Firefighters monitor a 2018 prescribed burn on the Gus Pearson Natural Area north of Flagstaff.
Quote from Andrew Sánchez Meador:
If you were to manufacture or engineer a species of tree that is well suited for that, ponderosa pine would probably be at the top of the list of the thing that you created. It’s well suited for the future climate. What it is not well suited for is the current density and the way wildfires behave, and insects and disease behave.
Yes, this fits into the “I think we already knew that” category, but it’s great to hear someone officially in the research community say it. Here’s a link to more information on the Fort Valley Experimental Forest. From Arizona Public Radio:
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A new study from Northern Arizona University shows thinning and regular prescribed burns can help ponderosa pine forests survive both drought and wildfire. The work took place at a thirty-year-old research site on the Fort Valley Experimental Forest north of Flagstaff. KNAU’s Melissa Sevigny spoke with ecologist Andrew Sánchez Meador about the findings.
Okay, so this experimental area has places that have been thinned, places that have been thinned and routinely burned, and then some places that have been left alone.
Yeah. And in this study, the initial thinning was followed by repeated burning every four years. In fact, we’re going to burn it this fall. That repeated burning, that frequent fire interval, is key to the function of this ecosystem.
What did you find out?
We actually found that both young and old trees responded to the thinning and grew really fast. That’s not a surprise with young trees. When you open up and make resources available, young trees can tend to thrive and jump on that. But what we found was trees 500 years old had dramatic increases in growth rates, suggesting that if we treat, both young and old trees can increase their vigor, they can be more resilient to drought, insect and disease, and what we also found was that if we introduce fire into this system, we don’t increase the mortality in that.
So the trees in the treated area are more likely to be resilient to the drought?
Yes. And to increased fire or being exposed to fire. Which is an equally important thing. Because you see a lot of messaging now advocating for putting fire back into these systems. People are scared of fire, rightfully so. But what we do know is, putting fire back into the system, seems to have only positive benefits in a frequent fire, naturally functioning system.
How do you hope the information from this study will help inform forest management in this region?
First and foremost, as we work to translate this science, I hope it makes the public feel better about seeing reduction in forest density. These forests we all live in here in Arizona, they are the only forests we’ve ever seen, so when we come here and someone tells us that these forests are unhealthy and too dense, that’s hard for us to understand. But these type of studies repeatedly show these forests are degraded and if we open them up we can increase vigor and resilience and make them healthy…And I think the other piece of this is that we know a lot about this. I often get the question about: we’re experiencing increasing severity of fire, and frequency of fire. The burn year is getting longer and longer and longer. What we can do to counteract it? Well, we know that thinning followed by the reintroduction of prescribed burning, that can counteract it. It took us 150 years to get into this mess, it’s going to take us a long time to get out of it, but we know that thinning and burning is a way out of it, we just need to be able to do it at a landscape scale in order to get ahead of these wildfires that we’re experiencing.
We’re on two decades of drought and we know that our ponderosa pines are struggling. After doing this research are you feeling more optimistic about the future of ponderosas, or are you still worried?
That’s a great question. Because I often say that if I look forward to the future climate… We know that we’re getting warmer, and the availability of precipitation is becoming less for plants and trees. If you were to manufacture or engineer a species of tree that is well suited for that, ponderosa pine would probably be at the top of the list of the thing that you created. It’s well suited for the future climate. What it is not well suited for is the current density and the way wildfires behave, and insects and disease behave. I’m very optimistic that if we can do more restoration at the landscape scale, if we can create more continuous parts of the landscape that are restored, we’re setting our ponderosa pines forest up to have the best chance they can have.
It’s starting to feel like fall here. The monsoons have started. And if you look at Inciweb, you easily find wildfires with estimated containment dates at the end of October. You might read stories like this, (and the same story has turned up in many outlets) creatively eliding the 10AM policy with the stated goals of full suppression or aggressive initial attack. It is true that some of us want the 10AM policy back, but exactly what does that mean? Does the “10AM policy” mean the same thing to everyone? And what is actually happening this fire year with the full suppression and aggressive initial attack approach? Since I can’t keep up with the terminology changes, and I think the term “beneficial fire” unhelpfully elides prescribed and WFU, I’ll just use WFU for now to mean what some people call Managed Fire (all wildfires are managed) or Wildfire for Resource Benefits or whatever.
Let’s take a look at one of today’s current wildfires (as of Aug. 27), the Upper Smith Fire on the Idaho Panhandle Forest:
The Northern Idaho Blue Team assumed command of the fire on August 12, 2026, at 6:00 am. A full suppression strategy will continue to be implemented utilizing direct and indirect tactics to protect critical values at-risk and minimize firefighter risk exposure.
Yesterday it was 30% contained and had 96 people on it, with an estimated containment date of 10/31/2026.
-Monitor and patrol H-2, north and downslope, through the avalanche chute and east along Smith Creek, using ground and aerial resources.
-Patrol DP-17 to above H-5 into burn scar. Patrol line from DP-17 to sling 2, sling 1, into Smith Creek. Patrol spot fires east of sling 2.
-Aerial resources will continue to check fire spread as it moves across the Parker Ridge fire scar.
-Continue to fine tune structure protection and prep the Westside Road for possible firing operation.
-Scout west into Smith Creek and look for opportunities for point protection on critical values.
-Patrol and monitor around associated values at risk from increased fire activity.
-assess ability to contain new starts within the TFR.
-continue to monitor and patrol for new starts and holdovers.
-Support the suppression of new fires within the TFR.
What are the conditions?
The fire is burning in mature mixed conifer with moderate to high loadings of 1000-hr fuels and deep duff layers. Fuels in Long Canyon Fire 2022 and Parker 2015 burn scars include snags, dead and downed woody debris, and conifer regeneration. Fuels in the Long Canyon Fire 2022 burn scar include a slash/blowdown fuel model and pockets of shrubs. Fuel moisture in 1000-hr fuels is 12-14%.
