Recovery from Waldo Canyon: WGA Working Lands Roundtable Presentation by Sallie Clarke

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The Western Governors’ Association has been having a Working Lands Roundtable with sessions on different topics.  I previously posted on a session here.  Here is a link to the presentations- they are all on video. Nothing “newsworthy” happened there. For me, as a retiree who doesn’t work daily with the folks slogging through this kind of work, I realized how much the media I read influences the way I think about what’s going on in the world.  In our forest policy arena, that means that controversies are visible (Bernhardt! Bears Ears!) and the day-to-day work (and non-partisanized successes) mostly invisible.  Speakers mostly discussed  what they wanted to do together, what is helpful and what is problematic, as kind of a large-scale team effort;  to be sure, influenced, but not circumscribed by,  the shifting winds of DC politics and the randomness of court cases.

I’ve mentioned before that sometimes there is a contrast between “people who deal with ideas about things” and “people who deal with things.”  Ideas about things are usually part of academia, other kinds of researchers,  and think tanks. Ideas about things can also be part of partisan narratives, or narratives promoted by unknown funding sources for their unknown reasons.  “People who deal with things” include firefighters, county commissioners, homeowners, agency employees, farmers and ranchers, and so on. These WGA workshops are relatively unique in that the speakers tend to be people who deal with things.

For example, I think this Youtube clip of a talk by former El Paso County Commissioner Sallie Clarke shows what it’s like to be on the ground working with communities during and post fire. Clarke’s presentation caused me to reflect on her and El Paso County’s experience compared to some of the ideas that are floating around out there.

(1) One is “wildfires wouldn’t be a problem if people wouldn’t build houses in fire prone country.”  New building may increase the acreage with house, infrastructure and evacuation problems, but fires are still problems with the towns, cities and communities that are already built.  Plus the communities downstream from where the big fires are. So being careful about adding buildings is important, but will not make wildfire/human problems go away.

The second idea is often associated with Jack Cohen’s work on structures and says that (2) if you want to protect homes or other buildings, you need to focus on fire-resilient building materials and a zone close to the house.  Again, that is an academic answer framed as being about structures, not people in communities.  The approach again, is important but not sufficient.  No one wants fire burning through their communities, even if it doesn’t burn down their houses and neighborhood infrastructure. Talk to someone who has lived through an evacuation.  Talk to someone who has large animals to move during an evacuation, which is not uncommon in El Paso County.  Talk to someone who was trying to evacuate and the roads were blocked, and had to decide whether to leave the car and run for it. Just.. not a good idea.

(3) The third idea is “you don’t need fuel treatments if the treatments are not adjacent to houses.” Yet wildfires can cause flooding that is often not good for the environment and destructive to communities and people- anywhere downstream. We often hear about “the vegetation needs high intensity fires to return to HRV or NRV”  but it’s not all about the veg.  Do hydrologists or fish bios get to weigh in on their own “desired range of variation?”  Wildfires not directly adjacent to communities can still impact them via flooding, silting up reservoirs and other impacts.

For some reason, post-fire flooding doesn’t seem to get the media or academic coverage that wildfires do themselves. Perhaps there’s no controversy or drama.  But if you want to get a feel for the things people need to do to slow water and reduce flooding post-fire, and the collaborations involved, check out Sallie Clark’s presentation or slides.

Mining Corporation Pursuing Project Approval with BLM and DOI Gives Ryan Zinke $234,000 Annual Package to Not “Lobby”

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According to the AP:

Former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke has a new job: a more than $100,000-a-year post with a gold-mining firm that’s pursuing project approvals involving the federal agency that Zinke left fewer than four months ago.

Zinke told The Associated Press on Tuesday that his work for Nevada-based U.S. Gold Corp., which focuses on mining exploration and development, would not constitute lobbying. But that company’s CEO cited Zinke’s “excellent relationship” with the Bureau of Land Management and the Interior Department in explaining his hiring.

“We’re excited to have Secretary Zinke help move us forward” on two pending mining projects, in Nevada and Wyoming, Edward Karr, head of U.S. Gold Corp., said by phone.

Karr said one of the mining projects is on land controlled by the Bureau of Land Management, which is under the Interior Department.

A 2017 executive order by President Donald Trump says executive-branch appointees cannot lobby their former agency for at least five years after leaving their government post.

