Colorado’s Experience with State-led Species Recovery

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This is from a post by Greg Walcher, former Director of DNR in Colorado. I wonder if this approach might be applicable to other species? (my italics). I don’t intend to diss the fish efforts, but I’m more familiar with seeing lynx.

Colorado’s plan to reintroduce lynx to the southern Rocky Mountains became one of our greatest challenges. At first, many Coloradans were angry about the plan, which came in response to the Fish and Wildlife Service listing the lynx as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. But after dozens of meetings and hundreds of letters, emails, and calls to the department, governor’s office, and the state legislature, an extraordinary picture emerged. None of the complaints were about the lynx. Many opposed the lynx reintroduction plan, but not one single message contained any complaint about the animal itself. The concerns were instead about the federal land management policies that accompany endangered species listings.

Colorado’s lynx recovery program represented a state-led effort to carry out the original intent of the Endangered Species Act: to recover species that we might otherwise lose. In the case of the lynx, those fears were understandable. The U.S. Forest Service had ordered all national forests in Colorado to rewrite their management plans based on potential habitat for lynx, even though there were none in the state. All land managers, communities, and other stakeholders affected by the listing had to determine what it, as well as the Forest Service’s order, meant to them. Discussions often centered on whether to close roads and trails, ban snowmobiles and off-road vehicles, discontinue logging and mining, stop oil and gas exploration, close campgrounds, limit ski area expansions, or eliminate grazing. In short, the debate was about everything but the lynx.

The Fish and Wildlife Service has always insisted that Colorado is not prime lynx habitat. Lynx had rarely been seen there. The last one was trapped in 1973, and only 18 had ever been documented in the history of the state. Yet the Forest Service remained determined to include lynx recovery as a key component of its management plans in the state. From the state’s perspective, the only clear answer was to establish a thriving population. So we did just that. Between 1999 and 2006, we imported 218 lynx to Colorado from Canada and Alaska, outfitted them with satellite collars, and studied their behavior. Today, their population is thriving and self-sustaining in the state and, along the way, has disproved many of the Forest Service’s initial assumptions about the species.

Federal documents said the San Juan Mountains were the southernmost limit where lynx could live, yet several migrated farther south, even into New Mexico. Forest Service officials said the lynx ate only snowshoe hares, yet Colorado lynx have eaten a much more varied diet, including squirrels, prairie dogs, and birds. One died from plague after eating a diseased prairie dog; one ate a dog in Durango. Some officials claimed lynx were threatened by ski areas, yet at least one was monitored living in a ski area during the crowded winter season.

The Forest Service also maintained that lynx would not cross open areas greater than 100 yards. Yet several lynx introduced in southwest Colorado crossed enormous areas of wide-open spaces on lengthy migration routes. One was trailed to Nebraska, several through the San Luis Valley, and still others beyond Interstate 70 more than 200 miles north of their release. In 2007, one lynx crossed five counties into Kansas before being recaptured south of Wakeeney, some 375 miles across the Great Plains. Others have roamed north as far as Montana. But the ultimate traveler was a lynx that, after four years in Colorado, headed home to Canada, 1,200 miles from his release site in Mineral County.

Colorado’s success with its lynx recovery program is instructive because it represented a state-led effort to carry out the original intent of the Endangered Species Act: recover species that we might otherwise lose. Like hundreds of other listed species, lynx were not threatened simply because of habitat loss; they live primarily at high altitudes where there are no towns and little other human activity. They were threatened largely because they have beautiful fur, and for many years our ancestors trapped them for it. For a time, the government tried to blame the species’ decline on shrinking snowshoe hare populations caused by timber harvest, fire suppression, and climate change. But in reality, as we discovered in Colorado, the high Rocky Mountain habitat remains mostly intact, so reintroducing the lynx was the simple answer, and it worked.

Despite its proposed land-use restrictions to benefit the lynx, the federal government had no plans to establish any lynx populations in the state. In fact, is it unlikely that the federal system would ever have done anything to recover the lynx. The Endangered Species Act focuses almost exclusively on regulating habitat, not on recovery. That’s precisely why state leadership is essential.

