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OPINION
MARCH 9, 2016 2:25 PM
State burned 893,000 acres in 2015 because of wildfires.  Forest Service estimates state has 9 million acres at risk.

A pond in Stanislaus National Forest reflects trees damaged but not killed by the Rim Fire that began in August 2013. The historic blaze in Stanislaus National Forest alone emitted over 11 million metric tons of greenhouse gas, writes Tuolumne County Supervisor Randy Hanvelt.

Last year, a staggering 893,000 acres burned across California – including over 537,000 acres of national forest land. Heavy fuel loads in our national forests, combined with the effects of drought, insect, disease and climate change, mean this wildfire season could bring more destruction to the Golden State.

While there is broad agreement on the need to treat fighting wildfires like other natural disasters, this crisis demands a more comprehensive solution.

Randy Hanvelt represents District 2 on the Tuolumne County Board of Supervisors.
Just as there is bipartisan support for ending the harmful practice of “borrowing” from management accounts to fight wildfires, there is also bipartisan support for ensuring public forests are healthier and more resilient to catastrophic fires. In fact, last December the Obama administration, along with key Republicans and Democrats in the House and Senate, reached a deal to fix how the federal government funds wildfire suppression and to increase the pace and scale of forest-restoration projects.

In addition to allowing the Forest Service to access emergency funding to fight the largest fires, the bipartisan deal would have provided expanded authorities under existing federal environmental law to reduce fuel loads through forest thinning. This would have allowed the Forest Service to move more quickly on small projects to address wildfire risks and improve wildlife habitat, especially those that had been collaboratively developed by diverse local stakeholders.

The solution maintained protections for old-growth forests while mandating the use of the best available science to maintain forest ecology. Forestry organizations, environmental groups, tribes and wildlife groups, as well as dozens of California county supervisors most affected by wildfire, supported the package.

Despite the best efforts of President Barack Obama and members of Congress on both sides of the aisle to include this package in omnibus budget legislation, it was ultimately blocked by the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. Though this package did not clear the final hurdle, there is a clear desire in Congress to continue efforts to reach a solution.

Congressional action can’t come soon enough for California forests that haven’t already been ravaged by catastrophic wildfire. The state’s unreserved national forest lands, such as those not set aside as wilderness, grow the equivalent of 4 billion board feet per year. Data from 2006 to 2010, which doesn’t fully reflect the current drought, indicates that annual tree mortality is 2.6 bbf. After big declines in timber harvest and other activities that reduce fire-fuel loads, just 5 percent of annual growth has been harvested since 1994.

The situation in our national forests also exasperates the effects of climate change and drought. Reducing fuel loads and tree densities should play an important role in California’s efforts to confront both of these challenges. The historic Rim Fire in Stanislaus National Forest alone emitted over 11 million metric tons of greenhouse gas; this is equivalent to the emissions of 2.3 million cars or the annual emissions of 3.2 coal-fired electricity plants.

REDUCING FUEL LOADS AND TREE DENSITIES SHOULD PLAY AN IMPORTANT ROLE IN CALIFORNIA’S EFFORTS TO CONFRONT THE CHALLENGES OF CLIMATE CHANGE AND DROUGHT.

There are also the risks to public health. In many California communities during the summertime, toxins from wildfire smoke put children and other vulnerable citizens at risk.

Improving management of our national forests can also help alleviate California’s drought. A study on the Sierra Nevada Watershed Ecosystem Enhancement Project detailed the influence of forest vegetation and the need for management activities to increase water supplies. Researchers from the Environmental Defense Fund and Wesleyan University found the Sierra Nevada’s unnaturally dense conifer forest is responsible for the loss of more than 15 billion gallons of water per day.

Without an adequate supply of timber to stay in business, the state forests’ infrastructure could slip away. The state has already lost 82 percent of its sawmills since 1981 and 44 of 66 biomass power plants, which turn forest waste into renewable energy. As we’ve seen in other states, once mills and biomass plants close, there’s insufficient infrastructure to economically restore forest health.

When that happens, the environment suffers.

