Fave Fuel Treatment Effectiveness Reports

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In various comments so far, we’ve had some links to interesting and helpful fuel effectiveness reports. If you would like, please post or repost yours as comments here, so anyone looking for them can find them in one central location (feel free to post links to collections of them as well.)

I’d like to highlight my current fave here. It’s the Carpenter Road Fire Fuels Treatment Effectiveness Monitoring in this Youtube video.

What I like about it:
1. time lapse photography of fire moving through the stands
2. music
3. other photos that give context for the fire
4. clear summary of effectiveness findings

Many thanks to all involved from Spokane Tribal Forestry, the producers Ben Butler and Sheldon Sankey and A Tribe Called Red for the music.

“Logging is Not the Answer”: But No One Said It Was

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Fig. 9. Left photo shows surviving trees in the half of Unit 46 that was thinned and burned. Right photo shows dead burned trees in the untreated area immediately adjacent to Unit 46. Both photos were taken back-to-back from same location on the treatment boundary. Photos: C.N. Skinner, USDA Forest Service, Pacific Southwest Research Station.

(photo from J.K. Agee, C.N. Skinner / Forest Ecology and Management 211 (2005) 83–96)

Everyone is entitled to their opinions. However, my concern is that when folks wrap their opinions in the cloak of “science”, especially when more than one scientific discipline is involved, we need to be especially careful. It’s often helpful to trace the claims made in the scientific paper, the conclusions of the scientific paper, the press releases related to the scientific paper, and the interviews with the authors of the scientific paper. Sometimes we see an observation mutate into a global pronouncement of what should be or should not be done.

I picked this E&E news report on the recent Schoennagel et al. paper. (Note that I posted on this, almost exactly the same topic (“logging in the backcountry”), on this blog here in 2010 called “Sleight of Science” in which people claim that folks are doing something they aren’t doing, and then say it won’t work- sort of a straw person argument.) Below are my italics and boldface.

But logging forests in an effort to reduce hazardous fuel loads is not the answer, the study says.

Between 2001 and 2015, these so-called mechanical fuels treatments have been applied across millions of acres of forestlands and rangelands, the study notes. And yet “the annual area burned [in the West] has continued to set records.”

The effort to reduce fuel loads on federal lands by “thinning” trees has value, but is expensive and does not do enough to reduce wildfire risks.

The study suggests using more prescribed fires as a way to reduce fuel loads, but also to help dry forests adapt to the warmer climate.

“We need adaptive approaches to wildfire now that will yield tremendous benefits later,” Schoennagel said. “Preparing now for adaptation to wildfire and climate change is a valuable investment in America’s residential communities and natural ecosystems.”

So this appears to be claiming that these scientists argue that the evidence for “mechanical fuel treatments not working” is that there are more acres burned in the West- not the sum of all the studies of fuel treatment effectiveness that we have seen here or can easily be googled. As these authors would be first to point out, there are a number of other reasons for acreage to increase (if it actually has), including people in forests, climate change, weather and so on. They also claim that it “does not do enough to reduce wildfire risks”- but to communities it certainly can- so why would a value judgment by scientists be more valuable than one by involved communities?

Oddly, according to this article, they suggest using more prescribed fires- which is of course exactly what you are supposed to do, if you can, following thinning to finish the task of “fuels treatment.” In fact, many use thinning to prepare a stand for prescribed burning. It seems kind of odd that that linkage isn’t made. Also not mentioned is mastication, another mechanical fuel treatment which is used with or without prescribed fire. But I haven’t gone back to the original article to check, so my quibbles might be with the writer of the article and not with the scientists at all.

Anyone can google “mastication effectiveness fuels” and get a variety of effectiveness papers. Having read a bunch of these, I have to say that I am impressed by the field knowledge and experience of the fuels folks involved..”this works in these conditions, but not so well under these conditions, has a good effect on helping suppression, but may increase intensity.”

Maybe the author of this article shaded the findings in the paper (and maybe didn’t or couldn’t read them with the keen eye that we would, knowing what we know?) Maybe the researchers who wrote the PNAS paper weren’t familiar with the effectiveness literature due to the proliferation of different scientific field and subfields? Or maybe fuels science and practice is not something they think they need to examine to make conclusions? Or are fuels practitioners’ experiences and reports, and fuels scientists’ findings – are they somehow invisible to some folks in the public/scientists? And why would that be?

