National Nursery Directory For Forest Trees and Native Plants in the US and Canada

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Screenshot of the Directory map view for part of California, including the Placerville Nursery.

Jon asked some questions about nurseries, and so I went looking to answer the question “what kind of nurseries are there that produce forest tree seedlings?” It turns out that the Forest Service has partnered with Southern Regional Extension Forestry to put up a website that shows nurseries in the US and Canada, . So I’m posting in the interests of public service.

Jon asked about the terms reforestation and restoration.  The Helms (1998) Dictionary of Forestry definition for reforestation is: “the reeestablishment of forest cover either naturally or artificially.” Anyone have the newer edition and can check if there’s a new definition?  But I think when these people use the term, they probably mean “planting plants that aren’t trees” because reforestation has traditionally dealt with trees (“forest cover” doesn’t usually mean bear clover or manzanita.  It’s confusing for sure, as people have always “reforested” burned areas whether they had timber production goals or simply shade goals. And if you’re talking outside what we might call the refo/resto community, restoration may mean prescribed fire, thinning, removing invasives or a variety of things not related to planting plants at all.

Ah, but people will say “trees are not forests, forests are a complex interrelationship…”. While is absolutely true, of course. So perhaps trees are necessary, but not sufficient to be part of a forest. At the same time, it is difficult to imagine “restoring a forest ecosystem” without trees.

Afforestation is defined as “establishment of a forest or stand in an area where the preceding vegetation or land use was not forest.”

Trivia Question

Name the largest human-made forest in the United States (at least according to its website)

Why a proposal inside Hoosier National Forest sees environmentalists facing off against forest managers

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News from the other half of the country:

Soul of the Forest: Why a proposal inside Hoosier National Forest sees environmentalists facing off against forest managers

A controversial project slated for Hoosier National Forest underscores a larger struggle percolating over America’s trees.

Excerpts:

Inside the heart of Hoosier National Forest, the last truly wild place in Indiana, a deep chasm has formed – between longtime area residents like Heinrich, environmental advocates, and U.S. Forest Service managers – over the proposed Buffalo Springs Restoration Project.

Forest Service leaders maintain that burning, cutting, and spraying thousands of acres of mature trees is necessary to preserve the forest’s “overall health.” They say it will protect the wilderness near Patoka Lake in southern Indiana from the impending stressors of climate change.

…

The project would further a larger U.S. Forest Service initiative to sustain oak-hickory ecosystems in the forest, which they said are “important to keep…on the landscape as many wildlife species have evolved with it and depend on it.”

…

“Our forest is all pretty much the same age. We call it even-aged. That’s not good to have trees that are all the same age, because they’re all going to get old together. Which isn’t a bad thing in some part of the forest, but you want to have that diversity. You want to have those younger trees coming on too,” Thornton said.

But several environmental advocacy groups, including the Indiana Forest Alliance, Sierra Club, Protect Our Forest, Save Hoosier National Forest and the Hoosier Environmental Council, believe the Forest Service is making a mistake.

They maintain the Forest Service is operating within an archaic framework that profoundly – and erroneously – simplifies the makeup of a complex forest system, and that the real reason the Forest Service is moving forward with the Buffalo Springs Restoration Project is because they want to auction off its most valuable trees for profit.

 

Analyzing Reforestation Controversy: The Five P’s and Whitebark Planting

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I posted Matthew Burgess’s work that shows 90% of people support tree planting.  But there are still controversies about it, that we will explore.  I think to some extent they are what we might call “manufactured controversies” or controversies that occur within the realm of “ideas about things at some global level” vs. “do we support planting these trees here now.”  How does something non-controversial become controversial? Well, it’s in the nature of current media to stoke controversy. If you want a truly depressing read, I recommend “Trust Me, I’m Lying” by Ryan Holiday. So let’s explore that together.

I’d like to start with my Five P’s. This might appeal to fans of the Pyramid of Pristinity.  It works for basically any natural resource topic, and helps us to understand the factors that are used in making judgment calls about whether doing something is a good thing.. or not. Feel free to add your own P or other consideration.

1.People.  Which people are proposing it and which benefit?  Some people have the benefit of the doubt and others not so much.  For example, Tribes might have the benefit of the doubt with regard to say, whitebark pine restoration.  But maybe not other Tribes who want pipelines or whatever. E.g., this Denver Post story from October 15. It’s a pretty interesting article;  hope it’s not paywalled.

