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https://www.fs.usda.gov/news/releases/agriculture-secretary-tom-vilsack-announces-randy-moore-new-forest-service-chief

National Geographic has an article published yesterday, June 24:

Despite massive effort, spotted owl populations at an all-time low

A threatened owl could disappear from much of its range unless old-growth forests are protected and invasive barred owls are controlled.

“Inhabiting older coniferous forests in the Pacific Northwest, the federally listed northern spotted owl species has been on the decline across its range, triggered by habitat loss. The two leading threats to its habitat are competition from increasing barred owl populations and decreasing forest area, due to wildfires and logging. Without strong intervention, northern spotted owls may face extirpation.”

Kudos to the Mount Hood National Forest for its excellent story map about last summer’s Riverside Fire. It’s an interesting overview and a great use of Esri’s GIS technology.

President Biden has recycled former Obama nominee Homer Wilkes as his Undersecretary of Agriculture for Natural Resources and the Environment. Dr. Wilkes’s bio is impressive:

Dr. Homer Wilkes, a native of Port Gibson, Mississippi, currently serves as Director of Gulf of Mexico Ecosystem Restoration Team. He is oneof the five Federal Executive Council member to oversee the rebuilding of the Ecosystem of the Gulf of Mexico after the BP Oil Spill of 2010. He served as the Acting Associate Chief of USDA/Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) in Washington during the period of 2010-2012. Dr. Wilkes’ tenure with the United States Department of Agriculture span’s over 41 years. During his tenure he has served as State Conservationist for Mississippi; Chief Financial Officer for NRCS in Washington, DC; Deputy State Conservationist for Mississippi; and Chief of Administrative Staff for the South Technical Center for NRCS in Fort Worth, Texas.

Dr. Wilkes also served as Naval Supply Officer in the United States Navy Reserves from November 1984 – Aprl-2007.

He received his Bachelors, Master of Business Administration, and Ph.D. in Urban Higher Education from Jackson State University. He also successfully completed the USDA Senior Executive Service Candidate Development Program (SES CDP) through American University’s Key Executive Leadership Certificate in Public Policy. Dr. Wilkes and his wife Kim, currently reside in Ridgeland, MS. They have three sons, Justin, Austin, and Harrison. He enjoys fishing, restoring antique vehicles and family activities.

Insofar as he has no experience with the Forest Service, which under the current organizational chart is the only agency Wilkes will oversee, does his nomination suggest that Vilsack will reunite NRCS and the Forest Service under NRE?

Bloomberg News has a pretty good article today:

Scientists Are Trying to Make California Forests More Fire Resilient

As the threat of wildfire looms, a debate has emerged in the state about the best way to plant trees.

Some interesting photos, too.

As someone who helped with numerous timber sales on the El Dorado NF in the 1980s, and helped suppress a few wildfires there, I agree that broad landscapes of plantations of evenly spaced trees are far from natural, and in a changing climate, perhaps are a liability — unless they are managed to be more like natural stands, with groups of trees and spaces in between. That can be done with “industrial” plantations, if thinning aims to leave groups/skips/gaps rather than maintaining relatively uniform stem density. Of course, this is site-specific. In some areas, even-aged, production-oriented silviculture is appropriate, and in other areas, nature has created dense, even-aged stands on its own. In between, group planting may help guard against the incineration of entire watersheds. Here is where desired future conditions, with due recognition of likely future climate conditions, might best guide management.

During this WildEarth Webinar, which was recorded on June 9, 2021, our guests Dr. Chad Hanson and Dr. Monica Bond cut through years of misinformation and misdirection to make an impassioned, evidence-based argument for a new paradigm of fire and forest management.

Chad Hanson is a research ecologist and director of the John Muir Project of Earth Island Institute, located in Big Bear City, California. Dr. Hanson has a Ph.D. in ecology with a research focus on fire ecology in conifer forest ecosystems. He is the author of the 2021 book, Smokescreen: Debunking Wildfire Myths to Save Our Forests and Our Climate, and co-editor and co-author of the 2015 book, The Ecological Importance of Mixed-Severity Fires: Nature’s Phoenix.

Monica Bond, Ph.D., is a wildlife biologist and biodiversity advocate with the Wild Nature Institute and a research associate with the University of Zurich. She has published more than 45 peer-reviewed scientific journal articles and book chapters. Dr. Bond spent the past two decades studying spotted owls and served on the Dry Forest Landscapes Working Group for the Northern Spotted Owl Recovery Plan. She travels around the world researching and advocating for the conservation of imperiled wildlife and habitats.