Federal Appeals Court rules East Reservoir logging project violates the law

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At left is the project map from the Forest Service for the East Reservoir timber sale on the Kootenai National Forest. At right is a satellite image of the project area, showing the extent of past clearcuts and logging. The Forest Service is proposing to log 8,800 acres with this project, including about 3,600 acres of clearcuts. Nearly 8,000 logging trucks would be required to haul out the trees. According to the Wild Rockies, the project area is home to bull trout, white sturgeon, Canada lynx and grizzly bears, among other wildlife species.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled in the Alliance for the Wild Rockies’ favor in its legal challenge to the East Reservoir logging project on the Kootenai National Forest in Northwest Montana.

“The Court found that the Forest Service violated its own rules for management of grizzly bear habitat“ Garrity stated. The rare and imperiled Cabinet-Yaak grizzly bear population of Northwest Montana has failed to recover to even half of its minimal goal of 100 bears after decades of management, which led to implementation of special management standards aimed to help recovery. However, the Court found that even though the agency adopted the recovery standards, it was not actually complying with them. “This grizzly bear population is less than 50 bears and in really dire straits – the Forest Service can’t just ignore that when it plans massive logging projects in grizzly bear habitat anymore,” said Mike Garrity, Executive Director for the Alliance for the Wild Rockies.

“The East Reservoir Project is huge,” Garrity continued. “But consider that there are already over 22,000 acres of clearcuts within its boundaries. Add to that the 8,845 acres of proposed commercial logging in the East Reservoir project, of which 3,458 acres will be new clearcuts, and the additional impacts to this already heavily-logged area are simply unacceptable for wildlife, water quality, hunting, fishing, and other public recreation and use of this area.”

“In addition to the environmental impacts, the project was a huge money-loser which, by the Forest Service’s own estimate, would have cost taxpayers over $2.5 million to subsidize further degradation of an already-degraded landscape at a time when the federal deficit is exploding,” Garrity explained. “Much of that cost will be to rebuild and maintain an astounding 175 miles of logging roads, build nine miles of new permanent logging roads, add an additional 13 miles of illegal, user-created roads into the legal road system, and open nine miles of previously closed motorized trails. This would occur despite the fact that all the existing science shows more roads lead directly to more grizzly bear deaths and more sedimentation of the spawning streams for bull trout, which are already listed as ‘threatened’ under the Endangered Species Act.

“As most Montanans know, there is incredible pressure from industry lobbyists and politicians to ‘get out the cut’ on our National Forests. But the bottom line is that these National Forests are public lands that belong to all Americans, not just the 1percent or corporate interests. Our federal laws are often the only thing standing between the ‘cut-and-run’ practices we’ve see on private timber lands, and the intact ecosystems we can still find on our National Forests. That’s because federal laws require retention of functioning ecosystems and diverse wildlife and fisheries on our National Forests.

“Simply put, thanks to our federal laws, our National Forests are not commercial logging lots that exist to benefit a single, private industry. In this case, we had to go to court to make this point clear, and the rule of law prevailed,” Garrity concluded.

You can view the Order here.

Longtime readers of this blog will recall that this timber sale has been discussed and debated many times. Here’s a sampling of some previous posts.

Of Grizzly Bears and Camels

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Today, in Alliance for Wild Rockies v. Savage, the 9th Circuit ruled the Forest Service violated Kootenai national forest plan standards that regulate road densities to protect grizzly bears.

A Venn diagram would help explain the court’s reasoning, but since I don’t know how to draw one on-line, here’s a silly analogy.

Imagine a two-humped camel that has spent her long life carrying straws. Now old, weak and feeble, the vet advises, “No more straws should be put on your camel or she will collapse and die.” Chastened, the owner counts the straws — 1,000.

To simplify future straw management, the owner decides that from now on he will add and remove straws only from the camel’s small front hump, which carries 20 straws; the other 980 straws being on the large hump.

The owner dutifully keeps a running tally of the straws he adds and removes from the front hump. But, unbeknownst to him, his wife has been surreptitiously adding straws to the camel’s rear. In fact, some of the original 1,000 straws were probably hers, but no one knows for sure because the old straw records are missing.

The next day, the owner puts 6 new straws on his camel and, in an abundance of caution, removes 8, figuring that having only 18 straws on the small hump will provide a safety margin for his aging camel.

A day later, the camel dies. The vet is called. “Why did my camel die?” the owner asks mournfully. “I was careful to never have more than 20 straws on the front hump.”

“There were 1,452 straws on this camel!” exclaims the vet. “I told you your camel could tolerate no more than 1,000.”

