[The following press release and letter to U.S. U.S. Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz from nearly 100 conservation organizations, trail groups, and respected U.S. Forest Service specialists with decades of wilderness administration expertise may be of interest to readers of this blog. – mk]
For Release: Wednesday, May 6, 2026
Freedom of Information Act records reveal U.S. Forest Service considering nationwide chainsaw use in Wilderness
In letter to Forest Service Chief, conservation organizations, trail groups, and retired agency wilderness specialists express strong opposition to requests from commercial outfitters and guides for chainsaw use in designated Wilderness
MISSOULA, MONTANA—Nearly 100 conservation organizations, trail groups, and respected U.S. Forest Service specialists with decades of wilderness administration expertise have written a letter to U.S. Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz expressing strong opposition to requests from commercial outfitters and guides for chainsaw use in designated Wilderness.
The letter comes on the heels of a Wilderness Watch Freedom of Information Act request revealing that the agency is considering nationwide chainsaw use in Wilderness, effectively letting commercial outfitters run chainsaws through Wilderness and the Wilderness Act.
“On behalf of our hundreds of thousands of members and supporters across the country, we write with growing concern over the Forest Service’s apparent consideration of commercial outfitters and guides’ request to use chainsaws for trail and camp clearing across much of the National Wilderness Preservation System….This is a precedent-setting consideration that could significantly impact the National Wilderness Preservation System, legally and practically, by systemically degrading wilderness character and outsourcing the Forest Service’s statutory duties of wilderness administration to third parties, including those with significant commercial conflicts of interest,” states the letter.
Wilderness Watch recently intercepted a letter from the Idaho Outfitters and Guides Association to Forest Service Chief Schultz requesting permission to use chainsaws in Wilderness in Idaho for trail maintenance. In response, Wilderness Watch reached out to the Salmon-Challis National Forest, but was effectively stonewalled. Meanwhile, Wilderness Watch members continued to reach out with tips that led the organization to believe that this effort is not limited to Idaho but has national implications.
Documents Wilderness Watch obtained through the Freedom of Information Act indicate the Forest Service wasn’t being forthright and the Idaho proposal is part of a nationwide effort to let commercial outfitters run chainsaws throughout protected Wilderness areas. According to internal emails, the agency is bringing in an outside contractor to “help address the chainsaws in wilderness issue at the national scale.”
“Chainsaws are prohibited in Wilderness because they represent, and effectuate, a level of domination and control over the landscape that has decimated so many other places. We hope the Forest Service Chief appreciates the seriousness of the authorization he is considering,” said Dana Johnson, Wilderness Watch’s policy director.
“Allowing commercial outfitters and guides to clear wilderness trails with chainsaws, particularly when the authorization is considered at a broad scale, is a foundational affront to wilderness protection on multiple levels,” said Wilderness Watch’s Dana Johnson. “It shows the Forest Service has abandoned its statutory duty to protect these special places from the tools of industrialization, and equally troubling, the Forest Service is putting the chainsaws in the hands of commercial interests. Motorized equipment and commercial enterprise are both prohibited in Wilderness for good reason.”
“Since the passage of the Wilderness Act in 1964 prohibiting the use of chainsaws in federally designated Wilderness, the Forest Service has developed and implemented an enduring national cross-cut saw program that has trained, certified, and supported thousands of highly skilled and dedicated crosscut sawyers—including employees, volunteers, and outfitters. This cadre of dedicated personnel has demonstrated that preservation of wilderness character, trail maintenance, and other wilderness work can all be efficiently and safely accomplished using non-motorized traditional tools. There is no reason for that to change now,” said Suzanne Cable, who retired in 2024 after a 30-year career with the Forest Service, finishing her career as the forest-wide program manager for Recreation, Trails, and Wilderness on the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest.
“Designated Wilderness was established to ensure we do not modify all lands and leave none in their natural condition, where only natural sounds abound and where outstanding opportunities for solitude may be cherished,” said Kevin Hood, executive director of Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics (FSEEE). “A chainsaw buzzing in a wilderness valley is as jarring as a chainsaw blazing in a church, library, museum or other place of reverence. It does not belong in an area defined as untrammeled, natural, undeveloped and with outstanding opportunities for solitude.”
“Here in the eastern mesophytic hardwood forest region, we have very few designated Wilderness areas compared to out west. We do get tornadoes and other events that drop trees on occasion. That is part of the ‘wilderness experience.’ If chainsaws are used to remove those trees, it is, by definition, no longer Wilderness. If chainsaws are allowed, how long will it be before ORVs are allowed in to facilitate easier access? Those of us who prefer Wilderness do not expect manicured trails. As always, the cheapest form of forest management is to just leave it alone,” said David Nickell, Chair, Heartwood Forest Council.
“Congress prohibited mechanized and motorized uses in Wilderness…Chainsaws, electric or gasoline powered, embody the attitude that human convenience, impatience, and demand come first, and that no place is beyond the reach of our appetite to dominate and control. Chainsaw use fundamentally undermines the goals of the Wilderness Act.”
“Part of the wilderness experience is meeting and experiencing Wilderness on its own terms—an experience that is increasingly rare in our tech-dominated, overly curated world. Visitors may not be able to access everywhere they desire as easily as they desire due to blowdown on trails, but that, too, is part of a wilderness experience.”
“To the extent the Forest Service wants to clear trails for access but is understaffed to do so, the lack of non-motorized trail crews is a problem of the Forest Service’s own making. The Forest Service has been using trail crews with crosscut saws in Wilderness for as long as the National Wilderness Preservation System has existed, and even before that. However, over the last decade or two, the agency has been systematically abandoning and defunding its wilderness program and increasingly outsourcing wilderness administration to volunteers and third parties…..The solution to this problem is to recommit to Forest Service wilderness programs and wilderness-compatible stewardship rather than resorting to chainsaws and other prohibited activities that degrade wilderness character.”
“If the Forest Service is seriously considering authorizing chainsaws for trail clearing, either by agency crews or private entities—a precedent setting decision with significant implications for our Wilderness System—the decision should not be made behind closed doors. The public must be properly notified and given the opportunity to comment.”
A copy of the letter to U.S. Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz is available here:
The recent reporting contains several inaccuracies and mixes data sources in ways that do not reflect ForestService data. Total hazardous fuels reduction work in 2025 decreased by about one million acres, not 1.5 million. On National Forest System lands, hazardous fuels reduction work was just over three million acres, not the 2.6 million stated.
The story also blends total fuels treatment acres with NFS‑only acres for 2023 and 2024, which leads to misleading comparisons. When combining NFS lands with State Fire Assistance and Community Wildfire Defense Grant activities, the correct numbers are 4.35 million total acres in fiscal year 2023 and 4.29 million total in fiscal year 2024, with lower figures representing NFS‑only work.
