In his State of the State address in January, Gov. Jerry Brown declared that we must act boldly on forest health. He and the next governor must make good on that promise, and not simply appoint another commission. Click on the “Read More” button and then https://calmatters.org/articles/commentary/my-turn-whats-needed-to-prevent-megafires/
Yosemite Stanislaus Solutions (YSS) is a collaborative
formed in 2010 to increase the pace
and scale of restoration to prevent large wildfires in the Stanislaus National Forest.
The collaborative was in its early stages of de
velopment in 2013 when the Rim Fire devastated
the region and shifted the focus ofYSS from a
preventative approach to a reactive one.
Since then the group has implemented several habitat restoration projects with the help of a large volunteer base and has raised $4.5 million for habitat restoration.
The YSS collaborative model is an approach that can be replicated in other forested areas.
See full article at: Forestland Steward 18-7
Tuolumne County is already seeing progress from a much-hyped “master stewardship agreement” with the U.S. Forest Service that elected officials approved in late December to boost the pace and scale of tree-thinning projects in the Stanislaus National Forest.
The county Board of Supervisors on Tuesday unanimously approved the first project through the agreement that aims to remove 5 million board feet of commercial timber and 50,000 tons of biomass across nearly 1,000 acres of the forest.
To put the numbers in perspective, the amount of biomass proposed to be removed is roughly equivalent to the average weight of a U.S. Navy battleship. Five million board feet of timber would produce enough lumber to build about 310 homes.
Mike Albrecht, a logger and co-owner of Sierra Resource Management Inc. near Jamestown, said the amount of timber is also roughly 10 percent of the average amount sold in the forest each year.
“This is not replacing the Forest Service’s annual timber program,” he said. “This is additional.”
Albrecht also said the 50,000 tons of biomass is about one-third of the amount needed to power the Ultrapower Chinese Station biomass-energy plant in Chinese Camp for a whole year. He called the project and overarching agreement “really important” for the future of the plant.
The project will be structured in the form of a commercial timber sale, with all of the profits going back into the agreement for future projects.
Timber-industry giant Sierra Pacific Industries, which operates mills in Standard and Chinese Camp, is one of the 24 partners that’s participating in the agreement and will donate its biologists to conduct the required wildlife and vegetation surveys prior to the sale.
The Forest Service will also chip in $160,000 for the project.
Albrecht said the project and others through the agreement will help keep the local timber industry strong and create jobs, as well as prevent wildfires and improve watershed health by reducing tree overcrowding in the forest.
“A lot of this is being done just because we believe in it,” he said. “We need to thin these forests rapidly to prevent fires and improve water yields.”
Tuolumne River Trust, a nonprofit river advocacy organization with offices in Sonora, Modesto and San Francisco, was approved by the board on Tuesday to manage the projects under the agreement.
The trust is one of the 24 partners along with SPI that collectively comprise the multidisciplinary collaborative group called the Yosemite Stanislaus Solutions, which was formed in 2010 but rose to greater prominence after the 2013 Rim Fire.
Partners in the group represent a broad range of interests, including county government, environmental organizations, logging companies, mining companies, industry associations, tribal representatives and more.
Under the agreement, the Forest Service will cover 80 percent of project costs and partners will pay for the remaining 20 percent through grant funding, in-kind contributions, or other potential sources.
District 1 Supervisor Sherri Brennan remarked at how the agreement is an example of what’s possible by finding common ground and working together.
“So much of the success is because of the partnerships that are formed,” Brennan said. “This is going to pay huge dividends in our county for safety, forest health and economic development.”
The board has been working on the agreement for the better part of seven years.
Such agreements, which were first authorized by Congress in 2003, allow the Forest Service and a partner to identify high-priority projects and let the partner carry out the projects over the course of 10 years.
District 2 Supervisor Randy Hanvelt said he believes the agreement with the county represents a “cultural change in the U.S. Forest Service.” He also gave credit to Stanislaus National Forest Supervisor Jason Kuiken, who was hired in October, credit for helping to foster the change.