I’m not a wildfire person, but it sounds like a sensible approach. Note that they are monitoring and doing point protection within the overall strategy of full suppression.
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Maybe the real issue is “when and how much WFU, and who decides?” This was a bad fire year, so maybe this wasn’t the year? Or maybe in some windowless cubicle farm in the bowels of Interior, some group is dreaming up a better way to go about it and build more public support. I
If I listen to some of the voices on the “not ever” side, I hear concerns about the way decisions are made to engage in WFU. Maybe implicit in that is the difference in public engagement and environmental analysis between major vegetation manipulation categories. For older folks, this is another incarnation of the old tension “should there ever be NEPA for wildfire management?”; “when is wildfire an emergency, and when not?”?
If we look at this handy table (last years below)
We find that the Forest Service FY 2025 Oct 1, 2024 to Sept 30, 2025, did 867,764 acres of WFU, actually twice as much as 2024. So it looks like the FS did over twice as much WFU in 2025 as 2024 (868k vs. 362K). From the outside, then, assuming these numbers are as close to correct as the FS and DOI have, it looks like WFU was increased during the first year of the Trump Admin by over 2x. Granted that the Admin did not start till January, and maybe lots of WFU happened between 10/01/2024 and January.
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When I hear Frank Carroll talking about his concerns, I hear the idea that “if it’s intentional and it’s supposed to be good, why don’t we measure its goodness (and decide on what that is) and fund it through non-emergency funds?” It’s hard to disagree with that formulation, or is it?
Then there’s the question of “if you need a CE to harvest 70 acres (and this CE was litigated!), why you don’t need any NEPA to intentionally burn potentially hundreds of acres.” Well, you do if it’s prescribed, but not if it’s WFU. This seems like a bit of a NEPA gap, and maybe folks should pick a lane as to whether it’s intentional or not. Everyone who follow TSW knows that I am not a fan of Forest Plans and the current planning rule. But WFU pre-decisions have been made in forest plans and amendments, so it does seem like a particularly useful thing to do in Plans.
To circle back to Roadless, one problem I have with the rescission idea is that land allocations should be made in forest plans. This one of those concepts that may sound good in theory, but in practice, forest planning is lengthy and often held up by litigation, and potentially too expensive and unwieldy for that to actually work in practice. Just think of all those assessments where FS employees calculated NRV and all that.. only to find that a couple hundred thousand acres is not in the condition they assessed and it’s already out of date. Still, given all that, I’ve argued for a long time that the FS should cease revisions until fire management amendments are up to speed.
At some point, we would understand the desired future conditions of some landscape, and then could assess whether any specific WFU was successful at moving toward those conditions.
But backing way up to the Three Horizons Framework, perhaps WFU as currently constituted with the inherent fuzziness on emergency applicability for NEPA and funding, is simply the equivalent of an H2 technology, as Google AI tells me:
H2 Capture: Governments often use H2 technology simply to extend the life of an outdated H1 system rather than transforming it.
Anyway, I hold both ideas at the same time- we put too much emphasis and effort on forest planning for what we get and let’s not put more on a potentially sinking ship. And if you’re going to have plans, that’s the best place for pre-WFU planning.
First of all, for context, a big shout-out to the California Assembly for this (from Jennifer Pahlka):
Last November, I wrote about an experiment in the California Assembly designed to change that. Speaker Robert Rivas launched a pilot called Outcomes Reviews: a structured process by which a legislator and their staff publicly commit to reviewing a law they championed, spend months meeting with the people the law actually affects and researching the outcomes, and then announce what they learned and what they’re going to do about it. Earlier this week, his office announced the results of the pilot year. Fifteen Assemblymembers reviewed fourteen laws, covering housing, energy, health care, foster care, wildfire recovery, and more. According to the Speaker’s office, the program will continue next session, with more members and more reviews, on its way to becoming a permanent part of how Assembly policy teams work.
Just like the Assemblyfolk in California, can you imagine the US Congress doing the same? I’d put NFMA on the top of my list for review.. But there’s no reason the Executive Branch, or even partners, or universities or someone out there could do a review with recommendations. That’s basically what Idaho and Colorado did with their Roadless Rules.
When it comes to Roadless, NWFP, Travel Management and Wildfire Use, basically some people have not been happy with the way things are working, and want to review and fix things. The NWFP, not reviewed and improved (although efforts were made last Admin) but with certain critiques apparently off-limits. The Roadless Rule. The Travel Management Rule. The Planning Rule. Wildfire Use.
Yet, how are some of these efforts covered in some media elements? As “all or nothing.”
Even though there’s an Alternative 3 for Roadless.
Even though folks like the American Motorcycle Association American Motorcycle Association that include those ideas (thank you to The Wilderness Society for sending this!):
As the Forest Service considers how best to move forward, it is important that any change to these regulations should preserve current access and ideally improve and streamline TMP-related decisions. However, a full repeal of the 2005 rule risks creating agency and user confusion and additional fragmentation of these areas. This process, although not perfect, was the result of close collaboration among recreation and conservation groups with Forest Service officials. Future decisions, while guided by national policies, should be made at the local level with these same stakeholders involved in the process.
There are many interest groups out there engaging on Travel Management (and likely Roadless) with “fix but don’t throw out”, with their own lists of experiences or issues that they would prefer to be changed.
Now, why would the Admin propose rescinding if they really plan to do something in the middle?