It also may be relying on incomplete 2025 data from a Grassroots Wildland Firefighting report. Prescribed burning did decline in 2025, but the correct data are 1.95 million acres in 2023, 2.19 million in 2024, and 1.17 million in 2025—not the 900,000 reported. Accurate comparisons require using consistent, official datasets, which the reporting did not do.
It is important to understand most of this reduction occurred in the southeastern United States because of elevated wildfire activity and elevated fire behavior due to excessive fuel loads from Hurricane Helene and other environmental factors. While we recorded the highest number of wildfire starts on national forests since 2016, we held total acres burned to nearly half the 10-year average.
Lastly, despite these challenges, 2025 was one of the most successful wildfire years in recent history. This success is the direct result of proactive forest management, aggressive initial attack policies, and favorable weather that kept fires small and communities safe.
As I said yesterday, I think part of the confusion is that the story used calendar years and the FS uses fiscal years, plus the difference using NFS-only versus all sources, and then using the complete year (not done in the original GWF study, posted about here and here) The only way to check would be to have access to FACTs ourselves. I don’t think we would need a great deal of sophisticated analysis to add up columns and rows of numbers.
It’s also a bit weird that the same story seems to resurface every few months.. whenever lawmakers of a certain party write a new letter of concern to the Admin. Here’s one from January from Boise State Public Radio.
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Anyway, today I’d like to give an opportunity for some reporters to look deeper into this.. the story might be “why did the the FS in 2025 accomplish so much more WMO than in 2024?” The answer actually may have nothing to do with the specific Admin, although that seems to be the go-to answer for many outlets, especially when something can be portrayed as bad.
One thing I found out by talking to a variety of reporters over the last few weeks is that many people are concerned about many things. But it’s relatively infrequent when reporters go back to see what happened. But not everything that could go wrong, will, or at least not all the time. So a reader could be left with a much more pessimistic view than is ultimately warranted.
Again, I know TSW readers disagree about Managed Fire (MF, Fire with Benefits, or Wildfire Meeting Objectives as the above table). Some say things are fine, leave us alone.. some say “don’t do it”, and many of us are in the middle as in “it’s great sometimes, and we shouldn’t stop, but perhaps various practices could be improved, and more planning and public involvement beforehand.”
Anyway, let’s take this story from March in E&E News.. which was about Interior but some of the same worries may apply to the Forest Service. I’ve heard the same concerns about the emphasis on initial attack.
Over time, many land managers have come to embrace wildfire as an inevitable — and often beneficial — force that shapes forests, grasslands and wildlife. In some cases, fires should be allowed to burn, said Tim Ingalsbee, executive director of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology, an advocacy group of current and former wildland firefighters.
“All suppression, all the time, is basically a failed — failing and failed — strategy,” he said. “We are losing the war on wildfire, and the whole paradigm needs to shift to working with fire instead of fighting against fire.”
Again, here’s what the FS said about the increase- keeping all the tools in the toolbox.
Our priority is reducing wildfire risk for communities, and we use every tool in the toolbox to do that. When lightning ignites a fire, we assess whether parts of the fire can safely help meet Forest Plan objectives, but that does not change our overall approach. The Forest Service maintains an aggressive initial attack posture to contain fires quickly and protect firefighters and the public.
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Sidenote about PF: remember when people were concerned about the stand-down after the Calf Canyon-Hermits Peak fire? In the overall scheme of things, given the chart above, it seems to have been a blip on the screen.. except for improving practices, as we see below.
Fire crews conducted 13 prescribed fires last fall and winter, treating close to 14,000 acres across the forest, according to the release. The work reduces the threat of wildfire to communities, watersheds and wildlife habitat.
Carson National Forest fire managers have declared all prescribed fires from last fall and winter as out. The declaration comes after fire crews spent months patrolling and monitoring over a dozen prescribed fires on site, ensuring no heat was detected. Drones and an airplane, both outfitted with infrared detection capabilities, were also used in the process.
“While no heat has been detected for some time, our approach has been to patrol and monitor for longer periods of time and more thoroughly, utilizing tools like drones and airplanes outfitted with infrared for heat detection” Fire and Fuels Staff Officer Jamie Long said in a forest press release
PERC’s latest report, Beyond Wildfire Suppression: The Economic Case for Fuel Treatments on National Forests, presents the most comprehensive real-world analysis to date of how fuel treatments—such as prescribed burns and mechanical thinning—affect wildfire outcomes. Drawing on newly compiled, high-resolution data, the report demonstrates that these treatments not only improve forest health but also deliver significant economic returns.
The report presents results from academic research by Frederik Strabo, PERC and UC Davis postdoctoral scholar, and Matthew Reimer, UC Davis associate professor of agricultural and resource economics. Their work has been accepted for publication in Science, one of the world’s leading peer-reviewed journals, underscoring the rigor and credibility of the findings.
“Wildfire policy has long emphasized suppression, but our research shows that complementing it with greater investment in prevention can deliver substantial public benefits,” said Strabo. “Targeted fuel treatments reduce damages, lower firefighting costs, protect communities, and restore healthier, more resilient forests.”
New Data Make the Economic Case for Prevention
For decades, policymakers and land managers have lacked clear, large-scale evidence on whether fuel treatments pay off. This report fills that gap.
Using detailed data on wildfire behavior, treatment locations, suppression efforts, and economic damages, the analysis finds:
Strong returns on investment: In the Pacific Northwest, every $1 spent on fuel treatments yields between $5 and $6 in reduced federal firefighting costs.
Reduced economic damages: Across the western United States, each $1 invested in fuel treatments in national forests generates an average of $3.73 in avoided damages from smoke exposure and property loss.
Billions in avoided losses: Fuel treatments prevented an estimated $2.8 billion in wildfire-related damages between 2017 and 2023.
The findings provide the first large-scale empirical evidence—based on observed wildfire outcomes rather than simulations—that proactive forest management delivers measurable economic benefits.
Healthier Forests, Lower-Risk Fires
Beyond cost savings, fuel treatments meaningfully improve forest conditions and reduce fire severity. Areas that received treatments experienced 36 percent less burned area and 26 percent lower rates of high-severity fire, helping maintain more resilient, fire-adapted ecosystems.
By reducing excess fuel loads built up over decades of fire suppression, treatments restore more natural fire regimes and lower the risk of catastrophic wildfire.
From Suppression to Stewardship
The federal government spends billions each year fighting wildfires, yet growing evidence shows that prevention is more effective—and more economical—than relying on suppression alone.
By demonstrating that fuel treatments can both reduce wildfire damages and free up resources for broader forest restoration, the report makes a strong case for rebalancing wildfire policy toward proactive stewardship.