“It was a smelly camel, anyway” his wife mutters, as she sweeps up the straws.

NFS Litigation Weekly July 20, 2018

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Litigation Weekly July 20

Plaintiffs’ claim that the Forest Service violated the Fifth Amendment by taking its property when it restricted access to inholdings after flooding was not ripe for review because there has not been a final agency decision on possible reconstruction of the roads.  (Fed. Cir.)

The USGS decision to not mark a cable 40 feet above a wild and scenic river on the Prescott National Forest, which led to the death of occupants of a helicopter that struck it, was considered a “discretionary function,” and the government could properly claim sovereign immunity from tort claims.  (9th Cir.)

(New case.)  Plaintiffs are seeking records related to the establishment of a Federal Advisory Committee that is addressing issues they view as contributing to privatization of national parks, and the Park Service has failed to respond within the statutorily mandated 20 days.  (D. D.C.)

 

BLOGGER’S BONUS:  Friends of the Wild Swan v. Kehr (D. Mont.)

The Beaver Creek Landscape Restoration Project on the Flathead National Forest was upheld by the Montana District Court on July 16.

  • Adjacent projects were not “cumulative actions,” potentially triggering a single EIS instead of separate EAs, because they were initiated in different years and there was no evidence of the Forest trying to segment a single project to avoid triggering an EIS.
  • The cumulative effects analysis of the two projects was adequate because it met the “bare minimum” of explaining “why the combined impact would not be significant.”
  • The project complied with forest plan requirements for road density in grizzly bear habitat by meeting standards for no net loss of habitat security and providing a “net gain” towards meeting security objectives by closing roads.
  • The Forest properly considered roads committed to “intermittent storage” to be closed for the purpose of the forest plan standard because they would be reclaimed so they no longer function as roads (though they could be reopened in the future).
  • The EA provided sufficient information to conclude that the project complied with an elk standard for road density.
  • Acquisition of private lands in the project area subsequent to consultation on the forest plan road density standards did not require reinitiation of consultation under ESA because the prior consultation had already contemplated improvements of road density in these areas (even though the forest plan did not apply to them at the time).

 

Undersecretary Nominee Hubbard Promises that Fighting Sexual Harassment Will Be First Priority

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From E&E News here:

President Trump’s choice for undersecretary of Agriculture overseeing the Forest Service promised yesterday to make fighting sexual harassment his first priority if confirmed.

“It’d be my first briefing,” James Hubbard told the Senate Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry Committee at his confirmation hearing.

As undersecretary for natural resources and environment, Hubbard’s primary responsibility would be over the Forest Service, where a history of sexual harassment and misconduct has unfolded in recent months.

Hubbard faced questions about the issue from Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), the panel’s ranking Democrat, as well as other lawmakers.

Stabenow said USDA has told the committee that 183 reports of sexual harassment were made at the Forest Service nationally in the past two years, and that officials confirmed 77 of them.

“These are high numbers for an agency,” said Stabenow, who added that she wants to be sure employees who report incidents don’t face retaliation.

Hubbard said he would quickly call officials together for an update on the Forest Service’s progress on the issue, and would protect people who make complaints.

“This idea of ‘it’s safe to come forward’ is essential,” Hubbard said.

The Forest Service’s troubles came to light last year amid news reports and intensified with the resignation of Forest Service Chief Tony Tooke in March (E&E Daily, March 8).

Interim Forest Service Chief Vicki Christiansen has said she’s implementing several measures, including a toll-free telephone number for employees to call with reports, which generates a response within 24 hours. The agency has also instituted anti-harassment training for permanent and seasonal staff, she said at a hearing in June (E&E Daily, June 6).

Hubbard’s nomination has won praise from forest industry groups and the National Association of State Foresters, of which he was president in 1990.

Committee Chairman Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) has said he wants to move as quickly as possible on nominations, although the political environment on the Senate floor threatens to slow them once they clear the committee.

Hubbard, a former state forester in Colorado, also told lawmakers he endorses “active” management of forests that would speed tree-thinning projects aimed at reducing wildfire risks. That work, he said, should be done in cooperation with state forestry officials.

Congress has pressed the Forest Service to increase those efforts, including through the omnibus spending bill for fiscal 2018.

As undersecretary, Hubbard said, he would consult with regional foresters and state officials — then move forward on those programs — knowing the Forest Service can’t treat all the millions of acres it deems in need of attention.