Here’s why I would hypothesize, not being privy to their deliberations:
a) The old English “you might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb.” Any tweaking will cause hyperbolic outrage, so why not go for the full thing at the beginning? Those of us who worked on the State rules have been through the media/NGO full-court press already, and maybe those groups can recycle their talking points from the State Petitions Rule and the State rules.
b) There will be high-quality and extensive litigation, so moving from a proposal to a final and considering public comments always looks good. Sure 99% of the comments are likely to be form letters generated by clicking on a “do you want your forests destroyed” button, but still.
c) As my old boss Fred Norbury used to say “we don’t need to negotiate with ourselves.” I looked this up on Linked in and found “why we do it.”
Lack of confidence: You don’t fully believe your position is legitimate, so you soften it before anyone even pushes back.
People-pleasing: You want to be liked (or at least not disliked), and you’ve convinced yourself that a more aggressive position will make you the villain.
Conflict aversion: You believe that holding firm will make things worse, so you try to smooth the road before you’ve even hit a bump.
Past baggage: A difficult history with someone leads you to presume the worst, so you preemptively adjust to avoid what you’re convinced is inevitable.
Deal fatigue: You’ve been working on this for months, and you just want it done. Any deal sounds better than no deal, so you start making mental price cuts before the first offer is on the table.
d) They get points from user groups for being influenced by them to change toward the reasonable from the disruptive.
“Trump Proposal Could Unleash ATV’s across Wyoming’s National Forests”
in the uniquely hyperbolic style of headlines nowadays. It was only Monday that we read in the NY Times:
“Bigger, Hotter Fires Are Slowly Erasing America’s Great Forests
Towering woodlands in the West are being permanently replaced by tracts of spiky shrubs. “
It reminds me a bit of the fable “the boy who cried wolf.”
Anyway, as a person who thought the TMR was too complicated to learn about (and that’s from someone who worked on Planning and Roadless Rules!), my first thought was that the processes could probably be improved, given the period of time that has elapsed (2005) and changes in mapping, climate change, additional recreation pressure (in some places), wildfire management, technologies and case law may have raised other opportunities for clarification and improvement.
Declaring that Forest Service regulations “for too long … have stood in the way of public recreation access,” the Trump administration seeks to open some 6.2 million acres of public forest land in Wyoming to virtually unbridled motorized access, prompting widespread criticism from conservationists.
What does “virtually unbridled” mean?
This is interesting..
The plan would strengthen rural economies, maintain safe and sustainable transportation systems, and support working lands, the USDA said in the announcement. A new “uniform national policy” would presume that all “existing roads, trails, airfields, trailheads, and other access routes and points on National Forest System lands are open to appropriate public use.”
Areas and routes that would be closed must be “supported by specific, documented and justifiable reasons based on science-based resource conditions, public safety, conflicts among uses, or maintenance and administrative capacity.” National forest supervisors and their staffers would enact the new plan and seek input on what areas might be closed to engine-powered access, the announcement suggests.
Don’t they already do that? Or do forest staff close roads willy-nilly and supported by their own druthers? I do know Patrick has questions about how decisions were made on one forest, including the process.
Apparently, based on the story there is a “spectrum of conservation organizations” but the quotes are from one, the Wyoming Wilderness Association. I resist lumping WWA with all “conservationists” and I wait to see what our hook and bullet friends have to say, especially about game retrieval. Or maybe folks at Wyofile have redefined “conservation” to a specific group?
It seems like an article would have quotes from, say, OHV groups to get both sides of the story. But maybe not. Here’s the other group the reporter contacted:
WyoFile sought reaction from Wyoming’s State Parks, Historic Sites and Trails agency, which operates a trails permit system and publishes off-road vehicle maps of trails on state and federal land, but officials did not immediately respond.
Back to dePasquale:
“The threat of changing the paradigm from closed-unless-designated-open to open-unless-designated-closed comes with the risk of widespread expansion of user-created motorized routes and a fear of significant damage to important habitat such as streams and wetlands,” dePasquale said.
I don’t actually see that in the proposal. There are routes, and there is off-route. Conceivably opening more trails is not the same as opening off-trail travel? Are these two different concepts?
In the comments earlier, Anonymous said that motorized people were hard to deal with because they were stuck on “no net loss.” Sure there is a risk of widespread expansion, but I’m curious about when do we trust local officials to make decisions and when not? I always thought the difficulty with the TMR was that it had different parts which were unevenly completed. After this time, again, like Roadless, with the mapping we have and our additional knowledge of critters and wildfire, as well as the increased demand for mountain biking and hiking trails (and conflicts) why not take another look?
Once again, beware of unquestioned elision of two different things…
“When people are able to go wherever they want, it’s not always malicious,” she said. But, user-created two-tracks and single-track motorized trails, “can create a large impact that is irreparable in a short amount of time.
Travel management regulations, 36 CFR part 212. The proposed action would establish a uniform national policy favoring increased access while simplifying regulatory requirements and preserving local decision-making. The proposed access rule would establish a national policy with a presumption that existing roads, trails, airfields, trailheads, and other access routes and points on National Forest System lands are open to appropriate public use unless closure or restriction is required by applicable law, valid existing rights, or another governing instrument, or supported by specific, documented and justifiable reasons based on science-based resource conditions, public safety, conflicts among uses, or maintenance and administrative capacity. Commonly available public data sets, including aerial imagery, may be used as evidence that a physical route or airfield exists or existed at a time relevant under the definition adopted in the proposed rule, but would not by themselves establish that the feature is part of the forest transportation system, that the Forest Service has jurisdiction or sufficient legal access, or that it is open to a particular public use. The proposed access rule would require annual review of all trails, roads, airfields, trailheads, and other access routes and points that are closed or highly restricted. The proposed access rule would establish processes and conditions for limited off-route motor vehicle use and other motorized equipment for, among other things, downed big-game retrieval, firewood collection and dispersed camping, and for designating areas for over-snow and other motorized recreation.