“The Southern Ute Indian Tribe of southwestern Colorado has a higher long-term credit rating than Wells Fargo & Co. and more oil and natural-gas wells than it has members. Welcome to the other side of the tribal land energy conundrum.”

Sometimes this is brought up by people against projects, such as “foreign” companies.

2.  Purpose.  Why is the project being considered?  Thinning is good, for example, if it’s for fuels reduction, but bad if it produces “commercial” products.  I understand the concern that the Forest Service is incentivized by Congress to do timber sales, and that does affect priorities and practices.  For example, let’s look at firewood. Do we think that firewood permits for people are good, but for commercial folks are bad? But commercial folks supply to folks who perhaps can’t get out and do it themselves, due to disability or age. To me concerns about “lining the pockets of the rich” seem to be focused on forest products and oil and gas, and not so much ski areas, for example.

3. Practices.  This is where I, and many folks, like to dwell.  If we look at the history of forest certification.  With FSC, for example, that was the idea that wood products from forests would be considered good (sustainable) if certain practices were followed, to some extent regardless of purpose or people.  Forest certification has been successful, but there continue to be people who are against cutting trees regardless of purpose or practice.  And that’s OK, the point is to clarify the reasons people feel the way they do.

4. Place.  Some things may be acceptable in some places than others. Place, to my mind,  is a complex mix of people, Nature and history. People and Place are certainly related, but People within a Place can and do often disagree. Additionally, there are concepts of what People means, in terms of say race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender and so on, that transcend a specific Place.

5. Property.  This is a bit different from place, in the sense that we might want different things from say, private, county, state or various designations of federal lands.

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There are also two non-Ps

Where do the controversies occur (media, scientific journals, within agencies)?

Are there institutions or mechanisms for resolution of these controversies?

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So let’s look at Tribes restoring whitebark versus previous efforts. Note: there has been a large body of effort, in both the Pacific Northwest and in the Northern Rockies, to breed resistant whitebark pine despite the fact it has never been a timber tree. It began in 2001 in the northern Rockies according to this paper.

Or you might remember the hard-working folks who developed a Range-Wide Restoration Strategy, a RMRS GTR in 2012.

Anyway, if you weren’t following this, there was some debate about whether planting trees is “trammeling by man” in Wilderness.

Some of the 50 people in the audience scoffed as they pointed to the section of the Wilderness Act that defines wilderness as an area “untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.” They argued that nowhere on the planet now escapes the influence of man, so planting trees shouldn’t be a big deal.

But Jimmy Gaudry, USFS Northern Region wilderness program manager, said it might be a big deal, depending on how many other groups want to manipulate the wilderness for their special purpose.

“It’s the concept of a death of a thousand cuts. One thing after another, we’re making concessions for the types of activities we’re approving in wilderness landscapes,” Gaudry said. “It gets to the point where what are we doing different in the wilderness versus what we’re doing on the rest of the forest. Every time we say yes to something, why are we saying yes to that and not the next thing that comes through the door?”

Gaudry said he encouraged the discussion, but a more neutral process was needed, where trust could be built between stakeholders and where people would do a better job of listening to each other.

But for now, the Forest Service would lean on policy and law, which provides “solid direction regarding wilderness management,” Guadry said.

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So here we have it.. restoring whitebark pine is generally a good thing, because People want it; it has a Purpose everyone agrees on; it’s an acceptable technology (Practice) and we think it will work in that Place; but our understanding of Property in terms of Wilderness means it’s a no-go.

So let’s look at the non-Ps-

Controversy occurs within the FS/stakeholder community

Controversy is resolved by the Forest Service.

For Tribes, Reforesting Means Reconnection to History, Culture: Pew Story on Tribal Nurseries

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ShiNaasha Pete, reforestation forester with the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, gestures at whitebark pine seedlings being grown in a greenhouse on the Flathead Indian Reservation in Montana. The tribes are working to restore whitebark pines, which are threatened by an invasive disease, because they serve as a crucial ecologic and cultural resource.
Alex Brown

 

Thanks to readers who sent in this article on Tribes and reforestation by Alex Brown of Pew. I didn’t know this but apparently they have a weekly newsletter called Stateline.

This is a generally good article IMHO, but I felt obliged to add context to this statement.

State-run and commercial nurseries often specialize in the species used for large-scale timber production, such as Douglas fir or loblolly pine. Some tribal programs similarly supply logging operations.

Many, though, have focused on species that are critical to ecosystems, and those that are woven into tribal history and culture.