It all seems a bit mysterious to me. I have no trouble saying “fuels, suppression, and affected communities need to work together for protection against negative environmental and social impacts of wildfires, and we should also all work together to get more prescribed burning on the landscape”. So who is doing what wrong, again?

First National Legacy Award presented to Forest Service retiree Dr. Jack Cohen

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According to Bill Gabbert over at Wildfire Today:

Dr. Jack Cohen received the first National Legacy Award given by the U.S. Forest Service, National Association of State Foresters, National Fire Protection Association, and International Association of Fire Chiefs in recognition of outstanding career-long contributions to wildfire mitigation as an alternative to suppression. Dr. Cohen helped develop the U.S. National Fire Danger Rating System and developed calculations for wildland firefighters’ safe zones; created defensible space principles, which resulted in the Firewise program; the Home Ignition Zone; and conducted research on ember ignitions and structure ignitability.

His research laid the groundwork for nearly all of today’s work on wildland urban interface risk reduction. Until his 2016 retirement, he was a research scientist at Missoula Technology and Development Center. The award was presented at the IAFC WUI Conference in Reno, Nevada.

Readers of this blog may remember that Dr. Jack Cohen’s research has been shared many times before. In the following video – produced by the National Fire Prevention Association – Dr. Cohen explains current research about how homes ignite during wildfires, and the actions that homeowners can take to help their home survive the impacts of flames and embers.

“Uncontrolled, extreme wildfires are inevitable. These are the conditions when wildland-urban interface disasters occur – the hundreds to thousands of houses destroyed during a wildfire.

Does that mean that wildland-urban interface are inevitable as well? No! We have great opportunities as homeowners to prevent our houses from igniting during wildfires….There a lot that we can do to the little things – to our house and its immediate surroundings – in order to reduce the ignition potential of that house.” – Jack Cohen

Please watch and share this video. Your home can survive a wildfire if, as a homeowner, you know what to do and take these simple steps to prevent your home from igniting during a wildfire.

60 Minutes: “Why fighting wildfires often fails — and what to do about it.”

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Thanks to Nick Smith for including this May 28 “60 Minutes” segment in his Healthy Forests, Healthy Communities newsletter: “Why fighting wildfires often fails — and what to do about it.” Text and video online. Features Q&A with Robert Bonnie, Jack Cohen. Overall, very well done. I plan to show it at a meeting of the local Community Emergency Response Team — I’ve been a member for years and, by coincidence, I’m scheduled to make a presentation on this topic in July.

Much of the program’s focus is on protecting homes in the WUI, but it does briefly address the larger topic:

Robert Bonnie: We’re not investing as much as we can and should in forest restoration, because we’re having to spend all our money fighting fire.

Steve Inskeep: Wait a minute, forest restoration is prevention of horrible wildfires?

Robert Bonnie: That’s right.

The Summer of Fuel Treatments

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It’s the 50th anniversary of the “Summer of Love” and my project for this summer is to try to understand the differences between people who say “fuel treatments don’t work and people shouldn’t do them” and those who say “fuel treatments can work and people should do them”. What’s really behind that? On what observations do people base their claims?

We can’t expect journalists to do this (the whole thing is too complex). The scientific world doesn’t provide fora to jointly examine claims and counterclaims within a discipline, let alone across disciplines. I guess that leaves it up to us. We have the opportunity to lay out different claims and jointly examine them, and learn jointly what the different values, assumptions, and observations lie behind these points of view. We can even tell our own stories of fuel treatments we have seen that worked or did not, and we can hear from people with direct experience in suppression as well as people who publish scientific papers. We can ask questions and get answers from each other.

Who knows? We could create one small space, where for one small topic, people could model civil disagreement, and gain a respite fromthis two pronged approach from Canada to defining fuel treatment effectiveness, but my search was fairly superficial and maybe others can help. Here are the two prongs:

1. Did the fire behavior change as a result of the treatment? Yes or no.
2. Did the treatment contribute to the control of the wildfire? Yes or no.

