BLACKDUCK, MINNESOTA – August 1, 2019 – The Chippewa National Forest (Forest) is seeking comments on the Forest-Wide Permanent Opening Management Project. To assure your comments are fully considered during this scoping phase of the project, we request that you submit comments by August 30, 2019.
The purpose of the project is to develop a management plan for the long-term maintenance and/or enhancement of high-quality permanent openings (POs). These openings are areas of land managed in order to create and maintain a wildlife habitatof grass, low shrub, and/or herbaceous ground cover. The project proposes to reduce the number of current PO’s from 4,103 to 513 and the managed acres from 7,313 to 1,223 across National Forest System lands within the Forest. Management would focus on high-quality POs that would benefit the native flora, fauna, ecosystems, and processes endemic to the lands within the Forest boundaries.
To assure your comments are fully considered during this scoping phase of the project, we request that you submit comments by August 30, 2019. Submit your comments electronically in a common file format (.doc, .docx, .pdf, .rtf, .txt) to: [email protected] with the subject line “Permanent Opening Project.” Please include your name, address, telephone number, and the title of the project with your comments. OR Mail your comments to the Blackduck Ranger District Office, Attn: District Ranger, Karen Lessard, 417 Forestry Drive, Blackduck, MN 56630. You can also submit your comments by fax to: (218) 835-3132.
For additional information about the public comment process or to receive a map of the project area, please contact Karen Lessard at: 218-835-4291 or [email protected].
Botanist Andy Walker of US Forest Service discusses a failed road and culvert that remains impassable this summer in the Croatan National Forest following storm damage from Hurricane Florence last year. Jack Igelman / Carolina Public Press[/caption
Another great story by Jack Igelman of the Carolina Public Press- full of interesting information about what happened on the Croatan National Forest with Hurricane Florence and their response. Here are just a few excerpts. The whole piece is worth reading and there are additional photos.
Facilities
While much of the interior of the Croatan is remote and difficult to access, the heavily used recreational components of the forest along the Neuse River were crippled, including three recreation areas that have campgrounds and beaches that remain closed.
Among the hardest-hit areas was the beach and a retaining wall at Flanners Beach in the Neuse River Recreation Area, which was destroyed by waves and wind that battered the shoreline during the storm.
“We are working really hard to get the campgrounds and beaches up and running,” Hudson said. But he added that “the number one priority right now is public safety.”
The popular fee areas are also a source of funds the Forest Service relies on to maintain campground facilities.
Also impacted by the storm is an 18-mile portion of the 21-mile Neusiok Trail, a segment of the Mountains-to-Sea Trail, which remains closed until Forest Service fire crews can remove damaged trees.
Gene Huntsman, a retired ichthyologist, helped carve the first mile of the Neusiok Trail in 1973 and remains active in stewarding the footpath. Much of the trail, he said, is maintained by volunteer groups, including the Carteret County Wildlife Club and other recreational organizations in collaboration with the Forest Service.
“The trail got mommicked,” Huntsman said. “It is so jungly down here that when a tree comes down, you don’t just get a tree, you get all of the vines and stuff that come with it. It took many people many hours of chain sawing, clipping and hauling to clear the trail.”
Prescribed Burn Program
One of the direct impacts on forest management from Hurricane Florence was that Forest Service resources have been diverted from managed fire.
Since the hurricane, the Forest Service has not conducted any prescribed burns. Staff members hope to resume burning once damaged roads and firelines have been restored this fall.
According to Hudson, the Forest Service targets managed burns in a single location of the Croatan every two to five years to match the natural cycle of fire. The annual goal is to burn roughly 15,000 to 20,000 acres.
How a fire burns depends on a range of factors, such as wind, humidity, topography and fuel load. A forest understory that’s too thick, for example, can stoke flames that burn longer and hotter and can damage longleaf pines or burn out precious species.
Managing fire and smoke also become more difficult and costly, and may produce health and safety concerns in nearby communities.
Hudson and Walker agree that missing one season of fire is manageable, but they are concerned about other future threats that can slow the progress of regular burns, such as funding, increasing development in areas bordering the forest and future large storms with damage on the scale of Florence.