“If we can’t cover everything, what’s most important?” he said he would ask regional foresters.

And he said he agrees with complaints by Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.) that the three or four years the agency sometimes takes on environmental reviews is too long.

“I don’t consider those timelines acceptable,” Hubbard said.

Landscape Changes and Climate: Toward a Broader Climate Accounting

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From Betts, 2000

Back when I was reading about the IPCC scenarios and what they included in this post, I thought “uh-oh, reforestation and afforestation, no one told us!”. As far as I know, though, the IPCC scenarios only include GHG based (I don’t know if they include other GHGs besides carbon), but not landscape changes that influence climate.

Here’s one 2000 paper by Betts of the UK on this topic. This paper is one of those that covers the whole world, uses remote sensing, uses a variety of datasets, makes a variety of assumptions, and may not relate well to more local studies, or even observations. For example, on soils like the Hayman, green trees vs bare soil post-fire may well impact albedo.. how much, is another question. Perhaps there are more recent and/or more local papers on this?

Still, it raises an interesting point. If you want to move from the general idea of afforestation (or changing crop back to forest lands, e.g. the Williamette Valley) how would the potential carbon sequestration and landscape change relate to each other? In the 2003 Marland et al. paper cited below (coauthored by several forest scientists), the authors consider a more holistic form of accounting for climate impacts beyond carbon.

It might even be appropriate to think of carbon management in the biosphere in terms of adjustment factors, or suitability factors, that capture other objectives of land surface change as well as carbon sequestration. These could include carbon leakage, other impacts on climate, ecosystem composition and structure, other impacts on hydrology and the environment, sustainability, and social and cultural objectives. Although this paper discusses changes in land surface entirely within the context of climate change, it is clear that changes in land surface have important considerations within other social and environmental contexts and within other international conventions. The Kyoto Protocol, for example, specifically notes that achieving mitigation objectives for climate change should be accomplished while
taking into account “relevant international environmental agreements; promotion of sustainable forest management practices;” and promotion of sustainable development. Relevant international agreements include the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, the UN Convention to Combat Desertification, and the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands (
IPCC, 2000 , p. 114). Alternatives for carbon management, whether protection of existing ecosystems or encouragement of more carbon intensive ecosystems, can have particularly important implications for biodiversity (Huston and Marland, 2003).

To fully consider the climatic effect of changing land surface and/or managing carbon stocks in the biosphere would require complex modeling of the interactions between the atmosphere and the land surface, Option 4. An international consensus would need to consider climate impacts that are both global and regional (multinational) in scale. Effects on the climate system could be expressed in quantifiable energy units such as joule or watt/m2 , perhaps normalized for the area affected (
Pielke et al., 2002 ). Both increases and decreases in energy flows would be recognized as impacts on the larger system. Such an accounting system could be equally rigorous, but would inevitably be more complex, than the evolving system based on tons of carbon equivalent.

I wrote one of the leaders in the field, Roger Pielke, Sr. and asked for a set of papers that would be helpful for readers to introduce them to this topic area. So here they are.they are accessible without a firewall (others are on his research website -https://cires.colorado.edu/research/research-groups/roger-pielke-sr-group)

Pielke Sr., R.A., R. Mahmood, and C. McAlpine, 2016: Land’s complex role in climate change. Physics Today, 69(11), 40. https://pielkeclimatesci.files.wordpress.com/2016/11/r-384.pdf

Mahmood, R., R.A. Pielke Sr., T.R. Loveland, and C.A. McAlpine, 2016: Climate relevant land use and land cover change policies. Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc. 195-202,
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/BAMS-D-14-00221.1

Marland, G., R.A. Pielke, Sr., M. Apps, R. Avissar, R.A. Betts, K.J. Davis, P.C. Frumhoff, S.T. Jackson, L. Joyce, P. Kauppi, J. Katzenberger, K.G. MacDicken, R. Neilson, J.O. Niles, D. dutta S. Niyogi, R.J. Norby, N. Pena, N. Sampson, and Y. Xue, 2003: The climatic impacts of land surface change and carbon management, and the
implications for climate-change mitigation policy. Climate Policy, 3, 149-157. http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/files/2009/10/r-267.pdf