SANTE FE, NM—Today, in celebration of the Gila Wilderness’ 97th Birthday and in anticipation of its centennial in 2024, WildEarth Guardians is excited to announce the upcoming publication of a collection of writing from Torrey House Press, edited by Elizabeth Hightower Allen, titled First and Wildest: The Gila Wilderness at 100. The anthology, to be published in the spring of 2022, showcases an exceptional assemblage of work from locally, nationally, and internationally renowned authors, ecologists, politicians, conservationists, and wildlife enthusiasts, including a foreword by Tom Udall and essays by Pam Houston, Beto O’Rourke, Martin Heinrich, and others.

As Hightower Allen says, “It’s a celebration of the first hundred years of not only the Gila Wilderness, but also of American wilderness itself. And it’s an opportunity to start a conversation about the next hundred years, beginning with (fingers crossed!) Congressional designation of the Gila River as Wild and Scenic. First and Wildest includes a huge range of diverse voices, from an Apache horsepacker to U.S. senators. I can’t wait to share it.”

The Gila Wilderness is the heart of the Greater Gila bioregion, an improbably biodiverse, impossibly immense section of southwestern New Mexico and southeastern Arizona. The traditional homelands of the Apache, Acoma, Zuni and Hopi Tribes, the Gila has been the home to Indigenous peoples of the Southwest since time immemorial. The Gila region is sacred land. It’s a living cultural landscape, a hunting ground, a refuge, a wildlife sanctuary, a place of refuge for wild nature, and an important part of both tribal and non-tribal community values.

“This compilation of work, praising the Gila in so many different voices from so many different perspectives, feels like a perfect preface to what we hope will be a grand celebration of this landscape and an even grander reimagining of who and what Wilderness is for, and how and why we protect public lands,” said Leia Barnett, Greater Gila Campaigner for WildEarth Guardians.

It is the landscape that stoked the imagination of the father of wildlife ecology, Aldo Leopold. As a young Forest Service ranger working in the Gila, Leopold learned why some degree of wildness was imperative for the ecological health and integrity of any biological system. Leopold advocated fiercely for the protection of the Gila and all its wildness, often in eloquent prose, some of which is included in the anthology.

Today, 97 years later, we’re celebrating America’s first wilderness, the Gila Wilderness, for its persistent wildness, the place it holds in the hearts of so many, and the inspiration it gives us to imagine our next 100 years.

Stay tuned to WildEarthGuardians.org for upcoming events celebrating the book launch.

Another article from the May edition of the Journal of Forestry is worth a look: “Changes in Relationships between the USDA Forest Service and Small, Forest-Based Communities in the Northwest Forest Plan Area amid Declines in Agency Staffing.”

The authors note “chronic budget cuts and shrinking resources,” but not the shift of a large portion of the budget it does have to suppressing wildfires.

The paper rings true for me, as a resident of a small community in the NW Forest Plan area. The local agency staff are good folks, but they are too few to meet the management needs on a diverse, high public use national forest. I’m interested to hear from others on Smokey Wire whether the situation is similar outside of the NW Forest Plan area.

Abstract

Study Implications: We found evidence that staffing declines, turnover, and long-distance
commuting may contribute to decreasing agency engagement in some communities, and that
diminished engagement by federal forest management agency employees may contribute to
negative attitudes toward the agency. Agency employee interviewees suggested that incentives
(i.e., promotions, opportunities to live elsewhere), internal conflicts, and a lack of opportunities
and services for their families are reasons that staff commute from neighboring communities
or leave their jobs. Our findings suggest that the USDA Forest Service may improve agency community
relationships by supporting its staff in ways that reduce turnover and long-distance
commuting and incentivize community engagement.

The New York Times today: “What to Save? Climate Change Forces Brutal Choices at National Parks.”

For decades, the core mission of the Park Service was absolute conservation. Now ecologists are being forced to do triage, deciding what to safeguard — and what to let slip away.

Probably available only to subscribers. However, the article has a link to this USF&WS web page on the topic.

NY Times excerpt:

The first one [of Park Service two papers], titled “Resist, Accept, Direct,” aims to help park employees triage species and landscapes. In some cases, that will mean giving up long efforts to save them. The second outlines how to assess risks when relocating species. That may be crucial to saving plants and animals that can no longer survive in their natural habitat.

Those two papers were the basis for the guidance published last month. On the very first page of that document, set over a photo of the charred Santa Monica Mountains after the 2018 Woolsey fire, the authors state that “it will not be possible to safeguard all park resources, processes, assets, and values in their current form or context over the long term.”

Decisions about what to protect are especially imminent for forests, where changes are leading some researchers to wonder if the age of North American woodlands is coming to an end.

