Forest Service – Friend of the Environment in Oregon

I thought this piece was interesting as environmentalists are claiming the FS is more environmentally sensitive than the BLM. It’s nice to be liked. Even only relatively.

The environmental groups argue some federal agencies have had a harder time adapting to new forest management goals in the Northwest Forest Plan, specifically noting that the U.S. Forest Service has done a better job transitioning to non-controversial restoration-based timber thinning projects while the BLM “has struggled to modernize.”

That may be why Oregon Wild’s Andy Kerr asked Salazar yesterday to transfer the BLM’s Oregon and California Railroad forestland in western Oregon to the Forest Service. Of course Salazar’s Department of the Interior oversees the BLM and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service but not the Forest Service, which is couched under the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Kerr’s request was met with a quick rap from Salazar: “Don’t go to disagreements,” he said. “Go to agreements.”

I put a call into the Fish and Wildlife Service to get their reaction to this lawsuit and some more information on the Spencer Creek timber sale. I also have some extra sound bites and background from yesterday’s roundtable that I’ll post soon.

Also the photo, by the Oregon BLM, is lovely.

Dead Trees Burning (or Burnt)

A guest post by Michael Dixon

These two photos were taken in the spring of 2008 from approximately the same spot, one looking up slope and one down slope. This area is on the Payette NF in the Flat Creek drainage of the Secesh River about 30 miles northeast of McCall, Idaho. This was an un-managed (no stumps) mature lodgepole pine stand. The area that is burnt down to bare soil was burned in the Burgdorf Junction Fire in 2000. That fire just killed the lodgepole but did consume the wood. The area re-burned in 2007. The down slope photo shows an adjacent lodgepole pine stand that was not burnt in 2000, but was burned in 2007. This gives an idea of what the stand that burned twice looked like after the 2000 fire.

This is likely an extreme example but it can and does happen. Any lodgepole pine seedlings that came in after the 2000 fire were consumed and no seed source left, so it will take many years before it becomes reforested. There was about 350 acres of the hotly burned area. I would think that a fire killed lodgepole pine stand would be less prone to burning that a beetle killed stand as fire would consume the duff and fine fuels that would remain in a beetle killed stand. Re-burns are often are hotter than the initial fire which killed the trees, since a lot of the wood is on the ground and much more bio mass is consumed. The burning conditions in 2007 were extreme, so I would not expect this to happen every time a dead lodgepole stand burns. Many areas will not re-burn if the fuel loading is lighter. I have seen where a fire stopped where it came into a fire killed lodgepole stand with a lot of waist high seedlings. Only some of the down wood was consumed, but the fuel loading of the standing and down dead trees was much lower.

In the on going debate over what to do with the bug killed lodgepole pine forests, I hope we get past the rhetoric and advocacy and start looking at actual on the ground conditions, such as terrain, fuel loading, fire history, access, and resource values. Treatments or non-treatments are going to be different in different areas. Letting nature take its course is appropriate in some areas, salvage logging and fuels treatment s are appropriate in some areas, it all depends on where it is and what it is, there is no one right answer.