Region Archives: US West

…Just outside of Coram on the Flathead National Forest independent contractors have gathered for a logging operation under a contract with Weyerhaeuser.  Forests have a life cycle, according to Paul Donnellon, a supervisory forester with the Flathead Forest who is visiting the site on this day. Trees grow, and they compete with each other — some die, some live, some fall, some burn.  The Lake Five area, where the operation is located, is a prime example of the cycle of forestland life.  …The land itself near Lake Five is a part of the wildland urban interface, which means it is a mix of private land, houses, businesses and national forest land. The Forest Service, while looking at long-term management goals for the forest, assessed that a logging operation would be beneficial in the area, Donnellon said. 

The state Department of Natural Resources is planning to torch more than 2,100 acres this spring in an aim to prevent more severe wildfires as things heat up this summer.  Lawmakers in 2021 earmarked $500 million for wildfire prevention and forest health treatments such as these prescribed burns. After evaluating weather and wind patterns, fire risk and ecological benefits, DNR officials zeroed in on seven sites in Klickitat, Kittitas, Okanogan and Spokane counties that could provide the biggest bang for their buck this spring.  …Other areas targeted for prescribed burns include those that were recently thinned, a process of removing some trees in a forest stand to reduce density. Research has shown that combining mechanical thinning with prescribed fire tends to do a lot better than just one or the other for both long-term resilience and for how that landscape will interact with a wildfire, said Will Rubin, a DNR spokesperson.

The black-backed woodpecker once thought to limit itself to recently burned areas can breed successfully in the unburned parts of fire-prone landscapes too, according to a study that holds key implications for improved conservation and forest management efforts. The research led by Mark Kerstens and Jim Rivers in the Oregon State University College of Forestry, sheds new light on the woodpecker, which lives throughout northern North America. Because woodpecker populations are sensitive to large-scale forest disturbances, they serve as an indicator for guiding management decisions, the researchers note. Woodpeckers exert strong influence on the surrounding ecological community by creating nesting sites that benefit a range of vertebrates and other organisms. The black-backed woodpecker has become a species of conservation concern because of habitat loss resulting from postfire management of burned areas as wildfires have grown in size and intensity in recent decades, the scientists say.

The Oregon Department of Forestry settled a lawsuit with an environmental group on Thursday that will mean larger buffers between logging roads and streams.  The Center for Biological Diversity sued the department in 2018 alleging it was endangering federally protected coho salmon by building logging roads that caused sediment to spill into streams in Tillamook and Clatsop state forests.  The lawsuit says state crews would carve roads through forested areas for clear-cutting and timber sales, and those roads were on steep slopes above streams crucial to Oregon Coast coho salmon. It says a lack of adequate buffers caused sediment to spill into streams, and sometimes triggered landslides.  …As part of the agreement, ODF will expand stream buffers from 25 feet to 120 feet — meaning the department can’t conduct logging or thinning within those zones. These protections apply to all fish-bearing streams, as well as large and medium streams that don’t typically bear fish. 

If we thin it – can we save it? That’s the high-stakes question at the heart of a $600,000 grant that will help a team of Northern Arizona University researchers conclusively demonstrate the value of controlled burns and thinning projects in the new era of megafires. The NASA grant will allow the Flagstaff team of scientists to meticulously monitor the effect of thinning projects in northern Arizona. The team will use the new thermal sensor ECOSTRESS aboard the International Space Station to measure soil moisture and evapotranspiration by plants. They can measure the moisture balance in thinned forests to similar, unthinned areas. This will help determine the impact of thinning and controlled burns on watersheds, tree growth and survival, drought resistance and a host of other questions. Cyber systems professor Temuulen Sankey will lead the team.

The Biden administration and industry groups pledged Thursday to promote logging practices and research intended to protect imperiled species on private forest lands. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and two forest products organizations signed a memorandum promising cooperation on projects that could boost struggling populations of pollinating insects, birds, fish and mammals. “It underscores the importance of the contributions private forest owners make to wildlife and natural resource conservation,” service Director Martha Williams said.” It was among several initiatives President Joe Biden announced this week to prevent loss of wildlife habitat. …The agreement between the government, the National Alliance of Forest Owners and the National Council for Air and Stream Improvement aims to halt a “historical pattern of costly litigation and counterproductive conflict” between industry and regulators, said Eric Breitling.

