bark beetles

Democrats Comment Against Forest Thinning

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Here is an early July LA Times article that, apparently, says that only Republicans are seeking to thin our forests, as we watch our forests burn. Clearly, this is a tactic to rile up their mostly Democratic readers.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-gop-fire-hearings-20130703,0,2185679.story

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Yes, it did rile them up, as evidenced by the wild comments. Here are a few examples:

As a logger in Susanville, California said at a Forest Service public comment session (1997), “But Trees are Dying in the Fiorest”!!!! (and therefore NOT making a profit for him).

My response, People are dying in the streets, so what is YOUR point.

The aLand Raping Logger coundn’t answer, because the only thing he cared about was turning a PUBLIC RESOURCE into his own private profit.

Dead trees in a dorest serve as nesting sites for birds and other animals and eventually fall to rot, providing food foe grub eating bears, light spaces for juvenile trees to start and replenishing the forest soil, for the next generation of trees.

When a person dies, what good do they do the Planet?

This commenter doesn’t realize that clearcuts have been banned in the Sierra Nevada for over 20 years.

The logging companies will only clear cut…not select cut, making for the ugliest scars and worse…ecological destruction of forest habitats.  This is not a good idea.  The problem is not the density of trees…it’s the residential areas built near thick forests.  Bad planning is a result of homes destroyed in forest fires.

Ummm, I think it is the wildfires that are causing “deforestation”, bud!

Is that what the GOP is calling deforestation for profit these days, as they bend over for their lumbering lobbyists?

Was this supposed excessive harvesting done in THIS millennium??!?

They have a point, but the GOP has a history of letting “thinning” evolve into excessive “harvesting” by lumber companies.

This person is in denial about current forest management practices that have eliminated high-grading AND clearcutting, while reducing fuels in the form of trees in the 10″-18″ dbh size class. The last 20 years of active management has not resulted in adverse effects. On the other hand, wildfires lead to MORE insects, as they kill the fire-adapted pines, through a combination of cambium kill and bark beetle blooms.

Much of the GOP have forest management/preservation for the past 40 years. While some may see forests as natural resources to be preserved and cherished, others see them as purely economic resources to be exploited. Timber interests in California have utilized the same pretext to no avail. Note that thinning the forests would have little effect in preventing or curtailing wild fires. Let nature take its course becasue fires are a natural occurance; and are necessary for killing insects, spreading new seeds and burning away dead wood.

Really, though, THIS is a big part of what we are up against. Loud-mouthed partisan politics, not based in fact, is harming our ability to do what is right for the “greatest good”. Shouldn’t we be “thinking globally and acting locally”, regarding forests? Is this mindset fitting into “If you are not part of the solution, then you are a part of the problem”?? It looks like commenters will say ANYTHING to bash the GOP, even if it is hyperbole and rhetoric. Sadly, this ignorance of forest facts continues to have a harmful and hazardous effect on our forests.

The Return of Let-Burn

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Sadly, we get the same results as we’ve gotten in the past. When you “preserve” wildfires for weeks, the winds eventually come up and fires can (and will) escape. Now, all sorts of scarce resources will be tied up for an unknown amount of time, impacting other current and future wildfires, during an intense heatwave. How many Forest Service recreation opportunities will be closed up, due to wildfire concerns? How long will these wildfires continue to impact humans living close by? How many tens of millions of dollars will be wasted on these “resource benefits” touted by fans of “free range” wildfire? How many fuels reduction projects will have to be delayed, because fire suppression has “stolen” their funds? These questions need answers but, no one wants to answer them. “Unforeseen weather conditions” is an unacceptable answer for losing containment. Mountains and winds always go together!

From the Evergreen Magazine’s Facebook page:

The South Fork Fire: A firefighters perspective…
This was sent to us by a firefighter friend of ours. Lack of management in the forest is costing hundreds of thousands of dollars, taking lives and homes, decimating the land, wasting timber, and natural resources as well as dumping large amounts of CO2 and carcinogens into the atmosphere.

“The following message was forwarded by one of my Smokejumper Bro’s. For many years he was a lead plane pilot and has seen a lot from the air.