Mahmood, R., R.A. Pielke Sr., K. Hubbard, D. Niyogi, P. Dirmeyer, C. McAlpine, A. Carleton, R. Hale, S. Gameda, A. Beltrán-Przekurat, B. Baker, R. McNider, D. Legates, J. Shepherd, J. Du, P. Blanken, O.Frauenfeld, U. Nair, S. Fall, 2013: Land cover changes and their biogeophysical effects on climate. Int. J. Climatol., DOI:
10.1002/joc.3736. http://pielkeclimatesci.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/r-374.pdf

Hossain, F., and R.A. Pielke Sr., 2012: A two-way street. Intl. Water Power & Dam Construction, 64:11, 26-28. http://pielkeclimatesci.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/r-373.pdf

Hossain, F., J. Arnold, E. Beighley, C. Brown, S. Burian, J. Chen, S.Madadgar, A. Mitra, D. Niyogi, R.A. Pielke Sr., V. Tidwell, and D. Wegner, 2015: Local-to-regional landscape drivers of extreme weather and climate: Implications for water infrastructure resilience. J. Hydrol. Eng., 10.1061/(ASCE)HE.1943-5584.0001210 , 02515002.
https://pielkeclimatesci.files.wordpress.com/2015/04/r-380.pdf”

If you’re interested in this topic, you can also sign up for Dr. Pielke’s Twitter feed. There’s an interesting current study on the effects of irrigation in Nebraska going on right now.

Reforestation, Afforestation, Soils and Carbon

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Katy Hofmeister obtains soil samples for a carbon inventory by digging a soil pit and getting specimens from various layers.

Having read a few of the “what should we do with carbon in forests” papers, and leaving aside for now the “should we use forest products” discussion, I am thinking that by looking more broadly at forests, carbon, land use change, and other environmental and social factors, we can come back to that discussion with a better sense of context for a variety of climate and carbon interventions.

I’ve found that afforestation and reforestation are on everyone’s list of what can be done that are good for carbon sequestration. Afforestation has a couple of problems. It is land use change, and in many places there are no trees due to the climatic conditions, so it wouldn’t actually work in practice. But in some areas we do have a track record of success..say in the plains states, we could have a 21st century equivalent of shelterbelts (some of the ones from the 1930’s are starting to look pretty ratty).

But back to reforestation (that is, planting trees on forested land post some form of disturbance). We know how to do it in most currently forested places, and used to do it not that long ago (1980’s). In my career, I was fortunate to be involved in the Great Region 6 Reforestation Campaign during which nurseries, infrastructure, technology improvement and so on, were all aligned toward the goal of reforestation. Even Oregon State University had the Fundamental Fir Program. Most people agree with the idea and it is not disruptive to current economic and social structures (such as converting agricultural land to forest). But here’s an angle on it I hadn’t heard before with regard to soil carbon.

Here are some quotes from this Cornell University press release:

The study examined the potential to expand the soil carbon sequestration in reforested areas.

“The ability of U.S. forestlands to offset our emissions of greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, is decreasing,” said Hofmeister, who conducts research in natural resources and hydrology. “This is partly due to a backlog in reforestation projects on public lands that has been increasing for several decades.

“Nationwide, since 2000, less than 10 percent of forests are replanted after disturbances that eliminate forest cover. Reforestation would increase the soil carbon sink and go a long way to mitigating climate change.”

..

Sequestering carbon should be a strong component in fighting climate change, according to Hofmeister. “And, unlike other biospheric sinks, such as trees themselves – which can burn up in fires – soil carbon is quite stable,” she said.

Here is a link to the PNAS paper. You’ll note that the paper is national in scope and used remote sensing. Looking out at your neighboring forest, you would be able to imagine that the numbers for increasing soil carbon locally (over what would happen without intervention) depend greatly on the soils themselves, climate and water availability, the kind of disturbance (think volcano, fire, logging) and how easily (or if) the forest would naturally regenerate. If one were to look at reforesting as a carbon investment and prioritize the areas where you would get the biggest carbon bang for the buck. Still, it’s interesting to think about.

Forest Policy Looms Over Oregon’s Climate Change Debate.. Or Does It? Oregonian Story

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Steve posted this story on forest carbon in Oregon in the comments here, but I thought it was worthy of its own post.

The article says..

As lawmakers gear up to make another attempt to pass a climate change bill in 2019, new data suggests that the forest sector is not only a factor in Oregon’s carbon picture, it is THE factor and one of national and even international importance as lawmakers look to reduce the concentration of heat trapping gases in the atmosphere

I’ll come back to the italics later at the end of this post.

