Region Archives: US West

Land management in the United States will need a paradigm shift to survive climate change and a legacy of mismanagement. A team experts from four tribes, 10 universities, the Forest Service and a handful of environmental firms across North America are calling for a “two-eyed seeing” approach to land management. This means genuine collaboration between Indigenous and Western governments. The policy recommendations were outlined in a report released April 10. The report was co-led by Oregon State University professors Cristina Eisenberg and Michael Paul Nelson, and fire ecologists Susan Prichard of the University of Washington and Paul Hessburg of the U.S. Forest Service’s Pacific Northwest Research Station. Forest management in the United States is at a crucial juncture, and agencies such as the Forest Service are more open to integrating Indigenous knowledge and practices of land stewardship. …In the Pacific Northwest, two-eyed seeing in part addresses misconceptions about fire and conservation. 

INCLINE VILLAGE, Nev. – Above Matchless Court in the First Creek drainage, new technology is chipping away at the vegetation and trees ecologically, efficiently, and safely. Two remote-controlled BurnBots RCU75s showcased precision mastication Wednesday as part of a demonstration hosted at the Parasol Tahoe Community Foundation by the Tahoe Fund and regional partners including the North Lake Tahoe Fire Protection District, Tahoe Fire and Fuels Team, Tahoe Regional Planning Agency, Tahoe Truckee Community Foundation, and the Martis Fund. “This thing can do 10 times what hand crews can do,” said BurnBot CEO Anukool Lakhina. “BurnBots mission is to make destructive wildfires a thing of the past.” …The $50,000 project will remove 75% of the vegetation on 22 acres in 2 to 3 days. This would have taken 1 hand crew or 20 firefighters 15 days. …BurnBot was created to complement human efforts and address the needed scale of fuels reduction and management, according to BurnBot’s website. 

CASPAR, California — With one exception, all the usual sounds of spring have returned to the Jackson Demonstration State Forest in Caspar. …But there is no sound of chainsaws and falling trees, and there is no chance of more tree-cutting for profit until 2025, possibly even later. A timber harvest plan that uses pre-burning and other environmentally favored techniques will be on the agenda of the Jackson Advisory Group (JAG) on May 8. Even if approved, that harvest would not begin before 2025. …The meeting will feature a new chairperson, Amy Wynn, and several members who have been reappointed. …The agenda includes a discussion of revamping the JAG charter, which could result in restructuring the JAG to solve the most vexing problem the advisory group faces, that of co-management. California Governor Gavin Newsom has pushed for Tribes to be part of managing the forest resources. 

Artificial intelligence tools are helping Oregon wildlife researchers study hard-to-reach threatened species like the marbled murrelet. Researchers with Oregon State University and the U.S. Forest Service collected millions of hours of audio from federal forests in Washington and Oregon between 2018 and 2022. “We cannot physically review all the audio data that we collect,” said OSU College of Forestry doctoral student Matthew Weldy. “So we are reliant on computational tools to filter this data set and find sounds of interest.” To comb through that colossal amount of data, Weldy and other researchers developed a machine learning algorithm to identify the call patterns of marbled murrelets. Their findings — published this month in the Ecological Indicators journal — could help biologists understand which areas are most important to these enigmatic seabirds, thereby improving habitat conservation efforts.

Bob Longatti

The management of cherished US forest lands has been mired in a complex web of regulations and legal battles, often driven by well-intentioned but misguided efforts to protect endangered species. It’s time to address this issue by amending the Endangered Species Act to prevent litigious groups from unnecessarily delaying or canceling vital forest management plans. …Citizens for Sensible Forest Management, a nonpartisan citizens group formed during the Creek Fire, has partnered with the Property and Environment Research Center of Montana. Research conducted by PERC sheds light on the need for amending the ESA in the context of forest management. PERC’s work highlights how the act’s implementation has frequently obstructed responsible forest practices that are essential for maintaining ecological health, reducing wildfire risk and safeguarding human communities. …By reforming the ESA, we can strike a better balance between conservation efforts and responsible forest management.

