Region Archives: US West

SAN FRANCISCO, California — The National Fish and Wildlife Foundation (NFWF) announced $53 million in grants to protect and restore forests and watersheds in California using voluntary, targeted headwater resilience planning and monitoring. The grants leverage $31.4 million in matching contributions, for a total conservation impact of $84.4 million. The awards were made possible by a first-of-its-kind agreement between the USDA Forest Service and NFWF.  “Our partnership with the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation helps us mutually support communities throughout California. Combining our resources, we can use the best available science and monitoring to protect our vital watersheds,” said Jennifer Eberlien, regional forester for the Pacific Southwest Region. “These investments help ensure future generations have healthy, productive forests and help the region combat the effects of climate change.” …Visit the California Forests and Watersheds program webpage for a list of the 2024 grants.

Katie and Steve Kohl

In the night sky, Sirius is the brightest star. For 2024, Sirius Woods, Steve and Katie Kohl’s 42 acres near McDowell Creek Falls, will shine brightly. The Kohls have been named Linn County Small Woodlands Association (LCSWA) tree farmers of the year. They will host a gathering of fellow woodland owners on a September Saturday yet be determined. The couple has actively nurtured the property for 33 years, working with Oregon Department of Forestry staffers to create wildlife habitat, recreation opportunities and maintain old-growth timber. …The Kohls are both OSU Extension Service master woodlands managers. They have advised other forest owners on their projects for the past two decades. …The Kohls exemplify woodland owners who choose a variety of goals relating to their property, said Mike Barsotti, LCSWA president. The Kohls and other honorees will be spotlighted in the fall at a ceremony at the Oregon Gardens in Silverton.

A federal judge in  Montana is holding a hearing next Tuesday on a motion for an injunction against the Pintler Face logging and burning project on Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest. A coalition of conservationists and activists has sued to stop work altogether. The Pintler project, northwest of Wise River, Montana, calls for 11 miles of new logging roads to access to 3,400 acres of clear-cuts, prescribed burns and logging of more than 560 acres of aspen. It would also log another 5,800 acres in a commercial segment of the project. Mike Garrity, executive director of the Alliance for the Wild Rockies, said the project will disrupt a continuous ecosystem that lynx and grizzly bears need to thrive. Critics of the lawsuit and supporters of the Pintler project said it would make strides to preventing wildfires and also backtrack on years of economic development the state has made in the region.

On Monday night, property owners attended an open house to learn about the new and improved Oregon wildfire hazard map, which will be available for public comment in July. It was one of six events planned for “high hazard” communities across the state. The initial map, released in June 2022, was quickly withdrawn after widespread public outcry. The revamped version includes several major changes. Two hazard categories have been eliminated; now, properties will be grouped in one of three hazard zones: low, moderate, or high. …A low hazard designation doesn’t mean that a fire can’t happen there; instead, the categories will help the state prioritize high-hazard neighborhoods and communities for mitigation.

MONTANA — A Legislative committee is backing the Gianforte administration in its opposition to a proposed U.S. Forest Service amendment that could make small changes to preserve old-growth forests. On Monday, the Legislative Environmental Quality Council approved sending a letter to the U.S. Department of Agriculture opposing an amendment that would affect all U.S. Forest Service forest plans to add a little more protection for patches of old-growth forest. Instead of protecting old-growth habitat, the EQC pushed for more active forest management. …The EQC wrote the letter in response to a two-year-old Biden administration effort to preserve old-growth forests in response to rapidly changing climate conditions. …In a report last spring, the agency estimated that there are nearly 25 million acres of old-growth forest on Forest Service land — or about 17% of the agency’s forested land — based on a complex set of definitions tailored to some 200 forest types.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service Northern Region said Tuesday it is investing $1 million to expand work with the Idaho Department of Lands to reduce wildfire risk and improve forest health through the Good Neighbor Authority. The investments will fund projects on the Idaho Panhandle National Forest while also providing funding for IDL staffing. The funds will support about 3,000 acres of fuels reduction work administered by IDL such as fuel breaks and vegetation treatments to improve forest health, a press release said. The funds will also expand road repairs to improve watershed conditions and provide access for wildfire management and implementation of project activities.

The last time the state Building Code Council crafted rules for protecting homes from the threat of wildfire, city officials criticized them as confusing, expensive and overreaching. Those rules are gone. As the state looks at drawing new wildfire risk maps and implementing new codes, local governments want more say in hopes of producing regulations that are understandable, affordable and help the communities most at risk. …Lawmakers on the state House Local Government committee heard from officials of state agencies and local governments, including Brad Medrud, planning manager at the City of Tumwater, about what must be done to implement new wildland urban interface, or WUI, building codes, and what a new law will mean for cities and counties. …Loren Torgerson of the Department of Natural Resources told lawmakers… the DNR is on track to finalize the map elements by Dec. 1.

