As a follow-up to a recent visit to Washington DC, Sagehen Creek Field Station and the UC Berkeley Office of Government Affairs hosted a "Sagehen Forest Project" Congressional briefing at the station on August 25, 2015. The guests were California and Nevada staffers from the offices of Senators Feinstein, Boxer, Reid and Heller, Representatives McClintock, Amodei and LaMalfa, and Assemblyman Dahle.
A broad spectrum of Sagehen Forest Project partners and others attended, including local and regional Forest Service representatives from both the management and the research sides, Sierra Forest Legacy, Sierra Pacific Industries, National Forest Foundation, Sierra Nevada Conservancy, Truckee River Watershed Council, Lahontan Regional Water Quality Control Board, Lake Tahoe Conservancy, California Forestry Association, Nevada County Board of Supervisors, Washoe County Air Quality Management Division, Center for Art + Environment - Nevada Museum of Art, US Geological Survey, Harrison Studio, the Washoe tribe, CalFire, California Rural Counties, and many others.
The forests of the Sierra Nevada (and the wider American west) are in trouble. Comstock-era clear-cutting, 100 years of fire-suppression in the regrowth, and a drying and warming climate has led to a tenuous situation in which our forests are overstocked and stressed, weakening their resistance to drought, disease, bark-beetle infestation, and wildfire. Before European intervention, regular low intensity fire cycled nutrients, introduced heterogeneity of species and structure, created small openings for wildlife, and cleaned out the duff layer and understory. Now, there is so much fuel built up that when fire does come in it often destroys the entire forest and sterilizes the seed bank. Forests experiencing this kind of fire will often not come back and look like they once did.
We need to remove that built-up fuel, so that low-intensity natural fire can reenter the system. But forest management practices of the past focused heavily on timber yields and fuel reduction, without sufficient attention to restoring ecological functions like wildlife habitat and water supply. This destroyed trust. The result is gridlock, where proposed forestry projects often end up in court.
From environmentalists to loggers, absolutely everyone is concerned about intense and destructive wildfire in our overgrown forests. Over a period of 18-months beginning in 2010, the Sagehen Forest Project partners came together to figure out a way to address everyone's concerns about forest health and management policy.
And we succeeded, creating new prescriptions and tools that are applicable (and being used) on much larger scales than just the Sagehen basin. See Scott Conway's presentation from the meeting to learn more:
Ironically, getting to agreement turned out to be the easy part. Now, with everyone in our community finally agreeing on how we should start managing our forests, there is not enough new biomass processing facility, small material technology, nor mill capacity left in California to provide a destination for the significant amounts of sawlogs and chip that need to come out in order to return to resiliency and ecological balance.
Hopefully, with the help of our State and Congressional representatives, our Federal and State agencies, local NGO's, private interests and citizen partners we can figure out how to move forward with the great forest plan we developed together.
We'll post more info on the project blog as it becomes available, and you can follow and contribute to the conversation on social media under the hashtag: #SagehenForestProject
Event photos from Sherri Eng.
Download PowerPoint presentations from the meeting:
There is lots of good information about the Sagehen Forest Project on this blog. But it can be tricky to find a succinct explanation, so I've written a synopsis (below). Printable version here.
Be sure to see the Purpose and Needs statement for a more complete and detailed discussion of the project genesis.
================
The Sagehen Forest Project
The northern Sierra Nevada was largely denuded of timber during the Comstock silver strike in Virginia City, the construction of the transcontinental railroad, and the post WWII construction boom. The forest that re-grew was optimized for timber harvest, and now shows limited diversity of tree species, size and age class, as well as a massive accumulation of fuel due to a century of aggressive fire suppression.
Dense "dog-hair" stand of Lodgpole pine.
These stands choke off resources for large
trees and constitute a big fire danger.
This is not a healthy structure for a forest nor for the things that live in the forest: large fuel loads along with high susceptibility to drought, insect infestation and disease result in devastatingly hot and destructive wild fires and declining wildlife habitat quality. Unfortunately, much of the forested western US suffers from the same conditions. Due to a warming, drying climate since their establishment after the last ice age, forests cannot always recover or reestablish after these disruptive events.
At this point in time, the forests need active manipulation to return them to a more natural, resilient, fire-tolerant structure, but this is too expensive to do everywhere. A strategy for treating a smaller portion of the forest that yields similar benefits was proposed and adopted by the Forest Service in the early 2000’s. The strategy was called SPLATs, Strategically Placed Land Area Treatments. The idea involves thinning and removing fuel from roughly 30% of forested areas in a waffle-like pattern. This approach shifts the choice of treatment zones from smaller, more targeted and logistically or politically motivated areas, to a broader “landscape” management perspective.
A large, ecologically-valuable Jeffrey pine, released by
thinning treatment at Sagehen.
