Category Archives: Forestry

The Washington State Department of Natural Resources is set to start prescribed burns across 2,580 acres of state trust lands starting next week, a move to bolster forest health and mitigate wildfire risks. The burns, announced Monday and spreading through central and eastern Washington, are a strategic push to revitalize aged trees, support wildlife, and provide safer conditions for firefighters battling future blazes. While these controlled fires are pegged to ignite during spring and could stretch into early summer, each is tethered to a slew of safety checks, influenced by weather patterns and the availability of resources, some may get pushed to later dates if conditions aren’t just right, according to the Washington State Department of Natural Resources. Prescribed burns have long been in the arsenal of land managers and private stakeholders alike, serving as a shield against catastrophic wildfire events.

In recent years, wildfires have burned millions of acres in Washington State, inducing a wide range of effects across environmental gradients and forest types. In 2017, the Washington State Department of Natural Resources (WDNR) launched the 20-Year Forest Health Strategic Plan to accelerate landscape-scale wildfire risk reduction, ecosystem restoration, and climate adaptation across all lands in eastern Washington. To better understand the widespread impacts of the 2021 fire season, we piloted a rapid assessment to evaluate the work of wildfire – i.e., the degree to which fire effects were consistent with the landscape resilience and wildfire risk reduction objectives of the 20-Year Plan. Here, we present lessons from the 2021 and 2022 fires across eastern and western Washington. We highlight how wildfires have both positive and negative effects, depending on location, forest type, and landowner objectives. [Zoom webinar series by NCASI and the Washington Chapter of the Wildlife Society]

Crews have been ramping up wildfire resilience projects to thin out brush and dead wood in California’s giant sequoia groves, clearing twice as many acres in 2023 compared with 2022. The Giant Sequoia Lands Coalition is trying to avoid a repeat of the disastrous mega-fires of 2020 and 2021 – which killed about 20% of large mature trees in their native Sierra Nevada range. Joanna Nelson, Ph.D. is the director of science and conservation planning with the nonprofit Save the Redwoods League. “We remove fuel,” said Nelson, “we get to a safe place to do prescribed burning and to do cultural burning – which is always led by indigenous people, which is another practice of taking care of the forest and reducing wildfire risk.” Sequoia National Park is just one part of California’s giant sequoia groves, which stretch over 26,000 acres. A new report shows that in 2023, the program treated nearly 9,900 acres in 28 groves – and more than 14,000 since 2021.

ASHLAND, Oregon — The Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument, a remote expanse of wilderness along the California-Oregon border, will not lose any of its acreage after the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to take up two challenges to its expansion. Logging interests and several counties in Oregon had asked the high court to strike down a 2017 addition to the monument. Their lawsuit claimed President Barack Obama improperly made the designation because Congress had previously set aside the land for timber harvests. By gaining monument status, the area won special protections, including a prohibition on logging. The challenges to the expansion raised the additional, and broader, question of whether the president’s authority to create national monuments unilaterally under the Antiquities Act should be restricted, the Chronicle said. …The Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument was created in 2000 to protect what is considered an ecologically valuable juncture of the ancient Siskiyou Mountains and the younger volcanic Cascades. 

One of the smallest school districts in Oregon is suing the state in an attempt to send a landmark forest habitat conservation plan back to the drawing board. On behalf of the Jewell School District in the heart of the Clatsop State Forest in northwest Oregon, a Portland law firm filed the suit on March 20 against the Oregon Department of Forestry, State Forester Cal Mukumoto and state forest chief Mike Wilson. The suit, filed in Clatsop County Circuit Court, alleges that the recently passed Western State Forests Habitat Conservation Plan will drastically reduce revenue for the school district, forcing it to cut staff and services. …Under the plan, the volume of wood permitted for harvest from state forests in Clatsop County will drop 35% and, in turn, cut 35% of the funding to the district, according to John DiLorenzo, a lawyer with the Portland-based law firm Davis Wright Tremaine, which filed the suit.

MEDFORD, Ore. – On April 2, three organizations are taking the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to federal court in Medford. The three conservation organizations — Klamath Siskiyou Wild, Cascadia Wild and Oregon Wild — are fighting to prevent BLM from what they consider excessive logging in a forest in Josephine County. They are specifically fighting BLM’s Integrated Vegetation Management (IVM) in Josephine County, about two miles northwest of Williams. According to BLM’s website, the purpose of IVM is to “promote and develop: safe and effective wildfire response opportunities that reduce wildland fire risk to Highly-Valued Resources and Assets; Fire- and disturbance-resilient lands and fire-resistant stands; and habitat for Special Status Species and unique native plant communities.” 

