Adrian Harpold, Ph.D., Nevada Mountain Ecohydrology Group, University of Nevada, Reno prepared this one-sheet to explain his work at Sagehen, titled "More Water and Healthy Forests? Improved Forest Management By Integrating LiDAR Remote
Sensing and Hyper-Resolution Models".
The Sagehen Forest Project proposes restoring ecological function to the Sagehen Basin. It turns out that doing this tames wildfire and is good for wildlife, good for the timber industry, and good for water quality. Everyone wins.
Some recent developments suggest that forest management policy in California may be about to shift dramatically in that direction.
"The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CAL FIRE) requests $180 million
Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF) in Fiscal Year (FY) 2016-17, with position authority and
associated funding in subsequent years through FY 2021-22...for a comprehensive
forest health program that will further secure forest carbon and reduce greenhouse gas (GHG)
emissions to meet the 2030 carbon goals within Executive Crder (EC) B-30-15. Funds will support the
expansion of the Urban and Community Forestry, Forest Legacy Programs , and target landscape-scale
Forest Health projects in high-priority forested upper watersheds in coordination with the Department of
Fish and Wildlife, to realize the largest direct benefit for GHG reduction, forest resilience and cobenefits,
such as protection of water, wildlife habitat, and rural economic stability."
2. Saving The West(now Living Forests). A policy Discussion Document from the Center for the Study of the Force Majeure, 2016.
"Just released PPIC report urges 5 reforms needed for water in California including restoring forest health and reducing fuel loads in headwaters. Also calls for FS to shift focus from fire suppression to fire prevention. The specific recommendation is:"
Initiate multiple large-scale collaborative projects to restore forest health
There has been considerable progress in improving the pace of restoration of forested lands nationwide (US Forest Service 2015). Yet many interviewees felt that to date, most efforts at fire prevention and forest health have been small-scale demonstration projects. To improve public perception and demonstrate benefits—including the potential for boosting drought resilience for downstream users—the Forest Service needs to incorporate a series of large-scale projects into all of the emerging forest management plans. These projects should explore incentives for financial investments from beneficiaries to cover a portion of the costs.32 In addition, partnerships should be formed to promote research and development of new wood energy and building industry products that can increase the value of harvests that reduce fuel loads.
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.
The legal notice of the decision is expected to be published in Grass Valley’s The Union newspaper as soon as tomorrow. The date of the legal notice in The Union will establish the timeframe for the 45-day appeal filing period under 36 CFR 215.
Laurie Perrot
Environmental Coordinator
Tahoe National Forest
631 Coyote Street
Nevada City, CA 95959
lperrot@fs.fed.us
(530) 478-6244
The 30-day public comment period for the Sagehen Project preliminary Environmental Assessment (EA) began on March 5, 2013 and will close soon. Interested parties who have not yet done so should read this excellent result of over a year-and-a-half of collaborative process and submit your comments.
We welcome your comments, feedback and ideas and asked for them to be submitted by July 22, 2011.
We have had only a few responses so this is one last reminder to get comments to me or directly to Kris Boatner (kboatner@fs.fed.us; 530-587-3558).
Thank-you!
/lisa wallace (facilitator)
*************
Lisa Wallace
Executive Director
Truckee River Watershed Council
P.O. Box 8568
Truckee, CA 96162
(530) 550-8760 (Phone)
(530) 725-4407 (fax)
www.truckeeriverwc.org
lwallace@truckeeriverwc.org
Tuesday
July 12, 2011
10:00am – 12:30pm
Truckee Ranger District
No conference calling available
We will not break for lunch, but will end promptly at 12:30pm
The agenda will be a detailed review of the final draft Proposed Action and Purpose and Need Statement.
Comments, feedback and ideas will be welcome at the meeting and after until July 22, 2011.
**Please RSVP so we can plan for seating and copies.**
Thank-you!
/lisa wallace (facilitator)
*************
Lisa Wallace
Executive Director
Truckee River Watershed Council
P.O. Box 8568
Truckee, CA 96162
(530) 550-8760 (Phone)
(530) 725-4407 (fax)
www.truckeeriverwc.org
lwallace@truckeeriverwc.org
Here is some documentation from previous meetings (note: if your software version can't open these files, upload them to Google Docs for viewing and editing--sorry, not for PPT):