I found this in a discussion linked to this Canadian research group, that has a variety of interesting ongoing projects. Here’s a link to an “effectiveness of fuel treatments” write-up in Sasketchewan with interesting photos. Here’s some summary findings:

1. Weyakwin
• Fuel treatment increased visibility into the stand.
• Fuel treatment increased firefighter safety in terms of movement and visibility.
• Under the fire weather conditions the extreme fire behaviour took place, fire crews were able to control and suppress a spot fire that would have likely increased in size and intensity and spread into other values.
• Items located around homes can act as a receptive fuel for embers to fall into. Keeping these areas clean is a homeowner’s responsibility and can contribute to protection of one’s town.

2. Wadin Bay
• An active fire front moved into the community.
• The fire moved into the fuel treatments.
• People were able to safely suppress the fire within the treatment area.
• A permanent home and two seasonal cabins plus other values were lost, and there was potential for further losses.
The Wadin Bay area had very thick stands at pre-treatment, which would have made travel within the stand difficult and dangerous given the observed fire behaviour in untreated portions of the hamlet. The combination of increased visibility and decreased fire intensity enabled firefighters to bring the fire under control and ultimately save several structures from burning

And here’s a photo

Figure 18. A good example of fire damage on left side and the lack of fire damage on the right in block D
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Secretary Perdue Talks Trees

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Yesterday USDA Secretary Sonny Perdue made an unprecedented and necessary appearance before the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Interior, Environment and Related Agencies (the Forest Service is a “related agency”) to explain the Forest Service’s proposed FY 2018 budget. “Unprecedented” because never before had a USDA Secretary appeared before this subcommittee. “Necessary” because never before did a new administration have only one USDA political appointee in place by budget time.

Here are my takeaways from the hearing.

1) Secretary Perdue is glib and personable. He’s also an experienced and crafty politician who is not above fudging the numbers. When committee members challenged him on proposed steep cuts in the Forest Service’s budget, he replied that money to manage the national forest system would go up 16%. What he didn’t say is that this increase is due entirely to shifting over $350 million in fuels treatment from the wildland fire account to the national forest system account. Compared to FY 2017, the national forest system budget actually takes a 7.5% cut, as shown below:

2) Chief Tidwell will be looking for a new job. If Perdue’s body language towards the Chief wasn’t enough of a hint, a committee member thanked him for his years of service at the hearing’s end.

3) Senator Hubert Humphrey is feeling unsettled in his grave. Humphrey, the key architect of the National Forest Management Act, exhorted in 1976 that “The days have ended when the forest may be viewed only as trees and trees viewed only as timber.” Perdue said national forest trees are “crops.”

4) Congress doesn’t understand why or how the Forest Service got into its profligate wildfire spending mess. “Why” is because timber money dried up 25 years ago. “How” is because it can. The bureaucracy needs fire money to pay the agency’s overhead, aka, “cost pools.” Does Perdue get it? No. So far, he’s parroting former Secretary Vilsack’s plea for even more firefighting dollars.

A Deeper Dive into Trump’s Forest Service Budget

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The take-homes from Trump’s first Forest Service budget suggest a significant shift in how this administration views the Forest Service.

Timber sale levels will go down modestly. With the Forest Products line item funded at a no-change level of $360 million, I predict sale levels will remain below 3 billion board feet (notwithstanding a stated “target” of 3.2 bbf) and the increases under the Obama administration (from 2.5 bbf in 2008 to 2.9 bbf in 2016) will reverse due to cost inflation.

Former Secretary Vilsack’s “all lands” approach is dead. “All lands” called for “using all USDA resources and authorities, in collaboration with NRCS, to sustain the entire matrix of federal, state, tribal, county, municipal, and private forests.” Trump’s vision is narrower. To justify zeroing out Urban Forestry, Open Space Conservation, Forest Legacy, and the Collaborative Forest Restoration program, USDA’s “focus will be on the maintenance of the existing National Forest System lands.”

Law enforcement,, which is small potatoes in the Forest Service, is the only program area that sees a budget increase (2%) over last year. Most everything else (e.g., fish and wildlife, livestock, minerals) faces an 11% cut. Forest planning will slow even further, hard as that is to believe, as planning not only faces the same 11% cut, but has to fight with inventory and monitoring functions (which spend almost four times as much money) for its piece of a smaller pie. Insofar as planning makes policy, don’t expect any new ones anytime soon.