Trump administration falls behind on wildfire prevention with risky fire season ahead
First, we’ll parse out the numbers, then we can think about the mechanics of doing the work and alternative hypotheses for what we find. I asked our friends at the Forest Service Press Office for the numbers that that the Forest Service has. Here they are, so let’s use them and go through the NPR story. First of all, let’s talk about Fiscal Years. They go from October 1 to September 30. So October, November, and probably January were before any Trump related cuts happened. It seems, though, as the NPR analysis was done on FACTs and used CY.
In 2025, the Forest Service reduced vegetation on almost 1.5 million fewer acres than in 2024, according to an analysis of the agency’s data by NPR and firefighting experts. It marks a significant drop from the more than 4 million acres of hazardous vegetation work done in the last year of the Biden administration.
There are no links to datasets as with the previous Grassroots study we looked at here. Just an “analysis of the agency’s data by NPR and firefighting experts.” Hopefully you don’t need to be a firefighting expert to look at columns of numbers of accomplishments on FACTs. I’m assuming that’s what they used.
The biggest decline was in prescribed burns, the low-grade fires intentionally set to clear dense underbrush, helping reduce the intensity of future wildfires. In 2025, the Forest Service burned only about half of the acreage that it did in both 2024 and 2023, according to an NPR analysis of agency records.
Using FY, it’s also about half of the PF of 2023 and 2024, but only a little under the PF of 2022, which I also believe was a Biden year. It makes you wonder whether FY 2023 and 2024 were anomalous in some way.
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In 2023, the Forest Service reduced hazardous vegetation on about 3.7 million acres, and in 2024 did more than 4 million acres.
Again, I can’t compare CY and FY.
That work fell during the first year of Trump’s second administration to 2.6 million acres, according to an analysis shared with NPR by Grassroots Wildland Firefighters and Redstone GIS Consulting. That includes mechanically cutting and removing vegetation, in addition to burns.
Prescribed burning, which had reached over 1.6 million acres in both 2023 and 2024, fell to about 900,000 acres in 2025, according to an NPR analysis of agency data. The Forest Service, which analyzes its data based on a fiscal year that begins in October, says it burned 1 million fewer acres in fiscal year 2025.
If anyone has access to FACTS, maybe we could get the data by region by month by CY and take a look. Does the public have access to FACTS? If so is it hard to use?
The Forest Service said in a statement that the drop in prevention work is mostly due to staff being occupied with firefighting and because environmental conditions were not right for doing prescribed burns in the Southeast. The agency lost 16% of its workforce as of last summer, with 5,860 personnel leaving in the first six months of 2025 as part of the Trump administration’s efforts to reduce the size of government. Senate Democrats have raised concerns that such cuts have hampered the agency’s ability to prepare for wildfires.
The story, of course, doesn’t mention that the FS had bulked up about the same amount just prior, and that fire folks were protected, but not all the support folks, nor all the people doing the NEPA- but the latter shouldn’t show up for a year or two. We could also tell how accurate the FS statement was by looking at R8 over time. In fact, we could probably tell a lot by breaking it out by state, month and year.
In 2023, the Forest Service reduced hazardous vegetation on about 3.7 million acres, and in 2024 did more than 4 million acres. That work fell during the first year of Trump’s second administration to 2.6 million acres, according to an analysis shared with NPR by Grassroots Wildland Firefighters and Redstone GIS Consulting. That includes mechanically cutting and removing vegetation, in addition to burns.
Again, we can’t compare CY to FY without looking ourselves. And FY 2025 had over twice as much WMO as FY 2024. Which to me was a bit surprising given the concerns about not doing enough WMO in this Admin.
So let’s look at the mechanics of how this works. To do PF or MT, you need an approved NEPA document. Conceivably those were all done and ready to go in CY2025 based on the prior Admin. Let’s look at how this works, take PF first. There’s a NEPA doc, there’s the right conditions, and if the fire folks are there.. they do it. Not necessarily support people, though, are lighting things off and watching. What other things would fire people be doing instead ? Perhaps with all those acres of WMO, they were monitoring those. The WMO acres were almost as large as PF in 2025 and higher than any other Fiscal Year. So maybe the missing support folks are less important for WMO than PF? But I’m not sure that makes sense. I imagine a team with WMO that needs support, not so much a local PF. You might think that those occur in the same seasons (please let me know if not) because when wildfires are most dangerous and resources are tight in the heat of the summer are not times to do either WMO or PF. I’m just thinking out loud here, so anyone who knows more about that, please tell us how it works.
Could doing more WMO than any other year affect the capacity to do PF? Or maybe they were told not to get grassland acres and focus on WUI (we had some WUI PF this past year in my neighborhood)? Maybe they ran out of funding for MT service contracts since IRA and IIJA bucks were used up? We could probably tell something by looking by month by Region. The original Grassroots study did provide that information.
Hmm. Region 2 and part of Region 4 (Utah) are doing exceptionally well. Note that the comparison is not September to September across the years. So actually Utah looks like its on its way to exceeding previous years.. making the same assumptions about what months are best for PF work. It would be interesting to see this broken out by PF and MT (back to The Peoples’ Database). Did fewer employees leave Utah, Colorado and Wyoming? Did they have the greatest amount in external grants for this work? Did they have a different mix of what kind of employees and contractors they use to do the work?
Maybe some Regions lost the folks who knew how to enter info into FACTS?
Or were the folks prepping the work redirected to timber sales without a fuel treatment component (that seems unlikely, depending on how the purpose and need is rationalized)?
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And of course, while some people left, others were hired by NGOs who received chunks of IRA and IIJA bucks to do.. hazardous fuel treatments. How did that balance out?
Who knows? It would be interesting to look deeper at the FACTs. And share your experience if you are currently working. Finally, I asked the Press Folks about the large amount of WMO. I know some people are concerned that it will go away. And of course other people are concerned that it will be used too much. This is their answer:
Our priority is reducing wildfire risk for communities, and we use every tool in the toolbox to do that. When lightning ignites a fire, we assess whether parts of the fire can safely help meet Forest Plan objectives, but that does not change our overall approach. The Forest Service maintains an aggressive initial attack posture to contain fires quickly and protect firefighters and the public.
I think this is the 2002 Hayman Fire photo taken in 2024. My photo. When we hike we notice a temperature difference without tree shade.
This is a special post for Jim Z. to file in the “I think we may have already known at least part of that” file. I used to joke that “if a tree falls in an east side forest (Oregon) and a researcher from Corvallis hasn’t observed it, has it really fallen?” I may have to change it to “if a tree burns in a forest and NASA hasn’t observed it, has it really burned?” Here it is (thanks to Nick Smith) and his HFHC News Roundup.
HUNTSVILLE, Ala. — Wildfires can do more than burn land in their path. New research led by a University of Alabama in Huntsville scientist working with NASA shows they can also create long-lasting “heat islands” that change local weather long after flames are out.
The study, published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, was led by Andrew Blackford, a UAH Earth System Science Center researcher affiliated with NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. It offers one of the most detailed looks yet at how wildfire burn scars affect the way land and atmosphere interact.
