Model made of mythical owls

GUEST VIEWPOINT

Model made of mythical owls

A flawed computer model led to nonsensical restrictions on timber management in Oregon

By Ross Mickey

For The Register-Guard

PUBLISHED: 12:00 A.M., JULY 14

On June 26 a federal judge in Washington, D.C., ordered the Bureau of Land Management to comply with the law and offer more timber for sale in Southwest Oregon. The judge also found that federal agencies had broken the law by not adhering to rulemaking requirements in instituting the Owl Estimation Methodology, a flawed model for quantifying the impact of federal timber harvests on the spotted owl.

Most of the media coverage has rightly focused on the judge’s order to sell more timber. The little coverage of the owl estimation portion of the ruling has failed to describe the absolute lunacy underpinning a computer model that led to nonsensical restrictions on timber management throughout Western Oregon. It deserves greater scrutiny from the public and our elected officials.

What if an agent of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service knocked on your door and told you that you could not harvest any of the vegetables in your garden because it is the home of a threatened slug? You know first-hand that none of these slugs exist in your garden, so your mouth drops when the agent insists that a very sophisticated computer model has determined that your garden is definitely the home of the slug.

Wondering what the consequences of harvesting your vegetables might be, you ask, “What would happen if I ate one of my carrots?”

He then becomes serious and tells you, “We would have to prosecute you for ‘taking’ a threatened species.”

Not believing your ears, you say, “Are you telling me if I ate one of my carrots, I would face federal charges for ‘taking’ a slug that no one has ever seen in my garden?”

“Yes,” he replies.

Wondering if this could get any more bizarre, you ask, “What would happen if I ate another carrot tomorrow?”

He answers, “You would be charged for taking another threatened species.”

For clarification, you ask, “So I would be charged for taking two slugs for eating two carrots even though no one has ever seen one of these slugs in my garden?”

His reply: “Yes.”

Following this, you wonder, “I have 50 carrots, 25 heads of lettuce, 25 zucchini and 25 summer squash. Would I be charged with ‘taking’ 125 slugs if I picked all my vegetables?”

He calmly replies, “Yes.”

Wouldn’t you be outraged at such a ridiculous situation? We were — which is why we joined the lawsuit challenging the use of the Owl Estimation Methodology to determine how many spotted owls would be “taken” due to harvesting trees on our publicly owned federal lands.

None of us wants any species to go extinct. Federal forest managers consult with the Fish & Wildlife Service to ensure that their actions will not jeopardize a threatened species. The owl methodology was developed following a different court decision requiring the agencies to either quantify the amount of “take” that would occur from an activity or to disclose that quantifying the “take” is impossible.

“Take” in this case is not the killing of an owl, but rather a disruption that somehow might “harm” the species. Rather than deciding to disclose why quantifying “take” for the spotted owl is impossible (which it is), the Fish & Wildlife Service developed a very sophisticated computer model built by the very best scientists to spit out a number the computer says is how many owls would be taken due to harvesting trees.

On many occasions, this model creates spotted owl home ranges where no owls have ever been found. The Fish & Wildlife Service then requires these acres to be protected the same as those lands that are occupied by owls. Most of these mythical home ranges are created in areas that are already below the habitat conditions the service has deemed to be necessary to avoid “take,” so the harvest of one tree will be deemed as a “take.”

Just as with the phantom slugs in your garden, under the Owl Estimation Methodology thousands of phantom owls can be taken that no one has ever found and are not known to even exist.

While the owl estimation madness has now been stopped, the Fish & Wildlife Service has created another “very sophisticated computer model built by the very best scientists” to declare that more than 9 million acres of federal land is “critical” spotted owl habitat, even though half of this land has been identified as either unsuitable or marginal habitat.

A lawsuit has been filed challenging this decision — but ultimately our elected leaders must step up to put an end to these flawed policies that threaten our forests and communities.

Ross Mickey of Eugene is the federal forest manager for the American Forest Resource Council.

Blue Mountain timber: Top forester backs ambitious program of tree thinning and restoration

Blue Mountain timber: Top forester backs ambitious program of tree thinning and restoration

By Richard Cockle, The Oregonian 
on March 12, 2013 at 8:42 PM, updated March 12, 2013 at 8:45 PM

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View full sizeA group of foresters and academics examines an overgrown woodland in the Blue Mountains northeast of Pendleton in August 2012. An ambitious reforestation program is being launched across the Blues, with timber harvests and thinning planned starting in summer 2014.DAVID POWELL/U.S. FOREST SERVICE 

LA GRANDE -- Trucks gathering logs for the Boise Cascade sawmill here roll out at 2 a.m. to begin their daylong, 480-mile round trips to the Mount Hood National Forest, Washington's Okanogan National Forest and other federal woodlands in Idaho.

