Region Archives: US West

 MONTANA — The recent collapse of western Montana’s timber industry did more than eliminate jobs, it also left Missoula County and various management agencies with one less tool to manage area forests. But county commissioners on Monday joined officials with the Bureau of Land Management and the Blackfoot Challenge to explore ways to revitalize the region’s timber industry. If the industry is going to reemerge, it will need to do so under a new model, they said. “There’s an acknowledgment that industry is a partner when you look at the millions of acres of federal land, as well as the private forested land and state land,” said Erin Carey, with the BLM. “When you look at the restoration needs across millions of acres in western Montana, we cannot accomplish those restoration outcomes without industry.” ….Forest restoration could be an industry in itself, along with the creation of new products like cross-laminated timber.

While authorities still don’t know what sparked the deadly fires in the Los Angeles area, they do know one clear way the flames have spread: embers. …The flames have been fueled by strong winds, which not only aid combustion by increasing the oxygen supply but carry embers to unburned areas. Contrary to popular belief, experts say most homes destroyed by wildfires aren’t overcome by a racing wall of flames, but rather burn after being ignited by airborne embers. Here’s a look at what embers are and the role they play in wildfires. …the embers involved in wildfires are drastically different from campfires, said Anne Cope, chief engineer at the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety. “Those embers can travel for miles, and it’s often the neighborhoods that are closer to the wildlands that get inundated with just loads and loads — just showered with embers,” she said.

Researchers at the University of California San Diego, University of Florida and Arizona State University have been awarded $3.28 million from the U.S. National Science Foundation to build OpenForest4D – a web-based cyberinfrastructure platform for next-generation 4D forest mapping and monitoring. The project’s goal is to advance the mapping and monitoring of global forest ecosystems by fusing the most up-to-date, multi-source remote sensing data and novel artificial intelligence models to generate research-grade estimates of forest structure and above-ground biomass across a range of timescales. …Previously these sorts of calculations were limited to research professionals with advanced expertise. By providing these cyberinfrastructure services via an easily accessible and user-friendly science gateway, users of all expertise levels can now access advanced forestry analysis tools regardless of their technical skill level, democratizing scientific computing and enabling on-demand generation of forestry-related products. 

CALIFORNIA, USA — Firefighters in Los Angeles, are fighting misinformation as people claim these fires could have been prevented with forest management. However, experts say there’s much more to minimizing fire risks than just prescribed burns. In an effort to curb wildfires, California aims to treat a million acres of land in the state each year. …ABC10 asked if anything could have been done to prevent the spread of the Southern California fires. “There’s nothing. The conditions that we saw in Southern California last Tuesday were in above the 99.99th percentile of severity,” Adrienne Freeman, with USFS said. …”Even a large scale fire break probably wouldn’t have been effective in keeping the wildfire out of the communities. And once the communities are burning, the spread is from home to home, and it doesn’t really have anything to do with the forest management,” said Chris Field, with Stanford’s Woods Institute for the Environment.

The resignation of Oregon’s top forestry executive last week comes at a pivotal moment for environmental policies in the state. Lawmakers are a week away from convening a legislative session that’s expected to tackle Oregon’s critical wildfire funding issues. And forestry officials are scrambling to finalize two major overhauls to endangered species protections on public and private lands… The state forester has long been a highly political role, juggling policy input from Oregon’s robust timber industry, timber-dependent counties and environmental advocates. “There’s nothing about the job that is easy,” said Board of Forestry chair Jim Kelly… But for many, state forester Cal Mukumoto’s resignation didn’t come as a surprise, even for Mukumoto himself. “Without the confidence of the Legislature and the governor’s office, I think it didn’t leave me many options but to resign,” Mukumoto said.

Firefighters battling the deadly wildfires that raced through the Los Angeles area in January 2025 have been hampered by a limited supply of freshwater. So, when the winds are calm enough, skilled pilots flying planes aptly named Super Scoopers are skimming off 1,500 gallons of seawater at a time and dumping it with high precision on the fires. Using seawater to fight fires can sound like a simple solution – but seawater also has downsides… A novel experiment called TEMPEST was designed to understand how and why historically salt-free coastal forests react to their first exposures to salty water… Our research group is still trying to understand all the factors that limit the forest’s tolerance to salty water, and how our results apply to other ecosystems such as those in the Los Angeles area. Tree leaves turning from green to brown well before fall was a surprise, but there were other surprises hidden in the soil below our feet.

The Washington State Department of Natural Resources (DNR) recently reached a milestone of protecting more than 200,000 acres of private forests threatened by development through the U.S. Forest Service Forest Legacy Program. Over the last year, DNR almost doubled the acres conserved since 1993 when DNR began participating. Washington secured $99,335,000 in funding from the U.S. Forest Service through the Inflation Reduction Act in 2024. “Washington has continued to be a leader in securing funding from the Forest Legacy program, protecting thousands of acres of privately owned forests that could have easily been turned into strip malls and housing developments,” said Hilary Franz, Commissioner of Public Lands for Washington State. “With increasing population growth putting pressure on our forestlands, this program is critical to helping private landowners keep their lands in forestry, ensuring local jobs and wood products, providing public access and recreation, and protecting environmental benefits from clean air and water to critical fish and wildlife habitat.”