The presumption embodied in the national policy would guide future decisions and would not itself change the legal status of any road, trail, airfield, trailhead, area, or other access route or point. Any change in lawful use resulting from a vehicle- or use-specific exemption would be limited to the scope and conditions expressly provided in the revised regulations. Existing motor vehicle use designations and maps would remain in effect until revised under the amended regulations. The environmental impact statement will evaluate the impacts of the proposed rule revisions and study alternatives for managing public access, including the motorized and other forms of access addressed by the proposed rule, on National Forest System lands in the context of multiple-use resource management. USDA invites written comments on alternatives, effects, and relevant information, studies, or analyses related to the proposal.
I read it as “existing roads, trails, etc.” not “areas” except they would (again) have processes and conditions for the usual suspect issues (big game retrieval and so on). I see a couple of questions arising.. would this include user-created trails in the analysis? That might be something to comment on so that it’s clarified.
Finally, there are areas already for over-snow and other motorized recreation. So there must have been a process to create them? Or not? And of course, we know that creating any new ones would likely be controversial, and likely litigated.
For me, I think the whole thing will be more interesting when they have a proposal on the table, although I already think the idea of an annual review is too frequent.
If it were me, I would have said “the FS has posted an NOI that they will do a rulemaking, including a proposed rule and an EIS. What do you think is important to keep about the current regulatory situation? What needs to be changed?
These processes take time, so we, unlike Wyofile, apparently have time to get different views.
OHV Folks and Mad River RD Staff with South Fork Mountain IRA after 2015 Route One Complex Fire
For many California OHV riders, the words “Roadless Rule” probably don’t mean much. You may have heard them in a club meeting, seen them in another public-land fight, or watched another battle unfold over a trail that seemed perfectly reasonable but somehow became tangled up in federal land-management policy. For those of us who have been involved in public-land recreation for decades, however, the Roadless Rule is a familiar—and sometimes frustrating—part of the landscape.
Now, after 25 years of litigation, policy battles and changing conditions on our national forests, the Forest Service has proposed rescinding the national 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule. The proposal would remove the nationwide prohibitions on road construction, road reconstruction and timber harvesting in inventoried roadless areas (IRAs) and return those decisions largely to individual forests through their existing land-management planning processes. For California’s OHV community, I think this is something much more interesting than simply another logging issue. It could be an opportunity to reset the way we think about roadless country, forest health and managed motorized recreation. I call that potential reset “Roadless 2.0.”
First, let’s clear up one misconception. The 2001 Roadless Rule did not close all the roads and OHV trails inside inventoried roadless areas. The Forest Service’s original analysis considered—and rejected—an alternative that would have prohibited motorized recreation in roadless areas. The new 2001 ROADLESS AREA CONSERVATION RULE RESCISSION DRAFT ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT STATEMENT (DEIS) makes the distinction even clearer. It identifies approximately 5,200 miles of motorized trails within the potentially affected roadless areas and recognizes that trailheads around the periphery of IRAs can provide motorized trail access into those areas. Existing OHV use on trails designated for motorized use remains governed by the applicable Forest Plan and Travel Management decisions.
How did we get here? The original Roadless Rule was adopted in January 2001 after years of controversy over how the Forest Service should manage the remaining large blocks of relatively undeveloped national forest land. The rule established national restrictions on road construction, road reconstruction and most timber harvesting within inventoried roadless areas. It immediately became controversial. Environmental organizations viewed it as one of the most important conservation protections ever placed on National Forest lands. Many timber, mining, recreation and multiple-use interests viewed it as another example of Washington imposing a broad management prescription on vastly different landscapes. And the litigation began.
California became part of that long-running legal and administrative struggle. For years, questions surrounded how the Roadless Rule interacted with Forest Plans, Travel Management and local decisions. For riders, however, the practical question was usually much simpler: “Can I legally ride on my motorcycle, ATV or UTV on that trail?” That question didn’t always have a simple answer.
The world has changed dramatically since 2001. California had already experienced major wildfires, but we had not yet experienced the landscape transformation of the last decade. Since then, California has endured fire seasons that have fundamentally changed portions of our national forests. The Camp Fire, Caldor, Dixie, Mendocino and August Complex Fires, Mosquito, and many others have left landscapes dramatically different from what they were when the original Roadless Rule was created.
2019 Post Fire Trail Survey of 2015 Rt. 1 Complex Fire – Pilot Creek OHV Trail System
South Fork Mountain IRA – Six Rivers National Forest
In some areas, what was once called an Inventoried Roadless Area could now reasonably be described by riders as an “Inventoried Treeless Area.” That’s obviously a little tongue-in-cheek, but there is a serious point behind it. A designation created around the idea of maintaining relatively intact, undeveloped forest landscapes now exists in places where fire, drought, insects, disease and extreme weather have radically altered the landscape. The question shouldn’t simply be, “Was this area roadless in 2001?” The better question is, “What is the appropriate management strategy for this landscape today?”
Dan East Trail BEFORE 2015 Rt.1 Complex Fire – Dan East Trail AFTER 2015 Rt. 1 Complex Fire
Pilot Creek OHV Trail System – South Fork Mountain IRA – Six Rivers National Forest
This isn’t an argument to pave the backcountry. Most OHV riders don’t want every mountain road turned into a highway. We don’t want every remote forest landscape turned into a subdivision or motocross track. And we don’t need to pretend that every roadless area is appropriate for motorized recreation. Some places are genuinely remote, special and appropriate for rugged backcountry non-motorized recreation.
But there is a huge difference between saying that some places should remain undeveloped and saying that a national rule adopted 25 years ago should determine the transportation and management options available on every roadless landscape regardless of what has happened since. That’s where I think Roadless 2.0 comes in.