A person might ask if Douglas-fir and ponderosa might also be critical to ecosystems, because they are predominant species in many places.  Also some species seem to do just fine with natural regeneration and others not so much.

Anyway,  I checked out my state’s nursery (which is closed this year for new orders).

Here’s what it says..

Covering Conservation

The seedling program allows farmers, ranchers, other landowners and land managers to obtain trees at a nominal cost to help achieve conservation goals, including:

  • Restoration after wildfire, flood and other natural disturbances

  • Growing shelterbelts, windbreaks and living snow fences

  • Creating and enhancing wildlife habitat

  • Protecting homes, cropland, livestock and highways

  • Increasing erosion control

  • Practicing “backyard” conservation that promotes clean air and water

You’ll note that trees for timber production aren’t mentioned..

OK, well perhaps Colorado isn’t a timber state, OK then, here’s Montana’s state nursery inventory. And Tennessee’s.   

Seems like each state nursery focuses on trees that grow there that people want to plant for whatever reasons.

The article doesn’t mention Forest Service nurseries, so here is their story.

 Over the last 15 years, the traditional role of the Forest Service nurseries has expanded to include the production of a wide variety of additional native plant species to meet the increasing needs of ecosystem restoration. These opportunities present new challenges to nursery managers because little is known about propagating many of these new species.

Anyway, that’s just a little context. Below are some excerpts from the Pew story.

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Pete oversees a program to restore whitebark pine trees to tribal lands and nearby forests. After identifying a handful of trees with genetic resistance to the blister rust, the team has collected enough seeds to repopulate the tribe’s entire 105,000 acres of whitebark pine habitat.

“It’s a keystone species,” Pete said. “It has over 100 different species that are reliant upon it. If we lose whitebark pine, it’s going to eliminate that ecosystem and habitat at the higher elevations, and that will have an effect on everything down below.”

The program has produced almost 11,000 seedlings, with plans to plant 4,300 of them next spring. Pete hopes to scale up to planting 50,000 seedlings a year. It will take 60 to 80 years before the trees she plants produce their own seeds.

Pete said she hopes to plant enough trees to reintroduce seeds as food for tribal winter ceremonies.

….

State-run and commercial nurseries often specialize in the species used for large-scale timber production, such as Douglas fir or loblolly pine. Some tribal programs similarly supply logging operations.

Many, though, have focused on species that are critical to ecosystems, and those that are woven into tribal history and culture.

“Our forest management isn’t based on revenue. It’s based on restoration,” said Tony Incashola, Jr., head of forestry with the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes.

The tribes grow more than 1 million seedlings each year at nurseries on the reservation, and the operation has doubled its conifer production over the last five years. Roughly half of the plants are grown for restoration projects on tribal lands, while the remaining half are sold to partners, including state agencies and other tribes.

…

In many tribal nations, nursery managers are growing tree species to help forests survive climate change, diseases and pests. The Mescalero Apache Tribe grows about 75,000 seedlings of ponderosa pine and Douglas fir each year.

“Our forest on the reservation is probably one of the healthiest in southern New Mexico,” said Smith, the nursery manager. “We cut out all the diseased trees and go back and replant in that area.”

Cut Douglas firs are used as lodgepoles for teepees, Smith said. Within the past five years, the tribe has grown more native plants to benefit wildlife using money from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service.

The Fort Belknap Indian Community, home to two Montana tribes, is seeking to restore subalpine fir, which a wildfire devastated in the 1930s. The tribes are in the first phase of their effort, conducting a study to see whether any remnant populations of the tree exist in its chain of mountains.

“If we do find some pockets of any remaining subalpine fir, we’re going to collect some seeds and possibly use them to grow and propagate and plant them back up in our mountains,” said Dennis Longknife Jr., the community’s climate change coordinator. “If we don’t have any, we have to find out where we can get some seed stock.”

Longknife, Jr. said the tree has cultural significance to the tribes, used for ceremonial purposes. The next steps in the restoration process will include identifying sites to grow the plants and areas for restoration. He noted that grant programs in the federal infrastructure bill may provide funding opportunities to support that work.

As nursery operations proliferate and expand, such efforts stand to benefit many other tribal programs, said Pinto, the Forest Service nursery specialist.

Climate Scientists (Re?)Discover Trees Produce Shade

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From our friends at Center for Western Priorities. Honestly I kind of got a laugh out of this, as plants, animals, insects and so on picked up on this billions of years ago.  It’s not the study so much, but the  CWP summary…

A new study finds that protected forests with limits on human activity are significantly cooler than neighboring forests that lack protections.

