The Smokey Wire : National Forest News and Views

Steve Wilent posted about the Trump administration allowing motorized electronic e-bikes on nonmotorized trails back in August. Here’s that post and discussion/debate.

Today, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) and a coalition of conservation groups and affected individuals filed a lawsuit to restore the ban on e-bikes in National Parks. Here’s the PEER press release:

Washington, DC — The recent National Park Service (NPS) order allowing electric bicycles on park trails violates several federal laws and should be rescinded, according to a lawsuit filed today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) and a coalition of conservation groups and affected individuals. Nearly 25 National Park System units have acted to implement the e-bikes order.

Following a Secretarial Order by Interior Secretary David Bernhardt directing that all Interior Department agencies, including the NPS, immediately allow e-bikes “where other types of bicycles are allowed,” on August 30, 2019, Deputy NPS Director P. Daniel Smith issued a “Policy Memorandum” ordering all park superintendents to now allow e-bikes on trails where the parks currently allow bicycles.

The PEER suit cites several legal impediments to the NPS order, including that it:

• Violated NPS’s own regulations that may not be set aside by administrative fiat;

• Improperly evaded legally-required environmental reviews; and

• Came from an official, Smith, who lacked the authority to issue such an order.

“This e-bikes order illustrates an improper and destructive way to manage our National Parks,” stated PEER Executive Director Tim Whitehouse, a former enforcement attorney with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. “Concerned groups and individuals are joining PEER in demanding that the Park Service follow the normal regulatory processes and assess the additional impacts that higher speed e-bike riders pose both to other trail users and to wildlife in the parks.”

It also turns out that Bernhardt and Smith’s staffs have been regularly meeting behind closed doors with an industry-dominated advisory committee called the “E-bike Partner & Agency Group” at Interior Headquarters and through teleconferences. E-bike vendors stand to profit from the NPS move. The PEER suit demands a halt to these meetings because they violate the Federal Advisory Committee Act, which requires transparency to prevent such clandestine lobbying.

“The impetus from industry is not surprising given that, as a former industry lobbyist himself, Secretary Bernhardt is known for hearing industry concerns and not public concerns,” added Whitehouse, noting that other Bernhardt moves, such as forbidding parks from trying to limit plastic bottle sales, are a form of creeping commercialization affecting park policies. “E-bikes represent another inroad of commercialized recreation into our National Parks.”

Joining PEER in the suit as co-plaintiffs are Wilderness Watch, Marin Conservation League, Environmental Action Committee of West Marin, Save Our Seashore, and three impacted individuals.

Read the PEER suit

See partial list of National Park units moving to allow e-bikes

Find out more about the issue

Thanks to Nick Smith for including this press release in his Healthy Forests, Healthy Communities news roundup today. The paper mentioned is here ($S). Goshawks prefer late-seral forest, but such stands are at greater risk of fire. California spotted owls aren’t the only at-risk species.

Changing wildfires in the California’s Sierra Nevada may threaten northern goshawks

Amsterdam, December 5, 2019 – Wildfire is a natural process in the forests of the western US, and many species have evolved to tolerate, if not benefit from it. But wildfire is changing. Research in the journal Biological Conservation, published by Elsevier, suggests fire, as it becomes more frequent and severe, poses a substantial risk to goshawks in the Sierra Nevada region.

How Northern Goshawks respond to fire is not well understood. The single study to date examined the effects of fire on nest placement and found that the birds avoided nesting in areas burned at high severity. The effects of fire on the birds’ roosting and foraging habitat however may be more complex, because prey populations may temporarily increase in burned areas and improve their quality as a foraging habitat.

“To effectively manage and conserve wildlife, we need to understand how animals use the landscape across their life cycle,” noted corresponding author Dr. Rachel Blakey at The Institute for Bird Populations and UCLA La Kretz Center for California Conservation Science.

Dr. Blakey and her colleagues at the institute wanted to better understand the habitat preferences of Northern Goshawks. In collaboration with scientists at the US Forest Service and the US Geological Survey Missouri Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit at the University of Missouri, the research team looked specifically at how goshawks use burned areas in the Plumas National Forest, California.

Twenty Goshawks were fitted with solar-powered global positioning system (GPS) tracking devices that monitored the habitats the goshawks chose for foraging and night-time roosting. Goshawks preferred forest stands with larger, more mature trees and higher canopy cover-also called “late seral” forest-for both roosting and foraging.

“While there was individual and sex-based variability in selection of habitat at the finest scales, at the larger spatial scales that are arguably most important for management, goshawks consistently selected for late-seral forest,” added Dr. Blakey.

