This is a pretty good story from NPR. One thing that is misses, I think, is that this isn’t all about USFS lands, especially in Northern California’s recent fires near Redding and Napa, where much private land burned. In this light, the USFS’s “shared stewardship” initiative is right on target — except that is does not call for funding to treat areas without merchantable timber that can pay for some or all of fuels-reduction projects.
Senator Bennet on Silverthorne Fuel Treatments- They Dodged a Bullet
I realize that groups of scientists can, and do, write that “fuel treatments don’t work.” But this is pretty much a hard sell around many communities in Colorado. Basically, the argument seems to be that you should believe this subset of scientists over your own experience (even if you aren’t familiar with the scientific literature that says otherwise, as we have looked at on this blog).
Below is an example from Colorado Politics (a valuable resource- wish that all states had this quality and attention of reporting!). We can see a successful fuel treatment, collaboration, and what success looks like in dollars. Note that Senator Bennet is a Democratic Senator from Colorado. #resistpartisanization
SILVERTHORNE • Looking west to California, where a wildfire just exploded into the largest in state history, Colorado forest officials and politicians had a “there but for the grace of God (and a lot of hard work)” moment on the flanks of Buffalo Mountain above Silverthorne on Tuesday.
U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet on Tuesday toured a 90-acre burn area on U.S. Forest Service land adjacent to two Silverthorne neighborhoods that very nearly erupted into a catastrophic loss of property June 12 before crews using slurry bombers, helicopters and boots on the ground beat back the flames. Nearly 1,400 homes were evacuated, but no properties were lost.
Bennet credits 900 acres of defensible space — basically tree clearing — that Forest Service officials completed in 2012 in conjunction with Summit County, Denver Water and the Colorado State Forest Service. The project cost more than $1 million and did not come without pushback.
“I was here in 2012, and this was very controversial to create this kind of firebreak, and you can see why,” Bennet said. “The community is used to living with trees right next to it, but there’s a safe way of doing it. This demonstrates that, and I hope everybody in this state and everybody in the West can see the benefits of this.”
Local and federal officials estimate that by spending $1 million on creating defensible space by clearing trees — an area where firefighters can safely work to combat a wildfire — more than $1 billion in property was saved in Silverthorne during the mid-June Buffalo fire.
“The Buffalo Fire may be the ultimate example of what our goals are when we do those fuel-reduction projects and those fuel breaks,” White River National Forest supervisor Scott Fitzwilliams said. “Sometimes they don’t work out perfectly, but this one did, and the importance can’t be underestimated.”
Over the last 10 years, more than 12,000 acres of national forest have been treated by thinning and clearing in the Dillon Ranger District at a cost of more than $12 million. About a quarter of that cost has been picked up by Denver Water through the Forests to Faucets partnership.
That’s because wildfires devastate watersheds, causing pollution and erosion, and Summit County is one of the most critical sources of water for the Denver metro area. Summit County also has contributed funding as Forest Service mitigation resources dwindled in recent years.
Perhaps this is a case of “economic interests” (homes, businesses, watersheds) triumphing over “ecological interests”- but I don’t think that that would fly as a narrative in Silverthorne.
George Wuerthner on the Poison Pills in the GOP’s House Farm Bill
The following piece was written by George Wuerthner. – mk
In the coming week or so, Congress will be considering the Farm Bill which has numerous inappropriate amendments for our public forests approved in the House but not in the Senate version. The bill’s fate will be decided in a conference committee between the House and Senate. It is critical that Senator John Tester not support the House bill as written because of numerous anti-environmental provisions that will fail to protect communities and increase fire intensity resulting from more logging.
Among the poison pills in the bill are provisions designed to speed logging in the West under the guise of reducing large wildfires. Not only is logging ineffective at halting large fires which are primarily driven by extreme fire weather/climate, but there are many ecological “costs” to logging including the spread of weeds, sedimentation from logging roads, loss of carbon storage, and disturbance to sensitive wildlife.
The House version of the Farm Bill would reduce the requirement for NEPA (National Environmental Policy Act) which protects our public lands from unmitigated logging projects. This will eliminate government accountability.