We should encourage our federally elected officials to support comprehensive solutions that not only treat the symptoms of catastrophic wildfires but also the causes. Merely fixing the Forest Service’s budget problems will not reduce the unnatural catastrophic wildfires we are experiencing today. In California, the Forest Service estimates there is up to 9 million acres of forestland at risk of catastrophic wildfire and insects and disease; we can longer wait to protect all of the things we value in our national forests.

Randy Hanvelt represents District 2 on the Tuolumne County Board of Supervisors.

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Tuolumne County will start on the job of removing  9,000 dead and dying trees that threaten roads, water supplies, and infrastructure this month. The state will pick up most of the cost but there’s no help for private homeowners.

Tree removal contractors in Tuolumne County are getting ready to cut and haul away timber that didn’t survive the drought.

Under an executive order from Governor Jerry Brown, the state will pay 75 percent of the $9 million cost of removal from public land.

Forty-four percent of the county’s roads qualify for federal funds which will reduce the county’s  share from the remaining 25 percent to just over 6 percent.

Tuolumne County Deputy Administrator Tracie Riggs says private property owners won’t get help unless their trees threaten public roadways or infrastructure.

“We even heard a homeowner call in that just the cost to remove the trees that PG&E had already fell was $9,600 and our homeowners simply don’t have the means to take care of that,” says Riggs.

Riggs says the removal project will take several years and trees are still dying.

BY DAVID SIDERS

October 30, 2015-The Sacramento Bee

 Lamenting “the worst epidemic of tree mortality” in the state’s modern history, Gov. Jerry Brown on Friday sought federal aid to remove dead trees from California forests and called for more controlled burns to reduce the risk of wildfire.

The declaration, including a controversial exemption from environmental reviews, comes amid California’s ongoing drought and a bark beetle infestation that has killed millions of trees weakened by lack of water.

Brown said the die-off exacerbates the risk of wildfires and the threat of erosion. He ordered state agencies to remove dead or dying trees from high-hazard areas and said his administration will work with federal authorities to expand controlled burns.

Brown is also seeking to increase the number of days tree waste can be burned, while ordering the California Public Utilities Commission to expedite contracts for bioenergy facilities that use forest products from high-hazard zones.

The order includes an exemption from the California Environmental Quality Act for efforts to remove dead or dying trees, alarming some environmentalists.

“CEQA requires agencies to tell the public what they’re doing, and to try to lessen the environmental damage of their projects,” said Kevin Bundy, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity.

Bundy said Brown should be using his executive authority in a “more restrained fashion than this seems to represent.”

In a letter to U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack requesting assistance, Brown said California “is facing the worst epidemic of tree mortality in modern history.”

“Tree mortality across California’s forests is putting lives and critical infrastructure at risk,” he wrote, “greatly increasing already dangerous wildfire conditions and exacerbating threats posed by falling trees.”

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article41962989.html#storylink=cpy

Thomas CurwenContact Reporter LA Times, October 20, 2015

Full Article with Illustrations

Biologist Greg Asner first heard the numbers in April, but they did little to prepare him for what he saw.

The Forest Service had estimated that nearly 12.5 million trees in the state’s southern and central forests were dead. But as Asner peered down upon the same forests from his airplane at 6,000 feet, he saw something far worse.

California’s drought-parched landscape was poised for a radical transformation. Much of the low-elevation forests near Mt. Pinos in the Los Padres National Forest and in Pinnacles National Park were going to disappear if trends continued.

A scientist with the Carnegie Institution for Science, Asner has a practiced eye for forest health, and with instruments aboard his plane that give him X-ray eyes into the foliage, he is able to assess not just dead trees but trees so stressed by the drought that their death is likely.

For three weeks this summer, he and his team flew out of Sacramento and Bakersfield, recording the devastation. Even if the drought were to end in a historic El Niño this winter, Asner worries that the most stressed trees will continue to fail.

The U.S. Forest Service shot this video of the Stanislaus National Forest in the central Sierra Nevada in July. Flying at about 1,000 feet, covering about five acres per second, Forest Service observers count dead trees — conspicuous for the brown foliage — and extrapolate over plots that are the approximate size of a football field.

There is no saying which trees will die, but by his estimation the count statewide could be close to 120 million — as much as 20% of the state’s forests.