Four Oregon lawmakers are calling on Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to help stop a plan that would kill 450,000 barred owls in an effort to save endangered spotted owls over the next 30 years. …In a letter sent Tuesday, state Rep. Ed Diehl, R-Stayton, Rep. David Gomberg, D-Lincoln County, Rep. Virgle Osborne, R-Roseburg, and Sen.-elect Bruce Starr, R-Yamhill and Polk counties, asked the incoming Trump administration officials to stop the reportedly more than $1 billion project, calling it a “budget buster” and “impractical.” …Here is why the Oregon lawmakers are opposed to the plan, what the plan would do and why it is controversial. …“As wildlife professionals, we approached this issue carefully and did not come to this decision lightly,” USFWS Oregon State Supervisor Kessina Lee said in announcing the decision in August.

IDAHO – The Nez Perce-Clearwater National Forest said it will finalize and release the long-awaited revision of its governing plan Friday. For more than two decades, Forest Service employees have been working on updating the document known as a forest plan. It was written in 1987 and designed to last about 15 years. Over that time the agency has started, scrapped and restarted the effort several times, often based on shifting federal rules governing the process. A final draft of the plan was released in the fall of 2023. While the finalized plan won’t be available until Friday, it is not expected to be dramatically different from the draft. …Conservation groups panned the draft plan because it dramatically reduced streams and rivers that would be recommended for protection under the National Wild and Scenic Rivers act from more than 80 to just 11.

The Biden administration appears to be doubling down on a plan to kill barred owls in order to protect the northern spotted owl populations in Northwest forests. But a group of bipartisan Oregon legislators… are calling on the incoming Trump administration’s proposed Department of Government Efficiency to reverse the decision. Two years ago, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced a plan to shoot and kill an estimated 400,000 invasive barred owls at a cost of roughly $1.35 billion over the next three decades. On Wednesday, the Bureau of Land Management said it’s signing on to that plan, too. …“This simply isn’t a sound strategy — fiscally or ecologically,” Oregon state Rep. David Gomberg, D-Otis, said. …Gomberg joined four Republican Oregon lawmakers on Wednesday to issue a bipartisan call to the next president. They asked Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to nix plans for culling barred owls in Northwest forests.

As wildfires continue to burn out of control across Los Angeles, questions have turned to why and how California authorities allowed the perfect conditions — extremely dry, uncleared forests, hillsides and brush — to proliferate during an already dangerous fire season made worse by a Santa Ana wind event that hits the area with relative frequency. Well before those dangerous conditions sparked the massive blazes… this week, the region was already a tinderbox due, in part, to a lack of prescribed fires. …The reason California hasn’t conducted more controlled burnings comes down to existing environmental laws in the U.S. that have posed bureaucratic obstacles to prescribed fires. It often takes years for proposals to go through reviews before any controlled burning can take place. …Lawmakers have introduced legislation that would allow for more controlled burning, but because no laws have been passed, environmental red tape has continued to present challenges to proactive fire management.

LOS ANGELES – Following President Biden’s afternoon briefing regarding the unprecedented Los Angeles fires, Governor Gavin Newsom thanked the Biden-Harris Administration for its swift support for the state that is boosting response efforts and protecting thousands of Californians. The Governor met today (January 9) with Federal Emergency Management Agency Administrator Deanne Criswell in Los Angeles. Yesterday in Santa Monica, Governor Newsom and President Biden were briefed by local and state emergency officials on the Palisades, Eaton, and Hurst fires. Shortly after, President Biden approved Governor Newsom’s request for a Presidential Major Disaster Declaration to support ongoing response efforts related to the major wildfires. Today, at the Governor’s request for more federal assistance, the President authorized increasing federal assistance to cover 100% of California’s fire management and debris removal costs for 180 days, up from the traditional 75%. This declaration makes available federal funding to help state, tribal and local governments cover emergency response costs.

Foresters across the country are asking private landowners for help saving white oak trees, and Missourians have eagerly answered the call. More than 40 people recently signed up to help the University of Missouri Extension and the state Department of Conservation plant and raise white oak tree seedlings. The project is a part of the White Oak Initiative, a more than 15 state effort that aims to make forests more suitable for the trees. Brian Schweiss, a sustainable forestry specialist with MU Extension, said the white oak is a critical component of the forest ecosystem and supports wildlife. However, young trees are struggling. “We have a lot of mature white oak, but we don’t have a lot of young trees that are coming up, replacing the mature trees that are harvested or died.”

PORT ANGELES — The committee of commissioners representing five encumbered counties, including Clallam and Jefferson, have arrived at a recommendation for how timber revenue from replacement lands should be distributed between the counties. The ratio agreed upon by the committee, known as the impact share method, will distribute funds based on how many encumbered acres each county has when compared to the total number of acres encumbered between the five counties. The Washington State Association of Counties (WSAC) will vote on the recommendation at its Feb. 5 meeting, Clallam County Commissioner Mark Ozias said. Encumbered counties are those which have substantial portions of their state trust land set aside for protection of endangered species such as marbled murrelets and northern spotted owls.