But SPLATs had never been tested on a real forest, nor in areas with topographic relief. In partnership with the Forest Service, Berkeley professors Scott Stephens and John Battles decided to implement the strategy at Sagehen. They funded a Ph.D. student and a massive data collection effort. Creating what is one of the best data sets of its kind, the study sampled the entire basin for vegetation and fuels, including a grid of permanent 500-m2 plots where every tree is tagged and measured, canopy closure determined, and ground fuels classified. LiDAR laser mapping created high-resolution topographic maps at 1-m resolution, for both vegetated and bare-earth surfaces. A rare eastern Sierra fire history dating back to the 1600’s was drawn from live trees and Comstock-era stumps.
Existing remote sensing and fire models were enhanced with this data and new predictive tools created. In this process, it became obvious that while these treatments would definitely disrupt fire behavior, their implementation would potentially impact wildlife, water quality and other forest products. To fill in the missing pieces, the Forest Service’s Pacific Southwest Research Station (PSW) put together an interdisciplinary team to come up with a guiding document: a science synthesis on the broader natural ecology of Sierra east-slope pine forests. The result, General Technical Report (GTR) 220, provided a big picture view of the issue and how to structure forests that are not just fire-resistant, but also topographically diverse, wildlife friendly and responsive to today’s--and tomorrow’s--altered climate conditions.
With this tool in hand, Sagehen worked with the Forest Service to create a collaborative process to decide what to do in the basin forest, where, and how to do it. We invited everyone who might be interested: loggers, environmentalists, agency staff, academics, NGOs, interested citizens. And they came. We hired a facilitator. We created a public outreach blog and posted every document the group created. We treated two demo plots so everyone could see the ideas on the ground rather than just in the abstract. The group spent the last year and a half hammering out a solution that everyone could live with.
And, amazingly, everyone was able to agree. The project was approved without litigation at any stage. Official letters of support came from both the loggers and the environmentalists.
Additionally, the National Forest Foundation has jumped on board, adopting the Truckee River watershed for their “Treasured Landscapes” initiative, and promoting the Sagehen Forest Project as the best way to address forest restoration efforts in the area.
This project potentially offers other forests a way around the logjam of litigation and contentiousness that has shut down many timber management projects proposed on public lands in the western US in recent years. As such, the Lake Tahoe Basin Management Unit has adopted the strategy and worked hard to shift their employees toward this new paradigm. Their public collaboration began in fall 2016 and includes Sagehen. A large forest management project at the Truckee-Airport Board’s Waddle Ranch is also modeled after the Sagehen Forest Project.
The Sagehen Forest Project is creating momentum to revisit past basin research and answer larger questions than this science originally addressed. In addition to resampling the vast forest structure inventory, and in anticipation of the coming changes to the landscape, hydrology and soils data collection expanded this year. And researchers actively re-sampled historic small mammal trapping transects, fish and bird surveys, and pine marten monitoring dating back to the 1960’s. Protected Activity Centers (PACs) set aside for species of concern like Northern Goshawks and California Spotted Owls are being watched carefully to see if the animals really do prefer the current conditions, or if they will move when different local habitat becomes available.
Everyone is happy. We thought we were done. We began implementing the prescription at Sagehen.
But it turns out that the timber industry in California is basically gone. There is very little mill capacity left and what there is, is now unavailable. As a culture, we made a huge misstep that seemed like a good idea at the time: we decided to give away the standing dead timber from catastrophic fire and beetle kill. This dead wood is now plugging up the available capacity: why buy green timber when you can get an unlimited supply of black timber for free? With no market for the wood coming out of the forest, there is no money to fund removing it.
Our culture has essentially decided to sacrifice the living in order to scavenge the dead. And it turns out that there is no valid reason to do this: ecosystem health values that standing dead, and once the needles fall off the beetle kill there is little fire danger left. In fact, removing just the logs from a forest (and leaving the brush, small trees, limbs, needles, bark, etc. as in traditional forestry) only reduces fire risk by 3 or 4%.
What we need now is a new timber industry, one that uses small diameter trees and slash to produce not just conventional timber, but new wood products like engineered timber, cross-laminated timber (CLT), oriented strand board (OSB), torrefied pellets, soil enhancements, bio-energy, and even hydrocarbon feedstock for plastics. A distributed forestry industry creates local jobs. Developing a viable small timber industry as a byproduct of forest health treatments has additional benefits, replacing steel, petroleum and concrete in multi-story structures that are more fire-resistant and seismic safe, while sinking massive amounts of carbon that will otherwise eventually burn up in the forest.
Jeff and I were just in Washington, DC with the Organization of Biological Field Stations (OBFS) to share information about field stations with Congressional staffers. One of the topics Jeff and I spent a lot of time discussing with our state reps is the Sagehen Forest Project.
One big issue is how project implementation is being held up by the lack of a market for our logs, since there is so much black timber from recent fires.
As a society, we are unintentionally sacrificing the living in order to scavenge the dead. Not good!
