Region Archives: US West

CORVALLIS, Ore. – A newly enhanced database is expected to help wildfire managers and scientists better predict where and when wildfires may occur by incorporating hundreds of additional factors that impact the ignition and spread of fire. “There is a tremendous amount of interest in what enables wildfire ignitions and what can be done to prevent them,” said Erica Fleishman, an Oregon State University professor. The Fire Program Analysis Fire-Occurrence Database was developed in 2013 by the U.S. Forest Service and since been updated five times. It incorporates basic information such as ignition location, discovery date and final wildfire size. The revised database now includes many new environmental and social factors, such as topography and vegetation, social vulnerability and economic justice metrics, and practical attributes such as the distance from the ignition to the nearest road.

ARIZONA—Navajo County last week celebrated hard won gains in the decade-long effort to protect fire-prone communities. An effort to save the timber industry in the White Mountains and thin overgrown forests has doubled the annual acres thinned while skirting the edge of financial disaster, government relations director Rochelle Lacapa told the supervisors at its last meeting. Navajo County Supervisor Jason Whiting currently heads the Northern Arizona Counties Association, which has taken the lead in saving the struggling timber industry and keeping forest-restoration efforts alive. The Apache Sitgreaves National Forests now hand out contracts for thinning projects in the White Mountains that cover about 16,000 acres annually. A decade ago, the White Mountains Stewardship Program managed to thin about 8,000 acres per year, while receiving a Forest Service subsidy of about $3,000 to $5,000 per acre. That effort is widely credited with saving Alpine and perhaps Springerville from the Wallow Fire.

Hamilton, Montana — Just days after going to “Very High” fire danger, the Bitterroot National Forest announced today that it is raising its fire danger level to “Extreme” and will go into Stage 2 fire restrictions starting Friday, July 19, due to continued hot weather and record dry fuel conditions. Extreme is the highest fire danger level possible.  When fire danger is “Extreme,” fires start quickly, spread furiously, and burns intensely.  All fires are potentially serious and development into high intensity burning will be faster and occur even on smaller fires.  Direct attack – fire fighters using direct methods to suppress a fire – is rarely possible and may be dangerous except immediately after ignition. … Forest officials are asking the public to be especially careful when camping and visiting the forest.

Oregon State University and the Oregon Department of Forestry will release the proposed wildfire hazard map at 8 a.m. Thursday. There, Oregonians can look up specific tax lots to see how susceptible they are to wildfires. This is Oregon’s second attempt at creating a wildfire map. State fire officials and OSU first released a map in 2022 under a tight one-year deadline set by Senate Bill 762. That first iteration received intense public backlash, particularly from property owners concerned it would affect their homeowners’ insurance. The state ultimately rescinded it. ….Once the map is finalized in October, the state’s Building Code Division will begin its administrative process for creating new building codes, and the Oregon State Fire Marshal will begin creating rules for defensible space. Both processes will have opportunities for public comment.

So far in this year’s California’s wildfire season, about 20 times more acres of land have burned than around this time last year. Since the beginning of the year, there were more than 3,500 wildfires across the state through early July, causing about 207,000 acres of land to burn. Around this time last year, about 10,000 acres had burned. The five-year average of acres burned through mid-July is about 39,000, Cal Fire said last week. “We are not just in a fire season, but we are in a fire year,” Joe Tyler, director of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire), said at a news conference earlier in July. …As part of its 2024 budget, California will allocate $2.6 billion through 2028 to fighting wildfires and improving forest health, in addition to $200 million annually to help prevent fires. 

WALDPORT, Oregon – A plan to spray herbicides on a Weyerhaeuser clearcut near one of Waldport’s municipal water sources has drawn condemnation by people who oppose the practice and triggered city officials to take precautionary measures. City officials have not yet been notified when ground spraying on the 110-acre “Pankey Pit” clearcut located immediately east of Waldport on Mount Eckman will begin, the 14-day public comment period required before any action ends Wednesday. …The City’s plan includes having an observer on site during the spray, shutting down the water intake for 72 hours and conducting water tests to determine if any contaminates exist. …“This is out of an abundance of caution,” city manager Dann Cutter told YachatsNews. “We will be on site and monitoring, but only a very narrow portion of the logged area falls into the watershed above our intake. Their mapping shows a significant buffer zone.”