Using California’s 2018 Camp Fire as a case study, researchers combined satellite data and weather modeling to find that burned areas can become hotter and drier than surrounding land, forming what they call “burn scar heat islands.”
They could have used thermometers, and I bet some scientists already have. Possibly from FS R&D.
“These effects are similar in concept to urban heat islands, but they’re driven by wildfire-induced changes to the land surface,” Blackford explains.
The study found that wildfire damage strips vegetation and darkens soil, changing how energy moves between the ground and the air. Even with less overall surface radiation, the burned areas showed increased sensible heat, leading to warmer air temperatures and lower humidity.
I’m not sure what passes for soil in this part of Colorado is darkened.
The impacts go beyond temperature. Researchers found burn scars can influence wind patterns, cloud development and rainfall, while also keeping near-surface air drier and affecting local recovery conditions long after a fire.
“This study shows that wildfire impacts extend beyond the immediate event,” says Dr. Udaysankar Nair, a UAH professor of Atmospheric and Earth Science and co-author of the study. “They fundamentally change how the land and atmosphere interact.”
A few new people have joined us since the News Hour story on Monday, so I thought it might be worth it to back up and give some (what seems to me) relevant context that was not included in the story. This post is very long, but I tried to summarize many of our previous posts for the new folks.
A dear friend said I sounded like an “apologist” for the Trump Administration . I don’t think that that’s the case and I’ll explain why. I do tend to see both sides of an issue and it helped a great deal in my work of briefing decision makers and trying to find areas of common ground.
I made two statements used in the piece. First was that, in my mind, if Congress didn’t accept zeroing out R&D the first time, it is unlikely it will do it now. I didn’t say that it was a good idea to zero it out .. in fact, I think it’s a really bad idea as people here at TSW know. Congress is always complaining (has been for 30 years at least) that much federal research funding isn’t helpful to their constituents (hence ideas like the Fund for Rural America). FS R&D does quite a bit of helpful research, including in areas of particular interest to this Admin, like fire and fuels, timber, wildlife and fish, hydrology, and grazing. I’d argue that it does more helpful research than any of its competitors in forest research. So I think it’s a bad idea to cut funding for it in general, but specifically inconsistent with this Admin’s druthers. There have been many years of zeroing out S&PF, but everyone knows the states always come through with support.
To be clearer, what I meant was “before I get concerned, someone has to make the case that Congress has changed its mind since last year.” I also think anyone who has influence with Congress should speak up for FS R&D budgets. My most recent experience was raising a concern with my Congressperson’s office, and getting back a form letter on a different topic, so I won’t be spending much time on that.
Thinking it’s a bad idea, and being concerned about something has an intervening step for me.. the likelihood of the bad idea happening. For those of you who weren’t here, the last time I said “this dog won’t hunt in Congress” was about federal land sales and I was right.
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The FS Budget Crisis and Administrational Whiplash
The other thing I said was that the reorganization is an opportunity to deal with some of the issues that have been identified as problems in the Forest Service for a long time. I was specifically talking about the 2007 Transformation effort. Good people, including people who became my employees later, put their energies, experience and minds to it. Folks in engineering and minerals made changes, and at least some of them seemed to work. That was in 2007, but the idea that maybe there was too much overhead has been around. The Forest History Society has this piece from Chief Jack Ward Thomas under the Clinton Administration in 1995 (my bold):
Is Public Forest Management Too Costly?
We must reduce the deficit and that calls for lean times in the public purse. The Forest Service is reducing headquarters and regional staffs by 25% and field
organizations by 6% between now and 1997. We have already reduced staff by 4000 people; we will drop 3000 more. We are responding to budgets which will go down at a 10% rate per year for some years to come, about $300 million below the presidential request for FY96. Budget reductions should be viewed in light of our streamlining and Reinvention efforts which will allow us to reach much further to improve efficiency and customer service. In all of this, our focus is on sustaining field activities and superior customer service as much as possible.
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The other piece that I didn’t think was covered was the Forest Service budget crisis history. Here goes: the IRA and IIJA gave the FS a huge cash infusion for various things/. The Biden Admin chose to hire 5300 or so permanent new employees. From my observation, at least some were not on forests and districts directly involved in doing work on the ground. There didn’t seem to be an overall agency plan for what positions needed filling.
Also some of these “new hires” were actually long-standing workers who had been on temporary appointments for years. So there were still serious gaps on some units, despite the new hires. The FS ended up being $740 million in the hole. So the Forest Service, before the Presidential election, determined that they could not bring on temporaries in 2025.
Meanwhile, the money that the agency received from the Inflation Reduction Act, the Biden administration’s signature climate law, has already been spent.
All of this, combined with recent cost-of-living increases for staff, means that the agency is feeling strapped for cash. The next year “will not likely be a very robust budget environment” said Forest Service Budget Director Mark Lichtenstein during an all-staff call in mid-September.
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In the all-staff call, Forest Service Chief Randy Moore acknowledged that the agency will be forced to struggle without its seasonal workforce.
“I know that this decision will affect your ability to get some of the critical work done,” he said. “It’ll also be felt deeply by managers and units all across the agency.”
So then, a new Administration got elected. DOGE tried to remove the new hires (people on probation) but were not allowed to, so to bring the numbers down, the FS had to use voluntary authorities, which took out many more experienced older people. So the FS, perhaps uniquely because they had so many new hires, and because they had been hired on special authorities that had longer probationary periods, suffered from Administrational Whiplash. For new folks here, you can dig deeper with this post and others.
The budget problem or crisis- which started under the previous Administration to my mind was an opportunity for change and not just “everyone reduces by 5%”. I’ve FOIAd some of the work products of the reorganization teams so at that point we can see what the different options were and the rationales.
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I’d like to go back to the NewsHour story.
Chief Schultz says “we have to manage within our budgets.” “push decision-making down to the ground, less middle management and more money to the field.”
1, “Shuttering 3/4 of the research facilities”
Reporters ask my opinion about this. I ask them, well the first question is do you believe what the FS is saying? I don’t necessarily, but I don’t know where else you start.
They ask “Do you believe that all these should be closed?” I say “I don’t know, I’d have to see the following information for each site:”
How many FS employees are currently located at that facility?
Is it owned or leased. If owned how much does maintenance cost per year? Are there any large investments that need to be made? If leased, what are the lease costs?
Are there vacant spaces at FS facilities within commuting distance?
Is there something unique about the employees’ research that requires a certain kind of facility or lab?
Are those facilities available elsewhere at less cost?
If at a university, has the FS asked the university the cost of leasing space? If an owned lab close to a university, has the FS explored leasing to others or moving other FS workers to that facility?
I’m assuming that if the researcher or staff moves “within commuting distance,” they will be able to get to research sites with about the same travel time and costs.