To me, Roadless 2.0 starts with a simple concept: manage the landscape we have—not simply the landscape we mapped in 2001. That means looking at each area based on current conditions, including wildfire history, forest health, fuels, watershed conditions, wildlife, existing roads and trails, historic access, recreation demand, community needs, fire response, post-fire recovery and the potential for sustainable motorized recreation.
The DEIS recognizes that the current planning system includes both Semi-Primitive Motorized and Semi-Primitive Non-Motorized recreation settings. It also identifies approximately 3.1 million acres of potentially affected IRAs as Semi-Primitive Motorized. Motorized recreation is therefore already part of the Forest Service’s legitimate recreation planning framework. Roadless does not have to mean nonmotorized.
California is also showing us what managed OHV recreation can look like. OHV recreation itself has changed. We have moved a long way from the old image of “just go ride wherever you want.” Today’s legitimate OHV system is increasingly based upon designated routes, MVUMs, trail standards, seasonal restrictions, route signing, resource monitoring, law enforcement, trail maintenance, restoration of damaged routes, user education, clubs and volunteers, and purposefully designed trail systems.
This is where conservation and OHV interests have found more common ground than we sometimes did in the past. A legal, designated trail can be mapped, signed, monitored, maintained, rerouted when necessary, closed seasonally, designed around sensitive resources and enforced. An illegal user-created route has none of those advantages. A carefully planned trail connection can sometimes be a conservation tool by concentrating use onto a durable corridor and keeping riders out of fragile areas. A logical loop or connector can also prevent riders from reaching a dead end and creating their own way around it.
The DEIS recognizes that new transportation infrastructure can provide additional access to dispersed recreation and that some temporary roads could potentially become trails after management activities are completed. That’s an important concept for California and for other fire-affected national forests.
The DEIS says the proposed rescission would return decision-making to individual forests and existing land-management plans. That’s good. But local decision-making needs to mean multiple-use decision-making where the OHV community gets skin-in-the-game by showing up and participates.
The DEIS identifies road construction needs associated with much more than timber harvesting. It specifically identifies fuels reduction, pre-commercial thinning, watershed restoration, habitat improvement and recreation development as activities that can require transportation access. That is a very different landscape than the Roadless debate of 2001 and leaves room for hybrid fuel reduction/recreation projects that can meet multiple objectives.
And here’s something every California rider should understand: the Roadless Rule isn’t the only thing that determines whether you can ride. Even if the national Roadless Rule disappears, your Forest Supervisor doesn’t simply get to say, “Open it all.” Forest Plans still matter. NEPA still matters. The Travel Management Rule or a revised version still matters. The MVUM still matters. Wilderness designations still matter. Wild and Scenic River protections still matter. Endangered species protections still matter. Private property rights matter. Tribal interests matter. Site-specific environmental analysis still matters. Roadless 2.0 is not a blank check.
What should California OHV riders support? I think the answer is pretty straightforward. We should support an alternative that ends the one-size-fits-all national prohibition, returns appropriate decision-making to individual forests, requires genuine consideration of motorized recreation, recognizes the difference between roads, motorized trails and unmanaged cross-country travel, and encourages strategic and collaborative transportation access planning efforts.
Roadless 2.0 could be an opportunity. But only if the recreation community helps define what that opportunity looks like.
Don Amador is a longtime public lands advocate with over 30 years of experience in recreation policy, trail stewardship, post-wildfire recovery, and collaborative land management and is former Chair of the CA State Parks Off-Highway Motor Vehicle Recreation Commission.
U.S. Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz argues full suppression is essential for this hazardous summer. And Brian Fennessy, director of the new U.S. Wildland Fire Service, defends a policy shift it’s made: Federal officials who want to promote forest health can no longer make the final call about whether to let a fire burn.
Public land managers have toggled back and forth about a full-suppression strategy over the past decades. Many believe that the full suppression strategy both overextends limited firefighting resources and ignores basic science about how fire affects forests.
“We don’t think wildfire should be divorced from the land,” said Bill Avey, president of the National Association of Forest Service Retirees. “That’s been a policy failure.” Decades of extinguishing wildfires and climate change-induced drought have left Western forests full of dry fuels, contributing to conditions that can produce catastrophic fires. Making full suppression the default response, they argue, could perpetuate that problem while demanding more firefighting resources than the government has available.
I’m always interested in positions that sound like things that Forest Service employees used to do. Like I’ve been saying for the past three or so years, I still think it would be great if the larger NGO’s would post what they’re doing with the federal bucks. We know they have to tell the Feds. And FOIAing is painful for both me and the FOIA people. My question is “did the FS have a plan for what kinds of work would be farmed out, and which kept in-house?” And “do we need as many employees under this new model?”
I am a fan of keeping the work in-house. I think the NGO’s and their folks are generally great. I’ve already seen situations in which NGO employees use FS vehicles and the lines seem to be a bit blurred in some cases, at least to the public. It also can’t be good for public interest in funding the FS. And to be honest, I’ve seen cases where NGO priorities don’t exactly line up with (my idea of) FS priorities. Do Interior agencies operate this way? I also understand that when the FS had a hiring freeze it had to do something to get the work done.
The Landscape-Scale Restoration Manager leads one of the most ambitious forest and fire restoration efforts underway in Washington State’s dry forests. This role focuses on advancing equitable, climate-resilient cross-boundary restoration from planning through implementation on federal lands, in close partnership with Tribes, the U.S. Forest Service, WA State and regional partners.
The manager serves as a practical integrator across forestry, prescribed fire, science, and partnerships, working to resolve bottlenecks, align projects and partners, and ensure restoration work moves forward at the pace and scale required. This role is both strategic and deeply operational, requiring the ability to navigate federal systems, advance complex agreements, and deliver real on-the-ground outcomes. This role is critical to ensuring that decades of investment in forest restoration translate into durable, on-the-ground outcomes.
