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The National Association of State Foresters (NASF) and the Coalition of Prescribed Fire Councils (CPFC) have released the 2021 National Prescribed Fire Use Report, “which for the first time shows acres treated by ownership type, revealed 1.5 million acres treated with prescribed fire on federal lands while nearly 8 million acres were treated on state and private lands in 2020. This indicates that 84% of all prescribed fire in the country occurred on state and private lands.”

“Collectively, federal land management agencies reported forestry and rangeland prescribed fire activity in 2020 on 62,633 acres in the Northeast-Midwest, 1,053,871 acres in the Southeast, and 355,352 acres in the West.”

A chart and data show that nearly 87% of USFS acres burned were in the Southeast. That doesn’t sound right to me, but may it is.

From the conclusion: “…the national prescribed fire program has many impediments to overcome. In order to sustain the current number of acres treated each year—and certainly to increase the pace and scale of prescribed fire use nationwide—capacity deficits, liability concerns, smoke emissions, and other obstacles must be addressed in meaningful ways.”

Judith Curry has an interesting discussion on her web site, Climate, Etc.: “Academics and the grid Part I: I don’t think that study means what you think it means,” by Planning Engineer (Russell Schussler). In this paragraph, substitute foresters (natural resource managers of a variety of disciplines, including those who use Rx fire) for practicing engineers:

There’s been a lot of discussion about the differences between scientists and engineers. The boundaries can get blurry and often are non-existent. In the energy power system arena, perhaps to my past professor’s chagrin, I’m afraid the more important boundary might be between academics and practicing engineers. Academics can approach the grid with some detachment while practicing engineers must keep it running 24/7/365. Practicing engineers have skin in the game and typically face consequences for errors and shortcomings, while academics and unfortunately many policy makers are more insulated. This brings to mind Thomas Sowell’s guidance, “It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.”

So:

Academics and interest groups can approach forest management with some detachment while foresters must keep forests healthy and protect a range of values 24/7/365. Foresters have skin in the game and typically face consequences for errors and shortcomings, while academics, interest groups, and unfortunately many policy makers are more insulated.

Also from the essay:

The path for innovation for the grid is most likely to follow the model of power electronics. Academics propose and refine an approach for the enhancement of the grid and/or power supply. Detailed serious evaluations of the approach take place and maybe additional research is warranted. Engineers determine specific areas where the new approaches might be most successful and the approach can be employed or tested. Project successes will be followed by further improvements and refinements and led to greater expansion as warranted.

That model seems preferable to this one: Academics propose and refine an approach for the enhancement of the grid and/or power supply (or a complete transition of the grid). The media and policy makers determine it is worthwhile. Policy makers and the public push for sweeping changes that are mandated. Everyone struggles to implement the new approach broadly in a sweeping near universal manner.

This second model is often employed in forest management…. Just food for thought and discussion.

Greenwire has this article today (paywall, I think) and the topic may eventually be covered elsewhere. FWIW, I suggest that retardant may reduce the effects of wildfire in aquatic species. Andy will probably counter that retardant is not effective, but I’ve seen it work very well to slow fires and give firefighters a safer place to build lines.

Forest Service plans for continued use of fire retardant

Interesting blog post, “The rise and fall of peer review.” Excerpt:

Here’s a simple question: does peer review actually do the thing it’s supposed to do? Does it catch bad research and prevent it from being published?

It doesn’t. Scientists have run studies where they deliberately add errors to papers, send them out to reviewers, and simply count how many errors the reviewers catch. Reviewers are pretty awful at this. In this study reviewers caught 30% of the major flaws, in this study they caught 25%, and in this study they caught 29%. These were critical issues, like “the paper claims to be a randomized controlled trial but it isn’t” and “when you look at the graphs, it’s pretty clear there’s no effect” and “the authors draw conclusions that are totally unsupported by the data.” Reviewers mostly didn’t notice.

For years there has been concern in the biodiversity community about top-downishness of forest interventions and implications for local people.

Forrest Fleischmann has an interesting Twitter thread on this, worth examining for anyone interested.