What is the “new data”? I wrote Ted Sickinger, the author of this article, and he said via email “I linked to the global warming commission’s draft report, which I’ve attached. But the paper linked below also addresses it. It’s also the one giving the industry conniptions.” Now I don’t know what industry he’s talking about for sure. But based on the abstract, if I were a grass grower who was asked to stop making money from grass crops, grow trees and not cut them, so that other people can claim a carbon reduction for the state, I would be a bit cranky. Unless the state were to compensate me (and the downstream folks who provide agricultural products and services) for the loss of income..

Here is the abstract of the paper his is talking about linked here:

Strategies to mitigate carbon dioxide emissions through forestry activities have been proposed, but ecosystem process-based integration of climate change, enhanced CO2, disturbance from fire, and management actions at regional scales are extremely limited. Here, we examine the relative merits of afforestation, reforestation, management changes, and harvest residue bioenergy use in the Pacific Northwest. This region represents some of the highest carbon density forests in the world, which can store carbon in trees for 800 y or more. Oregon’s net ecosystem carbon balance (NECB) was equivalent to 72% of total emissions in 2011–2015. By 2100, simulations show increased net carbon uptake with little change in wildfires. Reforestation, afforestation, lengthened harvest cycles on private lands, and restricting harvest on public lands increase NECB 56% by 2100, with the latter two actions contributing the most. Resultant cobenefits included water availability and biodiversity, primarily from increased forest area, age, and species diversity. Converting 127,000 ha of irrigated grass crops to native forests could decrease irrigation demand by 233 billion m3⋅y−1. Utilizing harvest residues for bioenergy production instead of leaving them in forests to decompose increased emissions in the short-term (50 y), reducing mitigation effectiveness. Increasing forest carbon on public lands reduced emissions compared with storage in wood products because the residence time is more than twice that of wood products. Hence, temperate forests with high carbon densities and lower vulnerability to mortality have substantial potential for reducing forest sector emissions. Our analysis framework provides a template for assessments in other temperate regions.

This study was funded by DOE and USDA-NIFA.

But this analysis reminds me of the California studies of thinning.. perhaps Oregonians could save water by doing more thinning rather than converting grass crops to trees? Was that analysis included in the study?
Here’s a link from an NSF funded study:

Forest thinning has increased in recent decades in an effort to stave off disastrous wildfires fueled by dense forests. This study shows that restoring forests through mechanical thinning or wildfire can also save California billions of gallons of water each year.

“The need for forest restoration is being driven largely by the need to lower the risk of high-intensity wildfires and restore forest health,” said University of California Merced scientist Roger Bales, director of the Southern Sierra CZO and study co-author. “Downstream users who benefit from the increased water yield are an important potential revenue stream that can help offset some of the costs of restoration.”

Forested areas needing restoration are large, Bales said, but potential changes in water availability are significant. The total effect of wildfires over a 20-year period suggests that forest thinning could increase water flow from Sierra Nevada watersheds by as much as 10 percent.

But back to the discussion draft, DISCUSSION DRAFT_OGWC Forest Carbon Project Report_v10_CLEAN_061818. I noticed that most of the references were from Harmon and Law. Which is fine, they work at OSU and OSU is the Oregon State University. But it makes me wonder whether other scientists have equally relevant ideas or points of view or research that might be relevant. If I were the State Legislature, I would have asked for a report that included a variety of different thinkers and stakeholders and scientists from all parts of Oregon, and asked “what are the environmental and social pros and cons of different approaches to forest carbon in Oregon?” That indeed might be an effort/paper worth funding.

PS After all that reading, nowhere did I find anything comparing the emissions of the timber industry to other industries, as alluded to by the first paragraph in the post “it is THE factor”. Or am I missing something?

Taking a Deeper Look at One Carbon Science Study: I. The Presentation Problem

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Average annual net carbon loss (Tg C year−1) attributed to the most likely disturbance type and estimated at the combined county scale for harvest, fire, land use conversion, wind, insect, and drought. Combining these six sources results in estimates of total annual net C loss from disturbance occurring between 2006 and 2010. From Harris et al 2016.
Last December, Danna Smith said in a comment here “Across the US logging emissions are 5x emissions from fire, insects, wind and conversion (to ag/development) combined. See this 2016 study published in Carbon Management. My process of exploration of this paper started with some of our questions about Figure 3 in this paper, which I posted above.