We’re Looking For You
The Landscape-Scale Restoration Manager helps translate restoration priorities into implementable projects on the ground. They coordinate with Tribal, federal, state, and community partners to refine priority landscapes, support National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA)-ready restoration pathways, oversee key agreements and deliverables, and help design implementable treatment packages that integrate mechanical thinning, prescribed fire, cultural burning opportunities, workforce development, and community-informed smoke management. The role focuses on removing barriers to delivery, including aligning partners, advancing agreements, coordinating contracting and implementation pathways, and ensuring that NEPA-ready work progresses through thinning, prescribed fire, and follow-on stewardship.
This role requires a strong understanding of how restoration work is implemented on federal lands, including familiarity with stewardship contracting, partner agreements, and agency processes. The manager works closely with agency staff, contractors, and partners to align timelines, resolve constraints, and maintain momentum through complex, multi-party projects.
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Then there’s this one for three Forest Recovery Program Zone Coordinators for the GW/Jeff- it says that they are funded by a “long term grant that ends in January of 2036”.. that is pretty long-term!
What We Can Achieve Together:
The Zone Forest Recovery Program Coordinator is a position that will work directly and coordinate with the George Washington and Jefferson National Forests to implement on-the-ground restoration of fire-adapted oak- and pine-dominated forests impacted by hurricane Helene. Specifically, this position will provide accountability and oversite for contracted fuels and silviculture modules, participate in controlled burns, support ecological monitoring, and support resource coordination between partners to support RX projects. We are hiring three coordinators, one each at the following locations in Virginia; Abingdon, Blacksburg and Lexington. The positions are funded by a long-term grant that ends in January of 2036.
We’re Looking for You:
This position will supervise seasonal/term fire crews and interns. Responsibilities include fire-line construction and maintenance, monitoring fuel conditions, burn implementation and mop up, equipment maintenance, vegetation monitoring, data entry and compilation, and assisting with burn plan development. This position will also coordinate with District/Zone Forest Service staff to support timber stand improvement and non-native invasive species activities, specifically development of program of work for contract solicitations. This position will also have responsibility for accomplishment reporting of all Helene recovery efforts to include planning and implementation. Accomplishing most of these duties requires effectively communicating between, work with, and often leading diverse teams of other Conservancy or partner agency staff, volunteers, and interns.
Dr. Hansen, left, and Dr. Eckdahl near Midpines this month. “Ponderosa seeds have adapted to fire, that’s how they live,” Dr. Hansen said. “But the fires are just too hot for them.”
To better understand these cascading effects, Dr. Hansen and Johan Eckdahl, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, visited the Sierra Nevada this month. On a 100-foot hillside plot that burned in the 2022 Oak fire, they recorded each flowering plant and shrub, filled plastic bags with soil, and checked the ground moisture and temperature with a special probe.
Under normal conditions, seedlings would sprout all over after a fire. Young trees would grow and compete for space, water and light, and the forest would return after a decade or two. But the combination of more intense fires and a warmer, drier climate has stopped this age-old process of regeneration.
As Dr. Hansen stood among the brush at the research site, the absence of new growth was stark. “We haven’t found one ponderosa seedling,” he said. “Ponderosa seeds have adapted to fire. That’s how they live. But the fires are just too hot for them.”
I know that there are many TSW readers with more Sierra experience, so I hope you will add your experience. It looks to me like the seed sources (Mom Pine Trees) are dead.
As we know from Silvics of North America:
Ponderosa pine seeds are not disseminated naturally over extensive distances. In central Oregon, seedfall at 37 m (120 ft) was only 22 percent of the seedfall at the west edge of a cleared area, and at 120 m (396 ft) it was only 8 percent (3)
So maybe the seeds are not there, not that “the fire is too hot for them.” Also I’m not sure that the seeds have “adapted to fire”. What does that even mean? Certainly the species has adapted to fire, and seeds prefer bare mineral soil.
If seeds flew from last year, they would likely be burned up in a ground fire. If a fire occurs in the summer, the cones are still on the trees, so in a crown fire are likely to become toast, just like the rest of the tree. Back to Silvics:
Throughout ponderosa pine’s range, except in the Black Hills and the west side of the Sierra Nevada, natural regeneration is sporadic. Successful natural regeneration is thought to be the result of the chance combination of a heavy seed crop and favorable weather during the next growing season. Soil texture, plant competition, and seedbed conditions are other common determinants of survival of young seedlings (13)
In some places “seedlings would sprout all over after a fire” is true. In other places not so much. Our friend the lodgepole is quite good at regenerating, often growing up into doghair. But ponderosa not so much everywhere, especially in drier climates. That’s why the Central Oregon forests hired our own Area Reforestation Specialist in the 1980’s. We used to think we needed a) Mother Trees to be alive b) a good cone year to coincide with c) bare mineral soil. This was always difficult, because competing vegetation tends to grow back and make the site less hospitable to successful seedling establishment.
The forest would return after a decade or two? I guess this depends on what you consider “forest.” In dry areas, you might get a foot a year of growth.
Even if seedlings do take hold, they face tough odds. Across the Sierra Nevadas, about one-fifth of the conifers, or cone-bearing trees, are not well suited to the current warming climate.
This link goes back to the New York Times story about zombie trees, which also quotes folks from Cary. I think I wrote about that one before so will look for that. It is kind of interesting for climate modelers to tell folks who understand conifer adaptation that the trees aren’t “well suited.” In simpler days, we used to measure “well suited” by survival, growth, resistance to pests, and ability to reproduce. We also studied how conifers adapt to changing environments and what the mechanisms for long-lived organisms stuck in the ground with changing climates.