 The findings suggest the cooling effect is strongest in boreal forests at high latitudes in the Northern Hemisphere, which make up about 27 percent of total global forest area.

The researchers attribute the cooler temperatures to the fact that protected forests have more vegetation and a more complex structure that creates a buffer against heat. An analysis of forest canopies shows protected areas have higher leaf densities, which means more shade and cooler temperatures that help protect biodiversity near the forest floor.

“The cooling effect is very important for life below the tree canopy near the ground,” said co-author Pieter De Frenne, a climate researcher at the University of Ghent. He added that most forest biodiversity is in that zone, including in temperate, mid-latitude forests.

Oregon State University forest ecologist Matthew Betts said the findings of the study are important but that further research is needed to determine how they hold up in the United States.

“At the moment we don’t have under-canopy data for large tracts of the planet,” he said. “Pieter has done a great job of implementing a network of under-canopy climate stations across Europe, but we don’t have anything like that in North America.”

I’d say unless they’re burned up… say, for example my photo of the Hayman Fire above. I don’t have too many photos because my friends don’t like to hike there.. due to lack of shade. Oh well, I suppose there could be a study of that. I think that was the point of Zach Steele and coauthors in the paper mentioned in posts here and here  last week, that forested lands can lose “forested” old-growth-y habitat due to wildfires, regardless of the level of “protection” unless “protection” involves being  protected from wildfires..

I’m kind of against using satellite data to make Global Pronouncements of What We Need to Do, as an average across the world is meaningless to a piece of land.  A So it amounts to a new class of folks -“climate scientists” telling local people and governments what to do in the name of “climate” .. oh and “biodiversity.” There’s obviously a power and privilege dynamic here with research institutions, scientific journals (wow, they say their conclusions impact the whole planet!), the media, and international ENGO’s who support this kind of thing, apparently uncritically. The voices questioning this tend to be social scientists, continually pointing out what I have just said, but the climate/media/ENGO behemoth rolls on.  Thanks to you social scientists, you have many supporters!

How’s this title for hubris:  Protected areas provide thermal buffer against climate change.

Maybe people from mesic areas don’t have the understanding and experience of shade that those of us from drier areas do. Or perhaps it’s just disciplinary swamping and rediscovery of what we already know by People With Large Datasets.

We’re #1! Reforestation as a Bipartisan Climate Solution: Matt Burgess (CU) Video with Some Ancient Wisdom

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I’m sure that many of you are suffering from the seasonal influx of Obnoxious Political Ads. Last week, I ran across this video by a Professor Matt Burgess at University of Colorado who is studying polarization, with an eye to understanding and decreasing it. I thought it was super that an academic was looking into this instead of fanning the flames (I do see quite a bit of that), so here’s a shout out to Matt!

Check out his video on climate change polarization and what people agree on. I took some screenshots of some slides. They looked at climate policies that people broadly agree on.

Here’s an important screenshot for forest folks:

It’s particularly interesting as in President Biden’s Executive Order has different prongs.. MOG, wildfire risk, reforestation and economic development.

Here’s the reforestation part.

(d)  The Secretaries, in coordination with the heads of other agencies as appropriate, shall within 1 year of the date of this order:

(i)    develop a Federal goal that charges agencies to meet agency-specific reforestation targets by 2030, including an assessment of reforestation opportunities on Federal lands and through existing Federal programs and partnerships;

(ii)   develop, in collaboration with Federal, State, Tribal, and private-sector partners, a climate-informed plan (building on existing efforts) to increase Federal cone and seed collection and to ensure seed and seedling nursery capacity is sufficient to meet anticipated reforestation demand; and

We haven’t heard as much about this part of the response to the EO. Perhaps because it’s not controversial. But shouldn’t we talk about the non-controversial parts just as much?  Perhaps controversy is interesting in a way that mutually moving forward in a positive direction is not?

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Discussing With Those Whom You Disagree… Burgess’s Take:

Here are a few of his slides about conversations with those people you disagree with.  Some old ideas and some new ones for us who have been doing this work. This discussion is about 45 minutes in.

Burgess explains that “steelmanning” instead of “strawmanning”  is that you want to understand the best argument for the other side before you argue for our own side.

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If this reminds you of Hillel and Shammai, as well as our friend, the author of the book of Kohelet in the Hebrew Bible – “there is nothing new under the sun,” well, maybe those ancient folks knew a thing or two.