The bill would also expand the use of “Categorical Exclusions” (CE) to 6000 acres that could lead to clearcuts as large as 9 square miles without any public review. Furthermore, there is no limit on CEs, so the agency could log one 6000-acre block and immediately adjacent log a second or third 6000-acre block.
How big is 6000 acres? A football field is about an acre—so imagine 6000 football fields being cleared of trees.
The worse thing about the proposed House Farm Bill is that these provisions are not based on science, but on flawed assumptions about the effect of logging on wildfires.
Recently more than 200 preeminent scientists signed a letter to Congress finding that proposed solutions to wildfire like thinning forests are ineffective and short-lived.
Worse, such solutions simply do not work under extreme fire weather conditions. With climate change, we are experiencing more extreme fire weather conditions.
To quote from the scientists’ letter: “Thinning is most often proposed to reduce fire risk and lower fire intensity…However, as the climate changes, most of our fires will occur during extreme fire-weather (high winds and temperatures, low humidity, low vegetation moisture). These fires, like the ones burning in the West this summer, will affect large landscapes, regardless of thinning, and, in some cases, burn hundreds or thousands of acres in just a few days.”
The letter goes on to say: “Thinning large trees, including overstory trees in a stand, can increase the rate of fire spread by opening up the forest to increased wind velocity, damage soils, introduce invasive species that increase flammable understory vegetation, and impact wildlife habitat.”
“Thinning also requires an extensive and expensive roads network that degrades water quality by altering hydrological functions, including chronic sediment loads”, the letter states.
It is critical that Senator Tester does not support phony solutions in the House Farm Bill will not work.
Over 38 Senators and over 100 Congressional Representatives signed a letter to Conferees to reject the House provisions. Hopefully, Senator Tester can join with his colleagues and reject this flawed plan for forest mismanagement.
George Wuerthner is an ecologist who has published 38 books including two on fire ecology.
PNAS: Less rain, more wildfire activity
A recent paper in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is informative: “Decreasing fire season precipitation increased recent western US forest wildfire activity,” by Zachary A. Holden et al. (subscription):
Abstract
Western United States wildfire increases have been generally attributed to warming temperatures, either through effects on winter snowpack or summer evaporation. However, near-surface air temperature and evaporative demand are strongly influenced by moisture availability and these interactions and their role in regulating fire activity have never been fully explored. Here we show that previously unnoted declines in summer precipitation from 1979 to 2016 across 31–45% of the forested areas in the western United States are strongly associated with burned area variations. The number of wetting rain days (WRD; days with precipitation ≥2.54 mm) during the fire season partially regulated the temperature and subsequent vapor pressure deficit (VPD) previously implicated as a primary driver of annual wildfire area burned. We use path analysis to decompose the relative influence of declining snowpack, rising temperatures, and declining precipitation on observed fire activity increases. After accounting for interactions, the net effect of WRD anomalies on wildfire area burned was more than 2.5 times greater than the net effect of VPD, and both the WRD and VPD effects were substantially greater than the influence of winter snowpack. These results suggest that precipitation during the fire season exerts the strongest control on burned area either directly through its wetting effects or indirectly through feedbacks to VPD. If these trends persist, decreases in summer precipitation and the associated summertime aridity increases would lead to more burned area across the western United States with far-reaching ecological and socioeconomic impacts.
Forest Ecology, Wildlife Experts Say: Reject the GOP House Farm Bill
It’s been my observation that many of the pro-logging folks that participate on this blog seem to like and agree with much of what Dr. Jerry Franklin has to say.
Well, today 16 leading experts in forest ecology and management, including esteemed professors Norman Christensen of Duke University and Jerry Franklin of the University of Washington, sent a letter to members of Congress who will conference on the Farm Bill describing their concerns on the Forestry Title of H.R. 2, The Agriculture Improvement Act of 2018, the House of Representative’s version of the Farm Bill.