The temperature at 7500 ft in Los Alamos today reached 94 deg F. The winds were light however we can no longer see Santa Fe and the Sangre de Cristo Mountains because of the smoke from the Jarosa fire. Unfortunately this will drive the fire further into the Pecos Wilderness and no suppression will take place until ti crosses the wilderness boundary.

The Silver Fire is now listed at 85,000 acres with 10% containment according to the news reports.”

Subject: Feds, Fires, Frustration — CO (Lengthy)

“With the understanding that I’ve been wrong before, that I don’t have access to a lot of information and that I might be wrong again, here’s my opinion:
1. Background
The forest is in bad shape due to drought and the beetle infestation. There’s a LOT of standing dead timber and associated brush. In short, it’s a disaster waiting for the proper time to happen and it needs to be carefully watched by people with serious understanding of the potential problems. The right people weren’t in position and the supervision never took place.
2. What happened
A frontal system brought thunderstorms through the area about 5/6 June with a little rain and a lot of lightning. At least 3 fires started from lightning strikes in this area. The Forest Service (hereinafter ‘Feds’) knew these fires were active and, thinking that they could burn out the dead timber and not have to worry about it later, let them grow for 10-12 days without intervention — until they blew up, completely out of control. Then they began trying to play catch-up…in small and ineffective advances.
3. Why?
Apparently, the Feds, hand in hand with the Greenies — who seem to believe that Walt Disney was a wildlife biologist and get their expertise about the outdoors by watching reruns of Bambi — are/have been firmly of the opinion that no one should harvest any of this standing dead wood…because that wouldn’t be ‘natural’. (The beetle-killed timber actually is useful for paneling, furniture and a number of other purposes but the Greenies are terrified that anyone going in to get it will make those terrible trails and roads into the forest that ruin its ‘wildness’.) So, a time-bomb was allowed to develop. And it finally detonated.
4. Result
75,000+ acres of wilderness are reduced to burned wasteland (and a lot more will go up in flames in the coming days), the communities of South Fork, Masonic Park, Creede and others have been put at extreme risk and the entire National Forest in this region may have to be closed to public use for the rest of this year… or at least until the snow flies and kills the hot spots. (South Fork would have been lost had not a MUCH higher power — Thank You, God! — apparently stepped in and redirected the winds. The fire was headed directly toward town when the winds changed abruptly and drove the fires past it. Other locales may or may not be as fortunate.
So…
IMO this debacle could have been avoided if the Feds had spent more time recognizing reality instead of fantasizing about ‘Nature’s intentions’.
A lone guy in a Super Cub could probably have overflown these fires early in their development, poured half a thermos of coffee out the pilot’s window and flown home with the problem solved.
Instead, the bureaucrats sat on their thumbs and let everything get out of control.
(A friend of mine has a saying: “Kill the monsters while they’re small.” The Feds don’t seem to subscribe to that thinking. )
Right now, the Feds are in full CYA mode, claiming that this fire is very ‘complex’, that it was impossible to forecast this sort of development and that the weather was a factor that was unforeseeable.
Well, it wasn’t nearly so complex before they allowed it to grow beyond control. If they’d actually gotten out of the office and walked through the woods from time to time, they would have seen the huge amounts of dead wood and brush that’s fueling it. And, if they knew how to read weather charts — or had asked someone from the weather service (another federal agency) to read the charts for them — they wouldn’t have been so surprised by that little shocker.
I understand that hindsight is always 20/20 but the locals were already asking why the Feds were sitting on this a week or more before it blew up. Seems to me that our expert forestry folks might have at least listened a little bit.
So, a lot of people are out of their homes. Some may lose them. The local law enforcement and fire organizations (who have been doing truly heroic work) are spread thin and overtaxed. And a lot of businesses are in dire financial straits just at the start of the summer season. And it can all be laid at the feet of the Feds, most of whom will probably be promoted for their ‘selfless’ efforts in fighting this disaster…that they created.

I guess that incompetence flows from the leadership. Lord knows we’re dealing with really entrenched (politicians) at every level of Federal gubmint.”

New Study Shows the Value of Active Forest Management

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Yes, we have already seen what happens with a hands-off, “whatever happens” strategy.