…Tree thinning efforts in the Upper Rio De Flag Watershed are part of a larger restoration plan to reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfire and post-fire flooding. The plan includes six project areas equalling over 12,000 acres, over half of the 21,500-acre watershed. While cutting trees may seem counterintuitive to maintaining a healthy forest, removing smaller trees and low-lying vegetation will prevent high-intensity wildfires and post-fire flooding that can destroy an entire ecosystem. …For decades, the U.S. fire policy was suppression… In more recent years, forest agencies have worked to restore fire as a management technique. …Thinning forests will allow fire to return to the landscape, both naturally through lightning strikes and prescribed burns. That leaves fewer fuels to supercharge the flames to reach the treetops. …Although thinning and burning a forest may seem damaging to the ecosystem, land managers hope residents will reap the benefits of their work.  

ARIZONA — Frustrated Arizona loggers aired a few complaints about the way the Forest Service handles thinning contracts in Arizona, especially when it relies on out-of-state contractors unfamiliar with the ecology of Arizona’s ponderosa pine forests. …The Forest Service is experimenting with a new, high-tech method of marking trees for cutting in restoration timber sales. That includes using computer tablets synced to aerial LiDAR surveys so loggers can determine which trees to cut without the Forest Service marking each tree by hand. …A century of logging, cattle grazing and fire suppression has increased tree densities on millions of acres from less than 100 per acre to more than 1,000 per acre. Now a high-intensity fire can climb up into the lower branches of the tallest trees. …The 4FRI aims to dramatically reduce tree densities across millions of acres in Northern Arizona, making it the most ambitious forest restoration project in the country. 

SOUTHERN OREGON – This summer the Oregon Department of Forestry (ODF) is using drones to help with multiple aspects of fire suppression and detection. ODF’s state aviation coordinator, Sara Prout said that aerial resources are important every summer, and that drones help expand the department’s aerial capabilities. “The manned aircraft and unmanned aircraft work together, just at different levels.,” Prout said. For years, ODF has utilized planes and helicopters to help detect, observe and fight fires. Drones can operate similarly, with more mobility and access to fires. Drones can provide valuable information during every phase of a wildfire. This includes the time after a fire has been mostly contained and crews are finishing their work. “Firefighters can have really accurate data when they’re doing mop up,” Prout said. “We can get really amazing hotspot identification for the firefighters to use in those efforts to make that process more efficient.”

A documentary, “Rematriation,” about saving old-growth forests, will be shown in Ojai on, June 23, followed by a time for questions and answers with Angela Davidson, aka Rainbow Eyes, whose fight to save 1,500-year-old trees in a Canadian forest is featured. View the promo for the documentary HERE. It is one of three events in Ventura and Santa Barbara counties that will be held from June 22 to 25. A member of the Da’naxda’xw-Awaetlala First Nation, Rainbow Eyes will speak about her fight to protect the old-growth forest of Fairy Creek on Vancouver Island and Knight Inlet. All profits will benefit the Dzunuk’wa Society – Wild Women of the Woods in their efforts to save ancient forests. Rainbow Eyes’ stay in Ventura and Santa Barbara counties will include outdoor Indigenous learning circles, a reception and opportunities for private conversations with Rainbow Eyes and her logging blockade partner, Glenn Reid.

A new machine-learning system developed at the University of Alaska Fairbanks can automatically produce detailed maps from satellite data to show locations of likely beetle-killed spruce trees in Alaska, even in forests of low and moderate infestation where identification is otherwise difficult. The automated process can help forestry and wildfire managers in their decisions. That’s critical as the beetle infestation spreads. The Alaska Division of Forestry and Fire Protection calls the spruce beetle “the most damaging insect in Alaska’s forests.” The identification system by assistant professor Simon Zwieback at the UAF Geophysical Institute was detailed in the ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing on May 18. Zwieback is also affiliated with the UAF College of Natural Science and Mathematics. 

Northern ecosystems are seeing some of the planet’s most sweeping changes from climate warming. For some animals and plants, that has posed a threat to their very existence and, for humans, a couple complicated questions: Can we — and should we — do anything to save them? In Alaska, one area where land managers and ecologists are wrestling with those questions is the boreal forest, home to spruce and birch trees, wetlands and many species of animals. But the boreal is warming more rapidly than anywhere on Earth and seeing more intense wildfires, invasive beetles decimating wide swaths and changing rainfall patterns that’ve caused some parts to shift to grasslands.

