YSS in the Press and Stories of Interest

By Alex MacLean, The Union Democrat

Published Oct 7, 2016 at 10:23PM

A century’s worth of total fire suppression that has created unnatural tree density in California forests compounded by increasing global temperatures and prolonged drought periods will lead to big changes for the Sierra Nevada landscape in the coming decades.

Despite current efforts to manage the latest bark beetle outbreak killing millions of trees throughout the state, experts say the beloved pines of the Sierra Nevada may be dominated more by oaks, cedars and other types of trees that are better adapted to survive a drier, warmer climate.

“I know that we’re all attached to the way things look around us, but we need to be prepared for that to change,” said Tom Hofstra, a forestry and natural resources instructor at Columbia College. “There’s really not that much we can do about it at this point.”

Hofstra moderated a panel discussion on the topic Thursday night in the Sonora High School auditorium hosted by the Columbia College Foundation. A summit hosted Friday morning by the Tuolumne County Alliance for Resources and Environment, or TuCARE, also focused on the fallout from the tree mortality epidemic.

Eric Knapp, a research ecologist for the U.S. Forest Service, gave the keynote address at Thursday night’s event. He has conducted research on forest management at the Stanislaus-Tuolumne Experimental Forest that encompasses 1,700 acres near Pinecrest.

Knapp talked about his research in the experimental forest that suggested fire suppression has had a greater influence on forest overcrowding than a lack of logging. He studied three plots that were left untouched since 1929, with some having been previously logged and others not.

The plots in 2008 were two-and-a-half times more dense than they were in 1929, with the density being nearly identical for both historically logged and unlogged plots. Knapp said past logging practices removed more of the larger trees from the plots, making them less diverse and resilient to fires, disease and pestilence.

“It’s kind of remarkable we’ve been able to maintain this density until now,” he said.

In the short-term, Knapp said tree mortality will lead to more biomass on the forest floor that needs to be removed to increase resiliency. He said the long-term goal should be to manage the forests for lower average densities and fuel loads by increasing the pace and scale of treatment through thinning, prescribed fires and managed wildfires.

Other speakers at Thursday’s event were Beverly Bulaon, a Forest Service entomologist, Terry Strange, a biological consultant specializing in wildlife and fisheries, and Lara McNicol, a Columbia College adjunct instructor whose family has owned Browne’s Meadow Ranch for 150 years.

Bulaon said that historic patterns of increased bark beetle activity in California forests closely follow drought periods. Water-stressed trees are more susceptible to infestation by the rice-sized beetles that are native to California.

Although aerial surveys conducted by the Forest Service in May estimated 66 million dead trees across the Sierra Nevada range, Bulaon said she expects that number to increase when results from new surveys are released in the coming weeks.

Other studies have found as many as 888 million trees throughout the state that show signs of measurable water loss in their canopies.

“From a lot of the literature that’s coming out, the drought that we’re having right now is really unprecedented in how little precipitation we’ve been getting,” Bulaon said. “It’s just something the bark beetles are responding to.”

McNicol, who teaches forestry and natural resources at Columbia College, spoke from a personal perspective about the changes she’s witnessed occurring on her family’s land since she was a child and management practices they have employed.

Over the past 10 years, McNicol said the amount of snowfall the property receives each year has declined significantly. Fire suppression over the past five generations has also led to conifers encroaching on the meadows.

McNicol said observations by county residents about the changes are just as valuable as research and studies.

“This is all very important stuff to chronicle,” she said. “We are a part of history. The Sierra Nevada is changing, and we get to be here for that.”

The 15th annual Natural Resources Summit hosted by TuCARE in the Sierra building at the Mother Lode Fairgrounds took a slightly different approach to the topic, focusing more on the effects of the tree mortality crisis and responses by lawmakers, public entities and private interests.

TuCARE is a nonprofit organization based in Sonora that advocates for timber, mining and agricultural interests, conservation and multiple-use policies for natural resources on public lands.

Stanislaus National Forest Supervisor Jeanne Higgins said the Stanislaus, Sequoia National Forest and Sierra National Forest are three in the state most impacted by the current situation. Aerial surveys have consistently found more and more dead trees over the past three years, from 3.2 million in 2014, to 29 million in 2015, to the current estimate of 66 million.

The Forest Service has felled over 166,000 dead trees across 18,000 acres to date, with 48,000 more acres targeted for work. She said more than 40,000 trees were felled in the Stanislaus National Forest over the past year alone.

Higgins said the current ecological disaster could be viewed as an opportunity to try different strategies.