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I haven’t read the article all the way through but, this appears to solidify the importance of managing our forests, and the fire dangers within. The are four entire pages of citations, plenty of pictures and some very convincing common sense recommendations that use site-specific science. The picture above is from a roadside treatment along the local Highway 4 corridor. This treatment extends for many miles along the highway, making this “ignition zone” much more fire resistant than it was. Also evident in this picture is the lack of old growth beyond the “Roadside Zone”, a remnant of logging practices in the last millennium.

http://www.calforests.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/The-Efficacy-of-Hazardous-Fuel-Treatments.pdf

Let us hope that the warnings are heeded and solutions are implemented with site-specific science. However, I would VERY much like to see a current view of that picture of fire intensities near Alpine, Arizona. I’m sure it would show increased amounts of bug trees outside of the firelines. Certainly, wildfire effects persist for MANY years, even outside of the firelines. I have seen it happen multiple times, in multiple places.

Summer Arrives With a Vengeance

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Spring ends with wildfires making people homeless. After the fires are contained and controlled, does it really matter if ignitions were man-caused or the result of “nature”? Actually, there seems to be a “natural component” of human-caused wildfires. We should not be welcoming this “natural” and inescapable component.

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This view from an abandoned fire lookout on the Toiyabe National Forest shows a decreased snowpack compared to a “normal” June. The Colorado fires were expected but, the “whatever happens” strategy has once again failed  us humans. There are MANY things we could have done to reduce or eliminate this tragedy but, it seems that some people prefer shade over safety. The Forest Service seems willing to reduce detection services, to save a few pennies.

http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&ll=39.014782,-104.692841&spn=0.114038,0.264187&t=h&z=13

This view of the Black Forest area shows how very little fuels work was done prior to this year. News footage seems to show that homeowners preserved the trees all around them. The aerial view shows why people wanted to build their homes there. They love their shade! It IS unfortunate that so many people’s homes burned but, there is ignored reality working here.

Similarly, are we really prepared to accept whatever damage or loss to our forest ecosystems? We do know that there will be big wildfires this year, due to weather conditions. Are we willing to let “whatever happens” (including arson, stupidity, auto accidents and any other human ignitions) determine the state of our National Forests? Remember, there ARE people out there who will sue to stop fuels projects that sell merchantable trees.

How Many Snags Do Birds Need??

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With our discussions about burned forests and blackbacked woodpeckers, here are some views of the Power Fire, on the Eldorado National Forest. Initially, the wildfire seemed to be of mixed severity but, as the summer wore on, more and more insect mortality caused previously green trees to turn brown. After Chad Hanson took his appeal to the Ninth Circuit Court, this project was halted with about 75% of the dead trees cut. The court decided that not enough analysis was done regarding the blackbacked woodpecker, despite only 55% of the burned area in the project.

In this picture, seven years after it burned, most of those foreground snags were in a helicopter unit, with a fairly large stream buffer at the bottom. At least 5 times we marked additional mortality in that unit. Also important is the fact that we were cutting trees which still had green needles, using the new fire mortality guidelines of the time. As you can see, the density of snags should be quite sufficient in supporting multiple woodpecker families.

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This patch of snags was clumped, below a main road and above a major streamcourse.

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Another view of abundant snags within a cutting unit, and a protected streamcourse.

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You can see that both large and small snags were left for wildlife. After 6 years, surely some snags have already fallen, as expected. Not every acre can, or should, have birds on every acre. Since this is predominantly a P. pine stand, the combination of high-intensity fire and subsequent bark beetles caused catastrophic losses of owl and goshawk habitat, including nest trees. You can also see that reforestation is, and will continue to be problematic, with all that deerbrush coming back so thick.

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Science synthesis to help guide land management of nation’s forests

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Key findings from the synthesis were:

  • Efforts to promote resilience of socioecological systems increasingly consider the interaction of social values and ecological processes in pursuit of long-term mutual benefits and social learning for local communities and larger social networks.

  • Research indicates that strategic placement of treatments to reduce hazardous fuel accumulations and to restore fire as an ecosystem process within fire sheds can lower the risk for undesirable social and ecological outcomes associated with uncharacteristically large, severe, and dangerous fires, which include impacts to wildlife species of concern, such as the fisher and California spotted owl.