"It is crazy to have to go that far for logs, totally," said Jim Princehouse of La Grande, who owns a fleet of 11 log trucks.

"This is a hard life," said Princehouse, 67. "It really is."

A staggering 800 million board feet of wood fiber annually reaches maturity in the nearby Wallowa-Whitman, Umatilla and Malheur national forests. Only 11 percent gets to sawmills, while 400 million board feet succumb to insects, disease, fire and age, said industry spokesman Tom Partin. He likened the mills' situation to "starving to death when you are standing beside the refrigerator."

That may soon change.

The top U.S. Forest Service official for Oregon and Washington, Kent Connaughton , has asked his foresters to plot out an ambitious, multiyear program of tree thinning and forest restoration in the Blue Mountains. Dubbed "accelerated restoration," the goal is to free more timber for mills while stiffening the woodlands' resistance to tree-killing insects, disease and wildfires.

It's not clear precisely how much lumber will become available under the plan to reduce fuel loads in forests, and funding is still being worked out. However, mill owners are hopeful, while criticism from conservationists so far is muted.

"It is a pretty high priority for us to get this thing going and be successful at it," said Bill Aney, U.S. Forest Service restoration coordinator for the Blue Mountains. "We can't afford to lose the mills. We can't afford to lose the forests."

Fire threat 

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Policies designed to halt clear-cuts and restore habitat and wildlife have severely limited harvests in eastern Oregon's national forests for two decades, leaving more fuel for forest fires while costing jobs

The area encompassed by the Wallowa-Whitman, Umatilla and Malheur national forests has lost 17 mills and more than 1,200 sawmill jobs since 1990, said Lindsay Warness, a Boise Cascade forest policy analyst in La Grande.

Industry officials have long advocated for thinning of federal forests as a way to reduce fuel loads and keep mills running. As evidence that federal priorities are out of whack, Partin, who works for the Eugene-based American Forest Resource Council,noted that the federal government spent $3 billion fighting wildfires last yearbut only $350 million on forest management.

Leading forestry officials are beginning to agree, driven in part by concerns about climate change.  A recent independent Climate Central study suggested that a summertime temperature increase of 1.8 degrees Farenheit could trigger up to six times the annual burning that the Blue Mountains has experienced in the past two decades.

"That is the thing that really worries me," says Umatilla National Forest silvaculturalist Dave Powell of Pendleton. "We may be dealing with fires that we don't have any historical precedence for."

Add the tinderbox effect of two decades of forest fuel buildups, and some communities could be extremely vulnerable, Powell said.

About 57 percent of the Umatilla National Forest has "very high" stand densities, up from 46 percent  in 2001.

View full sizeBill Aney, the new U.S. Forest Service restoration coordinator for eastern Oregon'™s Blue Mountains.RICHARD COCKLE/THE OREGONIAN 

Many of the open, park-like expanses of Ponderosa pine that once characterized the Blue Mountains have disappeared, victims of a century of wildfire suppression and selective logging. According to Oregon State University extension agent Paul Oester of La Grande, fire-tolerant Ponderosas have been replaced by dense, unhealthy and explosively flammable stands of grand fir, Douglas fir and other tree species.

In those dense stands, Oester said, wildfires burn fast and hot, and "ladder fuels" -- underbrush, dry grass and low branches -- carry flames upward into the forest crowns.

Last best hope 

These concerns are what led Connaughton, lead federal forester for the Pacific Northwest, to support a program of accelerated restoration in the Ochoco, Malheur, Umatilla and Wallowa-Whitman forests.

Responding to questions about the plan by email, Connaughton said: "I've heard from collaboratives, scientists and public leaders and believe there is broad public support for actively managing our forests to be more resilient to the uncertainties of climate change, uncharacteristically destructive wildfires and inevitable disease outbreaks."

Aney, under Connaughton's direction, assumed leadership of the initiative last month. He intends to have a planning team in place by June, he said. It will lay out projects in concert with collaborative groups of citizens, government officials, environmentalists and others.

View full sizeDave Powell, a silvaculturalist on the Umatilla National Forest, worries that unnatural fuel buildups and predicted increases in summertime temperatures could trigger devastating wildfires in the dry forests of eastern Oregon'™s Blue Mountains.RICHARD COCKLE/THE OREGONIAN 

The roughly 50,000 acres thinned or logged annually within the four forests is probably less than 20 per cent of what's needed, Aney said.