Grangeville, Idaho — The Nez Perce-Clearwater National Forests are moving ahead with a logging project near Grangeville that was rejected two years ago by a U.S. District judge. An environmental impact statement is being prepared for the so-called “End of the World” project area, which is located about 6 miles south of Grangeville and would encompass about 49,565 acres within the Fish Creek, Cove Creek and North Fork White Bird Creek watersheds. The area is in the heart of Nez Perce-Clearwater Lower Salmon Wildfire Crisis Landscape and is recognized as wildland urban interface by Idaho County. The agency proposes precommercial thinning on 1,098 acres and timber harvest on another 17,262 acres to reduce hazardous wildfire fields and improve forest health. The project also includes 7,900 acres of prescribed burning to reduce hazardous fuels and create a fuel break along the Grangeville-Salmon Road to increase public and firefighter safety.

Robert Bryant

Gretchen Mehmel

Senior managers at both the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service should be held  to account for allowing the misuse of federal grants to facilitate logging in Minnesota’s wildlife management areas and aquatic management areas. Both agencies cooperated to fund and allow aggressive logging, which has devalued habitat and undermined the legitimacy of federal grants. It seems the only accountability that will work is to step outside the respective agencies’ control systems and go public, while relying on the Office of Legislative Auditor to do its work. The OLA recently announced a special review of DNR’s oversight of wildlife management areas. …But there still hasn’t been any substantive changes in policy… The solution is to stop treating wildlife management areas like conventional state forest — we need a timber harvest system for WMAs that considers the best interest of the critters, and not just profit-seeking timber companies.

Washington State University is working with four local community colleges to improve tree canopy cover in several urban areas throughout the state. The five-year project, designed to increase resilience amid a changing climate, is supported by a nearly $1.8 million Inflation Reduction Act grant from the USDA Forest Service Urban and Community Forestry Program. WSU researchers will collaborate with faculty and students to create thriving urban forests in neighborhoods near those schools. …Partners at the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) hope the project will result in a more diverse and skilled workforce while inspiring colleges throughout the country to embrace similar approaches. …“A lot of these students are not necessarily on environmental science career tracks,” Joey Hulbert, at the WSU Puyallup Research & Extension Center and the project’s principal investigator said. “It’s a good opportunity to inspire them to work with trees and reach them before they really decide on a career path.”

Technology giant Apple has partnered with the Salt River Project to thin 30,000 acres of forest in the next decade, including most of the watershed of the C.C. Cragin Reservoir. Reducing the tree densities on that crucial watershed will not only save the 15,000 acre-foot reservoir – it will save about 1.8 billion gallons of water over the next 20 years, according to the SRP. “Apple’s leadership… will help protect Central Arizona communities and the water supply for the Phoenix metropolitan area,” said Elvy Barton, SRP Water and Forest Sustainability senior manager. “In terms of acreage, this is the largest corporate investment in Arizona watershed restoration efforts. This investment is critical because it addresses the wildfire risks of an entire watershed.” The 64,000-acre watershed of the C.C. Cragin Reservoir is among the most critical projects. A fire on the watershed could cause massive post-fire flooding that would fill the reservoir with mud and debris.

Invoking the names of some of California’s most devastating fires ― the Carr Fire, Camp Fire and Dixie Fire ― officials gathered in Redding on Thursday to mark the completion of an expanded air base in Redding they say will be the only one of its kind in the world for battling wildfires. The new base for reloading and refueling air attack planes used to fight wildfires will more than double the number of firefighting aircraft it can accommodate and the amount of fire retardant that can be loaded on aircraft, officials said Thursday. …Before the expansion, the air base had the capacity to only fill two air tankers simultaneously. Officials expect to increase the amount of fire retardant used at the air base. In 2021, the air base used 3 million gallons of fire retardant. With the expansion, that will increase to a capacity of 6 million gallons, according to the forest service.

UTAH – Approved last year, the Ashley National Forest Aspen Restoration Project aims to improve aspen health in the forest by making sure there’s an even distribution of ages. The Forest Service says Ashley aspens skew older right now, which makes the population as a whole more vulnerable to catastrophic fires or other disasters. Both logging and planting are among the tools the Forest Service authorized itself to use to restore younger trees. But four environmental advocacy organizations say “restoration” is a misnomer. “Their idea of ‘restore’ is to cut down aspen trees in roadless areas,” Mike Garrity, executive director at the Alliance for the Wild Rockies (AWR), said. He said his organization has sued the Forest Service more than anyone else. AWR sued the Forest Service together with the Center for Biological Diversity, Native Ecosystems Council and Yellowstone to Uintas Council in federal court April 24.

