The Smokey Wire : National Forest News and Views
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This is an interesting story from Wyofile on the Rock Springs RMP. Turns out that the Governor got together a panel to review the draft. Despite representing disparate interests, the 11 members of a governor-appointed task force reached consensus on more than 100 recommendations for the Bureau of Land Management’s controversial draft plan for managing … Read more
I was curious about what the FS is doing so looked it up here on the USDA list. Below are the FS entries.. my instinct would say that there are probably more, at least in R&D, that use machine learning. Development and Acquisition In-house Ecosystem Management Decision Support System (EMDS) USDA Forest Service EMDS … Read more
There are many new readers to TSW, so I will tell this story again. After I retired from the Forest Service, I spent a few months working as the Catholic Channel administrator for a for-profit company called Patheos. My job was to post snippets of blogs written by our writers . As part of that … Read more
From this page. The commission’s second and final report was submitted to Congress on September 27, 2023 and reflects one of the most sweeping and comprehensive reviews of the wildfire system to date. The report makes 148 recommendations covering seven key themes: Urgent New Approaches to address the wildfire crisis Supporting Collaboration to improve partner … Read more
Once upon a time, in a city far away, the U. S. Forest Service posted its schedule for revising national forest plans on its national website. There was even a map showing the revisions completed under the 2012 Planning Rule. Today, they are not where they used to be on the website, and I couldn’t … Read more
I thought this was a terrific podcast, an interview with Jason Forthofer at the Missoula Forest Sciences Lab by the Hotshot Wakeup on his Substack. He has a gift for talking about fire models in a way that is easy to understand, at least for TSW-ites and our ilk. And the range of tools he’s … Read more
A theme I’ve been thinking about..is in terms of infrastructure build-out our country has one foot (and lots of federal tax $) on the gas, and a log (and lots of federal tax $) on the brake. I’ve been working on comments to the proposed NEPA regs, and listening to speakers on their webinars. It’s … Read more
The proposed BLM Public Lands Rule regulation included two citations to papers. I decided to take a look at them and see what helpful info I could glean from them. They are both DOI (USGS) products. ******************** The first one is called “A Sagebrush Conservation Design to Proactively Restore America’s Sagebrush Biome,” with a bunch … Read more
Fervo Energy says it has geothermal energy breakthrough. This was a story in Bloomberg News, but can be seen on the Financial Post website here. Fervo has an interesting explanation of how their technology is different here. But I think the news story is about more general successful testing. ****************** How Fervo Expands … Read more
This is posted with the permission of the author, Sarah Hyden. Here is a link to the original. I thought she raised some interesting questions worthy of discussion. Forest Service wildfire management policy run amok From suppressing fires, to confining fires, to expanding fires, to igniting fires One of the most … Read more