Jeff Barnard, Associated Press

GRANTS PASS, Oregon — The last building block of the Obama administration’s strategy, to keep the northern spotted owl from extinction, nearly doubles the amount of Northwest national forest land dedicated to protecting the bird by the Bush administration four years ago.

Still, conservation groups that went to court to force the overhaul said key gaps remain, such as an exemption for private forest lands and most state forests.

The full critical habitat plan will not be published until next week, but the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced that 9.6 million acres of Oregon, Washington and Northern California will come under its provisions, almost all of it federal lands.

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Washington Examiner – Associated Press

Significant reductions in grazing on public land — in some places outright elimination of the activity — is justified because of the impacts of a warming climate, scientists say in a new report.   Read more>

Contact: Robert Beschta: 541-737-4292 or robert.beschta@oregonstate.edu

CORVALLIS, Ore. – Eight researchers in a new report have suggested that climate change is causing additional stress to many western rangelands, and as a result land managers should consider a significant reduction, or in some places elimination of livestock and other large animals from public lands.

Bill Bradbury figures you don’t have to be a climate-change expert to know which way the wind is blowing. The former Oregon secretary of state, who will discuss “Climate Reality” Thursday evening at Southern Oregon University, said he has seen denial over climate change slowly fade since he began giving talks about it in 2006.

“When I first started giving presentations, it was very normal to have a small group of deniers attending,” said Bradbury, 63. “Now I don’t need to convince anyone that climate change is happening.”   more>

Guest Column by Dominick DellaSala, PhD

The July 26 Oregonian editorial “Logging for spotted owls” dismisses decades of scientific research by touting one new study that suggests “heavy thinning” (aka, clear-cut lite) of forests could benefit spotted owls. Based on a single computer simulation, the new study suggests that intensive logging will magically prevent “catastrophic fires” such as the Biscuit that “wiped out” owls and other wildlife. This is unfounded.

The Biscuit fire did not destroy spotted owl territories, nor did it “consume” half a million acres of forests. More than half of the fire area actually burned with no, low or moderate fire severity, while a third was deliberately torched in what are called back burns set by firefighters trying to “control” the blaze. This fire was weather-driven, not fuel-driven, and occurred during a severe drought with gusting winds that created fire plumes up to 30,000 feet. Thinned areas burned as hot as those not thinned.

Klamath-Siskiyou country is no stranger to large fires. In fact, a Biscuit-like fire burned through the area in the late 1800s, and since then, fires of mixed severities (low, moderate, high) have repeatedly visited the landscape every 15 to 75 years. The renewal of plant communities — many of which are rare and fire-dependent — from repeat fires is part of the region’s globally distinct plant and wildlife richness. Mature evergreen forests with madrone and oak understories also have been shown to burn less severely than open forests, presumably because over time understory trees in these closed-canopy forests shade out flammable shrubs.

Ten years following the Biscuit fire, the landscape is a vibrant snag forest full of wildflowers, conifer seedlings, woodpeckers, songbirds and butterflies that began populating the fire area as the embers cooled (from nature’s rain, not firefighting). It was certainly not an ecological catastrophe. And while the fire influenced owl territories, its patchiness created a beneficial mixture of shrubby owl foraging areas with large dead and live trees left standing for nesting. Such snag forests are richer in plants and wildlife than even old-growth forests, and unlogged areas are rare because salvage logging, the true catastrophe in burned forests, typically damages them.

Decades of research on spotted owls and prey shows that logging is not as short-lived an impact as some might hope. This is because the owls roost and nest in closed-canopy, dense forests and so do many of the species’ prey. Opening up forests may encourage barred owls, a more aggressive competitor of spotted owls, thereby negating efforts by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to contain this invading owl.

We agree with social reasons for thinning forests to reduce fuels, especially near buildings, and ecological reasons in highly flammable tree plantations. A recent report released by conservation groups and forestry experts, in fact, recommended a 44 percent annual increase in log volume as a byproduct of ecologically restorative actions in primarily tree plantations west of the Cascades. Until scientists have more definitive information on thinning effects on owls and prey, land managers would do best to stick with less ecologically risky and more scientifically supportable actions.

Dominick A. DellaSala is chief scientist of the Geos Institute in Ashland and was a member of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service spotted owl recovery team (2006-08). Also contributing to this essay: Monica L. Bond, principal scientist of the Wild Nature Institute and a member of the dry forest landscapes work group for the Northern Spotted Owl Recovery Plan; Dennis Odion, fire ecologist at the University of California at Santa Barbara; Randi Spivak, vice president of government affairs of the Geos Institute.

© 2012 OregonLive.com

Society of Conservation Biology     www.conbio.org

The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service is strongly considering excluding up to five million acres from its proposal to designate nearly 14 million acres of critical habitat for the Northern Spotted Owl. Two SCB board members briefed Congressional staff and federal agency officials on why these exclusions would likely set back recovery efforts for the owl.

North America Section President Dominick DellaSala and board member Barry Noon visited Washington, DC  to discuss the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s critical habitat proposal.  In three days of meetings, Dominick and Barry briefed Congressional staff from the House of Representatives and the Senate on portions of the critical habitat proposal  MORE>

by Paul Fattig of the Medford Mail Tribune

Contrary to common belief, wildfires popping up in the dry forests of the West in recent years are not bigger and badder than those in the distant past. That is according to findings by scientists at the University of Wyoming at Laramie.

Based on studies of copious notes written by General Land Office surveyors around 1880 in Oregon, Colorado and Arizona, fire and landscape ecology professor William Baker and Mark Williams, who recently completed his doctorate in ecology at the university, conclude that many wildfires back in the day were as intense as those in the latter part of the 20th century and early 21st century. In addition to determining that more highly intense fires are not occurring now, they found much more forest diversity, in part from the areas having experienced a wide range of wildfire behavior over time, Baker told the Mail Tribune. MORE>

KBOO Community Radio

by Barbara Bernstein

Click here for the interview with Dominick DellaSala

Oregon Public Broadcasting  / Earthfix News

The U.S. Forest Service has made forest thinning one of its top priorities, particularly in fire-prone and unhealthy dry forests. But environmental groups say dense Douglas fir plantations on the wet side of the Cascades need to be thinned too. And that could help increase the lumber supply.

On a steep slope in the Siuslaw National Forest, Douglas fir trees are packed in like matchsticks. Dan Segotta, the U.S. Forest Service’s timber operations manager in the Siuslaw, says these woods were clear-cut in 1965, and then densely replanted. 20 years ago, forest managers in the Siuslaw began a thinning experiment on the site. They left this stand alone to serve as an experimental control.  more >

New study finds non-controversial timber volume

Contacts:
Jim Furnish: (240) 271-1650
Marc Barnes: (541) 609-0322
Andy Kerr: (503) 701-6298

Portland, Oregon—A new report by conservation organizations finds that logging volume on federal lands in the Pacific Northwest can increase substantially over the next two decades without controversy if carried out with specific ecological criteria.

The report, titled Ecologically Appropriate Restoration Thinning in the Northwest Forest Plan Area, finds that annual federal timber volume could increase 44% over what has been produced on average in the last 15 years while maintaining the clean water and wildlife protections of the Northwest Forest Plan. Under a program of science-based and ecologically appropriate thinning of mostly small diameter trees in degraded forests, BLM and U.S. Forest Service lands could produce 774 million board feet (mmbf) annually, compared to an average of 537 mmbf than has been produced since the Northwest Forest Plan was put into place (1995-2010).