Here are some excerpts from the letter:
“Many of the House bill’s forestry provisions are not supported by science. For instance, the bill seeks to aggressively expand post-fire ‘salvage’ logging on public lands to prevent wildfire, when in reality post-fire logging occurs primarily for economic reasons and rarely contributes to ecological recovery in the disturbed area. Post-fire logging of dead or dying trees is appropriate near roads where standing dead trees pose a safety hazard but should generally be avoided in areas where maintaining natural ecosystem processes is a priority. However, the House language does not recognize this key distinction.”
“By exempting controversial projects from meaningful evaluation and public engagement, the House farm bill runs counter to basic principles of science-based forest management, including the use of best available science and the application of robust decision-making processes. If they were to become law, the House farm bill’s forestry provisions would result in poorly planned, ineffective and harmful management actions that fail to address the vital need to improve the climate and fire resiliency of our national forests and the safety of our communities.”
More information and details can be found here.
Causes of Fire Worseness- Help Complete This List!
Before we start looking at press coverage, we need to list all the possible causes of worseness. Ideally, an article would say “fires are worse as defined by this criterion” and “causes for worseness are complex, and these are the factors that may be involved.” Right now I’d like to ask for help in making a complete list of these factors. Granted, it’s made more difficult by vagueness on what exactly is meant by “worseness” but still, I think we can take a stab at it. Here are a few that I’ve picked up:
Physical/Biological
1. Past Fire Suppression
2. Drought, and heat or combinations of the above (some proportion x, of which is climate change) both as they impact
a) fuel conditions
b) suppression activities
3. Increased length of fire season (some proportion x of which is climate change, but various 2nd order causes, including other climate patterns, more human ignitions, changes in species, and so on)
4. Non-native species with different fire-related characteristics than previous occupants of the landscape.
5. Changes in native fuels (e.g. more dead trees or changes in canopy structure or species composition??)
Social/Economic
6. More people living in the WUI (so infrastructure needs protection)
7. Tourism is more important economically, but smoke and closures impact that.
8. More people living and visiting the woods means more human-caused ignitions.
Suppression Management and Policy
9. Changes in policy (WFU), strategies and tactics.
I became more aware of 4 recently due to an article in New Scientist here. But there are many other articles around.
INVASIVE species of grass are making wildfires in the US up to twice as large and three times as frequent.
One species, cheatgrass, is now widespread in California and was involved in last year’s Thomas Fire, the largest recorded in the state until the Mendocino Complex Fire now burning (see Converted 747 flies to the rescue in battling California’s giant fire).
Like cheatgrass, many of the invaders are finer than native species, and so ignite more easily, and occupy space within and between patches of native grass. Other invaders, such as silk reed, grow more than 3 metres high and can spread fire into trees.
Emily Fusco at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst presented preliminary results of her study last week in New Orleans at the annual meeting of the Ecological Society of America. She analysed the impact of nine widespread alien grasses in areas of the US they have invaded.
Fusco combined this information with ground and satellite fire records, comparing fire frequency and size in infested habitats versus comparable but uninvaded habitats. She found all the invasive species except one made fires more frequent, and all but two made fires larger.
There are also different potential causes for some of the factors listed above. For example, non-Native species extending the fire season as in this NPR story.
Jeanne Chambers of the U.S. Forest Service is another combatant in the war on cheatgrass. She says in Nevada, they’re seeing fires burning as late as November and as early as January.
“That really has never happened in the past. When we have dry conditions and we have cheatgrass in the understory, we have fuels that can allow those fires to burn almost any time of the year.”
But back to my list, does anyone have other “worseness causes” to add?
Forest Service: We need more fires
An article in the Missoulian yesterday discussed “Toward Shared Stewardship Across Landscapes: An Outcome-based Investment Strategy,” a new Forest Service initiative that “rethinks the agency’s approach to wildfire, invasive species, drought and disease.” It seeks a more coordinated and broader-scale approach with the states. It seems to focus mostly on “systems that evolved with frequent fire.”
“Pre-settlement, 20 percent of California was on fire every year,” Phipps said. “That’s the scale of the problem. Lots of communities are doing wildfire protection planning, but they’ve been looking at, on average, 50 times less than the large landscapes we need to be concerned about.