Hazardous fuels treatment faces a 7% cut and a sharper focus to treat “priority areas near communities that reduce risk to communities and firefighters and increase resilience of forests to catastrophic fire.” It’ll be interesting to see if managers get the message to stop wasting money treating fuels in the backcountry.

Whatever rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure may mean to Trump, the Forest Service isn’t going to have a seat at that table. The budget calls for a 73% cut in capital improvement and maintenance, including zeroing out the Legacy Roads and Trails program that pays for replacing fish-blocking culverts. Trail maintenance will drop from $77 million to $12 million, so visitors should be prepared to scramble over downed trees and be proficient with maps and GPS as disappearing trail signs are not replaced.

As for roads, which are slated for a 56% funding cut, the budget’s nostalgia for the good-old-days envisions timber sales, salvage no less, paying for road up-keep. Maybe the reimposition of tariffs on Canadian lumber will boost Forest Service stumpage prices, but I wouldn’t bet my house on it.

Last, but not least, Forest Service research is slated for a 16% budget cut from FY 2017 levels. The only logic to the specific cuts I can see is that the Forest Service will spend a little more on counting things like trees, i.e., inventory, and a lot less on basic science.

In sum, this budget narrows the Forest Service focus to taking minimal care of its own land. The Heritage Foundation is happy. Is anyone else?

TRUMP’S FOREST SERVICE DENIES CLIMATE CHANGE!!!

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The smoking gun that proves Trump’s Forest Service now denies climate change! Compare Obama’s FY 2017 Budget Justification:

“Agency operations and assets must become more resilient to the impacts of a changing climate so we can continue to provide a high level of service while caring for the National Forest System lands.”

With Trump’s FY 2018 Budget Justification:

“Agency operations and assets must become more resilient to extreme weather so the agency can continue to provide a high level of service while caring for the National Forest System (NFS) lands.”

Gotcha!

A Steady Hand in the Storm

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Flying under the radar, especially when piloted by a savvy and experienced hand, is the key to financial survival in the Trump administration. Although OMB’s new FY 2018 budget is dead on arrival in Congress, much of the Forest Service may wish it isn’t. The Forest Service’s bottom-line is slated for a $1 billion cut compared to FY 2017, but $800 million of that cut comes from zeroing out the FLAME wildfire suppression reserve fund. The Forest Service knows that Congress always makes up the difference in subsequent appropriations if it overspends on firefighting.

Trump’s budget calls for increasing national forest system spending by 6%. Challenge for the reader — Is there another domestic, discretionary federal agency that receives such generous treatment in this most fiscally conservative budget in modern history?

The balance of the cuts comes from the expected sources. Forest Service Research and State and Private Forestry each get hammered by 20%. Rounding things out, Capital Improvement & Maintenance, aka “infrastructure,” gets slashed; and, predictably, so, too, does land acquisition.

Bottom line? In this new era of savaging discretionary domestic spending, the Forest Service makes out like a bandit. Corollary — who needs a permanent Undersecretary of Agriculture when you’ve got D.C. at the helm?

Wood Stoves, Pollution and Climate Change from the New Scientist

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This article in New Scientist (UK-based) is a bit of a public service announcement, or item of curiousity, for wood stove owners. It’s also interesting how they look at the climate effects.

The New Scientist article is mostly about pollution from wood burning in cities (London), but also speaks about indoor pollution.

The trendy log-burning stoves producing much of this pollution are marketed as a source of renewable energy that can cut fuel bills while helping reduce global warming. But recent findings suggest they pose a serious threat to the health of their owners, and are also accelerating climate change in the short term.

If nothing is done to discourage log burning in homes, it could become the biggest source of air pollution in cities like London. In the UK as a whole, wood burning is already officially the single biggest source of an especially nasty form of air pollution.

Indoor smog
Press-Kristensen has been measuring that pollution inside homes in Copenhagen. In three out of seven tests done so far, he has found very high levels. In one home with a modern log-burning stove, he found particulate levels several times higher than the highest ever recorded outdoors there (see diagram, above).

So do the health impacts outweigh any climate benefits? Astonishingly, there might not be any climate benefits, at least in the short term.