How do we decide where we should focus ecological restoration? A recent paper in @nature by Strassburg et al. provided advice that mostly ignored people. We think this is wrong, and Nature has now (finally!) published our response. https://t.co/qVYuv5qUzz

— Forrest Fleischman (@ForrestFleisch1) July 13, 2022

Here’s a quote from a paper by Fleischmann and others that was an answer to another Nature paper (which in turn was responded to by the original authors). Ironically, I couldn’t access the others without a Nature subscription:

Moving forward, land-use priorities could be better identified if scientists and policy-makers work with organizations representing people who live on and manage lands. Top-down approaches to defining global restoration priorities create unrealistic targets and are less likely to succeed in the long-term. At the same time, they risk exacerbating injustice, food insecurity and displacement. Restoration, like any land-management intervention, must ultimately be implemented by people in their distinct social and ecological contexts. Global models that ignore these contexts tell us little about when and where ecological restoration can succeed.

I ran across a job that’s being advertised on LinkedIn for the Wildlife Conservation Society a New York not-for-profit, which seems to be related to zoos. Here’s their program overview:

Program Overview

The overarching goal of WCS’s Forest & Climate Change Program is to help realize the full potential of forests, to deliver climate change mitigation and adaptation, along with national, global and regional biodiversity conservation, through a linked set of programmatic priorities: (1) Protecting Intact forests; (2) Preventing the expansion of deforestation and forest degradation; (3) Reforesting in and around WCS priority landscapes; and (4) Building resilience to the impacts of climate change.

We work both globally and in support of WCS field programs to achieve results at scale, using a varied, adaptive set of tools for impact:

• Using science, including spatial planning and monitoring, to identify priorities for action and measure our impact from a global scale down to specific landscapes, enabling more effective, adaptive implementation;
• Supporting policy reforms to accelerate implementation of each priority at national and regional levels, including through governmental, intergovernmental, and private sector initiatives;
• Catalyzing financial investment and innovation to enable effective and durable progress on each priority, and to help key geographies connect with favorable investment opportunities;
• Fostering economic alternatives at local and national levels to support green economic development for each priority in ways that both protect forests and promote human well-being;
• Building capacity within government and local community partners to effectively lead on implementation and delivery of each priority;
• Employing savvy strategic communications to support and amplify all of the above to inform key decisionmakers and the constituencies that influence them

Ah but what are “intact” forests? Here’s a Nature article

Around a third of global forests had already been cleared by 2000³⁸, and we show that at least 59% of what remains has low or medium integrity, with > 50% falling in these two broad categories in every biogeographical realm. These levels of human modification result partly from the large areas affected by relatively diffuse anthropogenic pressures whose presence is inferred near forest edges, and by lost connectivity. We also map a surprising level of more localized, observed pressures, such as infrastructure and recent forest loss, which are seen in nearly a third of forested pixels worldwide.

Conservation strategies in these more heavily human-modified forests should focus on securing any remaining fragments of forests in good condition, proactively protecting those forests most vulnerable to further modification⁸ and planning where restoration efforts might be most effective^39,40,41. In addition, effective management of production forests is needed to sustain yields without further worsening their ecological integrity⁴². More research is required on how to prioritize, manage, and restore forests with low to medium integrity^41,43, and the FLII presented here might prove useful for this, for example, by helping prioritize where the best returns on investment are, in combination with other sources of data (e.g., carbon)⁴⁴.

The cited paper on production forests (42) says:

 The state of the enabling environment for SFM and progress made at the operational level demonstrates commitment to sustainable forest management by governments, industry and communities. At the same time further investment in addressing these limitations is clearly needed to promote and support SFM – particularly in low income forest countries and in large parts of the tropical climatic domain. Overall, the evidence shows a trend favourable to SFM globally that will help ensure forests remain a valued part of our common future.

It almost sounds as if from the cite “sustaining yields without reducing integrity” integrity and yields can coexist? So confusing.