Separately, criminal statutes impose one and two-year bans on various kinds of communications between senior federal officials and their former agency, said Virginia Canter, chief ethics counsel of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a nonprofit ethics-watchdog.

Slash Piles Burned in the Air or for Bioenergy: Example from British Columbia

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Forest companies regularly burn slash piles after harvesting a site for lumber and pulp. Bioenergy companies say slash burning is a waste because they could use the waste material to create pellets.
– HANDOUT PHOTO

It’s always interesting to see how our northern friends deal with similar forests with different social, political and economic views. This is from Prince George BC. Thanks to the Forest Business Network for providing this link!

The issue is burning slashpiles in the open air instead of selling the material for bioenergy, and the policies that work against it.

“We want to put it to productive use,” said Stirling. “The idea that we don’t have to burn things into the airshed, we can mitigate the risk of forest fire, and take that forest residual in as a product we can make use of, products we can sell into Japan where we are offsetting nuclear and coal emissions, what could be better?”

All wood-pellet (also called bioenergy, biomass or biofuel) plants in northern B.C. already sell as much product as they can manufacture, as fast as they can make it.

Most of it goes to Asia or Europe where it is used in industrial furnaces or electricity generation facilities to reduce the amount of coal, natural gas, nuclear and the worst of the greenhouse gases pollutants used by factories, mills and communities.

Pacific Bioenergy recently signed the biggest contracts in the history of the fledgling bioenergy sector, a sector that was pioneered out of Prince George. These pacts are for the largest amounts of pellets ever asked for and for the longest duration ever established.

…

Here’s why PacBio and the other pellet companies can only stare at these grey skeletons of trees – entire forests of the stuff.
“There may not be saw-log material in that stand, but there certainly is material – ideal material, actually – for our business,” said Stirling but he explained that by provincial legislation, only the lumber company with the charter for that forest is allowed to cut it down and they are only allowed to cut down a set number of trees per year. If they cut down the dead pine, even to give it away to the pellet plants, that leaves them unable to cut down the equivalent amount of trees they need to make lumber.

Furthermore, a lumber company has to pay stumpage (a fee to the taxpayers’ bank account in Victoria) on every tree they cut, but the fee is too high if it’s only going to sell at pellet rates. Stirling said what’s needed is a government policy allowing for biomass harvesting of the otherwise useless timber so that it doesn’t count against the associated lumber company’s harvesting rights. Also, a stumpage rate has to be implemented by Victoria that charges an amount realistic for pellet sales instead of lumber sales.

There is another hurdle, though and it pertains to the brush piles. The lumber companies are held to rigid tree-planting requirements that gets in the way of bioenergy companies moving in to collect the woody debris.

“Don’t give out a contract on December the 10th and say you have to have it done by March 31st,” said Parfitt, illustrating a typical scenario. “What if it snows? What if the roads aren’t in shape until June? And that is why they (lumber companies) want it to burn, because they don’t want to plant it later,” as waiting for the right conditions for bioenergy staff and machines to go in and get the piles sets the treeplanting process back.

O’Donnell said, “That’s where it’s frustrating, because Canfor and Lakeland and all those guys understand that and will make concessions for us to go in there and get their piles. FFT (Forests For Tomorrow, a government program for forest management) and the B.C. government? No.”

It might be changing, said Stirling, offering cautious hope despite it being too late for a lot of piles already in flames.

Restoring pattern to frequent fire forests with variable-density thinning

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Interesting lecture coming up. If anyone here can go, please post a report on what you see and hear.

Restoring pattern to frequent fire forests with variable-density thinning: implementation and initial outcomes

Thursday, May 2, 2019
1:00 PM 2:00 PM

University of California-Davis Asmundson Hall “Big Hannah” (Room 242) Davis, CA

In the abstract for the lecture, I highlighted text that demonstrates the outcomes of such thinning. These treatments are needed throughout the west, including spotted owl habitat. I am mystified why anyone would oppose such management and claim it is “industrial logging” designed to line the coffers of timber companies.