Have all these additional layers of abstraction added anything to our knowledge? And why is the “model what bad things are going to happen” studies getting so much more funding than the “how do things work in the physical world and what can we do about it?” studies. It’s as if during WWII research went toward modeling “what if the Nazis took over and we did nothing about it?” rather than “what tools can we use to keep them from taking over?”
A team with the New Mexico Reforestation Center monitors seedlings in Mora County. (Courtesy of Pouli Sikelianos/New Mexico Highlands University)
This seems like science to me…from Matt Hurteau who is the Director of the Center for Fire Resilient Ecosystems and Society at the University of New Mexico.
“Plant and seedling survival in these wildfire footprints across the Southwest has averaged about 25 percent,” he said. ”What we’ve been doing is a years-long campaign to try and figure out how to improve those numbers.”
As we with refo experience (and just looking around on N and S facing slopes) know:
He says the model can predict the chance that a planted seedling will survive with about 63 percent accuracy. He and his team have produced maps for the Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon Fire’s footprint, which land managers can use to decide when and where to plant. So far, the model is limited to ponderosa pine, one of the most commonly transplanted species, but Hurteau said it could be replicated for use with other types of trees.
Hurteau has found that when planted in middle or lower elevation ranges, ponderosa pine seedlings fare the worst on south, southeast, southwest and west-facing slopes because they’re exposed to too much solar radiation.
“They’re much hotter and drier than, say, slopes that are northwest to northeast, maybe even east facing,” Hurteau said.
Areas that are more likely to accumulate water see higher survival rates, he added.
Yes, I can be down on some models. Models that don’t take known important variables into consideration. Models that are not ground-truthed, and their outputs not reviewed for accuracy (when predicting the future). But these reforestation models are likely to be updated with real world data over time.
Anyway, back to the Times article.
Researchers say that as trees disappear, winter and spring snow will melt faster, affecting wildlife as well as communities that are already struggling with water shortages. Some Western states get as much as 75 percent of their water from snowmelt.
“When you remove the forest, that snow is more susceptible to melting earlier,” said Benjamin Hatchett, an interdisciplinary scientist at Colorado State University. And he noted that a warmer, more arid climate dries out soil and pulls moisture from plants, making them more susceptible to wildfire. “That thirstier atmosphere is a big concern,” he said.
Trees are good. I’m all for trees. Still, remember the studies about how tree removal via thinning is good for water availability? Like this one. You might even remember the “let’s cut down more trees to increase water supply” controversy (was that Wyoming?)
Roger Bales: One thing we found is that medium-intensity fire is approximately equal to the restoration treatments the Forest Service and others are trying to do. And when you have that medium-intensity fire or the restoration treatment, you can reduce evapotranspiration, which means more runoff.
In the American River basin, the highest we saw was a net evapotranspiration reduction equal to about 55,000 acre-feet of water per year. This is for all of the American River basin. So when you add up all the fires in the American River basin over that time period, from 1990 to 2008, by 2008 you had gained 55,000 acre-feet more runoff compared to 1990.
People would love to have that amount of water. And that does not get us into the most recent decade of more high-intensity fires. This was just the period when we had the best data.
Now, you go down the Kings River basin, in the southern Sierra, and you didn’t gain nearly as much. Why? Well, the Kings is water-limited. They don’t get as much precipitation. You take out some trees, and the other trees that are left sort of say, “OK great, more water for us!” The potential for runoff gains basically increases as you go further north.
Note that Bales finds that the story is different within the Sierra Nevada mountains. Whereas the Times quote seems to imply one thing across the West. And of course, the elderly among us remember the Hubbard Brook study.
Changes in water yield are summarized for experimental treatments performed on three gauged, forested watersheds at the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest in New Hampshire. The treatments included clear-felling and herbicide applications performed on watershed 2 during 1965-68, progressive strip-cutting performed on watershed 4 during 1970-74, and whole-tree harvesting performed on watershed 5 during 1983-84. Responses in annual water yield varied markedly among treatments. Clear-felling and 3 successive years of herbicide applications caused annual water yields to increase by an average of 288 mm, or 32%. The strip-cutting and whole-tree harvesting treatments caused maximum annual increases in water yield of 114 mm (8%), and 152 mm (23%), respectively. Most of the water yield increases occurred as augmentation to low flows during the growing season, although some peak flows were also increased. Volume of snowmelt runoff was relatively unaffected. Increases in annual water yield diminished rapidly as forests regenerated and were undetectable within 7-9 years after treatment. Unexpected decreases in annual water yields occurred for years 13-30 after the clear-felling and herbicide treatment and for years 8-25 after the strip-cutting due to the regenerating forests having greater proportions of tree species with lower stomatal resistances.
Clearly, the impacts of wildfires depend on many, many things. You’ve got the weather, the climate, the soils, the fire intensity, the distribution of moisture over the year, the vegetation and so on.
We know wildfires can be bad for water quality, as well, which is why Denver Water is so enthusiastic about… fuel treatments. From Denver Water:
Moderate and severe wildfires are the greatest threat to Denver’s raw water supply. Denver Water partners with the U.S. Forest Service, Colorado State Forest Service, National Resource Conservation Service and the Colorado Forest Restoration Institute to restore forest health and reduce the risk of high-intensity wildfire through the From Forests to Faucets partnership. This work restores forests to their naturally resilient conditions through thinning, patch cuts and reforestation. In addition, the Colorado State Forest Service has been Denver Water’s forester since 1985 and manages over 50,000 acres of forested land on Denver Water property.
Denver Water works with multiple federal and state agencies, research institutions, fire management partners and other Front Range water providers to identify and prioritize at-risk watersheds that will be the focus of protection measures. Taking a collaborative approach to forest restoration and wildfire mitigation amplifies the benefits of watershed protection projects.