“Our normal response has been to take the things that have worked well for us in the past and apply it to a problem,” she said. “This problem is not the same as anything we’ve dealt with in the past, so we need find different ways to approach this into the future.”

Rick Carr, regional resource manager for Cal Fire’s southern region, said warmer winters are also contributing to the beetle problem. He said the warmer cycles have lengthened the reproductive cycle of the beetle, allowing them to reproduce up to four times per year instead of two.

Carr displayed a graph showing how mean global temperatures are two degrees higher now than in 1895. The increasing temperatures have also led to fire seasons in California being up to 78 days longer than they were three to four decades ago.

“While only two degrees may not appear significant on any given day, a warming trend has far-reaching consequences to weather patterns, species diversity and resiliency,” he said.

Carr commended the county for being a leader around the state in getting resources on the ground to address public safety concerns from tree mortality. He said the agency is encouraging other counties to model programs based off what Tuolumne has done.

In closing, Carr showed a picture of Lake Arrowhead in San Bernardino County during the midst of a bark beetle epidemic in 2003. Many brown, dead pines surrounded power lines and home along the road.

Carr showed another picture taken this year of the same area and only one pine is still visible, with other types of trees now dominating the landscape.

“The forest is changing,” he said. “It’s not going to be the full, pine-dominated forest, but there will be a forest there.”

The summit also featured speeches from Congressman Tom McClintock, R-Roseville, Assemblyman Frank Bigelow, R-O’Neals, and a panel discussion featuring representatives of Sierra Pacific Industries, the California Biomass Alliance, California Forestry Association and Sierra Nevada Conservancy.

15278638

JOHN HOLLAND jholland@modbee.com

I ambled with a tour group last week across a slope near Pinecrest that had grown thick with trees.

Researchers with the U.S. Forest Service talked about how best to thin these woods so they resist wildfire. The work also could provide logs for sawmills while enhancing wildlife habitat and a watershed that supplies Modesto and other locales.

Forest managers have done thinning for decades, leaving trees more or less evenly spaced across many acres. The project described last week creates much more variety, in patches as small as a quarter-acre. Some are open ground. Some are well-spaced trees. Some are left as thickets for the benefit of wildlife that prefers such habitat.

The researchers said the woods looked like this for millennia because of frequent, gentle fires resulting from lightning or Native American land management. Then came the 20th century and the policy of putting out every fire as soon as possible. The result was a fuel buildup that brought on infernos like the Rim Fire of 2013.

I touched on this research in a story Wednesday that mainly was about bark beetles killing millions of drought-stressed trees. I’m expanding on it in this week’s Farm Beat column because of the connection between Sierra Nevada forests and farming in the Valley below.

Forest thinning could increase runoff by 9 to 16 percent, according to research cited by Steve Brink, vice president for public resources at the California Forestry Association. Less water is taken up by the tree roots, he said, and more makes its way to streams and aquifers.

“Snow-catch is also a big deal,” Brink said, referring to white stuff that can evaporate from the upper limbs. “We want the snow to be on the ground and not in the canopy of the trees.”

The research took place on 27 acres at the Stanislaus-Tuolumne Experimental Forest, used since the 1920s to study logging methods and related topics. Because of fire exclusion, the site went from an average of 127 trees per acre in 1927 to 299 in 2007, ecologist Eric Knapp said.

The project involved intentional burning of some patches when conditions were right, along with logging that produced enough timber to build about 600 typical houses. The Stanislaus National Forest carried out the work with Sierra Resource Management, a company based in Jamestown.

Some of that lumber could supply homebuilders in and near Stanislaus County who are finally coming out of their nearly decade-long slump. And having a more fire-resistant forest could please flatland folks who don’t care to see massive fire scars while visiting Pinecrest Lake or the Dodge Ridge ski area.

The tour included members of Yosemite-Stanislaus Solutions, a coalition of environmentalists, timber industry people and others concerned about the national forest and adjacent national park.

Some of the green groups not in the coalition remain skeptical of forest thinning. I spoke by phone this week with Chad Hanson, director of the John Muir Project at the Earth Island Institute, who said large fuel buildups and wildfires like the Rim Fire are part of the natural process.

“They weren’t all low-intensity and small,” he said. “They were also high-intensity and large.”

His group, based at Big Bear Lake in San Bernardino County, argues that many wildlife species benefit from the dead standing trees and downed logs left amid the surviving trees after a blaze. National forest timber sales might require that some of these features be left, but Hanson said it is not enough.