Nick Smith

Actively managing Washington’s state trust lands and using locally sourced wood is a far better climate solution than leaving forests unmanaged. It is also better than “leasing” these public lands to private interests so polluters can keep polluting. The ongoing campaign to shut down these public working forests ignores the fact that timber harvesting is already prohibited on roughly half of all state trust lands in Western Washington. …These “protected” lands have abundant old growth and mature stands, but also tend to be unnaturally overstocked and vulnerable to carbon-emitting wildfires, insects and disease that increase tree mortality and decay. …If consumers and business are not using wood that’s grown, harvested and made here in Washington, we experience “leakage” effects, such as the importing of wood products from other countries, and “substitution” effects where more carbon-intensive projects, including concrete and steel are used instead of wood. These factors can’t be disregarded in the pursuit of a narrow political agenda.

In addition to more dry eastern Oregon wildfires, we’re likely to experience more wildfires in the wetter western part of the state. “Wildfire is not an ‘if,’ but a ‘when,’ living in Oregon,” said Alison Green, a spokeswoman for the Oregon State Fire Marshal. …Because of all this, the Oregon State Fire Marshal wants Oregonians to create more defensible space around their homes. That is more area between the house and potential wildfire, where vegetation has been modified to reduce the threat and help firefighters defend the house. mThe state fire marshal has set up a number of new programs to help: One involves bringing wood chippers into vulnerable areas so people can chop-up their yard debris for free. Another helps communities clear combustible fuels out of greenway spaces.

OREGON — Activists from the group Pacific Northwest Forest Defense ascended into the uppermost branches of an approximately 150-foot-tall ponderosa pine in southern Oregon. Nearby, they said, road construction for the Poor Windy Forest Management Project, operated by wood product manufacturer Boise Cascade and approved by the Bureau of Land Management, had already begun. While the pine was not part of the project’s timber sale, it stood in the path of a planned road, in danger of becoming a collateral cost. For three weeks, a handful of activists took turns in the tree, sitting on a wooden platform 120 feet in the air. By April 23, the BLM had amended its contract with Boise Cascade. High Country News recently spoke with two Wolf Creek tree-sitters, both of whom chose to use pseudonyms to protect themselves from future legal consequences. 

PAYSON, Arizona — Smoke billowed from Diamond Rim on the Tonto National Forest on Monday afternoon as a helicopter bobbed along overhead, dropping tiny fireballs to stoke flames on the ground. The federally contracted chopper is based for this spring and summer at a new, $4.9 million U.S. Forest Service helicopter base in Star Valley that will aid in both fighting wildfires and igniting prescribed burns like the one on the ridge. The Payson Ranger District’s helitack team, which fights fires via helicopter, at times rappelling to the forest floor, has moved there from trailers that it formerly worked out of at the Payson airport. The Forest Service started work last week on burning some 5,500 acres of brush and dense woodlands north of Payson… to reduce fuels available for what could be an active fire season as drought creeps back across Arizona after a relatively wet 2023.

There was a time when communities all across the Northwest would host logging shows and competitions to celebrate the forest product industries. Local loggers would pit their skills against some of the best in the world in events like pole climbing, axe throwing, and the crowd-favorite “hot saw” competitions. And the best of those shows, and smaller competitions, featured the pros and the amateurs, giving “loggers” of various skill levels from British Columbia to Forks to Flagstaff a chance to compete. Today, there’s only one Pro/Am event, and it’s coming this weekend in Missoula. “Forestry Day” at the Historical Museum at Fort Missoula was a relatively recent addition to the timber competition circuit, starting a little less than 30 years ago. Originally conceived as a way to both celebrate and preserve the legacy and importance of the timber products industry, it’s ended up doing just that.

