True forest management is not about making you (or the general public) "feel better". But if you need to hear it, of course logging projects are to get trees down and out of the woods. Isn't that the point - they keep growing back!

Should have known you would tout the Schoennagel travesty as vindication, George.
Let me just raise a quick point. If the climate is changing to a drier, warmer state (gee, this year seems kinda slow) then the logical response in an environment that is a 10,000 year historic artifact of Indian induced fire management is as follows:
Less water with same wood equals less water per stem equals less growth and more stress equals higher mortality equals more firewood.
Less water with less wood, removed by harvest and processing equals same water per stem equals same growth and normal stress leading to normal development of remaining steams over time equals adapted forest to changed climate.
Get it?

Dave:

What is the travesty of the study? If you are going to knock it at least give me some points to consider. It seems to me that the review was well done--and given its geographic scope--and large sample size--44,000 thinning projects--I believe it provides an accurate picture of the FS approach so far.

Yes, I know there appears to be a lot of moisture in the northern Rockies this spring. And I will bet that unless things turn extremely dry in July and August, we will not see many large fires this summer--at least in this region--despite the fact that we have a lot of fuel in the woods. Now California is another matter--they are going into the fourth year of serious drought.

Two other points that we have debated previously. The first is the extent and effect of Indian fires. While Indian burning did influence local areas, particularly around favorite encampment sites, their influence on the vast majority of the landscape is questionable.

You can't burn a forest that is too wet--even Indians can't do that. And most of the forests in the northern Rockies outside of the lowest valley bottoms and south-facing dry hillsides simply did not burn frequently--Indians or no Indians. Just as they do not burn now with many more people wandering around leaving campfires burning and throwing smokes out of truck windows, etc. The vast majority of all fire starts go out without burning more than a few acres--and most are not "suppressed" because they go out before anyone can even get to them to put them out.

Second point, your prescription presumes that dying trees are bad or wasted. As we have debated in previous posts, I do not agree with that assessment. Large scale removal of those trees, I believe, leads to biological impoverishment, as well as other impacts such as soil erosion, water drainage alternation (from road cutting), etc.

We will probably never agree on that point. So thanks for your comments, but sometimes one can't to a point of mutual agreement.

Skinner talks tree farms, George about forests. Easy to see why the simple farm model is so popular. Carrots, radishes trees, what's the difference?

1. Except in small areas of Coastal rain forests, fire has been an integral part of the northern coniferous forest ecosystem for hundreds of thousands of years at least. The proof is in the plants evolved in this ecosystem. There are very few that don't have some type of fire adaption in their anatomy, physiology or reproductive strategy. Some of these plants have actually become fire dependent for proper reproduction. 2. Regardless, of time intervals between fires, the mosaic model still holds. If not affected by humans, the forest will burn in a mosaic pattern created by contiguous older burns of different ages. Some of the mosaic patches will be tiny, others will be huge but will still be mosaic never the less. 3. The pre-European Indians, God bless em, had neither the numbers nor the labor force to practice ecosystem altering forest management. Some tribes burned to enhance browse for game species in localized areas 4. As far as public policy goes we can't keep borrowing money from the Japanese and the Chinese to do very much thinning so what little we do should be concentrated around wildland urban-suburban interface areas. In a lot of cases, prescribed burning would be better for the forest environment in the long run and require less borrowing from the Chinese and Japanese. 5. Tree farms and forests are different and should be managed differently. The more tree farms the better. 6. Forests can be logged and still remain healthy. Multiple use sustained yield is still the most viable public policy alternative especially since the word "sustainability" is now in vogue. 7. In order to take the pressure off of Forests to produce cellulose fiber we should invest in making cellulose fiber products like particle board and plywood from fast growing plants like industrial hemp just as the government invested money in Forest Labs to develop wood products in previous decades.

George,
It sounds like you've read a copy of the new study. Could you please post a link so that others can read it.
Thanks

After reading the paper, the headlines and conclusions being touted as its results are nowhere near as exciting as the vague suppositions actually posed in the paper. This paper is just a lot of smoke and mirrors – one of those that seemed to have a pre-set conclusion in mind and made sure to get the “right” data to back that up.

The authors define the WUI as a combination of interface (high-density residential areas of 97 people/square km) and intermix (low-density residences - >0.06 units/ha), and the WUI2.5 (WUI + 2.5 km buffer - the community protection zone). By this definition (as stated in a cited reference), the WUI comprises only 2% of the area with "wildland vegetation" in the West.

They did find that when the management objective was WUI/Defensible Space, 80% of the area treated was within 0-2.5 km of the WUI. Of treated areas >10 km from the WUI, only 41% of the area had the same objective.

From the paper: "Because ~70% of wildland vegetation in the WUI2.5 across the West is privately owned, the ability of federal agencies to implement fire-risk reduction treatments near and within communities is significantly limited and may explain the positive relationship between distance from WUI and area treated. This discrepancy between landownership patterns and the need for fire mitigation presents a vexing problem for federal land-managerscharged with reducing fire risk within the mostly privately owned WUI."

The authors used revealed they used NFPORS data from 2004 to 2008. They took the lat/long reported for the treatment and built a circle out from that point to represent the area treated (regardless of the actual shape of the treatment unit), then compared that to their WUI definitions in GIS.

They express surprise that during that time only 11% of all projects were in WUI because HFRA specified at least 50% should be in WUI. HFRA became law at the end of 2003. Only projects implemented under HFRA were subject to that 50% goal. Given the planning requirements and timeframes in today’s FS, it's unlikely many HFRA projects were even implemented until 2006 or later.