The debate will go on, and I will be happy to travel again to cover it in Tuolumne County, where I used to live and work. It has long been part of The Bee’s coverage area, because so many flatlanders visit there and rely on its water and other resources.

John Holland: 209-578-2385

Filmmakers Stephen Most and Kevin White have produced a trailer for their film, Wilder than Wild.  You can view it at: “https://player.vimeo.com/video/184561279”

By Alex MacLean / The Union Democrat

Published Aug 18, 2016 at 06:46PM

Three years to the day after the start of the 2013 Rim Fire that charred more than 400 square miles of the Central Sierra Nevada, the U.S. Forest Service officially signed off on a plan to reforest about 10 percent of the burned area.

Stanislaus National Forest Supervisor Jeanne Higgins signed the record of decision Wednesday afternoon that will allow reforestation work to begin over the next year, the service announced in a press release.

“I am pleased to announce that my decision, based on community input and referred to as the ‘Community Alternative,’ will help create a fire resilient mixed conifer forest that contributes to an ecologically healthy and resilient landscape rich in biodiversity,” Higgins said in a written statement.

The devastating blaze that also destroyed 11 homes was first reported about 3:25 p.m. Aug. 17, 2013, as a small wildfire burning on the south canyon wall of the Clavey River, about five miles west of Lumsden bridge.

Over the next several weeks, the fire became the third-largest in California’s recorded history after burning through 257,000 acres. About 154,000 acres were Forest Service lands.

Maria Benech of the Forest Service, team leader for the Rim Fire reforestation project, said the overall plan covers a total of about 48,000 acres of the burned area.

About 25,000 acres are planned for reforestation, 13,000 acres for thinning of existing plantations that survived the blazed, 5,700 acres for noxious weed eradication, and 3,800 acres for deer habitat enhancement, she said.

The press release and Benech both commended the involvement of Yosemite Stanislaus Solutions, a collaborative group that includes loggers, environmentalists and business interests.

Benech said members of YSS participated in all of the workshops and meetings held by the service while developing the plan, providing valuable input that helped create a stronger plan. The group previously helped the Forest Service with a salvage logging plan that was challenged in court by out-of-county environmentalists.

“When we went to court, the judges ruled in our favor because they knew we had a lot of community involvement and support,” she said of how YSS has helped the service through the post-fire recovery process.

John Buckley, one of the leaders of YSS and executive director of the Central Sierra Environmental Resource Center in Twain Harte, said he and others from his center have spent countless hours over the past several years scouring the Rim Fire area to gain a better understanding of the damage than even the Forest Service itself.

One of the recent observations Buckley has come across over the past year is that many of the trees that survived the initial fire are now dying or dead due to drought and bark beetles, leaving even less hope for those areas to naturally regenerate.

About 35 percent of the Rim Fire area, or more than 90,000 acres, burned at such a high severity that little to nothing survived. Some scientists called the destruction unprecedented at the time, because most large wildfires in the past typically saw 5 to 8 percent of the area burned at high severity.

Buckley said he and the center strongly supported the reforestation plan in order to restore the forest to as close to its previous condition as possible.

“Without reforestation, many of the hot burn areas will simply never be forest in our lifetime,” he said. “They’ll simply be converted into brush fields, weeds, non-native grasses and other plants, rather than being the forests that are so important for water values, tourist values and wildlife.”

One frustration for Buckley and others is the length of time it took to get to this point. Another is the fact that only about 1,100 acres will be reforested over the next year due to prep work and other requirements before planting can begin.

However, Buckley said members of the YSS team are still pleased to see something getting started.

“Our center and the local interests in YSS, which include the timber industry, business interests and others, have all been wanting the Forest Service to get this going,” he said. “We’re grateful and we’re applauding.”

Contact Alex MacLean at amaclean@uniondemocrat.com or (209) 588-4530.

BY JOHN HOLLAND/jholland@modbee.com

The Stanislaus National Forest gave final approval to a plan for replanting part of the Rim Fire acreage.

Forest Supervisor Jeanne Higgins signed off Wednesday on the plan, which calls for planting conifers on 21,279 acres. It is little changed from a proposal she released for public review in May.

The plan involves just 8 percent of the 257,314 acres affected by the 2013 fire, the largest in the Sierra Nevada’s recorded history. Much of the acreage is in Yosemite National Park, which leaves recovery to natural processes. Some is on private timberland, which already is being reforested. The national forest has areas that it will not plant because it is brushland, has poor access or did not burn severely.

The plan has support from Yosemite Stanislaus Solutions, a coalition that includes environmentalists, the timber industry and other business leaders in Tuolumne County. They agreed that it strikes a balance between bringing badly charred areas back to life while protecting soil, wildlife and other resources.