“This is such a huge step forward,” Hanvelt said. “We’re going to improve safety, improve our watershed, improve our environment. Everything is going to be a winner in this.”
Hanvelt also said the new $1.3 trillion federal omnibus spending bill passed Congress and signed into law by President Donald Trump in March allows for the agreement to be extended an additional 10 years.
District 3 Supervisor Evan Royce said he was at first skeptical when Hanvelt brought up the idea of the agreement seven years ago, but he now believes that it “truly is a fundamental change in the way things are done.”
“To see incentives aligned between industry and environmental communities is really I think the core root of the success of this,” he said. “You’re giving people reasons to work together.”
The board also approved county staff to submit an application for a $14.7 million grant through Cal Fire to fund multiple projects under the agreement that would remove an additional 125,000 tons of biomass across 12,550 acres of the forest.
Funding for the grant comes from the state’s greenhouse gas reduction fund that’s comprised of cap-and-trade revenues and intended for projects to restore forest health, protect watersheds, promote long-term storage of carbon in the forest, and minimize the loss of carbon from large wildfires.
If the county receives the grant, the deadline for the work to be accomplished is March 30, 2022.
Many of our FF forests have failed to receive the very
management that could increase resilience to disturbances
exacerbated by climate change, such as the application
of prescribed fire and mechanical restoration treatments
(Stephens et al. 2016). Recent tree mortality raises serious
questions about our willingness to address the underlying
causes. If our society doesn’t like the outcomes from recent
fires and extensive drought-induced tree mortality in FF
forests, then we collectively need to move beyond the status
quo. Working to increase the pace and scale of beneficial fire
and mechanical treatments rather than focusing on continued
fire suppression would be an important step forward.
California is grappling with the counterintuitive dilemma of too many trees, packed too closely together, robbed of the space they need to thrive—and with how to clear out more than 100 million dead trees, felled by drought or insects, that provide tinder for the next infernos. At stake is nothing less than life, property, air quality and the lands that hold most of California’s water. A state commission recently prescribed radical changes to address what it terms the “neglect” of California’s largest forests. Read more: https://www.newsreview.com/chico/environmental-catastrophe/content?oid=26106279
California’s headwater forests are not thriving under current management practices, and changes are needed to make them more resilient to periodic drought and long-term climate change. Read the report by the Public Policy Institute of California: http://www.ppic.org/publication/improving-the-health-of-californias-headwater-forests/?utm_source=ppic&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=epub
Read the Forest Service report that includes results, application, principles, and challenges from over 25 years of study. There are nineteen principles and 10 conclusions resulting from this research program, but more work in the form of 11 challenges is recommended.
https://www.fs.fed.us/psw/publications/documents/psw_gtr231/
Read the article from the SF Chronicle: SF Chronicle Wildfires and Greenhouse Gas 17-11
To read the study co-authored by Dr. Eric Knapp, please use the following link: Knapp_etal_2017_FEM_VariableDensityThinning&RxFire (1) 2017
The findings of a scientific study reviewing the 2013 Rim Fire, conducted by a team from Penn State University, highlight the benefits of controlled burning. Read the article: https://www.mymotherlode.com/news/local/338012/study-finds-earlier-controlled-burning-limited-severity-of-rim-fire.html
Read the full study at: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ecs2.2019/full
Chris Trott, chairman of YSS and managing partner of CT Bioenergy Consultation in Twain Harte, said the agreement will reduce reliance on the Forest Service’s limited budget that’s increasingly being diverted to fighting massive wildfires. Read the full article in the Union Democrat by using the “Read More” button for the live link.
http://www.uniondemocrat.com/localnews/5871122-151/deal-aims-to-restore-forests-support-jobs
An aggressive prescribed burning program is needed to manage the massive number of trees killed during the California drought. U.C. Berkeley fire scientist Scott Stephens says there’s limited time to tackle the problem.
| WRITTEN BYMatt Weiser | PUBLISHED ON | READ TIMEApprox. 7 minutes |
One of the biggest lasting problems from the state’s five-year drought is a vast quantity of dead trees. In November the U.S. Forest Service, based on aerial surveys, estimated the drought killed more than 102 million trees on national forests in California, with the greatest concentration in the southern Sierra Nevada. New surveys set to begin in June may raise that number even higher.