In the United States Southwest, for example, research suggests that, in the event of wildfires, up to 30 percent of forestland might never grow back because global warming favors shrubs or grasslands in their ranges. Joshua trees appear likely to lose all of their habitat in their namesake national park by the end of the century.

The following comment was written by Forrest Fleischman and posted here, but I believe it deserves it’s own post, so here it is. Here’s a link to the Fleischman, et al original paper, “US Forest Service Implementation of the National Environmental Policy Act: Fast, Variable, Rarely Litigated, and Declining.”  Also, here’s all the raw data (which the U.S. Forest Service has notoriously—and intentionally?—made nearly impossible to locate, for many years). – mk

Hi Sharon,

It’s an honor to have one’s work being seen as important enough to merit a response. This being said, as the lead author of the original paper, there were two surprising things about this publication.

First of all, in the scientific process, the norm is to inform the original authors of a paper that a critique of their paper is being published, and give them an opportunity to respond in the same issue. We were not given such an opportunity, and this reflects poorly on JOF as a scientific publisher. We learned about the critique the same way you did, I just read this paper yesterday.

Second, we can’t figure out what Morgan et al. disagree with us about. For example, they highlight that the length of time for analysis varies between CEs, EAs, and EISs, which was something we highlighted in our original paper. They highlight some regional differences, and our original paper included an extensive discussion of regional and local differences.

You highlight that they take issue with our statement about Forest Service budgets (which they erroneously describe as “one of our conclusions”). We reported that the number of NEPA analyses was declining over the time period of study, and wrote “This decline is likely related to the combination of flat or declining real budget allocations, retirement of experienced staff without adequate replacements, and increasing fire impacts that divert agency resources away from routine land management (National Interagency Fire Center 2019)” – so we wrote a *clearly* speculative sentence, including declining budgets as one of several well documented issues the agency faces, and cited an *agency* source which discussed these problems (elsewhere in the paper we cite a whole bunch of other sources that document flat or declining agency budgets in the face of rising fire costs). Although we presented this work in language that was clearly speculative, I haven’t found anyone who disagrees with it – including Morgan et al! Morgan et al. look in more detail than we did at the budget and what did they find? Flat or declining budgets (they frame one budget measure as a slight increase but the increase isn’t statistically significant, which is to say, its what a scientist would call no change – looking at the graph presented in their paper, that budget declined through most of the study period, and then had a modest increase in the last few years of data, so even if the increase had been statistically significant, most of our study data was produced in a period of declining budgets).

As far as the data cleaning issues they highlight, give me a break. We spent hours on the phone with PALS people working with them to try to understand the data (and the many data cleaning issues it contains). We spent months cleaning this data before publishing it, and like any good scientist, ran many versions of our analysis using different assumptions about which data were good. Most of the patterns we report are robust to just about any data cleaning assumption. We decided to not analyze the data for ongoing projects because from speaking with the PALS people, we learned that we would not be able to clearly distinguish projects that were discontinued or dropped from those that were suspended from those that were ongoing. Put in other words, since the incomplete projects are ambiguous, analyzing those data are not likely to be very meaningful. According to the people who manage the PALS database, many of the projects that Morgan et al. report having long time frames that are not completed are likely to be projects that were dropped (but were not listed as so in PALS), hence the long time frames. And including the incomplete projects doesn’t actually lead to very different results – as Morgan et al. themselves show. In fact, they don’t point to any data cleaning decisions we made that change any actual results in substantively meaningful ways.

We are debating whether we should write a response to Morgan et al., but its hard to write a response when its apparent that your critic’s analysis almost entirely supports your original analysis. Or to put it in other words, we think Morgan et al. could have written a better paper if they had written it not as a critique of our work (which they don’t really succeed in because their findings aren’t substantively different from ours), but as an addition. I found some of their work interesting on first glance, although I haven’t really been through it in alot of detail yet. For example, the detailed analysis of budgets they did seems valuable (and seems to be consistent with our original story), and its interesting to know that litigation is more common in Region 1 (again, this illustrates a point we made in our original paper, i.e. that there appears to be alot that could be learned by studying regional and forest level variation inside of the agency). We ran numerous analyses, but I don’t recall looking at litigation broken down by region.

There’s lots that can – and probably should be – done with this kind of data. I strongly agree with you that its a shame that the data isn’t collected in a cleaner manner – and it ought also to be openly publicly available – there’s no reason other than a modest investment in building an interactive public-facing web portal – that it can’t be shared openly and in real time with the public. We shouldn’t need a bunch of academics to spend a few months cleaning data when the data should be clean and publicly available in the first place.