Again, facilities budgets are given by Congress to all of the FS, not to NFS or R&D, so the entire portfolio needs to be considered as one.
2. “Moving the “entire agency’s” headquarters to Salt Lake City”
I’m not a fan of doing this because it seems mostly partisanly symbolic on both sides. Some stories seem to miss that they are leaving 120 people in DC to do the schmoozing necessary. I don’t think that’s in any way equivalent to the BLM approach that (I think) tried to move everyone or all career people.
Why does the story say “the entire agency’s headquarters” when they are leaving 120 people? Is 120 the right number or composition? This is “the next level down” or “how would it actually work” question.
There are potentially good things about moving (although I still think it’s a bad idea). First is that it’s easier to get people to move there in general, so you might have more quality candidates to choose from. Second is optimizing your schmoozing. If schmooze (or OK, relationships, formal and informal) is an important reason to keep people in DC, how many schmoozers do you need? Should you optimize schmoozing (and relationships) by spreading it among a broader range of locations? This also fits in with the State Director model. Suppose you were in Arizona or Wyoming. Instead of DC and Albuquerque or Denver, you would be able to see FS officials in DC, Utah and your own state. In that sense, the current situation would be focused on ROs and DC, while this approach would spread the schmooze.
3. “Critics argue that this restructuring is really a dismantling”. So they have Chief Dombeck, Chief during the Clinton Administration who says that the Trump Admin doesn’t like federal employees nor “science”.
“Dismantling” is one of those words that sounds like part of a media campaign. It seems to have to do with the idea of getting rid of the FS? That seems unlikely. The folks who want to move it to Interior tend to be D’s (like Megafire Action) and western R’s seem more hesitant.
I disagree a bit with Dombeck here. Again, it’s a matter of where you look. Dombeck said “give me some reason that you would trust an organization that treats its employees like this.”
Of course, Chief Dombeck apparently worked for an administration that had planned to cut, according to the quote from Chief Thomas above, even more employees.
“These changes are coming from an Administration that is hostile to both federal workers and scientific research and wants to slash the FS budget”. I’ll go with the “wants to slash budget”; however I respectfully disagree on the employees and research. I follow two other areas, energy and health. Chris Wright is not “hostile to science”, Jay Bhattacharya is not “hostile to science.” I would bet that the green eyeshades folks at OMB are not hostile to science so much as “looking for something to cut.” Anyway, I think it’s more complex than Dombeck attests, and different parts of the Admin want different things as is always the case.
Mike argues that dealing with the Admin has been “chaotic”, I’ll go with that, but he says “putting a reorganization on top of that makes him wonder What is the real end-game? What is the Administration’s long-term goal?”
I would say that a budget crisis (due to actions of the Biden Admin) is exactly the time to think about restructuring. To repeat what Chief Thomas said:
Budget reductions should be viewed in light of our streamlining and Reinvention efforts which will allow us to reach much further to improve efficiency and customer service. In all of this, our focus is on sustaining field activities and superior customer service as much as possible.
The story says that about 500 jobs will be relocated but the Union says that the number of “impacted” jobs could be much higher, around 6500. I don’t know exactly what “impacted” means. For me, getting a new list of things to do or a new boss to report to is very different from being asked to move my family. It would have been helpful to ask for a definition.
You might wonder where the unions were during the Clinton Admin. Here’s what Grok said.
Why Unions Supported (or Tolerated) It
Federal unions like AFGE, NTEU, and others did not universally cheer mass cuts—there was initial opposition and criticism of the scale and implementation. However, key union leaders accepted or backed elements for these reasons:
Targeted at Middle Management: Unions represented many rank-and-file employees and often viewed layers of supervisors and overhead as obstacles that micromanaged workers and slowed operations. Reducing these positions could empower frontline staff. NPR deputy director John Kamensky noted: “There was opposition, but union leaders supported reducing the power of middle managers, the target of most of the reductions… so they felt this was an acceptable trade-off.”
Increased Union Role and “Partnerships”: In exchange, the administration expanded union influence:
Executive Order 12871 created labor-management partnerships, giving unions more input into decisions.
Greater bargaining rights and involvement in “reinvention” efforts.
This shifted from adversarial relations toward cooperative ones in some areas. Unions gained a seat at the table that they lacked under prior administrations.
Humane Implementation: Cuts emphasized voluntary buyouts (incentives up to $25k–$50k in some cases), attrition, and retraining/relocation rather than mass firings. Clinton framed it as protecting “good people trapped in bad systems.” Unions preferred this to abrupt private-sector-style downsizing.
Broader Political Alignment: As Democrats, Clinton and unions shared many goals (e.g., labor-friendly policies elsewhere). Supporting “reinvention” helped maintain influence and avoid being painted as defenders of wasteful bureaucracy during a time of deficit reduction pressure.
Note that these programs emphasized “voluntary buyouts, attrition and retraining/relocation.” It actually sounds fairly similar.
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I think part of the problem with understanding R&D is that closing Research Stations is like closing Regional Offices. When the reporter says “77 research stations will be closed across 31 states” (we have heard that this is not final but..) it elides facilities closing and the Research Stations themselves. In my mind, outside the FS, a research station is a place where scientists work. In the FS, it’s an administrative layer. It seems to me that many media folks also elide facilities and the work done there. As I said in a previous post “facilities are not people are not programs.” We moved offices a couple of times when I worked in DC and it’s not unusual to do so. When scientists want to move from FS facilities to universities, for example, the FS doesn’t tell them “sorry, that will potentially disrupt your research.” More likely, they think “thank Gaia we won’t have to be responsible for hazardous waste disposal in that aging building on a septic system.”
And of course, the Fire Science Lab (where some of the photos were taken in the story) with researcher Mark Finney is not on the list.
Then there’s the “reorganization is bad for wildfire” which I think is odd since Interior is actually reorganizing… its wildfire folks! This season! If I were going to worry, I think I’d worry about that. I see stories every day about the FS not being prepared for this fire season, and I wonder why the emphasis seems to be on that rather than on Interior.
One thing I learned from talking to reporters the last few weeks.. many people have concerns. I can’t say it’s wrong to have those concerns or share them widely (I got in trouble with some for calling something “fear-mongering”). I have my own concerns which I have shared with some reporters. Here they are:
If not managed well, new organizations will themselves bulk up and suck up just as much funding as the old organizations. Ongoing and tedious levels of discipline are required. Centralized service units can give forests better service (in my experience, for example, the Content Analysis Team and the Minerals staff) and bring experts to bear (if you need a coal expert, you need one even if your former Region didn’t have one) but if they are not managed well they can be a disaster (it has three letters the last one is C). So my concern is that the agency will have the management discipline over time and Administration fads to keep the pressure on. Once every twenty years is not often enough to think about performance and efficiency. IMHO.