Tarnished beauty

On a hot summer morning, Asner boards his Dornier 228, a twin turboprop, at McClellan Airfield on what he hopes will be the final day of his survey. He needs to fly along the coast toward the Oregon border, but conditions are deteriorating.

An armada of firefighting aircraft has taken off at dawn to fight an outbreak of new wildfires to the north. The air is hazy with smoke.

Above the city of Santa Rosa, the plane veers northwest over the forests west of Guerneville toward the Lost Coast.

Asner, 47, sits in the cabin with Robin Martin, who manages the instruments and relays navigation instructions to the cockpit. They work in front of two monitors. She’s a lefty and he’s a righty, so they share a mouse pad. It helps that they are married.

To understand how Asner’s instruments work, you have to first step inside a leaf. There amid the busy factory of photosynthesis, water molecules are bending, stretching, rotating and vibrating.

Greg Asner’s vivid topographic images of Crescent Meadow in Kings Canyon-Sequoia National Park are created from data collected by an onboard spectrometer and laser. Healthy trees are blue, and drought-stressed trees run from mild (yellow) to severe (red).

These motions resonate into the atmosphere as reflected light, which is picked up by an on-board spectrometer that divides it into 480 bands from ultraviolet to shortwave.

Much like star light reveals a star’s distant chemistry, these bands are analyzed for their chemical content. Water is the primary focus: The more water in the leaves, the less reflected light, and the more reflected light, the drier the foliage.

The spectrometer works in conjunction with a laser that fans out beneath the aircraft, creating a 3-D image of the forest below.

By marrying the data from the spectrometer and the laser, Asner creates topographic images that show the condition of the forest. Healthy trees are blue, and drought-stressed trees run from mild (yellow) to severe (red).

The images help him to correlate terrain and tree stress. Higher tree stress, for example, often occurs on steep slopes and near meadows.

For Asner’s mostly Canadian crew, the Golden State is a tarnished beauty.

“It’s just burnt,” says pilot Don Koopmans of Saskatchewan.

Asner’s assessment is equally blunt.

The mountains ringing Los Angeles are “a tinderbox.”

The oak forests in the Sierra foothills are “in big trouble.”

Pinnacles is “not a happy place for a tree,” and the forests northwest of Redding are surprisingly compromised.

To explain what 120 million trees dying across the state might mean, Asner paints a picture of California’s ecological diversity and size. He then takes out his calculator.

He estimates there are 585 million to 1.6 billion trees in the state’s forests and apologizes for not being more precise. An accurate census, he says, has never been conducted, but 120 million represents 7% to 20%. Under normal circumstances, forests lose between 1% and 1.5% of their trees annually.

“At what point will the forest change into something else? We don’t know,” Asner says. “We don’t know when the lack of rain will lead to runaway conditions where the forests are beyond repair.”

Such a transition, especially in the lower elevations, is already underway in parts of the West, where nearly 6 billion trees — 13% of the area of western forests — died from 1997 to 2010 because of drought and the bark beetle.

Yet as grave as the effects of the drought have been, Asner insists there is hope.

“If I looked around and thought there was no way to deal with these problems, I would be pessimistic,” he says. “But there is a way with effective management.”

Among other things, aerial images can help land managers identify vulnerable terrain and consider how to strengthen stressed trees and protect healthy ones.

A march uphill

The study of forests is a formative science, and conclusions — like a definitive number for the trees that will die — are hard to come by.

Park Williams, a bioclimatologist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University who has been studying the California drought, is not surprised by Asner’s numbers.

If only half succumb, it would register as a very big event, Williams said.

“Think of it as one gigantic ax swing at the forest,” he said. “It takes a huge chunk out of the population, and if we see two or three more of these droughts, then that’s even more ax swings.”

Jeffrey Hicke, an associate professor in the department of geography at the University of Idaho, said that regardless of current tree mortality rates, the state will not lose its forests entirely. But he adds, based on the observations, the low-elevation forests are in greatest jeopardy.

Beyond this year’s drought, as climate change brings warming, tree species will migrate, Hicke said. Older trees will die, and younger trees will take root.