OK, so don’t you wonder sometimes if different disciplines even talk to each other? I looked up Hatchett (what is an interdisciplinary scientist, after all?). You’d think he might be a hydrologist… not so much.
Ben Hatchett is a fire meteorologist on the User Needs Assessment Team for the NOAA Fire Weather Testbed based at the Global Systems Laboratory in Boulder, CO. He received his B.S. in Geography (minor in Hydrogeology) (2008), M.S. in Atmospheric Science (2012) and Ph.D. in Geography (2016) from the University of Nevada, Reno. Hatchett works remotely out of California.
So let’s take a look at this NY Times article in depth. First of all, let’s frame it the way, say, a 1980’s educated forest geneticist might.
Due to whatever reasons (some combo of fire suppression, lack of fire suppression, climate change and whatever else) many wildfires today have many acres of dead trees.
While pollen can come from far away (my own dissertation) pine seeds don’t go as far.
Hence, no Mommy trees no seedlings
So if you want to get trees back, you need to plant them. We know how to do this. Or at least many retirees know how to do this. Maybe a useful task would be to interview these folks before their knowledge becomes inaccessible?
That forest is gone for good, scientists say. Spiky shrubs and poison oak have replaced the majestic trees. All that is left of the pines are burned logs and dead branches.
It’s part of a wider transformation that’s taking place across the Western United States, from Oregon to New Mexico, as bigger and hotter wildfires sweep through forests that have not evolved to survive such high-intensity blazes and a warmer climate. Recent studies estimate that as much as 40 percent of Western conifer forests will turn into shrubland by 2100 as a result.
Actually this is not unlike the wildfire-climate papers that model future wildfire acres without (you guessed it) fire suppression. I get it, it’s too hard to model. People and budgets and technology are all involved. But you can’t blow them all off. Or can you? Is that a theme… ignore the people involved in adaptation? And what is really behind it. Interestingly the authors of the study are from Pennsylvania, so maybe that makes it easier to ignore the things that are obvious to the people living with fire and trees.
So let’s look at that “recent study”:
Here, we developed a biogeography module based on BIOME419,20—a biogeography model that simulates the equilibrium distribution of dominant PFTs integrated within an existing biogeochemical model21. We then used the resulting model to assess the impact of changing climate on dominant PFTs in forested regions of the western United States, where trees are the dominant PFTs and determined whether these changes will result in a shift in the dominant PFTs under Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 4.5 and 8.5 at a monthly time step. The model uses bioclimatic envelopes to determine the PFTs that can exist in each grid cell. PFT competition is based on total Net Primary Productivity (NPP), where the most productive PFT is considered the dominant PFT, which is then selected and given 100% coverage of the grid cell. Each grid cell is 0.5 by 0.5 degrees. In our future run (2015–2100), we simulate varying levels of fire severity governed by ignition, fuel availability, and fuel combustibility. Historical fires use the same fire module but are modified to better capture historical fire regimes, as described in the Online Methods section. Analysis of model results focuses on changes occurring by the end of the century 2070–2100.
Folks will be glad to know that the 40% in the times article is from RCP 4.5 and not the discredited 8.5.
Uh- oh.
The four variables tested are interrelated: warming worsens drought, leading to more severe fires that clear tree PFTs, allowing grass and shrub expansion22. These findings highlight the roles of temperature, moisture stress, and fire severity in ecosystem shifts under evolving climatic scenarios. Our results show that warming and droughts lead to more severe fires (Supplementary Figs. 1 and 2).
They managed to ignore all of : reforestation, thinning, prescribed fire, and fire suppression actions and technological improvements… by the end of the century! This seems quite unlikely.
“This is a permanent shift from one ecosystem type to a fundamentally different one,” said Winslow Hansen, a forest ecologist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, an independent research center in Millbrook, N.Y.
Now you might ask, why is Cary Institute studying western wildfires? We might notice an asymmetry.. does University of Denver study wildfire in the Alleghenies? It turns out that there is a Western Fire and Forest Resilience Collaborative (with many PI’s including an FS employee) funded by three philanthropies.. the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Lyda Hill Philanthropies and Hearst Foundations. It sounds to me as if there is much USG funding similar things already.
I guess, based on bullet two, they’ve already decided that there will be “non-reversible forest loss.” But they don’t know that planting trees won’t work. No one knows but some of us have more confidence in conifer adaptation. Or maybe they’ve redefined “forest” as only natural regeneration?
And how can Hansen say something so unequivocally (assuming he was quoted correctly) about something we don’t know and we know he doesn’t know. And he knows we know he doesn’t know. And so on. Anyway here’s the write-up on the Collaborative.
It seems like the reporters might have mentioned the tie with the funding. If it were an industry-funded scientist, would the Times have pointed it out? Just sayin’.
But what is that thing where East Coast outlets interview East Coast people about Western Interior issues? I’m waiting for them to interview University of Utah profs on Mamdani’s housing policies…
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Key Objectives
Making science actionable by ensuring the research agenda is responsive to decision-maker needs and that the best available science guides decision making and adaptation.
Identify the mechanisms that underpin forest resilience with experiments and field work. Understand and predict where, when, and why the risk of non-reversible forest loss is greatest.
Track the changing nature of forest conditions and fire regimes in the western US using legacy and state-of-the-art remote sensing platforms. During an era of unprecedented investment in proactive forest management, this will allow us to precisely measure progress.
Projecting forests and fire by feeding remote sensing data into forest models to determine how current and future stewardship actions may shape future outcomes.
Quantify impacts on people and nature. This includes biodiversity, air quality, carbon storage, and water. Our model will help us better project how and where ecosystem benefits will change, and how they might be impacted by different management strategies.