[The law is in accord with the School of Hillel] because they were kindly and modest, because they studied not only their own rulings but also those of the School of Shammai, and because they taught the words of the School of Shammai before their own.  Eruvin 13b.

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Coming Out of the Wood Closet: Some Forested EU Countries in Tension With EU Centralization

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Here’s a news story from the Helsinki Times. Finland’s Minister of Agriculture and Forestry, Antti Kurvinen, has some interesting ideas. Some of it may sound familiar to those in North America. I too wonder exactly how forest policy has become a subset of climate and environmental policy. But then so has energy policy, I guess, and also agricultural policy. It seems to be a form of what I call disciplinary swamping.. where people who have worked on the topic for years become displaced by different, more trendy and important (or at least self-important) disciplines.

There are two strains that I see..

1) less wood, less food because of more “protection”; likely to raise prices on the basics of shelter and food. The UN biodiversity targets call for “at least 30 percent of land and sea” to be conserved through “systems of protected areas.”

2) Local people don’t know best how to manage their forests, rangelands and croplands, “we” do. Folks working in private coastal universities, international ENGO’s, the UN and so on.

There’s an inherent top-downishness in both these strains that I find puzzling. Translating ideas into practice, it seems to me, requires the input of both practitioners, and those likely to be affected.
I don’t really get the recipe here- some arrogance, some groupthink, with strong dose of catastrophizing and a dash of moralizing? Doesn’t seem very tasty to me.

A quarter of EU countries with large forest reserves have established a collaborative group to defend the interests of their national forest industries in the 27-country bloc, reports Helsingin Sanomat.

“A coming-out took place today. We’ve now come out of the wood closet. Forested EU countries have set up a collaboration group that we call by the name of For Forest,” Finnish Minister of Agriculture and Forestry Antti Kurvinen (Centre) announced on Monday.

Helsingin Sanomat wrote that the quartet is ultimately seeking to make sure more emphasis is placed on forests and forest industry activities in the EU.

The European Commission’s upcoming proposal on collecting data and monitoring the state of forests will offer the countries the first opportunity to wield their clout. The Finnish government is of the view that the commission has failed to sufficiently include member states in the preparatory work.

Austria and Finland have already secured support from 17 other member states for their position that research data on forests should be collected primarily through national mechanisms.

“You shouldn’t create a new system at the EU level. The supreme authority in forest policy belongs to member states,” argued Kurvinen.

Kurvinen on Monday aired a number of grievances about earlier and upcoming forest-related legislative proposals from the European Commission. The proposals, he stated, have been neither coordinated nor examined in terms of their overall impact on the use of forests, economic effects and social effects.

“I think it’s wrong to examine forest policy both in Finland and the EU solely through climate and environmental policy. You have to pay equal attention to competitiveness and employment,” he said.

He stated that the 27-country bloc is trying to squeeze all member states into the same forest-policy mould despite the fact that some members have hardly any forests in natural state. It is also “extremely problematic” that there is very little forest-industry expertise in Brussels.

“Expertise related to wood, forest growth and forest industry must be augmented in the EU, so that initiatives based on erroneous facts and initiatives not based on research data don’t move forward.”

Kurvinen, however, toned down his accusations when pressed to provide examples of such initiatives by Helsingin Sanomat.

“The initiatives aren’t necessarily based on erroneous facts,” he replied. “In Brussels, the impression of Finnish forest industry is sometimes such that, in the worst case, some actors in the field of non-profits lay out photos of a string bog in Lapland, saying this is what felling looks like in Finland.”

He also called attention to a proposal to reduce the use of protected plant areas by 50 per cent, claiming that the figure is not based on research but simply one that “looks good in an Instagram Story”.

The European Commission’s regulation to restore degraded forests would be devastating for the forest industry because of the amount of land areas to be protected, according to him. “A few member states are made to pay so that the rest of the EU can have a better conscience,” he summed up.

Finland has already restored wetlands and natural habitats under the programmes Helmi and Metso. Kurvinen viewed that the country is now being punished for its pioneering work because the programmes are not recognised in the restoration regulation.

30% of forests in the central/southern Sierra Nevada dead

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Headline: California tree carnage: A decade of drought and fire killed a third of Sierra Nevada forests 

The analysis mentioned in the Steel report we’ve been discussing. Excerpt:

California has seen devastating bouts of drought and record-breaking wildfire events in the last several years. From 2011-2020, a combination of fire, drought and drought-related bark beetle infestations killed 30% of forests in the Sierra Nevada mountain range between Lake Tahoe and Kern County, according to the analysis.