  • Science generally supports active treatment in some riparian and core wildlife zones to restore fire regimes. However, adaptive management, including experimentation at large landscape scales, is needed to evaluate which areas are priorities for treatment and what levels of treatment produce beneficial or neutral impacts to wildlife species and other socioecological values over long periods.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-02/ufs–sst022013.php

Yep, this is what we are already doing on my Ranger District. It is always important to focus on what we are leaving, rather than what is being removed. We still have longstanding limitations of protecting old growth and a ban on clearcutting. The picture is an example of salvage logging just six months after completion.

Utah’s High Elevation Mortality

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This picture is located within the Cedar Breaks National Monument, where conifer mortality is quite excessive. There is really not much that can be done with this situation, other than spending lots of money to fell, pile and burn. Within the Dixie National Forest, this mortality dominates the upper elevations. Even at this altitude of over 10,000 feet, the land is very dry for 9 months, except for seasonal lightning storms. Like some of our public lands, we need a triage system to deal with such overwhelming mortality and fuels build-ups. In this example, we are too late to employ a market-based solution, which would do more non-commercial work.

I have seen this area over many years, and have watched as forests die and rot, with catastrophic wildfire being the “end game”. Anyone venture a guess at what will grow here, in the future?

www.facebook.com/LarryHarrellFotoware

Do Bark Beetle Outbreaks Increase Wildfire Risks in the Central U.S. Rocky Mountains? Implications from Recent Research

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From the Natural Areas Journal. Abstract snipped below:

Appropriate response to recent, widespread bark beetle (Dendroctonus spp.) outbreaks in the western United States has been the subject of much debate in scientific and policy circles. Among the proposed responses have been landscape-level mechanical treatments to prevent the further spread of outbreaks and to reduce the fire risk that is believed to be associated with insect-killed trees. We review the literature on the efficacy of silvicutural practices to control outbreaks and on fire risk following bark beetle outbreaks in several forest types. While research is ongoing and important questions remain unresolved, to date most available evidence indicates that bark beetle outbreaks do not substantially increase the risk of active crown fire in lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta) and spruce (Picea engelmannii)-fir (Abies spp.) forests under most conditions. Instead, active crown fires in these forest types are primarily contingent on dry conditions rather than variations in stand structure, such as those brought about by outbreaks. Preemptive thinning may reduce susceptibility to small outbreaks but is unlikely to reduce susceptibility to large, landscape-scale epidemics. Once beetle populations reach widespread epidemic levels, silvicultural strategies aimed at stopping them are not likely to reduce forest susceptibility to outbreaks. Furthermore, such silvicultural treatments could have substantial, unintended short- and long-term ecological costs associated with road access and an overall degradation of natural areas.

California’s Dense Forests Present New Opportunities

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Forestry operations and bioenergy have been part of the economic and social fabric in Northern California for decades. A five-year study produced in 2009 by the USDA Forest Service modeled forest management under different scenarios across 2.7 million acres encompassing the Feather River watershed. The model’s time horizon spanned four decades, examining wildfire behavior, forest thinning operations and a range of environmental and economic impacts. It concluded that in virtually every aspect analyzed, managing forest resources and utilizing biomass for energy production provides significant advantages over the status quo.

With acres per wildfire going WAY up, thinning projects seem to be the way to go to reduce both wildfire sizes and wildfire intensities. Again, we have strict diameter limits in the Sierra Nevada, and clearcutting has been banned since 1993.

The link is here

“Fuel Treatments Can Address Wildfire Severity”

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The Sierra Nevada Adaptive Management Project (SNAMP) is a joint effort by the University of California, state and federal agencies, and the public formed in 2004 to assess how treatments designed by the USDA Forest Service to prevent severe wildfires affect fire risk, sensitive wildlife populations, forest health and water resources. SNAMP is in year five of an ambitious 7-year experiment to evaluate the effectiveness of management strategies to modify fire behavior across the landscape.

SNAMP has examined real-world fires and developed computer models to evaluate wildfire severity and environmental impacts in response to fuel-reduction treatments looking 30 years to the future. In its Northern Sierra project covering roughly 30,000 acres, SNAMP evaluated three different treatment scenarios. In each case, fuels were reduced across approximately one-third of the study area, and all treatments showed substantial reductions in high-intensity wildfire across the landscape, not just treated areas for 20 years after implementation.

This is from California Forests Magazine, and this issue is full of articles about severe wildfires. The whole article is here. The picture is one of mine from the Lassen National Forest’s 1987 Lost Fire.