This opinion editorial is a rebuttal to “Burn Back Better? USFS Chief’s Letter Of Intent Provokes Revolt In The Firefighting Community” One of the best methods for reducing the impact of wildfires is to reduce the number of trees per acre by thinning the larger trees and following up with prescribed fire, to enhance forest resilience, by removing surplus smaller trees that act as ladder fuels and potentially killing the larger trees in a wildfire. …Let’s … support the Forest Service when in “Full Suppression” mode and when implementing fuels treatment projects. We need to armor against the uninformed individuals who throw rocks and promote untrue and misleading characterizations of fuels treatments the Forest Service has accomplished using beneficial fire. It is time we push back and use all our collective influence to cooperatively work together and with the Fire and Smoke Management Agencies to reduce the flammability of California’s and Nevada’s fire-prone landscapes.

In recent years, California wildfires have taken on increased severity and reshaped the landscape. California Spotted Owls in the state’s central and southern forests—have been feeling that heat: Destructive megafires burned more of their habitat in 2020 and 2021 alone than in the previous 35 years. Experts say these growing disasters represent the most urgent threat to the birds. Recognizing this mounting menace—along with other hazards—the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service last year announced plans to give the birds Endangered Species Act protections. Yet the California Spotted Owl’s best hope, counterintuitively, may also lie in fire. Research increasingly suggests that lower-severity burning not only inoculates many drier forests against destructive megafires, but also creates the mosaic of habitat types that the birds gravitate toward. …fire will frame the future for these birds, either devouring the forests they need to survive or clearing a path toward a safer future.

ARIZONA—The USDA Forest Service is developing a five-year plan to reintroduce native plants and ponderosa pine trees in a 551-acre section of the Telegraph Fire burn scar to reestablish habitat for the Mexican spotted owl. Restoration also will support the San Carlos Apache Tribal Forest Protection landscape, one of 21 landscapes the Forest Service recently identified as part of the agency’s 10-year strategy for confronting the wildfire crisis, by reducing wildfire exposure to communities within the San Carlos and Fort Apache reservations. The Telegraph Fire burned through 180,757 acres in June 2021 on the Tonto National Forest Globe Ranger District. The fire reduced the Mexican spotted owls’ nesting source (ponderosa pine) and protected activity centers. These centers sustain and enhance sections of the forest that are presently, recently or historically occupied by breeding Mexican spotted owls.

Commercial logging may proceed in a Forest Service project south of Anaconda, but all other activities must cease until a lawsuit is concluded, according to a federal judge. On Friday, two and a half weeks after hearing oral arguments, Missoula federal district judge Dana Christensen issued his ruling granting most of the plaintiffs’ request for an injunction to stop the Pintler Face Project on the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest. All noncommercial activity, such as thinning and prescribed burning, will be put on hold across the 73,000-acre project until the lawsuit is concluded, but Christensen allowed the four commercial timber sales to go forward to prevent economic hardship. The logging work is slated to start on July 16. …Mike Garrity, Alliance for the Wild Rockies executive director, said he was happy that the judge said the plaintiffs are likely to win the lawsuit on the merits.

CORVALLIS, Ore. – Forest scientists at Oregon State University studying tree regeneration have found that wildfire smoke comes with an unexpected benefit: It has a cooling capacity that can make life easier for vulnerable seedlings. …Smoke’s impact on maximum and average near-surface temperature was similar to the temperature reduction caused by an increase of 15% in canopy cover, OSU College of Forestry research assistant Amanda Brackett said. The finding is line with the idea that while smoke can cause a range of concerns, fire is a natural forest occurrence with ecological upsides. …“Smoke absorbs and scatters incoming solar radiation, reducing how much reaches the forest floor, but we did not anticipate seeing this level of impact,” she said. “That extra cooling effect may be important during extreme heat events when canopy cover and topography do not provide enough protection from harmful and potentially lethal temperatures in the understory.”