The dead trees represent a massive fire risk that could harm nearby communities, habitat, water quality and air quality. Scott Stephens, a U.C. Berkeley professor and an expert on fire ecology, says the only realistic solution is to begin a massive program of controlled burning. This means using intentional practices to restore a natural fire regime to the forests.
California forests evolved to cope with fire. Regular lightning-caused fires created forests that were much more open than they are today. For 100 years our management of forests was misguided: We saw fire as a bad thing, and suppressed every fire. This resulted in forests that grew too thick with small trees, creating a fire risk today that is potentially catastrophic.
We have about five years, Stephens says, to start chipping away at this fire threat before it becomes unmanageable.
With most of the dead standing trees, there is no plan for removal. That means in about 10 to 15 years, probably 80 percent of them will be on the ground. That’s when, from a fire perspective, at least in areas of high mortality where 25 to 50 percent of the trees have died, having that much biomass on the ground available to burn … that worries me more even than what happens in the next couple years. Since they’ll be dry, they’ll be available to burn in the next wildfire.
Stephens: This is something the Forest Service has been thinking about. If you’re not going to remove these trees mechanically – because you don’t have enough sawmill capacity or roads – one thing you can do when the trees go into the “red phase” is begin new burning to remove some of that fine fuel that’s just accumulated. The red phase is when all the needles and the smallest branches have fallen on the ground and the tree itself is still standing there. So you begin to work by going in there and burning out the understory fuels.
And then as more and bigger material starts coming down from all those dead trees, in 10 years or 15 years, you do it again. You’re taking out the accumulated fuel in layers. Just don’t wait for the whole thing to come down and sit there until the next wildfire comes along and you have a disaster on your hands.
Stephens: No, we haven’t done it. It’s a challenge. We don’t have a lot of experience with it.
Down in the San Bernardino and San Jacinto mountains, they had a similar mortality event from 1999 to 2002. It looked a lot like what’s happening in the Southern Sierra today. It was a big deal. They did a lot of work down there, spent tens of millions and most of the material was taken down and chipped in place. Some logs were shipped by rail to Northern California to make into wood products.
But I’ve heard of nothing like that going on in the Southern Sierra. So, I think it’s likely the trees will go into natural succession and just fall on the ground. If that’s the case, you have to look at those issues of hazard trees and wildfire potential. A lot of these areas are unroaded and have steep slopes. So the only thing you can use to manage the risk is fire, in some capacity.
Stephens: There’s no doubt funding would be needed to do this, and the work is not going to generate money. I know there’s been some requests by the Forest Service in California for additional funding from USDA to do this type of work. But I don’t know of any outcomes of those requests.
There’s another thing that’s really challenging about doing this at the scale we’re talking about. This is a lot of standing dead material, which is very dangerous. A forester will tell you one of most dangerous things they can do is enter a forest with lots of standing dead trees. More firefighters are killed by falling trees than anything.
Water Deeply: You co-authored a study that found prescribed fire actually increases moisture in forests and helps trees survive drought. How does that work?
Stephens: That study focused on a place in Yosemite National Park, about a 45,000-acre [18,210-hectare] area called the Illilouette Creek Basin. Beginning in 1972, the National Park Service began to allow lighting fires to burn there. They allowed maybe 80 percent of the fires to burn without suppression, so fire’s been back in there for 45 years or so. And it really has changed it.
If you go in there today, there’s a lot of forest that is relatively thin, low-density – big trees with lots of space. The Hoover Fire burned in there about 2001, and it burned an area we visited a bunch of times. I remember just being there, walking in that system, and it was a lodgepole pine forest, a pretty place. And after the fire we were walking in 6 inches of water. A wetland got formed. And it was even there last year, after four years of drought. And I thought, this forest has got to be changing.
In the study, we found the amount of water leaving that basin is either unchanged or has increased over time, and the areas around that basin that never had fire going back 45 years, they’ve decreased in moisture. We also know from the paper that the resilience – the ability of that forest to survive drought and insects – is much, much greater. So the tree mortality is much, much lower.