“Once we fall behind on burning, it makes it that much harder to get caught up. If we get too far behind, the effects could be felt for years. The heavier the fuel load, the more difficult and costly each successive burn,” Walker said.
Rare Species
Since woodpeckers choose aging trees that are often hollowed out by disease, the trees are prone to damage caused by high winds. Throughout the forest, 150 trees with woodpecker cavities were snapped in two or damaged by the storm, which accounts for roughly 10 percent of the forest’s confirmed woodpecker nests.
To make up for the lost nests, the Forest Service drilled cavities in trees and installed 116 inserts developed by the N.C. Division of Wildlife that resemble a natural cavity.
Despite the damage, Cobos said, the woodpecker population is stable and evidence of the resilience of nature.
In fact, some rare species in the Croatan, Walker said, may not only have survived the storm but also are thriving because of it, such as the Carolina gopher frog, which requires fishless bodies of water to breed that were in abundance in the wake of the storm.
Another example is the well-known bug-eating Venus flytrap, whose range is limited to just a few portions of the Carolinas and flourishes in open longleaf ecosystems.
“Their seeds are like little tiny cannonballs that are dispersed by raindrops and may have been carried by floods,” Walker said. “We may find flytraps in places we haven’t found them before.”
For many of us, our natural terrain is not history and philosophy of science. But we need to dip into that world a bit to understand the context for what people mean when they use the term “science” in discussions today.
“Science” itself is an abstraction. In a novel by Andrew Greeley, the sociologist of religion, priest and fiction writer, he puts these words into the mouth of Bishop Blackie Ryan (speaking of individualism): “Actually,” I continued blissfully, “the word is a label, an artifact under which one may subsume a number of often contrasting and sometimes contradictory developments and ideas. Such constructs may be useful for shorthand conversation and perhaps for undergraduate instruction, but they ought not to be reified as if there is some overpowering reality in the outside world that corresponds to them.” Blackie goes on to say “in my experience all words that end in “ism” or “ization” are also constructs that should not be confused with reality.”
Any abstractions can be defined by different people, at different times, for different ends, or just change as ideas drift through time with no discernible cause. Privileged access to forms of communication may lead to other definitions falling by the wayside, or to no open discussion of definitions of abstractions (because generally who has the patience?), which leads to batting abstractions back and forth instead of deeper dialogue. Note: some of this can be laid at the feet of Plato and Aristotle, but I don’t think we need to go there.
Nevertheless, we can see that there are differences between science from the time of Thomas Aquinas- a time when theology was the “queen of the sciences,” to today when some have claimed that physics is now the queen (no doubt agriculture and forest research remain serfs under any classification scheme). But perhaps we should skip ahead and talk about who we define as a “scientist” today.
Maybe a good place to start would be 1981, when Sir Peter Medawar wrote a book called “Advice to a Young Scientist”. Medawar won the Nobel prize for his work in immunology and also wrote quite a bit about science and scientists. The 80’s are when the advisors, or the advisors of the advisors, of today’s students were being trained, and is also within the memory of many alive today.
Here are a few quotes from that book:
There is no such thing as a Scientific Mind. Scientists are people of very dissimilar temperaments doing different things in very different ways. Among scientists are collectors, classifiers and compulsive tidiers-up; many are detectives by temperament and many are explorers; some are artists and others artisans. There are poet-scientists and philosopher-scientists and even a few mystics. What sort of mind or temperament can all these people be supposed to have in common? Obligative scientists must be very rare, and most people who are in fact scientists could easily have been something else instead.
It is not easy and will not always be necessary to draw a sharp distinction between “real” research scientists and those who carry out scientific operations apparently by rote. Among those half-million or so practitioners who. classified themselves as scientists might easily have been the kind of man employed by any large and well-regulated public swimming pool: the man who checks the hydrogen-iron concentration of the water and keeps an eye on the bacterial and fungal flora. I can almost hear the contemptuous snort with which the pretensions of such a one to be thought a scientist will be dismissed.