21,279 Acres to be replanted in Stanislaus National Forest portion of Rim Fire

4,031 Acres that will recover naturally as trees drop cones

12,756 Acres of older plantations to be thinned of wildfire fuels

“This effort would not have been possible without the engagement of the community,” Higgins said in a letter to the public. “I commend the collaborative efforts of YSS and others to make this outcome possible.”

The approval came on the third anniversary of the fire’s start near the confluence of the Tuolumne and Clavey rivers. Keith Matthew Emerald of Columbia was accused of building an illegal campfire that caused the blaze. Federal prosecutors dropped the charges after two key witnesses died.

The planting will start in February or March and take three to five years, said Maria Benech, reforestation team leader. Professional crews will do the vast majority of the work, but the forest will set aside some spots for volunteers, she said.

Under the plan, 4,031 acres of less severely burned conifers will be left to reseed naturally through cone drop. Crews will thin another 12,756 acres of older plantations within the burn to help them resist future fires. And 3,833 acres will be managed mainly for oak for the benefit of deer.

John Holland: 209-578-2385

Posted on July 8, 2016 by TheBiomassMonitor

– by John Buckley, Executive Director, Central Sierra Environmental Resource Center

Over 13 years as a firefighter with the U.S. Forest Service, I worked primarily on hotshot fire crews. During those years I fought a number of the largest wildfires ever documented in California as well as many other wildfires elsewhere across the West.

For years I taught wildland fire behavior classes, helped ignite and manage prescribed burn projects, and spent entire summer/fall seasons (between wildfires) doing post-fire restoration work in recently burned areas.

From that experience, I can emphasize that fuel loading, fuel arrangement, continuity of fuel, and fuel moisture combine with fire weather, topography, time of day, and other factors to determine fire intensity. Put simply, the more dry fuel that is packed on moderate to steep hillsides on a hot summer afternoon when there are up-slope or up-canyon winds, the higher the likelihood that a wildfire will make major runs that kill a large percentage of trees that might survive a lower intensity fire.

Strategically planned biomass removal projects can reduce that build-up of excessive fuel.

Various groups over recent years have passionately attacked the removal of forest biomass and the burning of biomass chips at power plants with strident claims that carbon emissions are significant and that even low amounts of air pollution should not allow biomass plants to qualify as green energy. Such claims completely miss some important facts.

First, in national forests across the Sierra Nevada and elsewhere, tree density and the basal area of conifers far exceed the documented plot data that was taken a century or more ago in the Stanislaus Forest and other sample sites. Due to the accumulation of surface fuels, decades of fire suppression, and the selective removal of the biggest conifers, national forests have unnaturally high tree stocking and completely unnatural fuel loads. Small shade tolerant trees such as incense cedars and white firs now choke stands that were historically open with sun-loving pines and oaks. Fuel levels are extreme, which often leads to extreme wildfire impacts on the forest environment.

Unless science-based selective thinning treatments open up some portions of dense forest thickets, little sunlight can penetrate to the forest floor to benefit groundcovers, wildflowers, grasses, and other plants so vital for healthy wildlife habitat. Without selective removal of dense thickets of small, understory trees, fuel ladders will continue to dominate underneath the over-story trees that are vital for wildlife as well as valuable as scenic forests for recreation. The need to treat surface fuels and ladder fuels is tremendous.

In many areas prescribed fires can effectively consume portions of the dense brush and small tree understory. But in countless other areas, biomass removal is either the only solution or the only economic solution to deal with ladder fuels.

One critically important point often ignored by biomass critics is that in Sierra Nevada national forests, large quantities of branches and tops of logged trees are either spread out or piled up after thinning or salvage logging treatments on public forest lands. Almost always, if biomass removal of that fuel is not done, those piles or jackpot slash areas are burned openly in the forest. The fuel either burns with emission reductions in a biomass power plant or it burns with no pollutant controls in open forest burning. Carbon is released either way.

For 25 years our environmental center has been a leading voice for protecting at risk wildlife species on public forest land. Completely consistent with that strong defense of vulnerable wildlife, our Center endorses increased levels of biomass removal to reduce fuel loading and give over-story trees a better chance to survive the next wildfire. In our local region, due to the Forest Service implementing only a low level of thinning logging, prescribed burning, and biomass removal projects over decades, the truly gigantic Rim Fire burned more than 97,000 acres at high severity. Just recently I drove and walked through areas where three years after that fire, literally no conifers survived over many square miles. A far greater program of prescribed burning and biomass removal could have significantly reduced the ladder fuels that literally cooked not only the over-story trees, but also the cones needed to re-start a recovering forest.