Stephens: I think so, yes. We’ve done some statistical analysis based on tree-ring records. The pattern of fire that’s come back to the Illilouette Basin since 1972, compared to the late 1800s – amazingly the regime is almost identical. They did go through 100 years of fire suppression – the Park service was just as good as the Forest Service at putting out fires. So the pattern we see today, the reoccurrence of lighting fire, really was able to sculpt that forest.
Stephens: I think you’re right. No doubt the drought was pretty intense. But I think it’s fundamentally a result of the forest structure we have right now. We’re seeing mostly in California a manifestation of unsustainable forest conditions. Not everybody would agree with that. In a condition the forests were probably in 200 years ago – with lower density, larger trees – you get a drought like that and a fire on it and you’re still going to maintain the vast majority of the trees. And today we’re not.
Stephens: I do think a lot more people today are at a place where they understand there’s a problem. I think there has been some tide change in terms of people becoming more accustomed to a little bit of burning in the forest.
But if you just talk about the inevitability of what’s going to happen in the future – if we don’t do anything we’re going to have so much more severe fires, more smoke, potential damage to the urban interface and homes. To me there isn’t a no-fire option. You have to maintain the forests as best you can. But it’s not going to be simple. You start small with maybe 10,000 acres [4,050 hectares] of prescribed fire, and maybe in year three you’re burning 400,000 acres [161,875 hectares]. You ramp it up and show people what you can accomplish. I worry much more about the standard fare of just watching what happens if we do nothing. I just can’t support that.
“I think the highlights were the collaborative work that has gone on with multiple groups including YSS, Yosemite Stanislaus Solutions…”
Jeanne Higgins, the top administrator in charge of the Stanislaus National Forest that covers 42 percent of Tuolumne County and 11 percent of Calaveras County, is moving on from her role as forest supervisor.
Higgins, who has been on temporary assignment at Forest Service headquarters in Washington, D.C., since November, said in an email this week to contacts in Tuolumne County that her temporary assignment will end in a few months, but she will not return to the Stanislaus National Forest.
“I was asked to stay a few more months,” Higgins said Friday in a phone interview, speaking from the nation’s capital. “In the meantime, my husband, Bruce Higgins, he got a promotion to our Washington office and I am planning to follow him and support him. I will not be coming back to the Stanislaus at the beginning of next month as I had expected.”
Bruce Higgins has been employed the past 12 years in a Forest Service enterprise program that allowed him to work remotely from wherever Jeanne Higgins was assigned. In Washington, D.C., Bruce Higgins will be working as a National Environmental Policy Act specialist with the Forest Service, Jeanne Higgins said.
Scott Tangenberg, the acting supervisor for Stanislaus National Forest in Higgins’ absence, will now take over as her interim replacement.
“Scott will remain for short term as acting forest supervisor,” Higgins said Friday.
There is a federal government-wide hiring freeze the past few months as the Trump White House continues its transition, and that freeze is expected to remain in place until at least the end of April, Higgins said.
A Jan. 22 hiring freeze memorandum to heads of executive departments and agencies quotes President Trump stating “the Director of the Office of Personnel Management may grant exemptions from this freeze where those exemptions are otherwise necessary.”
Higgins said she expects the Department of Agriculture and the Forest Service will eventually “outreach to recruit and fill the position” she’s occupied since September 2014.
Arriving in the hotseat
She came to the Stanislaus National Forest in the wake of the devastating Rim Fire, the largest blaze in a century of Sierra Nevada records. Between August and October 2013 it burned an estimated 257,314 acres, including more than 150,000 acres in the Stanislaus National Forest.
Higgins has also seen drought stress and native beetle infestation clamp down and lead to pervasive tree mortality in the central and southern Sierra, including the Stanislaus National Forest. Scientists estimate more than 102 million trees have been killed in the Sierra Nevada since 2010, with 62 million trees killed in 2016 alone.
On Friday, Randy Hanvelt, Tuolumne County’s District 2 supervisor, remembered Higgins as a consensus builder who took time to get to know various groups and individuals, especially people in multi-stakeholder groups that included ranchers, timber interests, conservationists and environmentalists.