"We need to at least double that" to stabilize forest health within 15 years, he said.

The plan Aney will execute calls for managing the Blues in blocks of several hundred thousand acres, instead of the current 30,000-acre planning units. Logging or thinning is likely on no more than 40 percent of each planning unit, Aney said. Individual projects will have to go through environmental reviews.

Work in the woods is expected to start in summer 2014.

Tom Towslee, spokesman for U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., said some provisions of the new restoration process are based on an eastside forest plan floated by Wyden, now the chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. The Forest Service "liked what was in the bill" and integrated it into its plans, said Towslee.

Accelerated restoration is likely to become the model for restoring Oregon's westside forests and the unhealthy, overstocked eastside woodlands of Washington state, said Aney and Towslee.

Some conservationists support the Forest Service plan, saying forest restoration is impossible without the region's remaining sawmills, loggers and log truck drivers.

When sawmills close for lack of logs, even temporarily, "you always wonder, are they going to reopen?" said Susan Jane Brown, staff attorney for the Western Environmental Law Center,  which has challenged federal timber sales in the past.

Veronica Warnock, conservation director for the La Grande-based Hells Canyon Preservation Council, was more guarded. She said forest restoration is necessary but should be avoided in places where science doesn't support it, such as stands of old growth or wildlife corridors.

The Blue Mountains "have some of the highest plant and animal diversity of any place in the United States," she said. "It's a treasure... something we have to protect and preserve."

Sean Stevens,  executive director of Oregon Wild,  said he wants more details. Stevens said the closer the projects adhere to Wyden's earlier eastside forest legislation, the happier he will be.

Timber executives are cautiously optimistic.

Bruce Daucsavage, of Prineville, president of Ochoco Lumber Co., said the company has been considering a month-long shutdown this spring for an Ochoco subsidiary that employs 90 workers in John Day. He said the accelerated restoration plan is his company's last, best hope.  

"There is a groundswell here that I have not seen in 25 years," he said. "I think everybody has come to the conclusion that this is it."

-- Richard Cockle

Mount Hood logging disputes shift as clear-cuts decline and thinning projects rise

Mount Hood logging disputes shift as clear-cuts decline and thinning projects rise

By Scott Learn, The Oregonian 
on December 20, 2012 at 12:44 PM, updated December 20, 2012 at 10:58 PM

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View full sizeThe Collawash River, a tributary of the Clackamas, in Mount Hood National Forest.Scott Learn, The Oregonian 

The Jazz thinning project, a 2,000-acre logging plan near a Clackamas River tributary, features the type of selective tree cutting that's become the accepted approach for much of the Mount Hood National Forest.

But Mount Hood's main environmental watchdog group is fighting it, charging the Forest Service with using thinning as cover for potentially destructive logging.

Amid the criticism, the service has pulled back the previously approved project for a second look, upsetting logging interests who say Jazz is a far cry from the clear-cuts of the 1950s through 1980s.

It's a pitched timber battle, but also one that illustrates how Mount Hood's logging landscape has changed since the spotted-owl-driven logging wars fired up in the 1990s.

Disputes have become rarer, as new collaborative groups tamp down bickering and thinning projects supplant traditional logging throughout northwest Oregon's most familiar forest.

They've also become subtler, focused on the costs and benefits of thinning in often sensitive areas not slated for clear-cuts, and on the Forest Service's ability to monitor timber contractors for compliance with logging rules.

"Literally, nine of the 2,000 acres they're going to log are designated within the forest plan for that purpose," says Olivia Schmidt, program director for Bark, the Mount Hood watchdog group. "It just doesn't stand up to reason."

Thinning upsides

Logging groups and the Forest Service beg to differ.

Much of the forest is second-growth Douglas fir "plantations," planted roughly 8 feet apart after clear-cuts 30 to 60 years ago.

Thinning those stands helps the remaining trees set roots deeper and grow faster and healthier, they say, making them less susceptible to insects, disease and high winds. Forest undergrowth would increase, as would species such as western hemlock and red cedar, alder and noble fir.

Over time, the thinking goes, the forest would more closely resemble old growth stands. In drier eastside forests, it also significantly reduces wildfire risk.

EnlargeScott Learn, The OregonianThe Collawash River watershed includes roughly 600 streams and occasional ponds, making logging more of a challenge. The Forest Service says logging setbacks from streams help protect them. Environmental groups say their on-the-ground efforts find streams not identified on Forest Service maps. Scott Learn/The OregonianLogging in Mt. Hood National Forest holds controversy for watershed gallery (8 photos)

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That's been the logging model for the last decade, says Mike Chaveas, the Clackamas River district ranger on the Mount Hood National Forest. Commercial thinning has accounted for 80 percent of logging from 2001 to 2010, he says.