New research from a collaborative group of scientists from the USDA Forest Service, Bird Conservancy of the Rockies, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service found that frequent, low-severity fire supported owl habitat, but high-severity fire was detrimental. The study is published in the journal Fire Ecology. This finding suggests a potential win-win: forest management activities that can help to return historic low-frequency fires to the landscape and reduce risk of more severe wildfires will likely benefit Mexican spotted owls too. The Mexican spotted owl is a threatened species that inhabits forests and canyonlands in the southwestern United States. These owls often live in forests that are at high risk of stand-replacing fire—and yet at the same time, there is concern that forest management projects that can reduce wildfire risk, like thinning or prescribed fire, could remove or alter important habitat characteristics that owls depend on for their survival.

Coastal martens, also known as Humboldt martens, are small, catlike members of the weasel family that live in the coastal forests of Oregon and northern California. The animals were thought to be extinct due to logging and trapping but were rediscovered in northern California in the 1990s. Today, there are only about 400 coastal martens left in the wild, living in four isolated communities. The animals were listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act in 2020 and just last month received federal habitat protections after a petition from the Center for Biological Diversity. The conservation group also recently sued the U.S. Forest Service to enforce habitat protections for martens in the Oregon Dunes.

University of Copenhagen scientists may have found a new explanation for the California wildfires of 2020. Applying AI to detailed aerial photos, they created a unique dataset detailing mortality down to single trees for all of California State. This revealed individual and clustered tree death spread out among the living on a large scale. The new AI-model will increase understanding of tree mortality and give us a chance to prevent droughts, beetles and flames from destroying the world’s forests. …California has been one of the places hit hardest by droughts and wildfires, and saw 4% of its landmass go up in smoke in 2020. Now, scientists at the University of Copenhagen present a new picture of the health of Californian forests, revealing a new account of dead trees in the region, and possibly a new underlying explanation for the extensive fires in a study published in Nature Communications.

About two dozen projects aimed at saving imperiled fish and amphibians are getting a share of $10 million, the first round of grants to come out of Oregon’s landmark agreement on managing private forest lands. For years, conservationists and timber industry groups debated how to protect fish, frogs and salamanders while also logging trees on 10 million acres of privately owned lands. They came to an agreement called the Private Forest Accord, signed by former Gov. Kate Brown in 2022. As part of the agreement, the state would pool money into a grant program for habitat conservation projects around the state. This year, about $10 million were awarded to 25 projects. …In addition, the Private Forest Accord ushered in logging regulations to protect sensitive fish and other aquatic species including increased stream buffers and leaving more trees behind when logging on steep slopes.

NEW MEXICO — As summers become drier and hotter for New Mexico, the state’s National Forests become more vulnerable. In recent weeks, crews have been battling Blue 2 Fire, which was caused by a lightning strike in the White Mountain Wilderness. …According to Douglass Cram, a forestry and fire ecology expert at New Mexico State University, putting out every fire as soon as it appears is not only unrealistic, but it’s also not advisable.  …We’d like to change the fuel structure, so we have stands that are more resilient to fire behavior. So the idea of putting a fire out immediately or letting it burn, sometimes you can dictate that, other times you can’t.” And while climate change continues to drive instances of fire weather, Cram explained that the solution to severe blazes is to mitigate damage with the right type of management, including thinning and prescribed burns.

https://youtu.be/ckYCS3Ps-MI?si=Ekf-PNhUd4UFI72X

WASHINGTON — Bumblebees play an essential role in maintaining the stability and diversity of ecosystems through pollination; unfortunately, eight species in Washington are considered rare and at risk. To protect these vital insects, partners formulated and adopted a new conservation strategy across the state to promote proactive conservation actions for rare or sensitive species. …the Washington Bumble Bee Conservation Strategy, adopted in February of 2023, was developed collectively through a partnership between the USDA Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, Washington Department of Fish & Wildlife, and The Xerces Society. The strategy focuses on eight rare species of bumble bees and identifies priority areas and includes key recommendations for managing land cover, protecting nesting habitat and creating foraging areas. …In the Pacific Northwest, the Forest Service and BLM partnered to form the Interagency Special Status and Sensitive Species Program and are implementing the bumblebee conservation strategy.

About two dozen projects aimed at saving imperiled fish and amphibians are getting a share of $10 million, the first round of grants to come out of Oregon’s landmark agreement on managing private forest lands. For years, conservationists and timber industry groups debated how to protect fish, frogs and salamanders while also logging trees on 10 million acres of privately owned lands. They came to an agreement called the Private Forest Accord, signed by former Gov. Kate Brown in 2022. …This year, about $10 million were awarded to 25 projects in western and southern Oregon, and a couple in northeastern Oregon. …In addition to the grant program, the Private Forest Accord ushered in logging regulations aimed at protecting sensitive fish and other aquatic species. Among the changes, the accord increased stream buffers so timber companies don’t log too close to moving water, and it requires them to leave more trees behind when logging on steep slopes.