Abstract: Historical forests shaped by fire were highly heterogeneous at the within-stand scale, with dense groups of trees and individual trees interspersed with numerous small gaps. Stem maps from research plots on the Stanislaus National Forest dating to 1929 show that prior to any logging, canopy cover was 45% and over 20% of the area within stands was in canopy gaps where shrubs were abundant. As a result of past logging and fire exclusion, the contemporary stands were denser and more homogeneous, with no gaps and very low shrub cover. To improve resilience to disturbances such as wildfire or drought, while better balancing the needs of associated plant and animal species, we utilized the historical structure as a guide to a ‘variable density’ thinning prescription, comparing this with a standard thinning to an even tree crown spacing, and an unthinned control. Half of the units were then treated with prescribed fire. Mechanical thinning removed 40% of the basal area, and by favoring pines over fir and cedar, produced a species composition similar to the historical reference condition. Variable thinning enhanced within-stand structural heterogeneity and did so at spatial scales similar to heterogeneity found in historical stands. Both thinning treatments experienced significantly less tree mortality during the recent drought than unthinned controls. In addition, understory shrubs and grasses are already much more abundant, especially where thinning was followed by prescribed fire. While still early, it is our hope that the variable density thinning with prescribed fire treatment will not only be more resilient to future wildfires and droughts, but also produce conditions suitable for a greater diversity of species. [emphasis added]

Calif. Aims at Statewide “EIS” for Fuels Management Projects

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Greenwire today: “Efforts to clear fire-prone Calif. forests face hurdles.” Excerpt:

Forest treatment projects must obtain approvals under the California Environmental Quality Act. Butte County Fire Safe Council Executive Director Calli-Jane DeAnda said the environmental review process typically uses up 10 to 15 percent of grant funds local fire agencies receive for forest management projects. The reviews can take years.

The state has been working since 2010 on an environmental impact report that would cover all vegetation treatments in California under one overarching environmental document. It would identify environmentally sound processes for various natural landscapes. Then, if a project were proposed that met the guidelines for its landscape, it could be approved through a “checklist scenario,” according to Board of Forestry and Fire Protection Executive Officer Matt Dias.

Some projects wouldn’t fit the template, he said, and would require more review, but the idea would be to get projects approved and moving forward in a matter of weeks instead of years. A goal has been set to complete the document by the end of the year.

Maybe we need a western US EIS for fuels management projects on federal lands.

 

Let’s Discuss the Rebuttal to the Peery et al. Agenda-Driven Science Paper

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Many thanks to Derek for posting this link to the LBH groups’ rebuttal to the  paper. I think that this is a great thing to discuss, as it gives us insight into the science process as practiced in real life.  Many folks who read this blog have not experienced it directly.

Here’s what I agree with: everyone has an agenda, if only to do research that can be funded and is helpful to people. Having different views and proclivities is part of being human.  It’s only when you make a case that there is a thing called “Science” that has a unique authority and objectivity and therefore deserves a favored place at the decision making table,  that the lived, diverse, conflicted reality of the scientific enterprise becomes an issue.  Frankly, no one believes that scientists are unbiased and objective- except perhaps on topics that don’t have value implications. Remember the old days when people did research on whether bare root or plug seedlings had better survival?

In the rebuttal, the authors state:

 Peery et al.’s personal attacks have no place in science. Like many other scientists, we believe that National Forest management should be motivated and driven by ecological science and conservation biology principles, not timber commodity production imperatives and monetary incentives.

I think that this is a great quote because it lines out exactly what they believe and it turns out that their findings are in line with those beliefs. I think I agree about “personal attacks” and we might agree on what is personal (conduct) versus research critiques.

But imagine if you got another group of scientists together who said:

“like many other scientists, we believe that National Forest management should be motivated and driven by Congressional statutes, which include concepts of multiple use and environmental review and species protection. We believe that the role of science and scientists is to provide insight into the trade offs that may occur and understand the social, economic, physical, and ecological impacts of activities and help develop ways to reduce negative impacts.”

If you didn’t understand the details of their research, which group would you have a tendency to trust?

Peery et al. attack us personally and question our motives, citing our criticism and concerns regarding the USDA Forest Service’s commercial logging program on federal public lands. It is troubling to see Peery et al. personally attacking independent scientists, in the pages of an Ecological Society of America journal, for seeking public access to government-funded scientific data and for raising questions about the scientific integrity of decisions to log public lands. Such personal attacks do not belong in scientific discourse.

