Region Archives: US West

Phoenix has joined with Arizona Electric Power and Water Utility Company (SRP) in thinning Arizona forests to prevent wildfires that endanger watersheds serving the Valley. The city has contributed more than $1 million to the Biomass Power Partnership to help pay for bioenergy that supports strategic thinning across the Salt River and Verde River watersheds. “Joining with Salt River Project in this partnership is a crucial step towards protecting our forests and watersheds,” Phoenix Water Service Director Troy Hayes said. “By investing in forest thinning projects and biomass power generation, we are not only mitigating the risk of catastrophic fires but also ensuring the sustainability and quality of our water supply.” SRP signed an agreement with several municipalities to provide funding… that generates renewable bioenergy by processing the small trees that are removed through forest thinning projects in northern Arizona.

Colorado State University civil and environmental engineering Professor Hussam Mahmoud has been awarded a three-year, $2.7 million grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation for his work predicting how wildfires behave where neighborhoods and wildlands meet. Mahmoud’s goal is to help communities worldwide become more resilient. He expects the new funding will lead to tools that municipalities, businesses, and even homeowners can use to evaluate risks to their communities. …Mahmoud’s groundbreaking research uses graph theory to model wildfire behavior. Graph theory analyzes processes in networks, such as disease transmission. Where wildlands and urban developments meet, fire can spread in the same way contagions pass from one person to another. With increased data, the model has gained sophistication.

Timber companies faced another blow in court this week, after a D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the expansion of the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument in Southern Oregon. The decision on Tuesday rejects claims by the timber trade group American Forest Resource Council that expansion of the monument in 2017 conflicts with laws requiring the government to set aside land for timber production. The ruling is a win for environmental groups, that have sought to protect this incredibly diverse region from logging. The monument lies on the intersection of the Cascade, Siskiyou and Klamath mountain ranges. This court ruling is similar to another decision by the 9th Circuit Court in April. That lawsuit was filed by the Oregon-based timber company Murphy, which made similar arguments. In both cases, the courts said the government is well within its power to protect these lands from timber harvesting. 

CALIFORNIA — Redding residents and motorists on Highway 299 and Interstate 5 may see a smoke plume this week near Shasta College. If weather conditions are safe enough, firefighters plan a controlled burn between 7 a.m. and 5 p.m. on Thursday in the Ross Ranch area, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. …July is the first time this year the 101-acre grassy area has been dry enough to burn it. …While burning the grassy property will help remove flammable grass and reduce fire risk for nearby communities, it will also give new fire personnel a chance to train on a live fire, he said. But with temperatures rising over 100 degrees daily, firefighters may have to snuff out this week’s burn plan. Cal Fire will monitor weather conditions this week.

© Bugwood.org

SANTA ROSA — An invasive pest has been found in oak trees in a west Santa Rosa neighborhood that has officials and tree experts sounding an alarm. While the number of dying, infected trees is on the rise, removing them may make the problem even worse. …invasive beetle is called the Mediterranean Oak Borer. Prevalent in a number of European countries, it was first discovered in California about six years ago in the Calistoga area. There is a suspicion that it arrived Northern California on some imported wood used for making wine barrels. UC Davis plant pathologist Dr. Akif Eskalen says the beetles are taking advantage of how weak many trees are after three years of extreme drought. …It may seem like the solution is to remove the infected trees but Merlin Schlumberger, the master arborist who identified the borers in Fresco’s tree, said preventing further spread of the pest poses a difficult dilemma for tree cutters.

OREGON — With smoke burning their eyes and lungs, and the heat from the sun and flaming piles of brush beating into them, nearly 200 young firefighters faced their first live fire. Over five days of intense instruction, the newly certified wildland firefighters completed their training in preparation for 2023’s fire season, which officially began July 1. On June 30, in a culmination of all their in-class and hands-on training, the trainees fought a carefully set series of burning piles of dried grass and wood intended to mimic a genuine wildfire. …The Mid-Willamette Valley Interagency Wildland Fire School in Sweet Home is an annual five-day course held in the last week of June. …Trainees learn about fire behavior, suppression tactics, weather impacts, mapping, compass use, teamwork, leadership, safety and fire investigation. The majority of the trainees earned their Firefighter 2 certification, qualifying them for an entry-level position. This certification meets a national standard.