But wait; scientist is as scientist does. If the attendant is intelligent and ambitious, he may build upon his school science by trying to bone up a little bacteriology or medical mycology in a public library or at night school, where he will certainly learn that the warmth and wetness that make the swimming pool agreeable to human beings are also conducive to the growth of microorganisms. Conversely, the chlorine that discourages bacteria is equally offensive to human beings; the attendant’s thoughts might easily turn to the problem of how best to keep down the bacteria and the fungi without enormous cost to his employer and without frightening his patrons away. Perhaps he will experiment on a small scale in his evaluation of alternative methods of purification. He will in any case keep a record of the relationship between the density of the population of microorganisms and the number of users of the pool, and experiment with adjusting the concentration of chlorine in accordance with his expectation of the number of his patrons on any particular day. If he does these things, he will be acting as a scientist rather than as a hired hand. The important thing is the inclination to get at the truth of matters as far as he is able and to take the steps that will make it reasonably 1ikely he will do so.”
One of the most challenging aspects of increasing total knowledge, in our forest world, is to bring practitioner knowledge and academic knowledge together. Right now we can discuss our own definitions of scientists by paycheck, or by training, or by engaging in structured learning. These distinctions are still contested today and underlie many policy discussions.
Marty, a 2-year-old cattle dog mix, ate something, presumably human feces, on an area trail that got him high on THC. His owner took him to local vet Scott Dolginow, who said he is seeing more cases of dogs with marijuana toxicity. Photo courtesyA cautionary tale in the ever-popular “poop along trails” news,.. here’s a link to an Aspen Time story.
Dogs in the Roaring Fork Valley have found another way to get stoned other than the boring break-in of edibles at home: They are eating human feces tainted with marijuana.
Dr. Scott Dolginow, who owns Valley Emergency Pet Care in Basalt, said he is seeing anywhere between three and 10 dogs a week that come in with marijuana toxicity.
His working theory is that these dogs are eating human feces that have enough THC, the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana, in it to carry over for a second high. And they are finding these piles of pot-laced poop on trails and in campgrounds.
“Seventy to 80% of people say they have no idea where their dogs got it, but they say they were out on a trail or camping,” he said. “I can’t believe that the owners are lying.”
Just ask Rebecca Cole, the owner of Marty, a 2-year-old cattle dog mix that got into something on the No Problem Joe Trail and ruined a Sunday evening this past spring.
After spending part of the day on the trails east of Aspen, Cole noticed Marty acting strangely — staggering, throwing up, peeing on the floor and just generally out of it.
“He was crashed out; I had to carry him to the vet,” she said. “I literally walked in the door and they said he was high. … I couldn’t believe it because I don’t have anything in my house.”
Cole said she saw Marty with a chunk of something in his mouth on the trail but didn’t think anything of it.
“Most dogs will eat human feces given the opportunity,” Dolginow said.
Dolginow, who also owns a vet clinic in Moab near a lot of camping areas, said there are too many instances of dogs coming in with THC toxicity symptoms after being outside to not think human feces is the source.
“It’s unlikely that many people toss an edible or a roach on the side of the trail,” he said. “It also makes sense from the level of toxicity we see.”
The phenomenon is occurring in places like San Francisco where there is a high population of homeless people who defecate in parks.
Oftentimes there’s not much vets can do and owners have to just let their dogs ride it out until they come down.
In more severe cases dogs are either sedated or are treated with IV fluids, Dolginow said.
He added that when he is hiking Hunter Creek he notices human feces just off the trail on a regular basis.
Pryce Hadley, ranger supervisor for Pitkin County Open Space and Trails, said he has not seen evidence of human waste on open space.
“Obviously we encourage people to follow the ‘leave no trace’ principles in the backcountry and use established facilities in the front country,” he said.
Cole would appreciate that, too.
“It was scary,” she said. “I want people to pick up their poop.”
The 4th Circuit of Appeals ruled against the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s September 2018 Biological Opinion (BO) for the Atlantic Coast Pipeline certificate of public convenience issued by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission under the National Gas Act (again). A portion of the pipeline project transverses the Monongahela and George Washington National Forests. Forest Service decisions allowing the pipeline have also been invalidated and were discussed here. The Appalachian Trail crossing issue has been appealed to the U. S. Supreme Court (discussed here).
The New Hampshire Supreme Court upheld the rejection by the state Site Evaluation Committee last year of a large power corridor cutting through the White Mountain National Forest .
