Beetles, logging, and wildfires

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The National Center for Conservation Science and Policy (NCCSP) has issued a report titled Battling forest insects may be counter-productive. Here is the first paragraph:

IN RESPONSE TO RECENT BARK BEETLE EPIDEMICS, decision-makers are calling for landscape-level mechanical treatments to prevent the spread of these native insects and to reduce the perceived threat of increased fire risk that is believed to be associated with insect-killed trees. The best available science indicates that such treatments are not likely to reduce forest susceptibility to outbreaks or reduce the risk of fires, especially the risk of fires to communities. Furthermore, such silvicultural treatments could have substantial short-and significant long-term ecological costs when carried out in national forest roadless areas.

A person has to be careful when digesting reports like this from relatively obscure organizations. You don’t know when they are skewing “science” to promote their own point of view. Here is how the group describes themselves on their web site:

The National Center is a non-profit organization committed to bringing the knowledge of our nation’s top research scientists to the natural resource policymaking arena. We work with the country’s elected officials and policymakers to ensure the laws and policies of the United States help our nation address the threats from climate change, and protect and restore intact ecosystems.

Here is an excerpt from an article in the Bozeman Daily Chronicle about the NCCSP report:

“The beetles appear to have little or nothing to contribute to fire rates,” said Dominik Kulakowski, assistant professor of geography at Clark University in Worcester, Mass [and one of the four authors of the report]. “The fire rate is higher than it’s been in a century, but that’s because of recent drought, not the beetles.”

However, Marna Daley [a public affairs officer with] the Gallatin National Forest [in Montana] believes the infestation has a little more to do with the wildfire rates than Kulakowski does. Beetle-killed trees make the forest dryer and build up forest floor material, she said, and suggested that there is a difference between the Colorado forests in which the study was conducted and the forests around Bozeman.

“There’s a difference in the ecosystems as you go north,” Daley said. “We have to look at what is available in our own toolbox, and our opinion is based on how we can address the issues at hand.

“What we’ve found is that, as the trees turn red, there’s an increase in fire risk,” she said. “We have to ask ourselves, ‘What are the values at risk?'”

Much of the Colorado study focused on the effect of logging in backcountry areas, which has been generally accepted as a solution to the beetle infestation. The idea is that thinning the forest would decrease the infestation rate by reducing the density of the trees.

Colorado has proposed a change to their 2001 Roadless Rule to allow the construction of roads, allowing a preventative logging operation to take place.

Scott Black, executive director of the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation in Portland, Ore. [an author of the report], suggested that building roads and logging are not the best methods for dealing with the fires.

“There’s very little evidence that logging is effective,” Black said. “Thinning decreases stress for the trees, but not water stress during a drought.”

The conventional wisdom is that thinning, as Mount Rushmore has been doing, will reduce competition for water and nutrients, better enabling trees to fend off a beetle attack, while reducing the stand’s susceptibility to stand-replacing wildfires. However, the NCCSP has a different point of view:

FINDING 5

Thinning in roadless areas is not likely to alleviate future large-scale epidemics of bark beetle.

Thinning is often recommended to control outbreaks of bark beetles, but the evidence is mixed as to its effectiveness at the stand level, and it is unlikely to be effective in controlling or alleviating largescale outbreaks. Experimenting with thinning in roadless areas also can cause short- and long-term ecological effects.

Thanks Dick

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Author: Bill Gabbert

After working full time in wildland fire for 33 years, he continues to learn, and strives to be a Student of Fire.