This article is a companion piece to the diary that I posted on August 15, Views of old growth forest they won't show on calendars.
Given that major forest fires have dominated the headlines for several weeks, this is a good time to look at recent research on the subject. Let’s start with a disclaimer, that I am not a researcher myself, nor do I have the discipline to read large numbers of peer-reviewed papers in an effort to learn the fine details of forest science. I do read a few papers, mainly those published in the Journal of Forestry. Otherwise, I read summaries, or news articles about important studies.
The Daily Bucket is a nature refuge. We amicably discuss animals, weather, climate, soil, plants, waters and note life’s patterns spinning around us.
We invite you to note what you are seeing around you in your own part of the world, and to share your observations in the comments below.
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Before we dive into any details, let me repeat what I often say about commercial timber harvesting: The current world population is estimated at 7,800,000,000 human beings. Each person uses natural resources, including wood. Virtually every alternative to forest products is more damaging to the environment than cutting trees, and most of the alternatives are nonrenewable. Whatever our personal opinions might be, logging is a fact of life, and it will not go away. Our choices, then, are to use our forest resources wisely, or to use them poorly.
Another important point: The forests of Planet Earth are so vast and so diverse that it is difficult to make blanket statements about them. Broad generalizations are likely to be “partially true” at best. Some of the most incoherent nature diaries I’ve ever seen on Daily Kos were ones where the author attempted to cover too much ground, thus making Grand Statements About The World that might be true somewhere, but weren’t true everywhere.
I shall endeavor to avoid such mistakes, but I cannot promise perfection. This diary is far longer than my usual fare, but I shall limit the scope to recent events involving forests and wildfires in the western United States.
Now, on with the research.
One recently-published paper is worth a read, because the authors reviewed more than 1,000 papers related to forest fire, forest management, and climate change. Let that sink in for a moment. Consider the work required for a scientific team to analyze that many papers, and to arrive at a consensus of what those studies teach us. Again, I would never have the discipline to be a part of such an endeavor, but I’m happy that there are people willing to take that plunge.
A brief summary of the paper is here, courtesy of Penn State.
This is the link to the full research paper:
Adapting western North American forests to climate change and wildfires: ten common questions.
The authors: Susan Prichard, Paul F. Hessburg, R. Keala Hagmann, Nicholas A. Povak, Solomon Z. Dobrowski, Matthew D. Hurteau, Van R. Kane, Robert E. Keane, Leda N. Kobziar, Crystal A. Kolden, Malcolm North, Sean A. Parks, Hugh D. Safford, Jens T. Stevens, Larissa L. Yocom, Derek J. Churchill, Robert W. Gray, David W. Huffman, Frank K. Lake, and Pratima Khatri-Chhetri.
The research team set out to ask ten important questions.
(1) Are the effects of fire exclusion overstated? If so, are treatments unwarranted and even counterproductive?
(2) Is forest thinning alone sufficient to mitigate wildfire hazard?
(3) Can forest thinning and prescribed burning solve the problem?
(4) Should active forest management, including forest thinning, be concentrated in the wildland urban interface (WUI)?
(5) Can wildfires on their own do the work of fuel treatments?
(6) Is the primary objective of fuel reduction treatments to assist in future firefighting response and containment?
(7) Do fuel treatments work under extreme fire weather?
(8) Is the scale of the problem too great – can we ever catch up?
(9) Will planting more trees mitigate climate change in wNA (Western North American) forests?
(10) Is post-fire management needed or even ecologically justified?
At first, I planned to discuss all ten questions. But going back to what I said about trying to cover too much ground in one diary, I will limit my discussion to Questions 2 and 3, where I have personal (though admittedly anecdotal) experience.
I urge everyone to read the research paper. It might appear daunting at 81 pages. But it is written in a style that is easy to read, and everything after Page 35 is citations and charts. If your time is limited, go to Pages 69-71 for brief answers to the Ten Questions.
Questions 2 and 3 go hand in hand, because the various efforts towards fire mitigation are on a continuum. Some actions are for the sole purpose of reducing fire risk, while others have additional purposes, such as commercial timber production. Let’s look at some examples.
1. Remove small-diameter material that will constitute ladder fuels in case of fire. This might be done by mowing, by chipping, or by a crew with chain saws. Material might be left in place; more often it is stacked, and is sometimes burned. The end result is usually that the larger trees remain, and are more widely spaced.
2. Conduct a controlled burn without cutting or removing any woody material.
3. If enough large trees are present, thin the forest commercially, leaving a well-spaced overstory. This creates large quantities of slash (leaves, needles, limbs, logs with no commercial value). The slash can be
• Left in place
• Piled but not burned
• Piled and burned
• Burned in place, when weather and fuel conditions are favorable
Because of the incredible diversity of situations – urban versus rural, steep ground versus flat, good access versus roadless, dry forest versus moist, plus the wide variety of species and sizes – no single prescription fits every situation. Many sites simply cannot be burned due to nearby development, terrain, budget limitations, or air quality concerns. The treatment given to a site is often a compromise, rather than the ideal.
Many of the treatments mentioned above do little more than rearrange the fuels. A wildfire burning under mild conditions might spare the overstory, while one burning in extreme conditions will spare nothing.
A controlled burn by itself will remove fine fuels on and near the ground, but might leave the forest susceptible to a crown fire later on.
The most effective treatment includes thinning to remove ladder fuels and excess small trees, followed by a cool-season burn to eliminate most of the slash. Logically, it makes sense that such patches of forest are most likely to survive a major wildfire. That is what the researchers concluded, and is also what I have seen in my own wanderings.
This diary is already long, but I want to include three recent news articles about western wildfires. The first two articles look at specific locations where specific policies were followed, and consider the outcomes.