NFPORS is the repository for just about all fuels-related treatments including regular old-fashioned timber sales. That's why so many activities were outside WUI. The authors also pointed out that there were often multiple objectives for treatments, with 60% of the areas treated listing 5-12 objectives per treatment. NFPORS apparently indicated that 80% of all treatments had “fuel reduction” as part of the goals, which indicates federal agencies were working on the issue of fuel reduction long before HFRA. The authors chose to disregard that particular objective because its a "nonspecific term" and therefore not "discriminating." Seems to me if you are seriously looking at implementation of the National Fire Plan, you ought to look at fuel reduction.

The authors also pointed out that there were often multiple objectives for treatments, with 60% of the areas treated listing 5-12 objectives per treatment. They did not report results for "fuel reduction" since it's a “nonspecific term”, but it was recorded for 80% of the area treated and therefore, was not "discriminating."

From the paper: "Fire mitigation treatments located far from the WUI may play an important role in protecting timber resources and rare or threatened species or ecosystems from high-severity fire, but their effectiveness in direct community protection requires more systematic evaluation. In contrast, there is strong evidence that the potential for a home to burn is relatively independent of distant wildand-fire behavior. Empirical, modeling, and post-mortem studies have shown that ignitability of building materials and the abundance and arrangement of wildland fuels in the immediate surroundings (<50 m) of a house best predict its potential to burn (14). Thus, fire-proofing houses and their immediate surroundings should provide the most direct and effective wildfire protection of homes and communities in the WUI."

The "strong evidence" referred to is one Cohen paper from 2000 - "Preventing disaster - Home ignitability in the wildland-urban interface." Neatly sidestepping how well home ignitions are prevented when the fire doesn't get close to them in the first place:

From the paper: "The extent to which past fuels-reduction treatments actually mitigated subsequent fire severity was beyond the scope of our investigation. A number of studies have shown that mechanical thinning with slash removal and prescribed fire can reduce subsequent (within a few years) wildfire severity in stands with historical low-severity fire regimes (15-20). However, similar fuel treatments may be less effective in ecosystems where historical and current fire regimes are characterized by high-severity fires that are driven by extreme weather (21, 22), although treatment size and arrangement remain important factors to evaluate (23)."

Then a paragraph later:

"Far from the WUI, however, fuels treatments should be implemented only where substantial benefits to watershed protection, biodiversity, or restoration of degraded forests can be demonstrated."

For the full article: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2009/06/05/0900991106.full.pdf+html

The review can be found at http://www.pnas.org

I got mine bootleg, but anyone else not in the academic community has to cough up ten bucks, for what is pretty much five pages of not much, and certainly not news except to those opposed to HFRA or, as the last para says, doing anything in the woods to mitigate undesired wildfire.

Very well written piece, George. I enjoyed the sarcasm of the "presentation", lol.

I have a pdf of the study. If anyone wants one send me an email and I can send it off to you free of charge.

Well, that's my beef right there, George. Did you clear the copyrights with PNAS? And why wasn't this same document made available free to the interested lay public by the "news media?" There's a real problem when the scientific debate is conducted in the newspapers and no reader actually can see what the debate is about. Smoke and mirrors.

Dave, I think someone owns that document. Academic institutions pay a license fee, so that their use is legal. You could go into one of the public universities and colleges and download it easily.

The bigger, somewhat academic, question is why the authors signed their copyright over to a private organization. Does the public own that research, since it was conducted by public employees in public facilities? Have our universities become no longer repositories and discoverers of public information, but private consultancies on hire to whomever pays for the desired answer?

There's a lot of truth in the axiom that you get what you pay for. And, equally, not a lot of worth in what you don't.

Actually, Binkster, the authors retain ownership. I am certain NAS and Wilburforce Foundation can do whatever they wish. As for going to a college to download the document, that's if I'm a student, not a lay person. I guess I should mosey on over to the community collage (that's not a typo) and see what the options are.
You do raise a good point about academia. I would say there is a distinction however between land grant colleges and universities and private institutions. The mission is inherently different.

Mickey
I agree with in your comments. Thanks.

Geo.

Dave:

You're right, it's a problem sometimes to get these papers easily. If you are not a member of the professional society or whatever you often can not get the paper directly from the publication.

For future reference, I usually get such scientific papers by contacting the author. Search the author's name on google--and especially if they are at a university or government agency, you can usually get their web site address where they frequently have a link to their published papers which often are downloadable as a pdf. If not, than just send them an email asking for the paper and most are happy to send one to you.

Geo.

Geo,
Even finding the authors can be an issue sometimes. The Montana stories mentioned only Cara Nelson, not lead author Tania Schoennagel.
The bite here is, the press release is sent out seeking public attention for both the authors and the publication.
For example, the Billings Gazette used the paper (or the press release, anyway) to dump on WUI homeowners. One of the talking points is that only 3 percent of the acreage is in WUI, while whining that 50 percent of money spent is supposed to be WUI.
Any bells going off? Well, let me ring it for ya. You can treat a bunch more acres in the toolies with logging and prescribed fire than you can hand-piling brush and nibbling about under eaves. Only if the treatments are IDENTICAL and they are NOT, does that little bullet have any energy.
THAT'S WHY, when "scientists" pump themselves to the press, looking to score free publicity for something normal people would otherwise never read, the magic paper should be made available, hotlinked right there, without forcing readers to dig past obvious filtering and slant.

Dave

You make some valid points in your commentary. Yeah, the papers probably took the "Montana" connection and that is why Tania was not mentioned.

Well I don't know what to tell you about getting the papers other than from what I have seen you're done good at researching stuff on line and if anyone is going to find that information, you are likely to be successful. I guess one of our jobs is to bring attention to things we feel either misrepresents or represents our perspective. You're good at your job.