“Jeanne changed the game here,” Hanvelt said Friday. “She engaged all the stakeholders. She brought trust to the give-and-take in the wake of the Rim Fire. She always made time to share information. She is going to be sorely missed because she was always a partner.”
When Higgins began working with locals on challenges in the Stanislaus National Forest, she emphasized she believes watershed management is key to future forest health and recovery. Tangenberg said Friday he will strive to continue pursuing what’s best for the forest and the public.
“We’re sad to see Jeanne go, particularly for the excellent leadership she provided for the forest,” Tangenberg said. “We are very pleased with the direction she has placed us on and the great relationships we feel she’s built with the community. I certainly intend to fully maintain those relationships and keep the forest moving in the right direction.”
Higgins said it was a hard decision to remain in D.C. and not return to the Stanislaus National Forest.
“I’m going to miss working with the community,” Higgins said Friday. “I think the highlights were the collaborative work that has gone on with multiple groups including YSS, Yosemite Stanislaus Solutions, the Amador Calaveras Consensus Group, the partnerships with TuCARE, CSERC, the Tuolumne River Trust, the county-led tree mortality effort, water infrastructure and watershed restoration work and other informal collaborative groups and efforts.
“I’m hopeful the next supervisor who follows will continue that collaborative work, and I know Scott will in the short term, so I’m hopeful for the future.”
By Guy McCarthy, The Union Democrat, @GuyMcCarthy
The following is a link to some of the video from the tree mortality field trip. https://youtu.be/xwfOX2o_zxE
Sonora, CA — Two tour buses full of folks with eyes, ears and minds on the Mother Lode’s tree mortality disaster devoted a day, sharing and learning how to make the forests more resilient to rising bug kills and calamitous wildfire threats.
Themed “Tree Mortality: There Is Hope for the Future,” the recent tour made pit stops near Mi-Wuk Village and Pinecrest, where a roster of experts frankly spoke about the enormity of the growing catastrophe and how various agencies are collaborating to cope with it while working to establish new best practices.
Officials from Tuolumne County, the US Forest Service and CAL Fire as well as the volunteer-led Yosemite Foothills Fire Safe Council were among the participants who spoke; along with managers from Sierra Pacific Industries and PG&E. It was sponsored by the Tuolumne County Alliance for Resources and Environment (TuCARE) and Yosemite-Stanislaus Solutions (YSS).
Tuolumne County’s tree mortality task force, aligned with the state-level task force, is one of the leading counties responding to the tree mortality emergency. Its response plan taps state funds and integrates efforts and resources with CAL Fire, PG&E and other utilities such as Tuolumne Utilities District (TUD). Although funding to help private landowners remains a major issue, efforts are in place and a few large-scale tree removals underway in the county, as reported here.
Big Ideas and Cranes At Work
At the initial stop, tour-goers were treated to a demonstration by a PG&E contractor impressively using a master tree climbing crew and a monster crane to mechanically take down dead big trees in a Mi-Wuk Village neighborhood. (To view video of the crew and crane with commentary, click here.) A new program to help low-income and disabled landowners remove hazard trees around their homes was also discussed. (Details and links of this program, called TMAP, are available by clicking here).
Addressing the tour at Mi-wok Ranger District headquarters, Stanislaus National Forest Supervisor Jeanne Higgins did not pull any punches about how complex managing just shy of 900,000 drought-weakened bark beetle-infested forest acres has become with warming temperatures and increased fire risk. “Large wildfires present huge challenges in terms of response and recovery actions..but this situation that we are facing here in the Sierras is unprecedented…and presents a problem that we cannot solve with our traditional approach.”
Back in June, the US Forest Service reported that an additional 26 million trees have died in California since October 2015 — all in a six-county spread across 760,000 acres in the southern Sierra Nevada region. Adding that to the 40 million trees that died statewide from 2010 to October 2015 brings the estimated dead-tree total to historic die-off numbers that now probably exceed 66 million. Higgins further estimated a current mortality rate of 90 to 95 percent in the pine belt on the south side of the Stanislaus. She said, that since shifting the focus of her department’s work away from Rim Fire recovery to the daunting task of dealing with dead trees, “We have been cutting trees every day since then — close to 30,000 trees on the national forest in the last year.”
