mining and grazing.”

This case marks the 7th time in 20 years that these groups have sued the Fish and Wildlife Service to require them to comply with their obligations under the ESA to list bull trout, designate its critical habitat, and now establish a recovery plan for the species that will lead to their conservation, recovery and eventual de-listing.

Why Bull Trout are Important

Bull trout need the coldest, cleanest water of all salmonids. Their stringent habitat requirements make them an excellent indicator of water quality.

The Five C’s characterize good bull trout habitat:

• Clean water with very little fine sediment in the stream bottom.  Fine sediment fills up the spaces in the spawning gravel, restricts oxygen flow and smothers bull trout eggs.

• Cold water temperatures are very important for bull trout.  If water temperatures rise above 59 degrees F then it creates a thermal barrier that restricts migration and use of available habitats.

• Complex streams with intact riparian vegetation to provide shade, woody debris, bank stability and deep pools.

• Connected watersheds allow the fish to migrate.  Bull trout spawn and rear in stream habitats.  At about two years of age they migrate from their spawning stream and mature in lakes or rivers, traveling up to 150 miles.  They return to their natal stream to spawn but unlike salmon make the journey between stream and lake many times in their life.

• Comprehensive protection and restoration of bull trout habitat must done be throughout the range of this native fish.

The decline of bull trout is primarily due to habitat degradation and fragmentation; blockage of migratory corridors by roads, culverts or dams; poor water quality from warm temperature, sediment or pollutants; past fisheries management practices such as introductions and management of non-native fish; impoundments, dams, or water diversions; and non-native fish species competition and predation. Climate change is an additional threat to the cold water that bull trout need to survive.

This is the national version from Mac McConnell of one previously published here for Utah. From Mac:

Once again Congress is debating how to manage our national forests, hopefully it will accomplish more than in the past. The chart that shows the problem that they are being asked to solve.

The saga of BLM’s O&C lands continues. Criticism from all sides, so maybe the latest plan has a chance of survival. But it still does not satisfy the O&C Act’s mandate to harvest the sustained yield.

BLM plans to increase Western Oregon timber harvest; counties, including Lane, still plan to sue

I just saw these new photographs of the Jim’s Creek logging project on the Willamette National Forest posted on Facebook by Doug Heiken, who has sometimes commented on this blog.

Today, on Facebook, Doug wrote:

“The Forest Service logged the crap out of this old forest in 2008 in order to ‘save’ the old pines which are uncommon on the west side of the Cascades, but the thinned stands became vulnerable to winter winds that wiped out the very pines they hoped to protect. Now they want to log it again to “salvage” the down wood. Thankfully, some of the down trees will be used for stream restoration. Unfortunately, the FS wants to do more projects like this, only bigger. We would rather they focus on thinning young plantations instead of taking big risks by logging old forests.”

In the past, some of us have expressed concerns that ‘thinning’ forests makes them hotter, drier and windier…which aren’t exactly three positive outcomes, especially in an era of global climate change.