POTOMAC – A chunk of new funding aimed at fighting wildland fires got a reveal from the U.S. Deputy Secretary of the Interior during a tour of the Blackfoot River Corridor on Wednesday. Deputy Secretary of the Interior Tommy Beaudreau announced $185 million in federal investments through the Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. About $8.4 million of that will be directly funneled to fire prevention in Montana. …Fire managers know what work needs to be done to protect forested lands, Beaudreau said, but investments and resources have been lacking. The Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, two large spending bills passed last year, help alleviate that. …Federal money bolsters the BLM’s partnerships with Tribes and local nonprofits to manage fire mitigation efforts. The funding announcement will support pay for supplements and training opportunities for wildland firefighters. 

Arizona’s wildfire managers have struggled to keep up with thinning small diameter trees on the forest floor in recent years. Salt River Project will join with a number of metro Phoenix cities to help reduce the fuel load. A lot of Arizona’s forests have too many small trees, which make great kindling but are hard to sell on the open market. The buildup has led to bigger wildfires. That can devastate watersheds, which have natural breaks that help prevent post-fire flooding. So SRP will take what foresters remove in thinning projects and send it to a Snowflake power plant, where it will be converted to bioenergy. Elvy Barton, a spokeswoman for SRP, says that five Valley cities will invest in the project, which will be key to its success. 

NEVADA CITY, CALIF. — Tahoe National Forest has issued the record of decision (ROD) for its North Yuba Landscape Resilience Project. The forest and partners will now begin implementing the 275,000-acre vegetation and fuels management project in the North Yuba watershed over the next 15 to 20 years. The project aims to improve forest health, protect communities and reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfire within the project area. “I would like to credit the hard work of Forest Service staff and our partners for helping us get here,” said Tahoe National Forest Supervisor Eli Ilano. “Because of the dedication of individuals that have come together with a common goal, we are now able to move forward with the work so desperately needed on the North Yuba Landscape.” The ROD is the last step in the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) environmental impact statement process before a federal agency may implement a project.

SALEM, Ore. — The Oregon Department of Forestry said Tuesday it will soon begin work with Oregon State University to update the disputed, withdrawn wildfire hazard map, making revisions based on direction provided in Senate Bill 80, passed by the 2023 Oregon Legislature.  This is in addition to the work ODF and OSU have been doing to incorporate feedback provided by landowners and local governments following last year’s initial map rollout.  Senate Bill 80 advances Oregon’s wildfire programs established by the 2021 Legislature’s Senate Bill 762. Senate Natural Resources Committee Chair Jeff Golden (D-Rogue Valley), guided SB 80 towards passage.  “The revisions this bill makes,” said Golden, “address the plain fact that we’ll meet the massive wildfire challenge ahead only through a rock-solid collaboration between state and federal agencies, local officials, community leaders and affected property owners. We’ll succeed if Oregonians see this as their program, not the government’s.

Butte Falls is a small town in Southern Oregon, about an hour’s drive northeast of Medford. The 400 or so residents there are surrounded by a ring of what was until recently privately owned forest. But a decades-long effort by the town to buy and manage the land itself has finally come to fruition, with the help of state, federal and private funding — and too many agencies and elected officials to list.  As reported by Inside Climate News and Columbia Insight, Butte Falls will be making forest management decisions that preserve old-growth trees, clear wildfire fuel and directly encourage outdoor tourism. Trish Callahan is the mayor of Butte Falls. She joins us to talk about the effort and its implications for the future of the town.

Nearly 700 sites along Tongass National Forest streams could obstruct fish from migrating says a new report from the U.S. Forest Service. But there is a plan to deal with the old roads and culverts causing the problems. Restoring forest land from old logging projects has been a tough lesson to learn. Back in the 50s and 60s, timber was harvested throughout Southeast Alaska without plans for how all the construction – like roads, culverts, and bridges — would affect fish habitats as they deteriorate in the years to come.  And that deterioration has proved to be a big problem for fish. …Sheila Jacobson, fisheries program manager for the U.S. Forest Service is leading a new project that seeks to restore all 700 of the crossings on the Tongass that aren’t up to current federal standards. She says migrating fish including salmon, steelhead, and trout swim into human-caused barriers, leftover from those days of heavy logging.