The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has vacated the sentence of a man convicted of federal charges he polluted waters of the United States by digging ponds on his property and the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest (because he died).
A Montana State District Court held that Montana illegally re-issued a water pollution discharge permit in 2004 for the proposed Montanore copper and silver mine under the Cabinet Mountains on the Kootenai National Forest. This is in addition to legal violations by the Forest Service discussed here.
From Pielke Jr. tweet, note that 2009 should be 3M acres.
This piece in The Economist talks about wildland fire and firefighting in Alaska, a topic of interest to us. It appears, though, that pieces of information have been collected in order to generalize to the below conclusions.
More heat than light
There are two big cautionary lessons here. One is that, beyond the dysfunction in Washington, the excellence of America’s institutions is creating a false sense of security about the long-term threats its politicians are neglecting. That is starkly true of America’s early efforts to adapt to global warming. But much the same could be said for its armed forces, diplomatic service, judiciary and other institutional crutches against manifold threats. This is not sustainable. Without better leadership, there will be a reckoning.
The second lesson, given how little public attention has been paid to the wildfires, is that there is little reason to think increased natural disasters alone will produce the necessary leadership. Many Americans, and by extension their politicians, are already becoming inured to global warming’s devastating effects.
(my italics, “little attention”, where? Not in government nor in the press…)
What was most interesting to me was that Roger Pielke, Jr. decided to look up trends (on the Alaska State Government wildfire database here)
There’s an interesting discussion on Roger Pielke (Jr.)’s Twitter feed here. He found the statistics and posted them (see figure above). David Greene tweeted a correction, so it looks like someone checked on Roger’s figure. Meanwhile I took a look at 2009 to check David’s checking and found that 1.35 M acres were WFU, but I couldn’t find any WFU in the years before or after. Maybe someone knows more about this…
But back to the Economist story.
“A few thousand wildfire fighters stand between America and a terrible reckoning” That seems a bit of a low estimate, based on other figures.
“Wildfire fighters are racking up twice as much overtime as they were a few years ago, in part because there are fewer of them. The number of federal firefighters has fallen by over 2,000. That is a result of cost-cutting and also increased competition for free spirits from fracking and other extractive industries in the western states. More hazardous infernos are another disincentive. Almost 200 wildlife firefighters have perished in the past decade. America is therefore starting to run short of some of its most heroic public servants even as its need for them soars.
Areas formerly prioritised for protection—including native American forest—are being abandoned in times of high activity. And there will be more of these. Climate models augur a huge increase in wildfires’ frequency and range. Yet with many politicians on the right denying the reality of global warming, no government or agency has made a serious effort to model what firefighting resources will be needed, to defend what areas and at what cost.
I looked around on the internet in the usual places and couldn’t easily find totals for different kinds of wildland firefighters through time, but I did find this article about California firefighters and the different places firefighters come from. I don’t know where the author got his information that “fracking and other extractive industries” were the competition for firefighter, and not, for example, the burgeoning wind and solar industry in the West.
Now it appears that a State with a D governor, that is, California, is taking action to increase the number of firefighters. But maybe CalFire hasn’t done what the author of the Lexington column thinks is appropriate future modelling. And if that’s the case, it’s not because he’s an R.
I had to sign up for The Economist and they sent me a welcome email.
Welcome to The Economist. I look forward to introducing you to our distinct blend of fact-filled reporting, mind-stretching analysis and elegant writing. Since 1843 we have been the voice of progress in politics, business, science and culture.
I guess it’s mind-stretching if you feel you need to research every claim made :).
A news article, “U.S. Forest Service announces massive RFP to clear out Arizona forests,” describes the RFP here, which has this aim: “At full production, awarded contracts will seek to mechanically thin between 605,000 and 818,000 acres over 20 years within six separate sub-areas located in portions of the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest, Coconino National Forest, Kabab National Forest, and the Tonto National Forest.”
The agency notes that “This is one of the first times the Agency is using the recently authorized 20-year stewardship authority (from the 2018 Omnibus Bill).”
Lots of info from the agency, such as Examples of Desired Conditions after Mechanical Treatments, with images for:
All aged stand
Moderate Site
Savanna
Group Selection
Artificial Constraints
Variable Spacing Rx
A related article, “Conservation groups help pick up the slack in forest thinning,” says that “Environmentalists, conservation groups and local officials have all united behind the idea of thinning the forest to not only reduce the threat of catastrophic wildfires, but improve conditions for wildlife.” Mention only the Wild Turkey Federation.