From The Guardian, via yahoo news:
‘The fire moved around it’: success story in Oregon fuels calls for prescribed burns
The Bootleg fire stampeded through southern Oregon so fiercely that it spit up thunderclouds. But when the flames approached the Sycan Marsh Preserve, a 30,000-acre wetland thick with ponderosa pines, something incredible happened.
The flames weakened and the fire slowed down, allowing firefighters to move in and steer the blaze away from a critical research station.
That land belongs to the Nature Conservancy, an environmental nonprofit that has worked with the local Klamath Tribes to bring back pre-colonial forest management techniques such as prescribed fire – small, controlled burns that clear out fire-fueling vegetation, renew the soil and prevent bigger, runaway blazes.
A similar phenomenon occurred in the Black Hills Ecosystem Restoration Project, another area where the Klamath Tribes had worked with the US Forest Service to thin young trees and apply prescribed burning. When the Bootleg fire finally swept through, the forest was far less damaged than other areas that were not treated, the forest service said, noting that deer were even seen grazing on a “green island” preserved by the treatment.
Second article is from Berkeley News, a case study in the successful application of the policy of allowing high-elevation fires in isolated places to burn. The let-it-burn philosophy is controversial, because a wildfire left to its own devices will sometimes turn into a monster when there is a sudden change in weather conditions.
How wildfire restored a Yosemite watershed
Between 1973 and 2016, Illilouette Creek Basin experienced 21 fires larger than 40 hectares — approximately equal to 75 football fields — while Sugarloaf experienced 10 fires of that size. In Illilouette, the result today is a forest that may look a bit messy to the untrained eye, but it holds a lot of resilience.
Measurements also indicate that streamflow out of Illilouette Creek Basin has increased slightly since the managed wildfire program began, while streamflow out of other similar watersheds in the Sierras have all decreased. Boosting the amount of water that flows downstream is likely to benefit both the humans and the aquatic ecosystems that depend on this precious resource.
Finally, let’s look at a new (August 21, 2021) article in the Los Angeles Times. Compare the content and style with the previous articles I’ve discussed. Let’s begin with the title, which literally begins with a version of “some people say.”
As California burns, some ecologists say it’s time to rethink forest management
Top billing in the article goes to Chad Hanson, president of The Muir Project. Take a side trip to the website of the Muir Project, and we see that Hanson’s bio begins thusly:
Chad Hanson co-founded the John Muir Project in 1996. He first became involved in national forest protection after hiking the 2,700-mile length of the Pacific Crest Trail from Mexico to Canada with his older brother in 1989. During this hike he witnessed firsthand the devastation caused by rampant commercial logging on our National Forests in California, Oregon and Washington.
Hmm, is there a remote possibility that he has strong feelings about logging? From the “about us” page:
Many years of experience have taught us that, as long as the commercial logging program continues on our National Forests, our public forests will be treated mainly as commodities, and the needs of rare and imperiled wildlife species will be secondary at best.
In other words, the goal of The Muir Project is for there to be no commercial logging at all in our National Forests. That’s fine and good; everyone is entitled to their opinions and goals. But perhaps the Times could have mentioned this for the benefit of its readers.
The important practice of controlled burning is summarily dismissed in this statement by a UCLA faculty member:
Prescribed burns, also known as controlled fires, are among the better solutions for maintaining forest health, he said. But given the restrictions, planning and logistics required for those types of burns, it’s impossible to utilize them to any real benefit.
Nonsense. While there are many constraints, the burns are being done, and the benefits are real. However, the Times wasted no ink or pixels on any effort to discuss the best solution, which is the combination of controlled fire and thinning.
Oregon’s Bootleg Fire makes a cameo appearance as a horrible example. Not mentioned is the success story highlighted in The Guardian article.
Next, another dose of bothsiderism and “some people say.”
While some ecologists believe that removing accumulated fuels can help limit the potential for catastrophic fires, others have argued that thinning can in fact make conflagrations worse.
Perhaps a scholarly group of scientists can look at a thousand or so peer-reviewed papers, and make some sense of this controversy. Wait, that’s how this diary started. It was so long ago that I nearly forgot.
Late in the article is this gem:
When mechanical thinning or logging are done for profit — or when whoever is doing it gets to use the timber they’re taking out — that instead incentivizes removing the oldest, biggest and strongest trees, which fetch a higher price, and leaves behind the trees that are the least fire-resilient, he said.
Versions of this argument have been employed by anti-logging factions for decades, often in fundraising letters. If protecting some of our forests from the most devastating effects of wildfire is our goal, it is totally irrelevant whether some of the material removed goes to a sawmill (in fact, if a forest mitigation job makes money, then there are more funds available for additional projects). Additionally, the scientific evidence on fire mitigation points towards leaving the large trees in place, not removing them. Contrary to the scary quotes, the loggers do not call the shots. They don’t get to cut the big trees and leave the little ones if the contract says otherwise. The best mitigation projects that I have seen are those where large trees are left standing, and prescribed fire has been used to reduce the fuel load.
The impression I get from reading the Times article is that fire mitigation is essentially futile, and somehow we need to save houses. Certainly this will resonate with Californians who have lost their homes, or seen loved ones lose theirs. But when millions of people have taken up residence in the forest, the efforts to save homes must include a landscape approach, not a yard-by yard approach. Even with our best efforts — given the combination of fire suppression, climate change, and houses in the wildland-urban interface — forests will burn, and homes will burn.
If you have stayed with me to the end, thanks for reading. Having a brief discussion about wildfire and forest management is nearly impossible. I have only scratched the surface. Feel free to continue the discussion in the comments section.