…the US Forest Service has been rather quiet about its plans for one of the largest logging programs ever proposed for Plumas County. However, public land owners (that’s you, by the way) should be aware that the Forest Service is planning to authorize industrial logging and other forest “treatment” activities starting this year on more than 217,000 acres of public land bordering Plumas County communities. …While being marketed to the public as a “forest thinning project” and “community wildfire defense” is truthfully a large-scale, industrial logging project dressed up as a fire safety project playing to (legitimate) public fears over wildfire. …What we really need for “community protection” from wildfires are grants for community and home hardening and defensible space around structures, but of $650 million being spent on this project, there is not a single cent allocated for [that]. …human caused climate warming, not “overgrown forests” cause extreme fires…

Due to high turnover and competition with federal agencies, half of the state of Idaho’s seasonal wildland firefighters are new, which has resulted in fewer experienced firefighters filling leadership positions, state officials said. The state has full staffing overall with 170 seasonal firefighters, said Josh Harvey, the Idaho Department of Lands fire management chief. But the state is lacking experienced personnel, such as incident commanders and qualified engine bosses, who each lead a single fire engine and its personnel. “Experienced firefighters really do have a major impact on how successful we are and keeping our folks safe,” Harvey said. “We’ve got the staff. It’s just more of a concern to us if we had another fire season where fires really are explosive. It creates situations where inexperienced firefighters may not recognize some hazards they are facing.”

REDLANDS, Calif.–Land-use/Land-cover (LULC) maps contextualize and quantify the impacts of earth processes and human activity on the environment. Organizations around the world are now using these tools to inform policy and land management decisions around issues like sustainable development. In continued support of these users and their goals, Esri, the global leader in location intelligence, in partnership with Impact Observatory, has released a global land-use/land-cover map of the world based on the most up-to-date 10-meter Sentinel-2 satellite data for every year since 2017. Following the latest 2022 data released earlier this year, the artificial intelligence (AI) model for classification has been improved, making the maps more temporally consistent.

A panel of regional experts will spend the next two years updating a nearly 30-year-old plan for how to manage and protect millions of acres of federal forestland in the Northwest. U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack on Friday appointed 21 people, more than half of whom are based in Oregon, to the Northwest Forest Plan Advisory Committee. Committee members will recommend policies to federal agencies updating the Northwest Forest Plan, focusing specifically on the impacts of climate change. The original plan was created in 1994 and was supposed to have been updated 15 years ago, but it didn’t become a priority again until April 2022, when President Joe Biden issued an executive order on strengthening the nation’s forests. The order directs federal agencies to revisit and create plans to preserve the nation’s forests, especially old-growth forests, and ensure they contribute to climate change solutions.

WASHINGTON – The U.S. Department of Agriculture has established and appointed members to a new Federal Advisory Committee to provide advice and recommendations on modernizing landscape management across national forests within the Northwest Forest Plan area in Washington, Oregon and Northern California. The committee will make recommendations focused on a climate-informed amendment of the Northwest Forest Plan to update management direction so that national forests are managed sustainably, adapted to climate change, and resilient to wildfire, insects, disease, and other disturbances, while meeting the needs of local communities. …“This committee will also be asked to help reshape ways we engage with communities and deepen our connections with tribes as we go through the Northwest Forest Plan amendment process,” said Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack.

Brian Kittler

Reckon spoke with Brian Kittler, the vice president of forest restoration at American Forests, a 150-year-old Chicago-based non-profit dedicated to protecting and restoring healthy forest ecosystems. Over the last decade, the United States has lost 2 million hectares of natural forest. That’s about 3.7 million football fields worth. Deforestation, illegal logging, wildfires and climate change are some of the biggest issues facing our precious forests, and the situation is not improving. “At American Forests we tend to focus on forest ecosystems that are important for wildlife habitat, how they provide water to human communities, carbon storage, and for biodiversity values. Much of what we do is focused on recovering and helping forests that have experienced severe impacts from wildfires and other disturbances,” said Kittler. 

The Washington State Board of Natural Resources approved the Department of Natural Resources’ purchase of 119 acres of forestland in Wahkiakum County during its meeting Wednesday morning. The parcel, 14 miles northeast of Cathlamet, will be managed as part of DNR’s Elochoman State Forest, which is adjacent to the property’s north, south and east. It will be managed to raise revenue to support Wahkiakum County services. The $495,000 purchase price was paid with funds awarded to DNR by the Legislature to help replace lands encumbered by habitat requirements under the Endangered Species Act. “Acquiring these high-quality working forests in Wahkiakum County will increase our future revenue potential, ensure this land remains forested, and make the management of state lands easier by providing permanent access,” said Commissioner of Public Lands Hilary Franz, who oversees DNR.