The theme of the week is two-fold. We’ll continuing looking at mechanisms behind correlations, and also how the choice of space and time for studies influences the results.
An excellent example of both is this open-access journal article by wildfire scientists Jon Keeley of the USGS and Alexandra Syphard of San Diego State University. It’s worth a deep dive.
Recent studies conducted across western North America have reported a significant relationship between VPD and area burned and predict that fire activity will increase in the future due to global warming’s intensifying effect on atmospheric aridity (Seager et al. 2015; Williams et al. 2015; Abatzoglou and Williams 2016; He et al. 2025). One limitation of broad-scale studies, however, is that they potentially confound the effects of space and time, as climates and vegetation are variable across western North America.
This may be a version of what I would call “averages are not necessarily true anywhere, so the utility of an average depends on the scale over which you are averaging compared to the scale that you are interested in for doing something.” Some climate policies even notably deal with global average temperatures.. I’ll leave that there. I bolded some key points (to me).
As a result, subregional differences in climate-fire relationships may be masked as noise in aggregated analyses, potentially obscuring areas that diverge meaningfully from the dominant regional pattern. In addition, a major limitation of broad scale studies focused solely on fuel moisture is that they do not account for other drivers of fire regimes such as fuel load, weather, ignitions and management, which vary across broad regions and may benefit from the application of more fine-scale spatial analysis to parse out the relative importance of different drivers (MacDonald et al 2023).
Most folks, I think, would agree that predicting future wildfires without considering suppression (or management) is rather .. silly. But it would be difficult, plus technologies and policies are changing. So what indeed is the point? And couldn’t tax dollars be used for more realistic research?
In addition to evaluating the relative influence of multiple factors across diverse regions, much of the literature implicating climate change as the causal agent behind increasing wildfires relies on correlations with factors presumed to influence fire behavior. For example, correlations between climate variables and fire activity have been used to suggest that global warming will lead to greater annual extremes in fire behavior (Zhou et al. 2023). However, these studies often lack a causal mechanism (sensu Grace et al. 2025) connecting climate change to fire. For instance, in response to the unusually extreme winds that drove the recent Los Angeles (LA) wildfires in January of 2025, some media reports claimed that the extreme behavior of these winds was consistent with expectations from global warming, and thus attributed the disaster to anthropogenic climate change (Hossenfelder 2025; Qiu et al. 2025). However, establishing causality requires a plausible and testable mechanism. Santa Ana wind speed, widely considered to be the primary factor responsible for the damage from these LA fires (Murphy and Mass 2025), is influenced by the spatial proximity of high and low pressure systems. To date, no model has demonstrated that anthropogenic climate change is altering the distribution of high and low pressure cells in a way that would explain increased wind speed. Indeed, Meehl et al. (2025) reported on an example of foehn winds that suggested recent climate change had contributed to decreased wind speeds relative to historical patterns, and concluded that the mechanism behind this was in need of research. Guzman-Morales and Gershunov (2019) projected decreases in frequency and intensity of future Santa Ana Winds.
When mechanisms are proposed they need to be supported with known causal relationships. For example, Swain et al. (2025) reported correlations that implied high winter/spring rainfall followed by a dry year resulted in high fuel production and this contributed to the catastrophic impact of the January
2025 LA fires. They attributed this to the effect of high rainfall on herbaceous fuel production, a well known phenomenon and something we demonstrate below. However, in this Mediterranean climate herbaceous fuels are always dry and flammable in autumn regardless of whether or not there has been a long-term drought. In addition, as they acknowledge in their introduction, these fires started in chaparral, an evergreen shrubland with little herbaceous vegetation. A high rainfall year may increase primary growth in these shrubs, but these fine fuels comprise a minor part of the total fuel volume (Kummerow et al. 1981), and fire spread is largely a function of the long term accumulation of dead fuels (Keeley et al. 2022). Swain et al. (2025) coined the term ‘whiplash effect’ to describe the sequence of high rainfall followed by dry years (something not unique in the history of this region) and speculated that climate change was going to increase this so-called whiplash effect. However, it is unlikely such an effect can explain the catastrophic LA fires as fire spread was due to urban fuels, primarily the homes themselves, and wildland fuels played little if any role (Witze 2025).
So Keeley and Syphard divided up California into different regions, the North Coast:
This climate division holds the record for the largest fire in the state; two-thirds of the area burned within the August Complex fire perimeter had not recorded a fire since before 1910, conditions suggesting unusually high fuel accumulation. This is indicative of much of the North Coast as the rate of burning during the prior 100 years gives a fire rotation interval of ~130 years. Thus, woody fuel accumulation is likely a major proximate factor in large fires, resulting from ultimate factors that include fire suppression (Stephens et al. 2018), and mesic summer conditions (Viers 1979; Keeley and Pausas 2025), an example of how a proximate driver may have more than one ultimate driver.
The North Interior:
In summary, today climate plays a major role in determining fire regimes in the North Interior, but long-term woody fuel accumulation cannot be ignored as a contributing factor. Predicting future fire regimes based solely on climate projections may be misleading, since with increasingly more area burned (from wildfires and prescribed burn treatments), reductions in fuel load may lead to less extreme fire sizes given fuel feedbacks (e.g. Abatzoglou et al. 2021; Hanan et al. 2022).
Or in my words, if trees are gone and don’t grow back, or grow back at some rate, for awhile there won’t be enough fuel for (some) extreme wildfires.
Sierra Nevada:
In the higher-elevation forests of the Sierra Nevada, dominated by woody vegetation, area burned is dependent on high spring and summer temperatures that reduce woody fuel moisture – a pattern that held true in historical times as well (Taylor and Beaty 2005). It is noteworthy that in all of the forested ecoregions spring VPD was a significant factor driving annual area burned (Fig. 7), and this supports Westerling’s (2016) contention about the importance of early spring snowmelt in determining annual area burned.
However, it seems inescapable that large fires are also driven by anomalous fuel accumulation. For example, threefourths of the area burned in the largest fire (Creek Fire) had no recorded history of previous fire, and the division’s fire rotation interval is estimated at between 112 and 198 years. In light of the known historical range of variation in fire return intervals of roughly 20 years (Stafford et al. 2022), effective fire suppression has contributed substantially to the fuel load. Thus, ultimate drivers of the fire regime appear to be a combination of both climate and fire suppression.
Historically, prior to the advent of aggressively suppressing all fires, these forests experienced a frequent understory fire regime driven by lightning ignitions (Kilgore and Taylor 1979). Under such a regime, fire activity was likely regulated by the time required to accumulate sufficient woody fuels (Stephens et al. 2007), implying that fuel aridity played a secondary role. Looking ahead, increasing focus on fuel reduction treatments (Stephens et al. 2012) may reduce fire size, which over time may ultimately result in reduced available fuels and thus area burned (Kennedy et al. 2021).