…

On top of the overall decline in total conifer forest in the region, half of mature forest habitat and 85% of high-density mature forests were either wiped out entirely or became low-density forests.

The study also found areas protected as habitat for the California spotted owl, an endangered bird at the center of a historic battle between environmental activists and the timber industry, saw worse declines in tree canopy than non-protected areas.

That finding led the study’s authors to call for a rejection of traditional conservation methods that preserve forests as-is, before the loss of all mature forests in the Sierras. Using fire as a tool for landscape regeneration and removing low-lying vegetation can keep fires from becoming as devastating.

Public lands litigation update – as of October 12, 2022

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I’ve gotten a little behind.

Settlement in Citizens for a Healthy Community v. U. S. Bureau of Land Management (D. Colo.)

On August 11, the BLM settled another case against its resource management plan decisions involving oil and gas leasing.  Under the agreement, BLM will complete an amendment process for its Uncompahgre RMP, and prepare an EIS that will include alternatives that “reconsider the eligibility of lands open to oil and gas leasing, the designation and management of Areas of Critical Environmental Concern (“ACEC”), and management of lands with wilderness characteristics.”  (Availability for leasing on national forest lands is not included, presumably because that decision is made in national forest plan rather than BLM RMPs.)  With limited exceptions, new leases will not be issued prior to the amendment decision.  The settlement also imposes a deadline on completion of range-wide Gunnison sage-grouse amendment from a previous settlement.  (The news release includes a link to the agreement.)

On September 15, several logging contractors operating on the Malheur National Forest sued Iron Triangle, the recipient of a 2013 stewardship contract, for stifling competition.  “Put simply,” the lawyers write, “Iron Triangle won the stewardship contract by assuring the Forest Service in its written proposal that it would administer the contract in a manner that diversified the local economy and promoted the public interest. Once the contract was secured, however, Iron Triangle did the exact opposite.”

Court decision in Donohoe v. U. S. Forest Service (D. Mont.)

On September 16, the district court denied plaintiffs’ motion for a preliminary injunction against the Custer-Gallatin National Forest pending appeal of the court’s March 29, 2022 decision to affirm the Forest Service decision to construct a trail and a bridge (the latter of which was already complete).  The trail would adjoin plaintiffs’ property.  The court found that harm to grizzly bears from increased human presence would be “speculative,” but had dismissed the ESA claim for failing to provide a Notice of Intent to sue.  The court had earlier found no violation of NEPA scoping and connected action requirements, nor any violation of the forest plan.  The original opinion is here.

Court decision in Washington Cattlemen’s Association v. USDC-CAOAK (9th Cir.)

On September 21, the 9th Circuit stayed the July 5th order of the Northern California district court that had vacated the Trump Administration rewrite of Endangered Species Act regulations.  The circuit court held that the district court should have ruled on the validity of the regulations before it vacated them.  The Biden Administration is revising these regulations, which affect the listing process and consultation, and had asked the court to NOT vacate the Trump rules while that is pending.  The blog post above has a link to the 9th Circuit opinion.  The district court decision in Center for Biological Diversity v. Haaland is linked to this article.

Court decision in Earth Island Institute v. Muldoon (E.D. Cal.)

On September 21, the district court held that fuel reduction projects in Yosemite National Park constituted “changes or amendments to” the current Fire Management Plan, which qualified them for a Park Service categorical exclusion, and denied a preliminary injunction.  (See our prior discussion here.)  The court noted that neither party had provided a definition of the quoted phrase, so it deferred to the Park Service, following a 7th Circuit case that had done something similar.  (The Forest Service Planning Rule does clearly define forest plan amendments as something different from projects.)  The court also allowed the Park Service to tier its categorical exclusion to a prior FMP EIS because the failure of the CEQ regulations to expressly allow tiering for CEs does not mean that it is prohibited.  (The actual reason that the regulations do not mention tiering CEs is because environmental analysis is not relevant to determining if a CE applies, except to the extent it identifies “extraordinary circumstances.”)  The court also found that the projects were properly “tiered to” existing plans (which I think must be comparable to “consistent with” Forest Service plans) – “at this stage of the case.”  (The court used this or similar qualifiers multiple times throughout the opinion.)

One part of the NEPA issue in this case was whether a declaration by someone named Hanson had demonstrated a sufficient level of scientific controversy over the effects of fuel reduction.  The court chose to not delve into it very deeply because of the “limited evidence before the court” at the injunction stage of the lawsuit.