“This is not about pruning trees,” Phipps continued. “Today, on average we’re treating about 1 to 2 percent of the area we need. We need to create conditions where 30 to 40 percent of that area can be treated with low-intensity ground fire before we get a significant reduction of risk.”
Rawlings also acknowledged that prescribed burning was a more inexpensive way of treating the forest than harvesting. And according to Forest Service research, more burning must happen for even productive timber land to stay healthy. Examinations of last year’s Rice Ridge and Lolo Peak fires near Missoula showed that even heavily logged timber stands had little effect on the big fires’ progress. But past burn scars and prescribed burn areas did slow or redirect the fires.
“We know in these fire-adapted systems, there’s no substitute for fire,” Phipps said. “Even in areas where there’s commercial value, if we want to reduce the fuel density of forests, we still have to bring fire back.”
That raises several challenges. The first is how to reshape public opinion about the need for fire. That means getting people used to having smoky air in the spring and fall, when prescribed burns can take place under safer conditions and release up to 10 times less toxic pollutants than mid-summer megafires.
“Prior planning opens up possibilities for us,” Phipps said. “In a year like this year, it’s not a good strategy to take risks and allow fire to roam on initial attack. But two or three years out of 10, we can allow fire to roam.”
“We need to mutually agree where the best places for investment are,” French said. “The way to get ahead of this is mutual, collaborative, cooperative work across the communities affected. We can’t do it alone.”
It looks like they missed an opportunity to promote the relevance of forest planning to making the strategic decisions about where we consider to be “fire-adapted systems” (or other areas) where active fuels management would be appropriate.
Wildfires, Non-Native Species, Hunting and Sage Grouse
Folks quoted: Nevada State Wildlife specialists.
Worseness due to fires: reduction in habitat of threatened species and other habitat.
Future problems: non-native grasses change fire behavior AND are poor habitat. What to do? Here are some ideas.
I think it’s interesting (I think we’ve seen it before) that you can still hunt species that are threatened, and have massive efforts by ranchers and feds on the habitat side.
The agency says the fire that started in Paradise Valley north of Winnemucca burned 689 square miles of mostly rangeland — the largest fire in Nevada history. Visible from a NASA satellite, it came on the heels of another wildfire last year that burned 267 square miles north of Battle Mountain.
“This fire negatively affected one of the few remaining stronghold habitats for greater sage-grouse and a myriad of other sagebrush obligate species in Nevada,” said Shawn Espinosa, an upland game staff specialist for the state agency.
“Although we have hopes that restoration efforts can be successful, there will be some areas that will likely convert to cheatgrass which will further reduce available habitat for sage-grouse into the future.”
Hunting units 051 and 066 will remain closed for sage grouse until further notice along the Idaho line from McDermitt in the west to Owyhee in the east and as far south as just west of Battle Mountain.
Another fire burning about 15 miles (north of Battle Mountain has charred more than 60 square miles.
Greater sage grouse, a ground-dwelling bird about the size of a chicken, once numbered in the millions across much of the West, but the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service now estimates the population at 200,000-500,000.
Experts blame energy development, along with wildfires, disease and livestock grazing.
Their range covers parts of 11 Western states and two Canadian provinces.
State wildlife officials say the two big Nevada fires not only burned grouse breeding sites but also destroyed priority winter habitat which will likely affect he bird’s annual production and survival rates.
No other states have implemented grouse hunting restrictions as a result of fires. Wildlife biologists have said in the past that hunting doesn’t generally threaten the survival of sage grouse populations.
Here’s another interesting story about innovative tactics used on the Martin fire from Wildfire Today here, and using non-native grasses for fuel treatments.
Yesterday, fire spread slowed significantly due to the hard work of the local Elko Task Force that hit the head of the fire early Sunday morning and throughout the day. The task force took advantage of the fire naturally slowing as it entered flatter terrain with lesser fuel loads. Operations personnel report that the fire is moving into patches of greener vegetation such as Siberian wheat grass, which was planted as part of the BLM’s rehabilitation and fuel treatment efforts on previous fires. Green fuels slow the fire’s advance, making it easier for bulldozers and engines, with the aggressive assistance of super scooper air tankers and heavy and light helicopters, to catch up and get containment lines in place.