There is also the Central and South Coasts, which are probably of less interest to TSW readers, but you can read for yourselves. This is interesting.
The ignition sources for some of California’s largest fires have increased in frequency and area burned (Tables 1 and 3), and perhaps the most important of these is powerline ignitions e.g. Dixie and Thomas fires (Supplementary Fig. S1b, e). In the recent past powerline expansion into watersheds of hazardous fuels, in the South Coast, North Coast and North Interior have resulted in some of the largest and most devasting fires (Keeley and Syphard 2019; Rolinski et al. 2019; Troy et al. 2022). These types of fires are typically associated with extreme wind events such as Santa Ana Winds in the south or North Winds in the northern part of the state, which cause failures in electrical lines, and the powerful winds ensure such fires become large. It is critical to recognize that the winds per se are not the problem, as the vast majority of such extreme winds do not result in fires; rather fires are dependent on the coincidence of a human ignition source during a wind event (Keeley et al.
2021; Troy et al. 2022).
This is also true in Colorado. From the conclusion:
Lastly, what we have learned from this analysis and the implications for fire management are summarized in a modified version of Fig. 1 (Fig. 10). Here we link the limiting factors to fire activity to likely ultimate and proximate factors and what they suggest in terms of future fire management responses in California and other fire-prone regions in the western US and worldwide. Effective fire management will require aligning interventions with the proximate and ultimate drivers in each region, rather than assuming a uniform role for climate across all landscapes.
Figure 10 is at the top of the post. If you’ll notice, for grasslands grazing is a way of reducing fuels. We can observe that readily at least around Colorado. Perhaps cows and ranchers are not quite the enemies that they’ve been portrayed by some (remember “Cattle-free by 93?). Are cows back? And of course sheep and goats...
Hayman Fire, 20 years later, photo 9news.com. Good for grass, not so good for trees.
I’d like to focus on reforestation for a bit, that is the simple (but sometimes difficult) act of planting trees and helping them make it to maturity. The end result doesn’t really matter.. shade, wildlife habitat, carbon sequestration, wood products.. you name it – they all require shade-worthy trees. Some species, like pinyon or juniper, don’t have that much shade, but still.. let’s not over-analyze or over-complicate things.
There are also cultural differences about the ways different disciplines at different times approach thinking about the issue of planting trees. These differences promulgate via funding to the end-game of “what the science says”.. when many disciplinary or cultural or philosophical points of view are invisible to the reader, but deeply imbedded in the approach taken and the conclusions drawn.
Two examples today. The first is a comment by Second Law yesterday:
Natural reforestation is a slow process that moves through stages including dominance by non-conifers, and eventual conifer dominance. If we define slow reforestation as a failure, then herbicides will be required, but if we accept natural processes, it will produce Forests that are more biodiverse and more heterogeneous.
That would be nice, but in some places it doesn’t seem to be happening that way. I can kind of understand the ideas of stages, and how important that was seen to be based on research on the West Side (as I recall). Still, if all the Mom trees are burned up (pollen can travel pretty far), there are unlikely to be baby trees without intervention of some kind. We used to know that seed only travels so far, and that bearclover fields or grass fields don’t provide the bare mineral soil that we used to think were good conditions for conifer regeneration.
Bearclover’s rhizomes efficiently gather soil moisture and together with high rates of photosynthesis promote rapid growth and site capture. Using all available water limits species richness, and the plant community in established stands is limited to a few hardy species. Above-ground stem density of bearclover also is high.
So it doesn’t sound like the statement “accept natural processes the forests will be more biodiverse” isn’t true in this case. So a person could wonder “where is it true”? And if herbicides are not natural, I suppose vexar isn’t either. And neither is planting at all, in some sense.
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Sidenote: Since there is an EO about more timber production, then why does the President’s Budget zero out FS R&D -who do the work to figure out all things tree-related? I’d sure give that person at OMB (or whomever) a piece of my mind on Administrational consistency.
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The next piece came across my desk from an argument for the importance of FS R&D.
As climate change alters suitable habitat conditions for tree species, especially Douglas-fir, existing conifer forests will be unlikely to survive and thrive. Research addressing barriers to assisted population migration is crucial. Research shows that for some western species, their best habitats 60-100 years from now will be 200-400 miles NNW and perhaps up to 2,000 feet higher in elevation than their existing best habitats. Seed collection from healthy, thriving stands today need to be used to grow seedlings that are planted in much different locations to survive and thrive 6-10 decades from now.
Like I said yesterday, having experienced “off-site” plantings, as well as the ponderosa elevational transect study, forest geneticists of my generation tended to be fairly conservative about seed zones and breeding zones. Research on conifers also showed that there are epigenetic adaptive capacities as well as long-range pollen transport. For me, anyway, it is the height of hubris to move seed 200 to 300 miles based on computer models of computer modeled futures. Not to speak of the fact that the model outputs change over time, see this post:
Big news: The new framework has eliminated the most extreme scenarios that have dominated climate research over much of the past several decades — specifically, RCP8.5, SSP5-8.5, and SSP3-7.0. This is an absolutely huge development in climate science which will have lasting impacts across research and policy.
The future is not what it used to be.
It’s easy to change model parameters (well probably not that easy) but you can’t uproot saplings when model outputs change and start over.
Some of us geneticists would probably say “run the downscaled models and if it says the area will be hotter and drier, calculate the preferred stand density at maturity, and mix in some seedlings from adjacent zones so that there will be enough trees at maturity.” Seedlings tend to be planted at a higher density than ultimately needed, and natural selection will have a chance to work. At the same time, if the local sources have enough inherent adaptive capacities to deal with climate changes, they will be there in great enough numbers as well.
It’s not that complicated. And I’m giving the advice for free.
People running the models might not be familiar with some conifer adaptation mechanisms, such as these studies in Norway Spruce:
Johnsen Ø, Daehlen OG, Østreng G, Skrøppa T. 2005a. Daylength and temperature during seed production interactively affect adaptive performance of Picea abies progenies. New Phytologist 168: 589–596.
Johnsen Ø, Fossdal CG, Nagy N, Molmann J, Dælen OG, Skrøppa T. 2005b. Climatic adaptation in Picea abies progenies is affected by the temperature during zygotic embryogenesis and seed maturation. Plant, Cell & Environment 28: 1090–1102
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It used to be popular to study mechanisms- in the above case, for example, “how do conifers adapt?”. Today it seems more popular in some disciplines to study from satellite photos and models, find correlations, then make assumptions about what causes and effects are. This is despite the old scientific saying that correlation is not causation. It also seems that many have a (to me) remarkable lack of curiosity about mechanisms.. leaving that for someone else to figure out, I guess. Except that if the funding isn’t there to study mechanisms, we’ll live in a land of correlations and assumptions- and be unable to improve practices in the real world. But maybe that’s not the point. But then we could ask “what is?” More examples next time.