The U.S. Forest Service awarded grants this summer that could help revitalize the logging industry in the Tongass National Forest. Two businesses in Southeast have received hundreds of thousands of dollars to re-tool their mills. Those grants could help tackle housing shortages in local communities. In Petersburg, Brett Martin and his partner Mike Duman run Alaska Timber & Truss. This mill is about to get a refurb. It’s one of just two in Alaska awarded Forest Service grants to upgrade its saw. JK Forest Products in Thorne Bay got one grant. Over in Petersburg, Martin and Duman were given $300,000 for a small log sawmill upgrade. But this money isn’t just for splashing out on fancy new machinery. The plan is pretty ambitious — to breathe new life into a lagging industry and slash the cost of timber for local communities.

More than a decade after it was approved, a forest health and wildfire fuels mitigation project near Breckenridge and Blue River is turning some heads. The White River National Forest gave final approval to the project in 2011, but the most recent phase of clearcutting to establish fuel breaks has raised some questions from residents. “I’m hearing all about it,” Blue River Town Manager Michelle Eddy said. “It’s definitely a bit more visible. But it’s one of those things — we know it will all grow in.” …The Blue River West Hazardous Fuels Project is a 121-acre fuel break located near Blue River, just west of and paralleling Colorado Highway 9. …Eddy said she has lived in regions with wildfire mitigation projects for years. Having experienced evacuations two times — and receiving many evacuation alerts other times — she said she understands the importance of these projects and uses them as an opportunity to educate residents.

The Biden administration is trying to turn the tide on worsening wildfires in the U.S. West through a multibillion dollar cleanup of forests choked with dead trees and undergrowth. Yet one year in, federal land managers are scrambling to catch up… And they’ve skipped over some highly at-risk communities to work in less threatened areas …mixed early results from the administration’s initiative underscore the challenge of reversing decades of lax forest management and aggressive fire suppression that allowed many woodlands to become tinderboxes. …Hindering the Forest Service nationwide is a shortage of workers to cut and remove trees on the scale demanded, government officials and forestry experts say. Litigation ties up many projects, with environmental reviews taking three years on average before work begins …Another problem: Thinning operations aren’t allowed in federally designated wilderness areas. That puts off limits about a third of National Forest areas

Brennan Garrelts

CANYONVILLE, Ore. — Brennan Garrelts’ “passion for forestry” was recently recognized by the Oregon Society of American Foresters. Garrelts was honored with the Forester of the Year Award for 2022 at the society’s annual conference. The 39-year-old is a Lone Rock Timber Company vice president who oversees the Roseburg-based company’s logging company. His responsibilities include managing timber cutting, logging, road construction, trucking and mechanic shop operations. He’s also Lone Rock’s director of forest management policy and governmental affairs and director of wildland fire suppression. A press release states the award is given annually in recognition of the recipient’s contributions on both the professional and public levels. This includes the use of professional skills to advance the forestry field in Oregon and through public service which benefits the community.

On the morning of July 5, dozens of community members and organizers from Cascadia Forest Defenders protested outside of Sierra Pacific Industries (formerly Seneca timber) to stand in solidarity against timber sales. The protest took place outside gate four of SPI. Chants of “clearcuts? No way. Not ever. Not today,” took place while blocking the way of semi trucks and workers. Upon arrival, SPI workers told protesters where they could legally stand. After listening, protesters took place between the entrance gates of SPI just off SPI property. SPI operation trucks were blocked in by protesters who were locked down using a linked chain connecting three chairs between gates, singing about saving the future and acting now. …Riley Fields, a Cascadia Forest Defender, said it’s important to send a message to SPI that the community will do anything to stop the N126 sale and the sale of public forests and public lands. 

Scott Goetz

A recent study that uses 3D satellite imagery collected by technology on the International Space Station found that worldwide protected forests have an additional 9.65 billion metric tons of carbon stored in their aboveground biomass compared to ecologically similar unprotected areas—a finding that quantifies just how important protected areas are in our continued climate mitigation efforts. The study, published in Nature Communications by researchers at the University of Maryland (UMD), Northern Arizona University, University of Arizona, Conservation International and more, demonstrates the importance of protecting existing plant life, especially forests, in the global fight against climate change. “This research is vitally important for documenting the value of protected areas… for the climate benefits provided by forests, which sequester carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and fix it into aboveground biomass,” said Scott Goetz, a professor at NAU and co-author of the study.