In just two years, wildfire has killed an estimated 13% to 19% of all mature giant sequoia trees. These most massive of trees grow only on certain western slopes of the Sierra Nevada, the mountain range that divides California’s Central Valley farmland from the Great Basin Desert. “No description can give anything like an adequate idea of their singular majesty, much less of their beauty,” said conservationist John Muir. …national parks that have protected many sequoia groves from logging, but our concern about wildfires led to government-mandated fire suppression for more than 100 years. Through a federal agency’s zeal, the big trees are in trouble. In the Sierra Madre’s fire regime, developed over centuries, sequoia groves burned every 6 to 35 years. Wildfire thinned the smaller trees… Without fire, sequoia cones don’t open and spread their seeds. The same fire also creates openings in the forest canopy, giving seedlings the sunlight they need to survive.

A new study shows conifer forests in the West are struggling to regrow after wildfires. KNAU’s Melissa Sevigny reports, the researchers say forest management practices can help.  … Kyle Rodman of Northern Arizona University is one of the study’s authors. “One thing that that a lot of us have been noticing is just a lack of sufficient recovery in fires that have happened in the Southwestern US and other parts of the West,” he says.  That’s due to more severe fires and to the warmer, drier conditions brought on by climate change. The researchers project about a quarter of the study area is unlikely to be able to regrow conifers by mid-century. …Robles says thinning and prescribed or managed burns can help reduce the severity of wildfires in ponderosa pine forests, while other types of forests may need re-vegetation efforts.

MISSOULA, Mont. — The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service is investing over $9 million in wildfire protection projects in Idaho, Montana and North Dakota as part of the Community Wildfire Defense Grant program.  The program is designed to help different communities, nonprofit organizations, state forestry agencies and Alaska-native corporations with planning and mitigating wildfire risks on tribal, state and private lands.  Four projects including the Blackfoot Watershed Fire Refugia, the Lincoln County Wildland Urban Interface Communities Wildfire Risk Mitigation Campaign, North Gallatin Front Wildland Urban Interface Mitigation Project and Treasure County Community Wildfire Protection Plan Update and Modernization are currently being selected for the first round of funding in Montana. …The funding is made possible by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.

For the past several years, the U.S. Forest Service has tried to harness natural wildfires to improve forest health and wildlife habitat in the West’s forests, where decades of fire suppression have left many areas overgrown and cluttered with fuels.   The goal is to restore wildfire’s place in the ecosystem when it is practical and safe — but the policy occasionally results in unwanted, even catastrophic outcomes.  Should the Forest Service be held liable for damages to private property in cases where a “managed,” but otherwise naturally occurring wildfire gets whipped into an unmanageable destructive monster?  That question is now before a Utah federal judge hearing a lawsuit targeting decisions by the Uinta-Wasatch-Cache National Forest to not immediately suppress two late-season wildfires in 2018, as well as the policy directives that led to those decisions.

A collection of environmental groups suing the U.S. Forest Service and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service over a logging project in grizzly habitat north of Troy has asked a court to halt work on the project while their lawsuit plays out. The Center for Biological Diversity, Alliance for the Wild Rockies, WildEarth Guardians, Native Ecosystems Council and Yaak Valley Forest Council sued the federal agencies last year over the Kootenai National Forest’s Knotty Pine Project. The Kootenai Tribe of Idaho intervened as a defendant alongside the federal agencies. The project entails commercial logging and fuels thinning in an area about 10 miles north-northwest of Troy, around where Yaak River Road meets U.S. Highway 2 just east of the Idaho-Montana border. The project proposes logging 5,070 acres, including 1,000 acres of clear-cut, scattered across several individual units. Most of the work is proposed for northeast of Highway 2 and northwest of Yaak River Road. 

Due to their massive resources and global reach, businesses could contribute immensely to global efforts to reduce biodiversity loss. Within the last few years, businesses have indeed shown interest in biodiversity conservation. However, their current efforts are too limited and perfunctory to be consequential for achieving the 2050 vision for biodiversity. This article proposes the following five distinct yet mutually reinforcing strategies for bringing about transformative change in how businesses can contribute substantively to biodiversity conservation: (i) making biodiversity protection every business’s business, (ii) giving biodiversity a central stage in the corporate sustainability discourse, (iii) holding companies accountable for biodiversity impacts across their entire supply-chains, (iv) developing biodiversity-friendly organizational cultures so that employees become biodiversity champions, and (v) creating third-party certifications to benchmark and evaluate biodiversity-friendly business practices.

So let’s see how fluent you are in “logger-speak.” Here are some words or phrases you may be familiar with…or maybe not.

• Widow Maker:  A dead, detached limb that is hung up in a tree above you.
• Highball or Highball It:Word or phrase indicating the need to “hurry” — often for safety reasons.
• Hit the Skids: Placing a log on skids so that it could be slid downhill. Generally the phrase came to mean a quick downturn of fortunes.
• Long Logger: A logger who worked on logs 40 feet long or longer.
• Bullwhacker: The person who was responsible for the oxen and use of the ox teams.
• Hoot-nanny: A small device that was used to hold the crosscut saw in place while sawing the log from underneath.
• Swedish Fiddle: A crosscut saw. It was said that when the saw was in use, it sometimes sounded like a fiddle.