As warm and dry weather is forecast to stick around, fire danger begins to increase in forests across the state. Here is where campfire bans and fire danger levels stand across forests. Mount Hood National Forest prohibits all campfires. Beginning Friday, all fires will be prohibited in Mount Hood National Forest. This includes all campfires, charcoal or briquette fires, pellet fires and any other open fires. Portable cooking stoves, lanterns and heating devices using liquefied or bottled fuel are still allowed as long as they can be instantly switched off. Mount Hood National Forest is the first to announce a total fire ban in the state. Oregon’s hot weather has caused fire danger to rise and with the dry and warm long-term forecast, the risk for wildfire increases. Fire personnel anticipate the potential for fires to continue to remain high through the season, the agency said in a news release.

Just as the microorganisms in the human gut play a crucial role to our well-being, microorganisms in forests are essential to forest stability. Researchers at the University of Idaho are working to understand exactly how those microorganisms respond when faced with stressors, such as drought and wildfires, and what their role could be in helping trees survive. Principal investigator Tara Hudiburg, who is leading the project, is a professor in the university’s forest, rangeland and fire science department. This year she and her research team received a six-year, $15 million grant from the National Science Foundation to study how microorganisms in Idaho forests respond to stress and how they rely on each other to survive. …The project – coined EMBER, or the Embedding Molecular Biology in Ecosystem Research – can help scientists and forest managers better understand which of those microorganisms can help tree species endure harsh conditions under a warming climate.

OREGON — A statewide “wildfire risk map” that drew the ire of many Oregonians will return in several weeks with few changes but with a new name following a yearlong makeover. The new “wildfire hazard map,” set to debut in mid-to-late July, will not differ in substance too much from the previous map published in 2022, according to Chris Dunn, an Oregon State University forestry professor and wildfire expert. That first map was quickly taken offline due to public backlash over many areas classified as high risk. Property owners saw the map as a state attempt to regulate their properties, and it coincided with some insurers raising premiums. In the new Map some grass and ranch lands will no longer be considered at high-risk depending on what they’re used for. The replacement of the word “risk” with “hazard” indicates that the map is an environmental assessment, not an assessment of individual properties. 

Edward Ring

Practical solutions to California’s energy and water shortages will always have a better chance of Edward Ringbeing implemented if they adhere to the limitations placed upon them by those concerned about climate change. A solution that should work for everyone is forest thinning. It will save our forests, with the added benefit of increasing our water supply. …California’s forests today have tree densities that are many times what is historically normal, and conditions are more dangerous because we’ve reduced our annual timber harvest from 6 billion board feet per year in the 1990s to around 1.5 billion board feet today. …But what about water? It turns out that forest thinning also reduces the amount of water that is immediately taken up by the roots of overcrowded trees and undergrowth and transpired into the atmosphere. Instead, more of this water can run off into tributaries or percolate to recharge springs.

MONTANA — Federal Judge Dana Christensen has stopped the Flathead National Forest from implementing its forest plan for the 2.4 million acres because the U.S. Forest Service ignored the impact of roads on the endangered grizzly bear and bull trout populations. In his decision, which mostly upheld federal magistrate Kathleen DeSoto’s initial ruling, he said that the Forest Service continues to ignore the impacts of closed roads and unauthorized motor vehicle use. …The U.S. Forest Service, which doesn’t comment on pending litigation as a matter of policy, continues to disregard or ignore roads that have existed, but are no longer used, according to the order from the U.S. District Court. Because the U.S. Forest Service has not permanently closed them, returning them to a natural or impassable state, the roads are still used, the judge said, even if illegally.