As climatic trends result in longer fire seasons, hotter temperatures, and accumulating fuels, forest managers can control only one factor – fuel. By expanding biomass removal of a portion of the small trees and brush that create ladder fuels, forest managers can shift the forest back towards more natural mosaic conditions, while simultaneously benefitting local economies.

John Buckley is executive director of Central Sierra Environmental Resource Center (cserc.org), a non-profit organization working to defend water, wildlife, and wild places across the Northern Yosemite Region of California.

When Gov. Jerry Brown appointed Michael Picker as president of the California Public Utilities Commission, Picker announced that his top priority would be protection of public safety. Last October, Brown declared an emergency for California’s forests, where tens of millions of dead trees pose enormous risks for wildfires, the water supply, local communities and more.

The emergency order calls on the PUC to accelerate the development of small bioenergy facilities to convert the dead trees to renewable energy. Despite the obvious threat to public safety and the huge costs of wildfire, the commission is dragging its feet. Read more:  PUC is too slow dealing with dead trees 16-7-28

BY NATHAN GRAVELINE, CHRIS TROTT AND JOHN BUCKLEY

Special to The Bee

Recently, The Modesto Bee ran an editorial acknowledging the enormity of the wildfire threat currently facing public and private lands across the West. (“Preventing forest fires is up to Congress,” July 7) In particular, The Bee accurately emphasized the urgent need for Congress to stop forcing the U.S. Forest Service to divert enormous amounts of the agency’s normal, budgeted funds to be spent fighting wildfires.

Those budgeted funds could actually reduce the potential damage and expense of future wildfires if they were spent on forest fuel reduction treatments such as thinning logging projects and prescribed burns.

In contrast to that positive and factual Bee editorial, a guest opinion piece by Chad Hanson in The Bee on July 6 ran under a headline claiming that the onslaught of bark-beetle-killed trees in the Sierra Nevada poses “no threat.”

Hanson misled readers by falsely claiming that millions of dead and dying trees in already fire-prone forests do not increase the wildfire threat. In reality, fire agencies and fire scientists are consistently describing the dead tree situation as an unnatural, extreme fire threat.

One key factor in the behavior of any wildfire is fuel moisture. Live, green trees – even in the hottest, driest time of summer – still contain moisture in their needles and branches that reduces fire intensity if the green trees are burned by a fire. In contrast, the tens of millions of trees that have already died from bark beetles add up to an unprecedented amount of bone-dry fuel. The highly flammable branches and tops of the dead pines, firs and cedars produce a perfect wick for flames to flare up into the crowns of adjacent dead and live trees. In addition, many of the dead trees that died during the last two years of the drought have dropped broken tops and branches that further add to the depth and the jumbled layers of flammable fuels on the forest floor.

In direct opposition to what Hanson’s editorial claimed, there is a significant threat to public and private forests of the Sierra Nevada due to the tens of millions of trees that have already died. There is no question that hot weather and windy conditions can create ideal conditions for high severity wildfires even when fuels are mostly green vegetation. But add in dead fuels to those same extreme conditions, and the basics of fire behavior will always result in an even higher degree of incineration and severity of a fire’s effects.

Hanson’s opinion piece reflected his long-standing opposition to any commercial logging on national forest lands. In contrast to that rigid view, the environmental organizations that serve as members of the Yosemite Stanislaus Solutions collaborative group strongly support more science-based thinning logging and salvage removal of a portion of trees killed by fire and insects.

With limited staff and resources, the U.S. Forest Service will only be capable of planning and implementing the removal of a small fraction of dead trees compared to the enormity of the conifer die-off. To suggest that leaving every dead tree makes sense defies any logic when even prior to the bark beetles, the drought and wildfires already created unnaturally high levels of dead trees and wildfire risk. Balanced collaborative groups such as YSS – made up of environmental organizations, industry and business interests, rural politicians and water agencies – strongly support the strategic removal of large numbers of the dead trees now posing so much risk across our iconic Sierra Nevada ecosystem.

Nathan Graveline is a wildlife biologist; Chris Trott is a bioenergy consultant; and John Buckley is executive director of the Central Sierra Environmental Resource Center.

Escalating fire threats are a primary concern. Changes in Sierra Nevada ecosystems are among long-term effects.

By Guy McCarthy / The Union Democrat

Published Jun 28, 2016 at 11:17PM