The 85th Annual Oregon Logging Conference boasted more registered attendees and exhibitors this year. The inclement weather did cause the cancellation of elementary school tours and prevented some of the students from attending the Future Forestry Workers Career Day. But the setback did not dampen the spirits of all those who came out to the Lane Event Center and Fairgrounds in Eugene, OR.  Overall, pre-registered attendance was up 18% and exhibitor participation was up 17% over last year. As the weather improved during the Oregon Logging Conference (OLC), so did attendance, especially on the final day of the Conference, which is Family Day, and open to the public with no admission charge.   …Conference Manager Rikki Wellman said registration was up this year and there were more displays including several first-time exhibitors. 

The Flathead National Forest has proposed logging, thinning and prescribed burning on 14,532 acres of land west of Whitefish and Kalispell. The proposal, named the Cyclone Bill Project, is located about 13 miles west of Whitefish. The project area encompasses about 40,880 acres stretching from around Tally Lake on the north end to just north of Ashley Lake on the south. But work has been proposed only on 14,532 acres within that project area, scattered across 504 individual units of varying size. According to a proposed action released last week, the project aims to reduce tree density and fuel loading, improve vegetation diversity and resilience to disease, and offer economic benefit through logging in an area that Montana, Flathead County and the U.S. Forest Service have prioritized for active forest management.

KALISPELL, Montana — In December, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service listed the whitebark pine as “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act, even as efforts to protect the keystone species have been underway for 25 years on the Flathead National Forest and at Whitefish Mountain Resort, which in 2016 earned the designation as the nation’s first “Whitebark Pine Friendly Ski Area.” This week, the resort on Big Mountain announced it had been recertified by the Whitebark Pine Ecosystem Foundation. …The key to unlocking a strategy for recovery lies in the success of a program to promote extra-hearty strains of whitebark pine that have developed a genetic resistance to blister rust. …Today, Whitefish Mountain Resort is one of 14 sites on the Flathead National Forest where researchers are trying to reverse the decline.

John Thune

WASHINGTON — U.S. Sen. John Thune, a longtime member of the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry, today reintroduced the Expediting Forest Restoration and Recovery Act. This legislation would require the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) to expedite treatment of more than 70 million acres of National Forest System lands, in consultation with states, that have been identified as in need of treatment to reduce the threat of insect and disease infestations and catastrophic wildfires. “Proactive management plays a critical role in keeping the Black Hills National Forest healthy and supporting the forest products industry, which supports jobs in rural communities,” said Thune. “This legislation would ensure the Black Hills National Forest and other forests receive the expedited treatment they need in order to mitigate the threat of insect infestations and wildfires.”

Deb Haaland

The Biden administration said on Tuesday it rescinded a land swap deal struck by former President Donald Trump’s interior secretary that would have allowed a new road to cut through an Alaska wildlife refuge.  The decision comes as President Joe Biden’s administration faces heavy criticism from environmental groups for its approval earlier this week of a massive oil and gas development in Alaska’s Arctic.  In a statement, the Interior Department said Secretary Deb Haaland withdrew the 2019 land exchange deal between the agency and the Alaska native King Cove Corporation, but would be open to examining other proposals to replace it. …The deal set by Trump’s Interior Secretary David Bernhardt in 2019 was particularly controversial because it left open the door to commercial use of the road.

In the days after a record-breaking heat wave baked the Pacific Northwest in 2021, state and federal foresters heard reports of damaged and dying trees across Oregon and Washington. Willamette Valley Christmas tree farmers had lost up to 60% of their popular noble firs, while caretakers at Portland’s Hoyt Arboretum said Douglas firs, their state tree, dropped more needles than ever seen before. Timber plantations reported massive losses among their youngest trees, with some losing nearly all of that year’s plantings. …Nearly all of the research on climate-related stress in trees has focused only on the impact of insufficient water. But it turns out that trees respond quite differently to extreme heat versus prolonged drought. A new study on the heat dome is focused on untangling the effects of both conditions. Given that extreme heat and drought are both becoming more common and intense, foresters and tree farmers will need tools to prepare for each.

The U.S. Forest Service’s Rocky Mountain Regional Office announced March 1 that the Arapaho and Roosevelt National Forests will receive $39 million through the disaster supplement of the federal omnibus legislation. The money will fund more fire rehabilitation efforts in the areas of the Cameron Peak and East Troublesome fires. A news release stated that water providers and the forest managers completed $15 million of emergency watershed stabilization in 2021 using funding from the water providers and state grants. It also mentioned $21.2 million of slope stabilization work done on National Forest lands in northern Colorado in 2022 with previous disaster supplemental funding, according to a forest service news release. The new federal funds will continue stabilization efforts on 50,000 acres and start long-term rehabilitation work like road and trail repairs, reforestation, noxious weed containment, project planning and recreation facility repairs.