Looking at the map of “Forest Landscape Integrity” it sounds a bit as if some institutional entities think they know best how to manage (or not) landscapes and those living there (human beings). It seems to me to be fairly arrogant.  Isn’t colonialism what wreaked havoc on many of those countries in the first place?   If a country has fewer intact forests or makes up its own criteria, why is it the international community’s business? In the simplest world of helping communities, the first step is to ask them what they need.  Why do these international efforts and NGO’s seem to skip this step?

In addition, count me very mistrusting of a) satellite maps and b) indices of things that aren’t measured well in the first place, and then mooshed together.  Many thanks to Forrest and his colleagues for pushing back on this nascent neocolonialism.

Here, more or less on the Front Range of Colorado, it is very cold.  That’s good news, I hope, for bark beetles populations to be set back a bit.

Winter festivals of whatever ilk tend to be about light coming into or returning to the world.   It ‘s  a season of hope, in which old traditions are savored and new ones made.

 For though my faith is not yours and your faith is not mine, if we each are free to light our own flame, together we can banish some of the darkness of the world.

And

History does not give rise to hope: hope gives rise to history.

— Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks

Blessings to all this holiday season! I’ll return on January 2.

News article about a legislation to establish “1.4 Million Acres of Federal Land Between Yosemite and Kings Canyon [as] the Range of Light National Monument.” I’d much prefer Congress to create monuments than for any president to do so via the Antiquities Act, which, as I’ve said on Smokey Wire before, I think has been used in a way never intended by Congress when it created the act. The Sierra Club loves the idea. Nat Geo notes that “The sprawling national forest in California has thousands of mining claims, timber sales, grazing leases, and private inholdings, activities not typically found in national parks.”

Anyhow, I’d like to discuss not the politics, but the management proposed Range of Light National Monument, how management would change — taking national forest and transferring it to the National Park Service. The area is in the midst of a dire forest health crisis. Which agency is better positioned to tackle it? Not to mention all of the other uses….

Excerpt from a Greenwire article. I haven’t read the study yet….

Study shows worsening drought threats to Western forests

GREENWIRE | Drought — not wildfires or logging — may be the biggest long-term threat to forests in part of the West, according to researchers from the Forest Service and two universities.

A research paper suggested drought is the main contributor to ongoing losses of dense conifer forests in the southern Sierra Nevada, speeding the conversion of land to nonforest or lower density woodlands. Drought and the beetle infestations it invites were more responsible than the combined effects of wildfire or forest-thinning, researchers said.

In the area the scientists studied, they found that about 213,000 hectares — or slightly more than half of the area that transitioned to nonforest — could be blamed on drought alone. Forty-five percent could be attributed to drought and wildfire combined, and 4 percent to when drought and mechanical activities like thinning coincided.

That and other findings, the researchers said, together point to a need to manage forests through a mix of prescribed fire, thinning in some areas that have grown thick for lack of natural fire, and leaving big trees in place to protect against wildfire and maintain wildlife habitat. It also illustrates the dire future that may await forests in dry regions as the climate warms and wildfires potentially increase.

From Biomass Magazine. Seems like a very positive development. The Sierras are loaded with dead and dying trees, and the die-off in recent years is continuing. The state’s existing mills and other users of dead trees and debris have not been able to keep up with the vast amounts of material that need to be removed or treated, and the accumulations of fuels are likely to add to wildfire risk. These two pellets plants will help, but more are needed. I’ve talked to folks who study the forest-products industry who say that California, a net importer of products such as OSB panels, has more than adequate supplies of raw material.

California group begins development of 2 industrial pellet plants

Golden State Natural Resources, a California-based nonprofit public benefit corporation, is developing two industrial wood pellet projects within the state as part of its effort to increase forest resiliency and reduce the risk of catastrophic forest fires.

GSNR has purchased sites in Tuolumne County and Lassen County to develop the proposed projects. The planned capacity of the Tuolumne site is 300,000 tons per year, with the Lassen site expected to produce 700,000 tons per year. Wood pellets produced at the proposed plants will be railed to port for export to customers that use the biobased fuel for energy production.