ST. GEORGE — The Center for Biological Diversity submitted a letter to the U.S. Forest Service on Jan. 14 calling upon the agency to stop cutting down old-growth trees on the Kaibab Plateau in northern Arizona. The Forest Service responded saying they are willing to have a discussion with the center, although a date has not yet been set. The letter states that the Forest Service’s logging practices involving trees older than 300 years along the Grand Canyon’s North Rim are worsening climate change, increasing wildfire risk and damaging the area’s ecosystems. In addition to the letter, the center launched an action alert asking people to add their names to the demand asking the Forest Service to stop cutting down centuries-old trees. …The Forest Service is looking forward to discussing the center’s concerns and finding possibilities for collaboration, spokeswoman Brienne Pettit said.

John Twitchell

At the end of a snowy logging trail on Gould Mountain west of Rocky Mountain National Park, a clawed machine piles up hundreds of dead lodgepole pines. The trees, killed by the notorious mountain pine beetle, will be cut down and turned into two-by-fours to reduce wildfire fuel. The Gould Crest project will remove dead trees from 328 acres of land. John Twitchell, a supervisor forester with the Colorado State Forest Service, pointed to clearings in the landscape where loggers have harvested trees.  … Logging is one way to remove excess fuel since these forests don’t burn like they used to. In the 1900s, local and national land managers started to suppress fire in areas that evolved with flames. “Lodgepole, ecologically is developed to burn,” Twitchell said. “When we live here, you know, hundred-thousand-acre fires are no longer acceptable.” The other way to remove fuel is to bring that fire back.

Even as winter snows cover the ground, the unease is growing across this state and the nation that the steady march of climate change is impacting our western forests in ways we cannot stop. Here in Colorado, our timberlands are beset by drought, being eaten alive by a variety of beetles, loved to death by human beings over-running public lands, with their resiliency damaged by decades of fire suppression that has left the dead timber load at historically high levels. The Colorado Forest Service estimates a backlog of $4.2 billion in forest-thinning, just to protect homes in the growing  urban-wildland interface areas. … For the past four years, the Trump administration has focused on the value of timber extraction rather than on conservation methods that encourage forest health. Colorado, like California and Oregon, has begun to see historic wildfire seasons — earlier, longer, larger and more deadly.

LOS ALAMOS, N.M., January 27, 2021–A new 3D analysis shows that wildland fires flare up in forests populated by similar-sized trees or checkerboarded by large clearings and slow down where trees are more varied. The research can help fire managers better understand the physics and dynamics of fire to improve fire-behavior forecasts. “We knew fuel arrangement affected fire but we didn’t know how,” said Adam Atchley, lead author on a Los Alamos National Laboratory-led study published today in the International Journal of Wildland Fire. … The study for the first time links generalized forest characteristics that can be easily observed by remote sensing and modeled by machine learning to provide insight into fire behavior, even in large forested areas.Understanding how wildland fire behaves is necessary to curb its spread, and also to plan safe, effective prescribed burns.