OREGON — Roughly two years after the devastating blaze, recovery efforts from the Holiday Farm Fire continue in the McKenzie River Corridor. …Salvage efforts since fall of 2020 have found many trees that have suffered extensive damage, enough that many aren’t usable for much. But leaving these around — along with other debris — creates fuel for future wildfires.But nearby, workers are also operating an open metal chamber that’s taking all that slash, and incinerating it. Jonas Parker, a district hydrologist and soil scientist with the Bureau of Land Management, explained to KLCC how the air current burner — in this case, a CharBoss — works. …Through integrating biochar into the affected areas, the soil can be enriched and also made less apt to let water flow away. And the CharBoss contains a lot of the burning matter within its chamber, which means less smoke released into the air.

DAVENPORT, California — This year marks my 50-year anniversary in the forest products industry, as well as my 40th year working in the redwood forests on the Central Coast of California. These pending milestones have caused me to reflect on my industry and my observations during this time. One thing that stands out is how disconnected most of our population has become regarding the countless products we use. This includes how they are produced, where they come from, and what are the implications to the environment—and the planet, for that matter. This disconnectedness is not a harsh criticism. It is more a recognition of countless recent changes in society. In my career I’ve had numerous conversations with people who are passionate about the issue of cutting trees. Some of these conversations have been congenial. Some not so much.

Betsy Johnson

Former candidate for Oregon governor Betsy Johnson and a convoy of about 100 loggers, timber owners and students on Wednesday blasted an increasingly controversial plan for 600,000 acres of state forests they say would lead to a decline in logging, revenue for communities and jobs in the state’s timber industry. Their wrath is centered on what’s known as a Habitat Conservation Plan, currently being crafted by the Oregon Department of Forestry to help manage Oregon’s state forests for the next seven decades. Timber groups say they were originally told the plan would allow harvest of 225 to 250 million board feet of timber annually — close to the most recent 10 year average. However, projected harvest levels of 165 to 182.5 million board feet for 2024 and 2025, incorporating elements of the plan, have sounded alarm bells across Oregon’s forestry sector.

CORVALLIS, Oregon — A crowd of about 100 people gathered at the Oregon Board of Forestry’s meeting to blast a proposed habitat conservation plan that would restrict logging on 640,000 acres of state forests west of the Cascade Range. …Opponents of the plan, or HCP, testified that reductions in timber harvest will threaten high-paying jobs and decrease revenue for essential services in rural communities, including schools, public safety, fire protection and health care. While discussion of the HCP was not on the board’s agenda, students, loggers, industry representatives and elected officials took turns speaking during an open public comment session. “These are lifetime decisions,” said Courtney Bangs, a Clatsop County commissioner. “Take time, do the work (and) get the best deal, before these communities are gutted.” …The plan is essentially an agreement that the forests will be managed to mitigate harm to 17 species that are either listed as endangered, or could be listed.

WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Senators Jim Risch (R-Idaho) and Angus King (I-Maine) and U.S. Representatives Jared Golden (D-Maine) and Glenn “GT” Thompson (R-Pa.) reintroduced the Future Logging Careers Act on Tuesday. The legislation would allow teenage members of logging families to gain experience in the logging trade under parental supervision so they may carry on the family business. The Future Logging Careers Act would amend the Fair Labor Standards Act to allow 16 and 17-year-olds to work in certain mechanized logging operations under parental supervision. “Idaho’s logging industry has long been a family trade, but current law is hampering its future by preventing young men and women from working in their family’s businesses,” said Risch. “The Future Logging Careers Act would give timber families the opportunity to pass down their trade. With a decline in labor and an aging workforce, we must empower the next generation of loggers ….”

Montana’s state forestry programs topped 31,000 acres last year, topping the acreage from 2022 as the state pushes to increase the pace and scope of forest management. The office of Gov. Greg Gianforte and the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation announced that state put more than 31,000 acres under forest management programs. The figure includes ongoing logging, thinning and prescribed fire projects that are ongoing or placed under contract in 2022. The acreage is a combination of state land timber sales, cross-boundary work that includes private lands, grants to private landowners and cooperative agreements with federal agencies. “Creating healthier, more resilient Montana forests through active management is one of our top priorities, and DNRC continues to deliver results for the people of Montana,” Gianforte said in a statement. “We’ve made incredible progress over the last two years to increase the pace and scale of forest management in Montana, and we’re not done yet.”