Brief filed in Ohio Environmental Council v. U.S. Forest Service (S.D. Ohio)

On September 16, plaintiffs filed a reply brief in this case (so the complaint would have been filed months ago, but we have apparently not reported it) involving the Sunny Oaks Project on the Wayne National Forest.  It would clearcut existing white oak forest, which plaintiffs assert “may also destroy the soil’s suitability for future oak ecosystem success.”  The case includes NEPA claims, and “nullification” of a forest plan standard for loose bark tree retention for Indiana bats, allegedly illegal under NFMA, as well as violations of other forest plan guidelines.  We’ve previously discussed white oak management here, and this article provides more background on the lawsuit.  Plaintiff’s blog (above) has a link to the brief.

Court decision in Blue Mountains Biodiversity Project v. Jeffries (D. Oregon)

On September 26, the district court upheld a logging project in a developed recreation area on the Ochoco National Forest.  The court held that the purpose and need for the project, to curb root rot in a developed recreation area, was consistent with the forest plan requirements to detect and treat diseases.  (While this sounds like an NFMA consistency holding, it is actually a NEPA conclusion that a purpose and need for projects that is based on a forest plan is reasonable, suggesting that one that is not might not be.)  The court also found that including an NFMA-required finding of a preliminary need to amend a forest plan as part of a project’s purpose and need does not violate NEPA (even though it may preclude project alternatives that don’t require an amendment, which it did not in this case, which is good because an amendment is a result of a project proposal, not a purpose).  The court upheld the use of an EA instead of an EIS, and it adequately considered soil impacts.  (The opinion alludes to previously granting plaintiff’s motion for summary judgment on something, but does not explain further.)

Court decision in Save the Bull Trout v. Williams (9th Cir.)

On September 28, the circuit court held that plaintiffs were barred from litigating the bull trout recovery plan in the Montana district court because some of the plaintiffs had previously made the same claims against the recovery plan in the Oregon district court (and lost).  This blog post explains it further.

Court decision in Klamath-Siskiyou Wildlands Center v. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (D. Oregon)

On September 30, the district court held that the FWS violated the ESA when they determined that old-growth logging by the BLM in the Poor Windy and Evans Creek timber sales on 15,848 acres of threatened northern spotted owl habitat would not jeopardize the species or adversely modify its critical habitat.  In particular, the court found that the Service “was not faced with scientific uncertainty, but unanimity concerning the negative impact of reduced [nesting, roosting, and foraging] habitat and the barred owls’ threat to the spotted owl based on the barred owls’ ability to out-compete for food and shelter,” so its assumption that other areas would continue to support spotted owls was arbitrary.  The court added that mitigation measures addressing barred owls are not “reasonably certain to occur.”  The FWS determination of no “incidental take” was also arbitrary.  The judge also found that the Bureau and the Service illegally failed to reinitiate consultation on the effects of the East Evans Creek and Milepost 97 wildfires that actively burned the timber sale area as the Service concluded its evaluation.  Along the way, the court determined that a prior challenge to an RMP does not preclude raising the same issue for a project (so it does not create a similar situation to the bull trout case above).  The court denied two other ESA claims.

New lawsuit:  Grand Canyon Wolf Recovery Project v. Haaland (D. Ariz.)

On October 3, five conservation non-profits filed suit in Arizona against the July 1 revised Section 10(j) rule governing management of Mexican wolves in New Mexico as a “nonessential” experimental population, and preventing their further dispersal in the southwest.  The news release includes a link to the complaint.

On October 11, a lawsuit was filed in the Montana federal district court against the Forest Service by Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics for violating the Clean Water Act by the continued use of chemical flame retardant from aircraft.

A notice of a final rule to delist the snail darter from protection under the Endangered Species Act was published October 5, at the request of the Center for Biological Diversity, among others.  The fish is known for stopping the construction of the Tellico Dam on the Tennessee River in the first test of ESA in the Supreme Court.  While the dam was later authorized by Congress, other measures resulting from ESA are credited with the species’ recovery.  More in this article.

New Steel et al. Paper: Mega-disturbances Cause Rapid Decline of Mature Conifer Forest Habitat in California

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The Rim Fire in the Stanislaus National Forest U.S. Forest Service photo.