Several cuts in the Collawash River watershed, home to the Jazz planning area, have followed the pattern.

Like Bark, the American Forest Resource Council, which represents timber interests, appealed the Jazz decision. But its objection was that the 2,000-acre planning area was too small. The Collawash watershed covers roughly 97,000 acres.

"It's thinning that our forests need," says Tom Partin, the group's president. "The equipment we use out there anymore is all high-tech, with a much lighter touch on the ground."

The 1994 Northwest Forest Plan, adopted after the northern spotted owl came under the Endangered Species Act, predicts annual sales from Mount Hood of 64 million board feet. Nowadays, it's coming in around 30 million board feet, with overall annual tree growth about 13 times harvest levels, the Forest Service says.

Over time, as timber sales are executed, the Jazz project could generate 15 million board feet, the service says, projected to support about 125 timber jobs and provide enough wood to build several thousand houses.

The Forest Service screened the project through the Clackamas Stewardship Partners, a collaborative group with timber and environmental representatives in place for eight years. No members of the group appealed.

But Bark dropped out of the partners group for a time, knowing it was likely to oppose Jazz. Oregon Wild stayed on and decided not to fight the project. Erik Fernandez, Oregon Wild's wilderness coordinator, said the group is focusing on other Mount Hood logging proposals outside the Clackamas drainage that it sees as more harmful.

Jeffrey Gerwing, an associate professor of environmental science and management atPortland State University, is part of the partners group.

The Jazz project's "variable density thinning" would help make a more complex forest, he says. Studies of other Northwest forests have shown increases in plant diversity, insect abundance and migratory songbirds after thinning.

Into the forest

Walking through the Collawash watershed, you see evidence for that point of view. Stands of spindly young Douglas firs, bark still chalky white, are common. Logged areas aren't clear-cut, with the "leave trees" left behind still marked in orange.

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But the forest doesn't call to mind a plantation either.

It's steep and watery, with dozens of streams coursing through. Ferns, Oregon grape and hemlock trees cover much of the understory. Dead snags and fallen "nurse" trees, important to a natural forest, abound.

"There's a difference between planting trees and letting nature do its thing and the kind of industrial management you see in private forests," says Alex Brown, Bark's executive director.

Bark has more concerns about the Jazz project because its staff and 50 volunteers have scouted every acre, Brown says. They've found unusually steep slopes destined for logging, he says, unmapped streams and water features and more complexity than the Forest Service describes. Twelve miles of road, including seven reclaimed at taxpayer expense, would be reopened for the project.

The Collawash includes some of the most geologically unstable terrain in Mount Hood's forests and 168 miles of fish-bearing streams. Road building, logging truck traffic, skid rows and logging yards can increase erosion into those streams, threatening water quality.

Bark contends that the thinly staffed Forest Service doesn't have the personnel to make sure timber contractors are following "best management practices," or BMPs, that reduce erosion, particularly on a 2,000 acre project.

Since 1996, Mount Hood Forest Service staffing dropped from 400 permanent positions to 159, according to a 2010 report.

A Bark record request for Forest Service BMP monitoring documents returned evidence of just four units being monitored in two sales, and several of those documents showed problems. Bark says it has found skid trails too close to streams and large trees that were cut instead of spared.

"The Forest Service says they're doing the monitoring," Bark's Schmidt says, "but if they can't provide documents, then we're just taking their word for it."

Moving forward

Ranger Chaveas concedes the Forest Service doesn't have "rigorous documentation" of monitoring. The last overall review of BMP implementation came in 2004.

But timber sale administrators do regularly monitor activity, and can penalize contractors who don't follow the rules and properly reclaim areas after logging, he says. Forest Service scientists use their findings to improve requirements for subsequent projects.

On Jazz, some 400 acres of the 2,000-acre plan area are off limits to logging because of needs for stream and water quality protection.

Chaveas says loggers will stick largely to flat spots and logging trucks will avoid roads along streams and steep slopes to prevent erosion.

A Forest Service environmental analysis said the logging would create little increase in sediment runoff, a hazard to fish. The National Marine Fisheries Service, which oversees salmon and steelhead, signed off on it.

But Chaveas said the Forest Service did decide to take a second look at sediment issues after Bark's appeal. That could take several months.

Gerwing, of Portland State, said he'd like the Clackamas Stewardship Partners to work with the Forest Service on how BMP implementation and monitoring might be improved. After that, he hopes the project can move forward.

Scott Learn; Twitter: @slearn1