But decisions about logging public lands don’t have to do with “scientific integrity”.. because they are not scientific decisions.  Again there seems to be a tendency to think that “science” should determine, rather than inform, policy.  Which it simply can’t, not only for the political science reason that we aren’t a technocracy and voting still counts, but the pragmatic reason that scientists disagree.  Nevertheless,  I do agree that personal attacks don’t belong in scientific journals.

It could be that the Gutiérrez-Peery lab may suffer from funding bias, also known as sponsorship 268 bias, funding outcome bias, funding publication bias, or funding effect, referring to the tendency 269 of a scientific study to support the interests of the study’s financial sponsor (Krimsky 2006). As RJ Gutiérrez wrote when he severed our data-sharing agreement, “We have signed a ‘neutrality 271 agreement’ with the MOU partners associated with the Sierra Nevada Adaptive Management 272 Project. Essentially, this means that use of Eldorado and SNAMP data in a way that could be perceived as conflicting with USFS management or antagonistic to them would be perceived as a  violation of the agreement.” (Supporting Information ‘RGutierrez1’ and 275 ‘USFS&UWisc_contract’). Peery et al. have a long-term financial relationship with the USDA Forest Service—an agency that sells timber from public lands to private logging corporations and retains revenue from such sales for its budget. In light of the Forest Service’s financial interest in commercial logging on public lands, and the fact that the spotted owl has been a major thorn in the side of the Forest Service’s commercial logging program, candid disclosure of  conflicts of interest from spotted owl scientists employed by the Forest Service, including any conditions or constraints associated with that employment, are particularly important.

I am interested in the data sharing agreement, I have never heard of that. Perhaps others know more. But the idea that FS employed and funded scientists come to the conclusions they do because of their source of funding sounds a bit like an attack, not only on the owl folks but pretty much all folks who accept FS bucks for research.

Note: I grew up professionally in the Pacific Northwest with FS scientists Jerry Franklin and Jack Ward Thomas (who weren’t toeing the timber management line in the 80’s) and also having worked for Forest Service R&D for years, my experience is that the timber production part of the FS and scientists mostly have a pretty good firewall. I’d be interested in others’ observations and experiences.

Behind the Science Curtain with One Carbon Science Study: III. Journals, Space and the Streetlight Effect

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Structural Problem: Using the Power of Hyperlinks in Scientific Publishing.. or Not.

For those of us who grew up with paper journals, journal article size was circumscribed by paper publishing. Now publishing in journals is online, but complex datasets may well require more “room” to get at how things are calculated and which numbers are used from which data sets. This seems especially true for some kinds of studies that use a variety of other data sets.  Without that clarity, how can reviewers provide adequate peer review?  As Todd Morgan says:

In some ways, I think journal articles can be a really poor way to communicate some of this information/science.  One key reason is space & word count limits. These limits really restrict authors’ abilities to clearly describe their data sources & methods in detail – especially when working with multiple data sets from different sources and/or multiple methods.  And so much of this science related to carbon uses gobs of data from various sources, originally designed to measure different things and then mashes those data up with a bunch of mathematical relationships from other sources.
For example, the Smith et al. 2006 source cited in the CBM article you brought to my attention is a 200-page document with all sorts of tables from other sources and different tables to be used for different data sets when calculating carbon for HWP. And it sources information from several other large documents with data compiled from yet other sources. From the methods presented in the CBM article, I’m not exactly sure which tables & methods the authors used from Smith et al. and I don’t know exactly what TPO data they used, how they included fuelwood, or why they added mill residue…

As Morgan and I were discussing this via email, Chris Woodall, a Forest Service scientist, and one of the authors of the study added:

“This paper was an attempt to bring together very spatially explicit remotely sensed information (a central part of the NASA carbon monitoring systems grant) with information regarding the status and fate of forest carbon, whether ecosystem or HWP.  We encountered serious hurdles trying to attribute gross carbon changes to disturbances agents, whether fire, wind, or logging.  So much so that deriving net change from gross really eluded us resulting in our paper only getting into CBM as opposed to much higher tier journals.  The issue that took the most work was trying to join TPO data (often at the combo county level) with gridded data which led us to developing a host of look up tables to carry our C calculations through. “

Woodall brings up two structural problems:

Structural Problem: NASA Funding and the Scientific Equivalent of the Streetlight Effect.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect

NASA has money for carbon monitoring based on remote sensing. Therefore, folks will use remote sensing for carbon monitoring and try to link it to other things that aren’t necessarily measured well by remote sensing. Would the approach have been the same if Agency X had funded proposals to “do the best carbon monitoring possible” and given lots of money to collect new data specifically to answer carbon questions?”

