Restoration

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?

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Winter Reflection

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It is especially so, in a profession like forestry, that some of us get a chance to reflect on what has happened, and what might happen. Some of us find other ways of being outdoors and enjoying nature. My winter “data collection” involves sampling, organizing and capturing millions of scenic “data points” in a pleasing manner. Sometimes one has an entire winter to look at a problem from a new point of view than they had before. Being more moderate, I keep and cultivate an open mind, welcoming new points of view to scrutinize. Anyone who said that collaboration, consensus and compromise would be easy and painless was lying to you. Like in photography, scientific studies can use composition, depth of field and field of view to adjust what the viewer sees, and doesn’t see. A telephoto lens and a polarizing filter can dramatically affect what you want the viewer to see.

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My young nephew called and invited me to take the extra bed in his Yosemite Lodge room. I hustled to get down there and we enjoyed a nice dinner, after I made Isaac and his friend some potent “Snugglers”. The three of us skied at Badger Pass, with glorious conditions the next day. The last morning, I took them to this secret spot along the Merced River. I never fail to get great pictures at this little-known spot, and I greedily sucked up more than my share of nice shots.

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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

Group Hails Forest Cooperation

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I saw a local article about our part of the Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Program.

For the first time in many years, loggers and conservation groups are working together and the results have been stunning, according to Katherine Evatt, president of the Pine Grove-based Foothill Conservancy.

The Amador Calaveras Consensus Group has been working in the Stanislaus and Eldorado national forests on projects that are part of a larger national program called Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration.

The goal is to restore forests for people, water and wildlife, and a report released in December shows some of those goals are being met.

The ACCG Cornerstone Project is one of 23 national projects that split $40 million in 2012. According to the fiscal year-end report for the project, the two forests spent more than $658,000 in CFLRA funds this year, matched by more than $433,000 of other Forest Service funds. There was more than $67,700 in ACCG in-kind partner contributions and more than $1 million in leverage funds from ACCG members. Additional funds included a $196,000 grant from the Coca-Cola Company as well as $283,000 worth of in-service work under stewardship contracts.

The article 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.

Pine Regeneration: Bridge Fire, Bryce Canyon National Park

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The 2009 Bridge Fire was started by lightning, and burned in both the Dixie National Forest and Bryce Canyon National Park. Since the fire didn’t closely approach structures, the fire was allowed to burn to the road, and in some places, to the rim.

Mortality was pretty severe but, there were still some green trees scattered about. It is hard to say if there has been a good cone year, since the fire. I didn’t see a single live new tree in this particular area.

I did see this dwarf Oregon grape but, it really wasn’t a surprise, since I had seen them growing among the hoodoos.

I also saw some manzanita and ceanothus becoming re-established, along with other desert brush species.

As the years go on, the odds for having a pine forest soon are worsening. At 9000 feet in elevation, this is a pretty harsh environment for any tree. I posted most of these pictures in high resolution, so you can see the vegetation easily, if you click on them. You cannot judge pine regeneration after only a few years but, in this case, pine regeneration looks very poor.

To see the pictures from my Bryce Canyon and Zion National Park adventures, go see my Facebook page, please. These include the Peekaboo trail in Bryce Canyon, and “The Narrows” in Zion National Park.

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Giant Sequoia Plantation!

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We ran across this Giant Sequoia plantation, within our restoration project. I’m not sure of the age of this plantation but, it was probably back in the late 70’s or early 80’s. It is mostly south-facing, and not really like where they normally grow but, a “renegade” culturist did several experiments. I’m not sure what future management ideas are. This one needs some thinning, as their vitality seems quite variable.


Thinning in the Sierra Nevada

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I tried my hand at some “digital thinning”, with a picture of the Stanislaus National Forest, above the Mokelumne River. I couldn’t really remove as many of the bigger trees as I should, without sacrificing photorealism. I did “enhance” some of the oaks, which is a keystone of the new paradigm of ecosystem wildlife values. I am sure there are some home habitats of ESA birds, here. There would also be some pockets of undisturbed forest, and maybe some bigger openings around the oaks.

Below is the original picture

I think we can all say that there is, indeed, some excess trees to thin out, in this stand.

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“An Ecosystem Management Strategy for Sierran Mixed Conifer Forests”

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http://www.fs.fed.us/psw/publications/documents/psw_gtr220/

“Description: Current Sierra Nevada forest management is often focused on strategically reducing fuels without an explicit strategy for ecological restoration across the landscape matrix. Summarizing recent scientific literature, we suggest managers produce different stand structures and densities across the landscape using topographic variables (i.e., slope shape, aspect, and slope position) as a guide for varying treatments. Local cool or moist areas, where historically fire would have burned less frequently or at lower severity, would have higher density and canopy cover, providing habitat for sensitive species. In contrast upper, southern-aspect slopes would have low densities of large fire-resistant trees. For thinning, marking rules would be based on crown strata or age cohorts and species, rather than uniform diameter limits. Collectively, our management recommendations emphasize the ecological role of fire, changing climate conditions, sensitive wildlife habitat, and the importance of forest structure heterogeneity.”

This is a basic scientific reasoning for the marking prescriptions we are using in our current project. In scanning through some of it (it seems QUITE comprehensive!), I found this little gem.

‘How is ecological restoration defined in the GTR? In the face of changing
climate conditions, our focus is on increasing ecosystem resiliency. This focus
is consistent with that described in USDA Forest Service Manual 2020.5,
which defines ecological restoration as: “The process of assisting the recovery
of resilience and adaptive capacity of ecosystems that have been degraded,
damaged, or destroyed. Restoration focuses on establishing the composition,
structure, pattern, and ecological processes necessary to make terrestrial and
aquatic ecosystems sustainable, resilient, and healthy under current and future
conditions.” ‘