I don’t think the findings of this paper will be surprising to many TSW readers. I usually try to excerpt from the discussion, but this paper also has a management implications section. The basic story is that ideas developed around mesic forests may not work in dry forests. “Protected” areas, including important endangered species habitat, may be lost to wildfire, beetles or drought, or any combination thereof, whether due to AGW, historic fire suppression, human ignitions or any combination of the above.. what is, is. Here’s a link in case it’s not posted on Treesearch yet.

***Note: some of what these authors claim is contrary to the “science-based” claims of many MOG advocates. It’s easy to say your claims are based on “science”; it’s a bit harder to dig into the existing scientific studies and what they show; especially if they disagree. The authors also question static conservation approaches (if this reminds you of Botkin’s 1992 book Discordant Harmonies, the idea has been around for a while), e.g, “Thus even today, in both law and in practice, the scientific conservation of endangered marine species continues to be based on the idea that nature undisturbed is constant and stable . . .” I wonder whether resistance to change from this static worldview is perhaps a form of scientific/philosophical comfort with the status quo or that the momentum of law and policy is just too strong for the few voices saying “maybe not.” Anyway, back to the paper.***

Such “static” conservation approaches are heavily embedded in existing wildlife and ecosystem conservation policy (Leopold et al. 2018), as well as land management plans (e.g.,USDA 2004) in North America. Yet recent disturbance patterns and their cumulative impacts have demonstrated that efforts to resist change are often falling short in dynamic ecosystems, such that achieving the specific conservation objectives and possibly the intent outlined in policy documents may no longer be feasible in disturbance prone areas (Davis et al. In Press). In fact, continued attempts to resist change may be counterproductive where a hands-off approach (but continued fire suppression) creates a higher likelihood of rapid, transformational, and undesirable changes in the form of large scale type conversion and habitat loss from disturbance (Rissman et al. 2018). In our study region spotted owl Protected Activity Centers are often managed using a static conservation approach but our analysis shows they have recently experienced more declines in canopy cover (49% relative to 2011) than outside of their borders (40%). This observation suggests that conservation of habitat for old-forest dependent species may require a more dynamic approach that increases resilience to disturbance while maintaining valuable habitat features such as large, tall trees.

This is from the last section of the Discussion.

Rapid loss in mature forest habitat in the southern Sierra Nevada and longer term trends in fire-related forest decline throughout California (Stevens et al. 2017, Steel et al. 2018) suggest that existing forest management paradigms may be inadequate for maintaining mature mixed-conifer forests under current and projected future disturbance dynamics (North et al. 2022). If these rates of decline continue, we are likely to see near total loss of southern Sierra Nevada mature conifer forests in the coming decades. This would be much more rapid than the time horizon of mature forest loss estimated by Stephens et al. (2016b) (by 2089, or ~75 years). However, Stephens et al. (2016b) did not consider drought-related mortality, and only analyzed fire activity up through 2014, which missed the record fire year of 2020 (Safford et al. 2022). It is worth noting that the extreme fire activity documented in California during 2020 was likely not a one-off anomaly; recent observations indicate similar, if not exacerbated fire activity in 2021 (Shive et al. 2021).

The region has also reentered extreme drought (Williams et al. 2022) with implications for both drought and beetle mortality and severe wildfire. More optimistically, total loss of mature forests in this region could be delayed until mid-century if we enter a period of cooler, wetter years, if surviving mature forests within these fire footprints have gained resilience to future disturbances, or if recruitment of mature hardwood species compensate for losses of large conifers. Hardwood species may become a greater component of the Sierra Nevada landscape as conifers decline (Restaino et al. 2019, Steel et al. 2021b). Oaks, especially California black oaks, are relatively resilient to both wildfire and drought, and are utilized by species such as the spotted owl and fisher (North et al. 2000, Aubry et al. 2013, Green et al. 2019). However, loss of mature forest habitat, on any likely timeline, is unsustainable given that the recruitment of conifer or hardwood mature forests takes many decades to centuries. Stephens et al. (2016a) emphasize that policies prioritizing forest resilience over other resource concerns may be needed to meaningfully address the current backlog in forest management and shift course from forest decline to sustainable disturbance dynamics. Indeed, our analysis showed that areas of higher canopy cover are more at risk of loss, and that large areas of relatively homogenous moderate and higher density forests, like PACs, are at risk of larger declines if resilience needs are not addressed. Recognizing the dynamic nature of habitat in these forests, and prioritizing the restoration of these dynamics over the attempted strict preservation of existing habitat, may help minimize the impacts of these changes and maintain habitat functionality in the long term (Fabritius et al. 2017, Stoetzel et al. 2020, Gaines et al. 2022).