Burning logs is often touted as being carbon-neutral. The idea is that trees soak up as much carbon dioxide when growing as they release when burned.

In fact, numerous studies show that wood burning is not carbon-neutral, and can sometimes be worse than burning coal. There are emissions from transport and processing. Logs are often pre-dried in kilns, for instance.

Burning wood also emits black carbon – soot – that warms the atmosphere during the short time it remains in the air. Most studies ignore this, but Mitchell and Forster calculate that over 20 years – the timescale that matters if we don’t want the world to go too far above 2°C of warming – soot cancels out half the carbon benefits of all wood burning.

For home wood burning, the figures are even worse. “On a 20-year timescale, wood stoves provide little or no benefit, but they do on the 100-year timescale as they remove some of the long-term warming effect of CO2 emissions,” says Forster.

Press-Kristensen’s calculations show much the same thing. And both sets of findings almost certainly underestimate the problem, because they assume wood burning is carbon-neutral.

Defenders of wood stoves point out that there is a lot of uncertainty about how much black carbon is emitted when wood is burned and how large its effect is. Patricia Thornley of the University of Manchester, UK, thinks we need more real-world measurements before coming to conclusions.

But the uncertainties cut both ways. For instance, the effects of black carbon can be amplified if it is deposited on snow and melts it, exposing dark land that absorbs more heat. It’s possible soot from wood burning is contributing to the fall in spring snow cover in Europe, but it’s very hard to study.

More research is needed to pin down the precise climatic effects of wood burning, which can vary hugely depending on factors such as the source of wood and where the pollution goes. What is clear, however, is that burning logs in homes in towns and cities is not the best use of the wood we have.

It produces more pollution than wood-burning power plants that can be fitted with expensive filters, it produces that harmful pollution where lots of people live, and it has the least climate benefits, if any. “If we are going to burn biomass to meet climate targets, then we ought to do it in big, remote power stations,” says Martin Williams of King’s College London, who is studying the health impacts of the ways the UK could meet its climate targets.

Most researchers say it isn’t their role to make policy recommendations, but it would be best if cities like London discourage private wood burning before it becomes an even bigger health problem. At the moment, all the focus is on diesel vehicles.

Press-Kristensen doubts governments will ban wood-burning; France recently backtracked on a proposed ban on open fires, for example. Instead, he proposes installing heat sensors in chimneys and taxing people when they burn wood, with the level of tax depending on how polluting the appliance is.

Most importantly, governments must not ignore health impacts when deciding climate policies, says Press-Kristensen. “I like fires, but I have to say they are as polluting as hell,” he says.

Thinking of getting a wood-burner?

Wood-burning stoves are touted as an eco-friendly way to heat your house cheaply. But tests now show that even new, properly installed stoves can produce dangerous levels of outdoor and indoor pollution (see main story). What other options are there?

Consider instead

Stick with gas or oil for heating, and spend your money on insulation. Get a heat pump if you can afford it

Fake it

You can get the same cosy feeling from a log-effect electric or gas fireplace, the best of which are hard to distinguish from the real thing

Already have a wood-burner?
Here’s how to minimise its effects:

Don’t burn scrap wood

Scrap wood or painted wood can release highly toxic substances such as arsenic when burned

Burn wood that’s just right

Burning dry wood with a moisture content of about 20 per cent minimises pollution. But if wood is wetter or drier than that, pollution increases

The italics are mine, since these folks are arguing for big filtered biomass plants instead. Also note that the better health and climate choices promoted here are natural gas- yes, natural gas, which we discussed in the previous post. Most of us probably get our wood from not too far away, so the climate impacts of our wood include driving our truck there and using our chainsaw, and possibly increased food and alcohol consumption to replace the personal energy used. Most of us probably live in rural areas, so are not contributing to city pollution. But the indoor pollution observations are interesting and potentially scary. For those who are interested, this EPA site called Burnwise looks like it has just about as much information as anyone could want. Including this Q&A:

Are gas stoves cleaner than wood stoves or pellet stoves?
Gas (whether you use natural gas or propane) emits less soot and other air pollution.

I’d be interested in any experts out there who could related our EPA wood stove air quality standards to the European ones.