Unfortunately, late-seral forest is already in short supply in the western US and the attributes that make it attractive to Northern Goshawks also put it at a high risk of large and severe wildfires. Further analysis of the study area showed that 80 percent foraging habitat and 87 percent of roost sites were designated a “High Wildfire Potential Hazard” by the US Forest Service.

Rodney Siegel, Executive Director of The Institute for Bird Populations and co-author of the study said “A lot of work by our organization and others over the past decade has shown that some wildlife species are quite resilient to forest fire and can even thrive in recently burned forests.

“But habitat selection by the Northern Goshawks we studied suggests that these birds, with their strong preference for late seral forest attributes like big trees and closed forest canopy, are jeopardized by changing fire patterns that reduce forest cover,” added Dr. Siegel.

Dr. Siegel also notes that reducing wildfire risk in goshawk habitat will be a major challenge for forest managers. “The treatments to reduce risk of high-severity fire, including forest thinning and prescribed fire, may also reduce goshawk foraging and roosting habitat quality if they decrease canopy cover and fragment late-seral forest,” said Dr. Siegel.

Dr. Blakey expects that the foraging and roosting habitat preferences seen in goshawks in this study are probably common to goshawks throughout the Sierra Nevada region, and perhaps western montane forests in general. Likewise, this preferred habitat is likely at risk of high severity fire across the region as well.

“Given that fire regimes are changing across the range of the Northern Goshawk, both in the US and across the species’ distribution globally, the use of burned habitats by this species should also be investigated more broadly,” concluded Dr. Blakey.

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The following piece was written by Brandon Keim, who provides comments on this blog once in a while. It’s shared here with his permission. – mk

When to let a dead tree lie

It’s often argued that logging trees killed by insects or diseases is beneficial for forests—but evidence is mounting that it causes long-term ecological disruption.

By Brandon Keim

When trees are damaged by insects or disease, there’s often pressure to cut them down. It’s argued that “salvaging” these trees is actually beneficial for forests—but evidence is mounting that it causes long-term ecological disruption.

The latest findings come from Białowieża Forest, a 550-square-mile woodland that straddles Poland and Belarus and is a last redoubt of the vast forest that once stretched from France to Russia. Long the protected domain of aristocracy, Białowieża escaped large-scale logging; it’s one of the few places in Europe where natural cycles of wind, fire, and disease still shape a forest at landscape scales.

Only during the last century has logging taken place. A prime target is the dead trees that are present in far larger numbers than in commercially-managed forests, in particular trees afflicted by bark beetles. Salvage logging following outbreaks is presented by supporters as ecologically beneficial, but it “alters the potential for natural regeneration,” says Anna Orczewska, an ecologist at the University of Silesia.

Orczewska is the lead author on a new study, published in the journal Biodiversity and Conservation, of what grows in the aftermath of salvage logging in Białowieża. The forest is set on a new trajectory; “the human ‘clean-up’ attitude,” writes Orczewska and colleagues, “inevitably leads to the homogenization of the forest.”

The researchers looked at the so-called herb layer—low-growing grasses, ferns, and flowering plants—in sites where spruce and pine trees were killed by beetle outbreaks and either logged or left alone. Salvage logging in Białowieża, as in many places worldwide, involves clearcuts followed by removal of trees with heavy machinery and plantation-style replanting.

Several years later, the herb layer in logged sites was dominated by disturbance specialists rarely found within the intact forest. The previous herb layer was largely destroyed by machinery or withered in the suddenly intense sunshine. Their seeds did not sprout. When beetle-killed trees were left alone, though, the original herb layer regrew. Dead trees provided necessary shade; their fallen trunks and branches created pockets of protection from grazing.

In short, the regrowth that occurred after natural disturbance was dramatically different from that which occurred after human-driven disturbance. And whereas the former represent the first stages in a cycle that will eventually restore the original plant community, the latter represent something different. The new, disturbance-specialized assemblage may persist for decades. “In some cases, it seems that pre-disturbance herb layer assemblages never recover,” write Orczewska’s team.

They argue that salvage logging is actually worse than disease outbreaks for Białowieża’s plant communities—a lesson that, though based in this study on the research in Białowieża, is broadly applicable elsewhere. Natural disturbances create structurally and biologically complex forests.

“In the era of global warming we should eliminate salvage logging, at least in forests which still hold the potential for natural regeneration,” Orczewska says. “Instead we continue cutting.”

Source: Orczewska et al. “The impact of salvage logging on herb layer species composition and plant community recovery in Białowieża Forest.” Biodiversity and Conservation, 2019. Open access here.

About the author: Brandon Keim is a freelance journalist specializing in animals, nature and science. He is now writing Meet the Neighbors, a book about what animal personhood means for our relationships to animals and to nature. Connect with him on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.