USFS supports bill for a pilot program using “alternative dispute resolution”
Excerpt from an E&E Daily article, “BLM, Forest Service officials support contentious bills.”
Glenn Casamassa, the Forest Service’s associate deputy chief, indicated the service also supports the goal behind S. 2160, sponsored by Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.).
Daines’ bill would require the Forest Service chief to establish a pilot program using “alternative dispute resolution,” most likely arbitration, in lieu of legal action “for certain projects” designed to reduce wildfire risks in Montana and parts of Idaho.
Only projects dealing with reducing wildfire risks, and developed “through a collaborative” process with various stakeholders, would be eligible for arbitration, he said.
“Combating chronic litigation doesn’t erode public input, it safeguards it,” he said. “It does so by ensuring that consensus-driven decisions of the majority are not obstructed by isolated dissenters, in most cases extreme environmental groups.”
Casamassa told Daines that litigation has harmed important forest management projects and is a concern for the Agriculture Department and Forest Service.
“USDA supports the idea of arbitration as a tool to help streamline project decisions while maintaining public engagement and input,” he said.
The Wildfire Situation and Definitions of Worseness
Lots of newspaper articles say that “wildfires are worse now than they used to be” and often say “the major part of that is due to climate change”. Logically, first we have to define “worse” before we can go on to ascribing causes. In other words, we need to be clear on “what aspects of them are worse, compared to what other time periods” before we can collect relevant data (assuming it exists) and be clear on attributing causes. So can we be more specific about what is worse? Through reading different articles and studies, we can come up with different variables possibly related to “worseness.” It should be noted that the value of the differences and the timeframe of comparison are both essential to clearly understanding the “worseness” question.
First, there are acres burned. I would argue that that does not tell us much, for at least two reasons. If we have WFU (wildland fire use) now and we didn’t used to do it, it seems logical that that this change in suppression policy would lead to increased acres burned by wildfires. Kevin and Andy have also brought up the question of whether burned area is currently accurately measured (a) and whether that can be compared to measurements from the past (in the US) (b). See Kevin’s comment here for links to the more recent data. In the last 150 years or so we have gone from (1) intentional and natural ignitions with no suppression (by Native Americans) in the western US to (2) serious attempts to get fires out all the time but perhaps without the greatest technology, to (3) great technology to put out fires, coupled with the concept of WFU to reduce fuels.
If wildfires can be good, and we are encouraging fire on the landscape through WFU, we would expect burned areas to go up. If that makes wildfires “worse” for purposes of attributing the increased acres to climate change (for example), that seems like it’s a logical problem. Burned area, in and of itself, seems like it would be a function of suppression strategies and tactics.
So people maybe don’t mean “number of acres” when they say “worse”. Maybe there’s more damage to property, infrastructure, soils and watersheds? Or the latter damage is more visible? Of course, there wasn’t as much property around in the past (not in forests or shrublands, but maybe in grasslands). And no one was measuring soil and watershed damage. So how can we compare that to the past? What people might mean is that “nowadays in some cases (most notably in California, based on the news) people are unable to suppress wildfires until they burn up housing and other infrastructure.” And the scariest thing is that there are conditions under which fires become uncontrollable, even today. What could be the differences from the past? 20 years ago? 50 years ago?
There’s also “more frequent“. Since many are human-caused, this could be because of more people being around and/or more people around behaving unsafely. Across the West, there are powerline started fires, steam train started fires (apparently, I don’t think this has been found out for sure), and military training exercise started fires, plus clueless campers and shooters who start fires. At some point, does “more frequent” mean “less attention can be paid to each individual fire” which would also allow acreages to increase?
To understand all this, we really need to interview people working in fire suppression right now, in the past, and perhaps people who study their observations in some way. To readers: in your area, are fires “worse” than the past? When in the past? How do you define “worse”? What do you think the reasons are?