The article notes that a$1,000-per-acre subsidy, as for the White Mountain Stewardship project, “would cost about $2 billion to accelerate the thinning of the more than 2 million acres in the footprint of 4FRI.” Of course, not every acre needs treatments. But that offers a bit of perspective on the scale of the need.
Thanks to Nick Smith of Healthy Forests, Healthy Communities for the link to the article on the RFP.
I ran across these links to Canadian fire and forest info, and thought they were pretty interesting. You can break them down by province, source of ignition, and so on. Of course, everything from BC to PEI is in the combined statistics. I wonder what the data would show if it were arrayed as “forest fires of similar vegetation types across western North America? Maybe someone’s done that.
Here’s the link to the fire info in the Forestry Database (which has a variety of other interesting info, including forest products prices, that you can find from this dashboard).
Here’s a link to the Canadian National Fire Database. This shows some of the reports you can play with.
An open-access article from the Journal of Forestry by Terry Jain, “The 21st Century Silviculturist.” With discussion by Connie Harrington and others. Worth a read and discussion here.
Introduction
As a discipline, silviculture has a long legacy of practitioners who mentored the next generation, passing their knowledge—and vision for the future—onward. For example, silviculturists in the northern Rocky Mountains such as Julies Larson, Irvine Haig, Chuck Wellner, and Russ Graham (Graham 2009) followed this mentoring process, leaving a legacy of knowledge and irreplaceable experiences that many others have been privileged to incorporate into their own careers. Along these lines, we offer this discussion. The unique opinions and perspectives of this group of silviculturists from across the United States are intended to contribute to the mentoring process by offering our thoughts on the promises and challenges facing 21st century silviculturists, beginning with my own insights concerning the future of our profession.
The BBC’s article, “Could Wooden Buildings be a Solution to Climate Change?” looks not only at the carbon content of mass timbers such as cross-laminated timbers, but also at CO2 in forests. Some bloggers here will disagree with the author’s assertions. In my view, we have in mass timber structures a means of addressing the apparent increase in mortality in western US forests, including the iconic Douglas-fir: More mortality means more GHGs are released via decomposition and wildfire. Instead of leaving dead trees where they are, we ought to use some of them (not all dead and dying trees, of course, and not from reserved areas, but in areas on National Forests and elsewhere where harvesting is allowed) to produce CLTs, etc., which leads to a reduction in the use of steel and concrete, the world’s two largest sources of GHGs. In stands where mortality is low, but likely to increase, active forest management would both prevent or delay mortality and provide raw materials for mass timbers.
Here’s an excerpt from the article. Read on….
Recently there have been calls for tree planting on a colossal scale to capture CO2 and curb climate change. However, whilst young trees are efficient and effective carbon sinks, the same is not so true for mature trees. The Earth maintains a balanced carbon cycle – trees (along with all other plants and animals) grow using carbon, they fall and die, and release that carbon again. That balance was knocked out of kilter when humans discovered ancient stores of carbon in the form of coal and oil, which had been captured during previous carbon cycles, and began burning them, releasing the resulting CO2 into our atmosphere far faster than the current cycle can deal with.
Many pine trees in managed forests, such as the European spruce, take roughly 80 years to reach maturity, being net absorbers of carbon during those years of growth – but once they reach maturity, they shed roughly as much carbon through the decomposition of needles and fallen branches as they absorb. As was the case in Austria in the 1990s, plummeting demand for paper and wood saw huge swathes of managed forests globally fall into disuse. Rather than return to pristine wilderness, these monocrops cover forest floors in acidic pine needles and dead branches. Canada’s great forests for example have actually emitted more carbon than they absorb since 2001, thanks to mature trees no longer being actively felled.
Arguably, the best form of carbon sequestration is to chop down trees: to restore our sustainable, managed forests, and use the resulting wood as a building material. Managed forests certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) typically plant two to three trees for every tree felled – meaning the more demand there is for wood, the greater the growth in both forest cover and CO2-hungry young trees.