A critical tree species found in some of America’s most revered national parks is in decline, leading researchers to embark on a race to prevent more from dying off. Whitebark pine, or Pinus albicaulis, is a keystone tree species found in the greater Yellowstone area, play a critical role in the ecosystem in the greater Yellowstone area, Laura Jones, branch chief of vegetation ecology at Grand Teton National Park, said. But the already few whitebark pine trees that exist on the rooftops of the Teton mountain range are dwindling quickly, and the impacts — while still unknown — could be a major disruption to the ecosystem, experts said. …One of the key steps to conserving the species is identifying the trees that are resistant to the pine rust and promoting those trees on the landscape, Jones said.

The Bureau of Land Management oversees much of Utah’s land for grazing, oil and gas, mining and logging. On April 18, the agency published the new Public Lands Rule that puts conservation on par with those commercial uses in an endeavor to build resilience to climate change. The BLM says that the rule restores balance on public lands by establishing “restoration and mitigation leases” and clarifying protections for Areas of Critical Environmental Concern. …Conservation groups laud the rule, arguing that it fills gaps in the current implementation of the agency’s mandate… But industry representatives and Utah politicians say that the change poses a threat to their lifestyles and livelihoods. …Sen. Mike Lee said, “This misguided rule will hamper critical projects such as mineral extraction and strike a harsh blow to small family-run businesses dependent on BLM land access.” Rep. John Curtis agreed, adding it will allow private companies to capitalize on public land.

AUSTRALIA — Some reports have argued that extensive areas of Australia’s forests were kept open through frequent burning by First Nations people. Advocates for widespread thinning and burning of these forests have argued that fire is needed to return these forests to their “pre-invasion” state. A key question then is: what does the evidence say about what tall, wet forests actually looked like 250 years ago? …In a new paper, we looked carefully at the body of evidence. Our analysis shows most areas of mainland mountain ash forests were likely to have been dense and wet at the time of British invasion. The large overstorey eucalypt trees were relatively widely spaced, but there was a dense understorey. …The evidence we compiled all indicates mountain ash forests were dense, wet environments, not open and park-like. …Based on this evidence, we should not be deliberately burning or thinning these forests.

MINNESOTA — The U.S. Forest Service is gearing up to launch a spruce budworm response project in Cook County this summer as the prevalence of the spruce budworm expands across northeastern Minnesota. Spruce budworm, a native insect that feeds on the needles of spruce and balsam fir, fluctuates in 30-40-year cycles. The last influx of spruce budworm occurred in the 1980s in Cook County. As a preventative mitigation effort, this summer, the Forest Service intends to implement a Blue Cascade Spruce Budworm Response and Restoration Project stretching from the Caribou Trail to County Road 14, east of Grand Marais. The entire project will encompass over 2000 acres and focus on vegetation management, reducing hazardous fuels, and minimizing the density of spruce plantations to allow for more ecologically appropriate mixed-forest types.

“Urban forestry matters because that’s where people live. So, if we want to help people, we have to go where they are,” said Francisco Escobedo, a research social scientist with the Forest Service’s Pacific Southwest Research Station. …Communities can plant trees and glean many benefits from urban forests, said Escobedo. These benefits include reducing summer peak temperatures, improving air quality, reducing stormwater run-off, increasing property values, providing wildlife habitat, and strengthening neighborhood social connections. …Los Angeles averages about 267 days of sun a year. Its rays beat down on rooftops, roads, parking lots, cars and the tops of heads. About a fifth of the city’s trees and the shade they provide grow where only 1% of its residents live. This scarcity is not lost on Los Angeles and county city planners, who have recently been coming together to grow urban forests in the nation’s second-largest city.

HELENA, Montana — Two conservation groups and the U.S. Forest Service and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service have reached a settlement on a lawsuit over a a 20-year logging and burning project in the Helena-Lewis and Clark National Forest, the plaintiffs said. Native Ecosystems Council and Alliance for the Wild Rockies said the Middleman Project that they stopped over 110 miles of road construction and reconstruction in the forest and halted over 5,000 acres of commercial logging in lynx and grizzly habitat. …The project, approved in 2021, was meant to reduce wildfire fuels and improve forest health and rangeland habitat conditions, forest officials said. It was also designed to maintain and improve water quality and aquatic habitat through a variety of methods including logging. The conservation groups sued in September, saying the project violated the National Environmental Policy Act, the National Forest Management Act, Endangered Species Act and the Administrative Procedure Act.