Who was your most helpful research scientist (FSR&D or funded by them) and what work did they do?
Some of us have been contacted by reporters about the important and unique work FS R&D has done. But for me, it’s not about the papers.. it’s about the scientists and support folks who are there, listening and learning what problems practitioners face and working on those problems, hand in hand with practitioners. Which is not to diss researchers such as Johnston in his work with Blue Mountain Forest Partners, but FS R&D provides a research home for scientists doing long-term research. When people say “university research tends to be short-term”, I think they mean that university researchers often rely on federal grants which are short-term. But long-term problems require a consistent focus over time.
So I thought, in additions to the folks who are sending reporters lists of Papers Thought to Be Important Scientifically, here we could round up examples of Forest Service scientists who made a difference on the ground. There are folks like Jack Ward Thomas and Jerry Franklin. When I worked in Region 6, not only did their own studies but took the time to go on field trips and talk to us practitioners-listening as well as talking.
When I called folks like Ken Skog at the Forest Products Lab, they would answer my questions- which were not always phrased accurately in economic lingo. He and many others, take the time to understand questions. Today, the folks at BBER (not FS employees)( funded by FIA, so in the R&D budget) answer the same kind of tedious questions,with some answers making their way into TSW.
The fact is that Big Science gets absorbed by the coolness of what I call “science fads”. If we go back in time there was “radiate things and see what happens”, then “let’s sequence the genome of ..everything” and the ever-popular “let’s make a bunch of assumptions and run climate models and predict the future”. In my own history, genetics became “conservation genetics,” and sin some fields, studying how to produce things people use- including how best to protect the environment as the things are produced- became déclassé.
I remember (sadly) one Assistant Station Director in FS R&D who told me that with “systems” research we would no longer need to study organisms (!). Sure, FS scientists have done this kind of work and we can’t blame them because after all, both the money and the science-coolness factor tends to go with the fads. But trees and forests are only capable of being understood over the long term, and so studies and careers and funding need to reflect that, if we want something more than an accretion of different fads.
Perhaps geneticists of my generation will never forget that lesson (as well as have deep humility about projecting tree responses to the unknown future) from the ponderosa pine elevational transect study. The study was in 1973 with (only) 29 years of data at the time. Perhaps someone is out there now measuring? I’ve been unable to contact anyone who might know.
But at the high-elevation test site, height means for zone groups shifted with age as the relative heights of the higher elevation progenies increased.
The Rocky Mountain Research Station has a whole section on Science You Can Use. Check it out.. here’s a recent example, studying first come first served or lotteries for recreation allocation. Here’s one about wildland firefighter injuries.
If FS R&D does become more centralized in administration, I hope the new comms shop expands Science You Can Use across the country.
Or remember the work of Jim Barnett on longleaf restoration, or today trout genetic researchers studying where translocation of trout would be effective, or Matt Reeves Fuelcasting system that tells us what this year is going to look like in terms of fuels, or Nate Anderson helping folks working in the biomass industry. It could be that biomass utilization, like the Canadian softwood lumber agreement, will be a multigenerational endeavor. And who better to follow that endeavor than scientists, like silviculture stars Russ Graham and Terrie Jain.
When we were working on the Colorado Roadless Rule, the State wanted to hear from different researchers on whether fuel treatments worked (basically). The issue was “to what extent should some restrictions be loosened for roadless areas in proximity to communities?”. I selected Russ Graham for “our side”. Based on his long-term perspective and direct experience with wildfires, he could come and speak to people with varying views with great intellectual heft and legitimacy. It may seem odd to you that we are basically discussing the same things (Roadless, fuel treatments) today but where would we be without forest Service scientists to talk to and call upon?
Oh, and maybe this is nothing to the Science Establishment, but all work done by FS R&D scientists is open access. That means that non-federal hoi polloi have access. Science For the People!
I’d like to send these ideas in to the reporter, along with your own. Since it seems that reporters tend to use emotional quotes from people, if you want to make an emotional comment about how FS R&D scientists or work funded by FS R&D helped you in your work, please comment. Emotion and colorful language, with perhaps a dash of hyperbole, would be good for these purposes.
In 2007, the Angora Fire burned through this landscape overlooking Lake Tahoe. Taken in 2022, this image and researcher surveys show that, even 19 years later, most of the burned area continues to support very few or no tree seedlings. (Hugh Safford/UC Davis)
This came across my X feed shortly after I posted the prior piece on reforestation. Maybe Jim and I should start the Geezers’GRAN Reforestation Advocacy Network.. conveniently the acronym would be GRAN… would be better with a D at the end.
From UC Davis..
Wildfire-Driven Deforestation Rates in California Among Highest in World
Reforestation Efforts Fall Far Behind Rate of Loss
Here’s a link.
I think we knew most of this, but it’s interesting that Canada has taken a different approach.
The team found that on Forest Service lands only about 8% of high-priority areas and less than 3% of acute-priority areas were reforested during the entire study period. Between 2016 and 2023, only about 1% of deforested Forest Service lands were replanted. In contrast, on private industrial timberlands, more than 90% of severely burned lands were replanted.
Fire-driven reforestation needs
The state’s greatest reforestation needs are in Sierra Nevada mixed conifer forests and Northern California Douglas-fir forests, especially areas hit by the massive 2020 and 2021 wildfires: the northern Inner Coast Ranges, the northern Sierra Nevada–southern Cascades, and the southwestern Sierra Nevada.
While middle-elevation forests experienced the greatest losses, high-elevation forests showed the fastest increases in deforestation.
Those rates are right up there with the world’s leaders in fire-driven forest loss.” — Hugh Safford, UC Davis
The paper noted that federal budgets and staffing for reforestation have been dropping for decades, even as drought, wildfire and pest outbreaks increase. This is in contrast to Canada, where similar trends have led to increases in budgets for reforestation science and management. Without sustained, substantial intervention, current restoration efforts will not be enough to prevent the long-term transformation of California’s forest ecosystems.
“California has much more fire-driven forest loss than people understand,” Safford said. “It’s high even by international standards. It’s happening more in high-elevation, climate-sensitive areas that protect our watersheds, and there’s almost nothing being done about it. If commensurate actions aren’t taken soon, we’re going to lose huge areas of conifer forest and the ecosystem services those forests provide.”
One problem is that in some places in California, successful reforestation (at least in the day) required herbicide treatments. In one place I visited in the last few years, Tribal folks didn’t want herbicide use, while the neighboring industry land had successful reforestation with herbicides. That adds another complexity.. where experts and studies would be handy. Or maybe that’s not an issue in California at the present. Maybe it’s just the bucks. Or key NGOs are busy scaling up?
I think the FS should decide itself to be the leader with expertise in both planning and implementation (and carry through), with partners for sure. We were there once, and the FS could be there again. With interagency agreements with Interior agencies.