Note: I am not criticizing any individual involved. From my first to my last questions, they were all extremely helpful to me. I hope this little story gives non-scientist a glimpse behind the curtain of the scientific paper production process.

Fortunately, the paper was published in an open access journal so we all could read it. I followed the trail to the first author and emailed her as to where she got the data for the map in question. She replied almost immediately and perhaps surprisingly, the trail went directly to a person we know, Todd Morgan at University of Montana! Small world. So I wrote him and he gave me a thoughtful answer.

A Presentation Problem
From Todd Morgan:
“One of the reasons why the harvest carbon data look so odd has to do with how they are displayed on these maps. Nevada is prime example of this, but it applies to several other areas in the west. The viewer sees huge geographic areas (e.g., the entire state of NV) shaded with a single “carbon loss” value, whereas most of the rest of the country is shaded on a county-by-county basis. Because of the way the TPO data (and possibly other FIA data) are stored in the database, and counties are often grouped together to prevent disclosure of individual landowner information, there are county groups or whole states with a single value. The paper briefly mentions this in the section “Timber product output data (TPO 2007).

A possible way to deal with this “combined county” grouping is to take that single value and divide it among the number of counties it includes. So, in NV, the value of each county in NV would be 1/17 of the state total. Or one could contact the source of the data (like you did) and find out that the NV value for harvest is really from two small counties in western NV and the statewide value could be split between those two counties and the rest of the counties assigned a Zero value. That would help make maps that visually make more intuitive sense – i.e., the brown shaded area of NV would be very small geographically relative to the rest of the state – like can be seen in east Texas vs. west Texas.

Another solution to this would have been tabular reporting of state level values for harvest (and possibly other disturbances) would allow comparisons to other whole states. At the state level, one would see that the volumes for NV (should) make sense compared to other whole states (i.e., NV would be a very small value compared to most other states). A third way to make the maps make more visual sense would be to map Tg C per acre per year – in other words scaling the data by the acres of timberland – like was done in Figure 1 of the paper. Again, that would probably reveal amounts of carbon that “make more sense” so instead of comparing the total carbon for the State of NV to each individual county in the rest of the country, one could compare the carbon per acre in NV to the carbon per acre in other locations.”

Still, something very odd seems to have been happening in Coconino, Arizona (and neighboring counties?) during this time period.

Next post: Potential Pitfalls of Combining Datasets

Slanted News?

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I found an LA Times article regarding the Rim Fire, as well as the future of forest management within the Sierra Nevada. Of course, Chad Hanson re-affirms his preference to end all logging, everywhere. There’s a lot of seemingly balanced reporting but, there is no mention of the Sierra Nevada Framework, and its diameter limits. There is also the fact that any change to the SNF will take years to amend. There was also no mention that only about 20,000 Federal acres of the Rim Fire was salvaged, with some of that being in 40-year old plantations.

http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-rim-fire-restoration-20180718-story.html

There might also be another ‘PictureGate“, involving Chad Hanson displaying supposed Forest Service clearcut salvage logging. His folks have already displayed their inability to locate themselves on a map. If he really had solid evidence, he SURELY would have brought it into court

Additionally, the comments are a gold mine for the misinformation and polarization of the supposedly ‘progressive’ community of readers.

Trump “demands” more logging. Really? Does he ever request, suggest or ask for information? I’m tired of hearing of Trump’s “demands.” It could be that some logging would be beneficial but the minute Trump “demands” it, it is suspect. One of his friends will be making millions on the logging and probably giving a kickback to a Trump business. Trump is the destructor of all things beautiful or sacred, the King Midas of the GOP.

A tiny increase in logging of small trees is very unlikely to generate “millions”.

You have no idea what “forest management” is. You want to clearcut all of the old growth forests and then turn them into Christmas tree lots and pine plantations. That is industrial tree farming, not forest management. That is the dumb dogma, speaking, not actual management of the forests.

Most people in southern California don’t know that Forest Service clearcutting and old growth harvesting in the Sierra Nevada has been banned since 1993. The article makes no mention of that.

Riddle me this, Lou. How did the forests manage before we spent $2.5 billion dollars a year on fire suppression? Are we the problem or the cure? Is this just another out of control bureaucracy with a life of its own?

Of course, no solution offered.