The recent closures of Pyramid Mountain Lumber and Roseburg Forest Products in Missoula County is a warning for Montana and a symptom of broader challenges threatening the region’s forest and wood products sect of which is pivotal for thousands of private sector jobs and crucial for federal efforts to improve forest health, mitigate wildfire risks, and cater to the escalating demand for carbon-friendly wood products. Montana’s timber industry, an integral component of the state’s identity and economy, faces a multitude of challenges – from workforce shortages and affordable housing crises to the whims of volatile markets. However the underlying issue driving mill closures across the west is a declining supply of raw material to manufacturers, a critical concern given that Montana’s wood products manufacturers are surrounded by federally owned forests. …Currently, the milling demand in Montana, spurred by the public’s demand for wood products, surpasses the available and projected log supply.

Michael Hoyt

For years the Forest Service, BLM, and timber industry have claimed that publicly owned forests are unhealthy and therefore susceptible to insects, disease, and worst of all, wildfires. They have asserted the only solution is increasing the amount of logging and thinning, euphemistically known as vegetative management. The concept of improving forest health by increasing logging and thinning remains unsupported by scientific evidence and an increasing number of people oppose such activities. …Now, as evidenced by the recently announced closure of two forest products businesses, Pyramid Lumber and Roseburg Forest Products, we’re discovering there can be economic consequences to unchecked logging and thinning. ..Unsaid is the fact that, in this case, plummeting lumber prices are caused, not because there is diminishing demand, but by a market glut. …The Forest Service and BLM should reevaluate the validity of their internal culture based on logging and other extractive activities. 

One of the smallest school districts in Oregon is suing the state in an attempt to send a landmark forest habitat conservation plan back to the drawing board. On behalf of the Jewell School District in the Clatsop State Forest in northwest Oregon, a Portland law firm filed the suit on March 20 against the Oregon Department of Forestry, State Forester Cal Mukumoto and state forest chief Mike Wilson. The suit alleges that the recently passed Western State Forests Habitat Conservation Plan will drastically reduce revenue for the school district, forcing it to cut staff and services. The conservation plan, which has been years in the making, was approved March 7 by the Oregon Board of Forestry on a narrow vote. It will regulate logging and conservation on about 630,000 thousand acres of state forests for the next 70 years, including the Clatsop State Forest, to protect 17 threatened or endangered species.

Karen Crowley

Some of the oldest, most biologically diverse and carbon dense lowland forests that remain in Snohomish County are at risk. Ten state timber sales are planned for auction by the Department of Natural Resources this year in Snohomish County that would collectively clearcut more than 500 acres of these rare, publicly owned forests, including trees that are more than four feet in diameter and over 100 years old! …The DNR’s own policies require that the agency develop a plan to restore old-growth conditions across a minimum of 10 percent to 15 percent of state forestlands before logging any mature or structurally complex forests. Currently, only about 3 percent of state forestlands in the North Puget Sound region can be classified as old-growth forests, and yet the DNR continues to allow the clearcutting of the oldest remaining forests in the region at an alarming rate.

The U.S. Forest Service has drastically cut funding for the 4-Forests Restoration Initiative (4FRI) on which the future of Arizona’s watersheds and every forested community depend. 4-FRI funding hit $123 million in fiscal 2023, but will come in closer to $48 million in fiscal 2024, said Scot Rogers, the 4FRI Forest Restoration Initiative Program Manager for the Coconino National Forest. He broke the news to the Natural Resources Working Group meeting in Show Low on Tuesday. The Eastern Arizona Counties Association sponsors the group, which includes local officials and timber industry representatives. The dramatic drop in funding comes as sawmills, forest crews and the state’s only biomass burning power plant struggle in the shadow of bankruptcy to find enough wood to stay in business. …Thanks to the expiration of several federal stimulus and infrastructure programs, the increasing chaos in federal budgeting and the identification of 21 high-priority, fire-menaced landscapes all now competing for dwindling federal funding.

The effort to save the C.C. Cragin Reservoir watershed is finally ramping up, even as the larger 4-Forests Restoration Initiative faces a crisis. A series of projects this year and next will make headway on thinning the 64,000-acre reservoir on which both Payson and Valley cities rely for their water supply, the Natural Resources Working Group learned last week. The progress relies on extra funding from the Salt River Project, the Valley utility that manages the reservoir. The plan calls for logging, firewood, thinning projects and prescribed burns on more than 10,000 acres on the watershed of the reservoir this year, said Arizona Department of Forestry and Fire Management project coordinator Christine Mares. “We’re hiring like crazy right now” to start cutting when the forest dries out, said Mares.