Complex Issues, Collaborative Solutions
Setting a tone that continued to echo through the comments of every other speaker for the rest of the day, Higgins stated, “It takes a community to actually respond to this and we need to bring our best thinking to this…everybody is scratching their heads. We need to come up with strategies and tactics that are going to be far different from what we have employed in the past…and also incorporate the use of prescribed fire.” She added that past fire prescriptions, which did not include dealing with drought conditions, are being retooled to address complex challenges both on the ground and with managing risk.
Along for the tour, Jodi Axelson, an entomologist recently hired as a Cooperative Extension specialist at UC-Berkeley, piped up that her department will be developing an extension program to address the infestation issue.
Sharing expertise on dealing with outrageous bark beetle breakouts in British Columbia, she said insecticide injections and anti-aggregation pheromones are more effective in protecting individual trees. For stands with low numbers of beetles just starting to increase in population, Axelson advised, “You can make a dent by cutting down the trees that are still green…when they are full of beetles, even if the crown is green, they are dead — they just don’t know it yet.” She further recommended that an active sanitation program, to remove these trees — along with the visibly dead ones — especially while the beetles are wintering in them, prevents those populations from reemerging in spring. (Click here for more details from her talk.)
While speaking for CAL Fire, Tuolumne-Calaveras Unit Forester Adam Frese highlighted advice and recently streamlined regulations that enable landowners to remove trees on their properties by filling out a one-page form and site map, (detailed here). He called it a credit to the foresters, loggers and local timber industry facilities that there have been very few issues after over a thousand such permitted-projects have been enacted through his unit office. Along with helping remove debris from tree-felling projects Frese said that CAL Fire remains busy doing outreach and inspections to ensure that residents are doing their part to maintain defensible space around their homes. He also credited area fire safe councils for their collaborative efforts in helping fund and execute fuel break projects in fire-sensitive areas such as the one that helped contain the Oak Fire near Sonora last summer, asreported here.
Taking Lessons From History
Onsite at the USFS experimental forest in Pinecrest, ecologist Eric Knapp stood in a clearing on a formerly fire-suppressed forest plot where scientifically determined, variable thinning to a much lower tree percentage, along with debris removal was subsequently followed up with prescribed fire. The result was the creation of a demonstration forest area that was more resilient to drought, wildfire and bug kill. He stressed that fewer trees, more site management and returning fire to its historical role were all key tools that needed to be used together.
Colleague Malcolm North, chiming in, stated experiments across western forests are showing that maintaining spatially variable tree patterns in restored forests are more in line with how they naturally developed; they are also conducive to providing habitat for sensitive species like the spotted owl. USFS silviculturalist Ramiro Rojas dryly opined, after sharing a dire report of nearly complete pine devastation due to tree mortality in the Sierra National Forest where he works, that such strategies should be enacted while there are still trees.
Tuolumne County Supervisor Randy Hanvelt offered his takeaway from the experimental forest that the tree mortality crisis came from forest managers simply not doing enough for too long.
Said Hanvelt: “The trees are healthier here [in the demonstration area] so they are withstanding this bark beetle better than our standard forests, which are the overgrown forests. So it is just a clear answer to me that we really to be need to be doing is upping the pace and scale of everything that we are doing in the forest to thin it, make it look more like it did 100 years ago, and somehow introduce fire back in a judicious fashion…and do mechanical removals where there is a place. The bark beetle kill is a result of not doing enough.”
For speaker highlights from CAL Fire/Frese and USFS/Knapp, along with Hanvelt commentary, click here. To view tour images, click the slideshow link in the upper left image box.
The tour was followed up last Friday by a summit at the Mother Lode Fairgrounds, featuring some of the same speakers. Mother Lode lawmakers Congressman Tom McClintock and Assembly Frank Bigelow were also featured guests, as reported here.