Structural Problem: Not all journals are created equal.
But the public and policymakers don’t have a phone app where you type in the journal and it comes out with a ranking. and what would you do with that information anyway? Also, some folks have had trouble publishing in some of the highest ranked journals (e.g., Nature and Science) if their conclusions don’t fit with certain worldviews, and not necessarily that they used incorrect methods, nor that the results are shaky. So knowing the journal can help you determine how strong the evidence is.. or not. But clearly Chris points out that in this case, the research only made it into a lower tier journal. Does that mean anything to policymakers? Should it?

Behind the Science Curtain with One Carbon Science Study: II. A Simple Suggestion For Improving Peer Review

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I found this in a paper about making bio jet fuel. I’m sure that’s not the original source.

 

Thanks to Matthew for pointing out that all kinds of scientists have conscious and unconscious agendas.  That’s why open QA/QC, collaborative design, public peer review, and other techniques can be so valuable for increasing peoples’ confidence in scientific products.  I think everyone agrees on that.  To that end, let’s talk more about the Harris et al. paper. Remember we are looking at it because I looked at Figure 3 and wondered about carbon emissions due to timber harvesting in Nevada and Southern California, places I thought I knew did not have much going on in the timber harvest biz.

Todd Morgan, whose data was used in the study (without asking him), raises some questions about double-counting emissions from mill residues. Now that’s a pretty technical thing. I can’t tell who is right, and I don’t even know the field well enough to know if there is a reviewer out there who a) knows enough to tell the difference, and b) does not have skin in the game (personality conflicts with authors, and so on), so I could ask that (unbiased) person for their point of view.  To know that, you really have to know the folks in a discipline. In many cases, it’s hard to find people like this willing to do reviews (not paid extra, some credit), let alone write a piece for The Smokey Wire (not paid extra, potentially negative credit).

Nevertheless, there is one very simple thing journal editors could require that would have an enormous positive influence IMHO.  If a paper uses a variety of datasets, I would require a letter from each source a) acknowledging that they were asked for data, b) and a finding or questioning whether their data were used appropriately.  These writeups then would be shared with all reviewers.

If I put on my reviewer hat, I would say “Hey, we can’t do that! We’d spend all our time waiting for people to write up their stuff, and we can’t force them to do that, and besides, it’s unlikely I’ll be able to tell who was right if they disagree.”

I don’t think most non-scientists understand how difficult it is to do quality peer review, nor exactly what peer reviewers do. They don’t (can’t) check data sets or calculations. They mostly see if the right techniques (appear to have been) used, the findings are plausible, and the right citations (the reviewers’ own work ;)),  and conclusions are drawn.  I think the whole biz was easier when I was a young scientist and perhaps disciplines were easier to understand, scientists perhaps tried harder to be objective, there was less emphasis on multidisciplinary big data manipulation studies, and findings were easier to ground truth by observation in the area studied.

You get what you pay for, and no one pays for peer review. I acknowledge that many scientists work their tushes off with little acknowledgement or support in this area, but if anyone really cared about good scientific products, we (society) could do a great deal more to support the quality process.

Here are Morgan’s specific concerns about mill residues in the paper:

“I’m skeptical of the methods that have led to such high proportions of carbon loss attributable to harvest (Table 5) – particularly in several western states.
One major concern I have is how/why mill residues seem to be counted twice.  My understanding of the Smith et al [31] publication is that mill residue (e.g., sawdust, etc) from processing timber products (e.g.,sawlogs) into primary products (e.g., lumber) is accounted for in the sequestered vs. emitted fractions for each product.  For example, we see that about 40% of the sawlog volume (in figure 6) is emitted, 40% is landfill, and 20% is in-use.  SO, adding mill residue is essentially double-counting the carbon emissions and sequestration associated with the wood harvested for products. Since the authors assume dispositions for mill residues which show 80-90% emitted (Figure 6), it looks to me like double counting of mill residue is causing much higher amounts of emitted carbon (loss) from harvesting.”

If you had reviewed the paper, wouldn’t you want to see the authors’ answer to this question? And perhaps involve Smith et al. in the discussion?