 Welcome to another seminar series from the Blue Mountain Natural Resources Institute. I'm the Institute Manager, Larry Hartman. The Blue Mountains Natural Resources Institute is a part of the Pacific Northwest Station of Forest Service Research and is also funded by the Pacific Northwest Region of the National Forest System. Our territory includes all of the Blue Mountains, including 10 counties in Oregon and four counties in Washington. The Institute achieves its success by working with its partners, which include federal, state, tribal and local government agencies, as well as industry, environmental organizations, private landowners, and educational institutions. The Institute does three main types of activities. First, we offer educational activities and technology transfer, including seminars like this one, and we do research management tours, publications, videos, and we even sponsor conferences. Second, we conduct applied research, which is designed to meet real-world resource management problems. Third, the Institute serves as a neutral forum for discussing environmental issues so that people or organizations with differing opinions can get to understand one another better. This presentation exemplifies the Institute's goal of putting science to work. It's part of our ongoing commitment to bring science results to resource managers and to the general public. This seminar series is entitled Fire Ecology and Management in the Blue Mountains, which explores the role and function of fire in the ecosystem. The third of the five sessions looks at two subjects, prescribed burning and productivity, a nutrient management perspective, and Can You See the Forest for the Smoke, a plan for addressing prescribed burning and wildfire in the Blue Mountains of Northeastern Oregon. I hope you enjoy it. I'm going to focus on productivity, however I will point out that I'm working on a paper at the present time with Dr. Jim Clementson from the University of Arizona that addresses many of these other issues and hopefully addresses them in an objective fashion. So we have a lot of other concerns about fire, but tonight I'm going to try to focus on nutrient cycling and productivity. The approach that I'm going to take is fairly basic. I don't know the range of understanding of the audience, so I may be too basic for some of you and you may be bored by it, but hopefully we'll kind of reach a middle target. Before we go any farther, I want to make one point that I think is very important. We refer to forests, wild lands, range lands, these lands that we deal with as renewable natural resources. I think it's very important to keep in mind that these renewable natural resources and their renewability depends on a finite supply of water and nutrient resources. These are items that can be depleted from the system and have a long-term influence on productivity. I'd like now to give you a little bit of background information that will help you understand why I have some concerns about forest productivity and fire. And it may be helpful if we took a look at the forest habitat as a crop, much the same as the agronomist view of their crop of wheat. The forest vegetation captures CO2 from the atmosphere, sunlight, and with water from the soil and nutrients from the soil converts this with photosynthesis into biomass, carbon, various plant chemicals, proteins, and that's what you see standing above ground. In the process of recycling, these are cycled back to the soil via the litter layer and the forest floor, and I'll have some emphasis on the forest floor later, again to be picked up by the tree and the shrubs and the grasses and the other vegetation. So what I'd like you to do is to think of this forest habitat as an assemblage of standing nutrients, nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, sulfur, and of course carbon, rather than looking at it as a tree or a shrub as we go through this. And the agronomist and the farmers have known for probably over 100 years that as you remove a crop, you're removing carbon and nutrients, and if you're going to have another crop you need to replenish those nutrients at some point in time. So this is a well-established science and management strategy in the agronomic world. That's not so with forestry. Our understanding of forest fertility, forest fertilization, forest nutrient cycling is really in its infancy and particularly so for drier habitats and nutrient limited habitats like the eastern side of the Cascades. There is a basic difference between the crop land and the forest setting. Wild lands go through a process called succession and this is the orderly process of change in ecosystems whereby one plant community replaces another plant community. Diagrammatically, I swiped this from Odom and put in a few trees, Odom's 1978 text. We look at age and years from zero to 100 and we'll call this a typical Douglas fir or grand fir habitat in the Blue Mountains. And our community type, as we go here, we start out with our grass fir shrub habitat. That's the habitat or the stage of succession that we have immediately after disturbance and over time that succeeds into ponderosa pine, Douglas fir and grand fir and we've depicted those as coming in here in the understory as change over time as the site the grasses, forbs and shrubs here moderate the site and make it more suitable for the plants that come along later in succession. We call each of these stages before climax, seral stages and we refer to the whole process as a sear and this is our climax stage and actually in actuality all of these other components are going to be here at the end point. I didn't have room to depict those and I didn't think about it until after I had the slide made. I think there are several aspects of the successional process that we need to focus on that relate to the productivity of the site and these are ecosystem attributes for the developmental or the seral stages and the mature or climax successional stages and this is directly from a publication by Odom called the strategy of ecosystem development published in about 1975 in Science. For the attribute organic matter at the seral stages it's fairly small there's a small quantity of organic carbon above ground in plant materials. In the climax stage the organic matter component is very large. The nutrients in the seral stages are extra biotic most of them are in the soil or they're in the ash after burning. At the climax stage they are intrabiotic they're tied up in trees, understory vegetation and forest floor. These diversity it's low in seral stages and it's high in climax stages. Stratification is poorly organized in seral stages and it's well organized in climax stages and it's particularly well organized vertically at climax stages. In seral stages the mineral cycles are open in climax they're closed and the role of detritus or plant parts, shed plant parts is unimportant in seral stages and important in climax stages. Now to put this into perspective the forest that pioneers saw looked very much like this in the Blue Mountains. This happens to be a research natural area near Yakima. Open stands of ponderosa pine and western large with an understory of grasses. Over a period of 80 years as succession proceeded this is the way the stands looked and these are two stands that are side by side on meek's table. We helped this process along by not only removing fire from the system but by also selectively removing some of the tree species. The ponderosa pine and the western large were very desirable so we removed them. Along with this change in succession is an accompanying increase in the amount of organic matter above ground and meek's table gives us a pretty good example of this. We have a basilar area of ponderosa pine of 39 meters squared per hectare. In our mixed conifer Douglas fir we have 66 so consequently we have almost twice the biomass in the mixed conifer stand which means we have probably almost twice the concentration of nutrients in that setting. And the forest floor one of our most important areas has 32,000 kilograms per hectare in ponderosa pine, 42,000 in the mixed conifer. So we've seen a shift in biomass accumulation along with a shift in nutrient accumulation patterns and these will focus some of the concerns that I have a little later. The next thing we need to look at, I'm going to zoom this in a little bit, are the soils of the Blue Mountains. These soils are relatively young, they were formed, pardon me, let me back up. The dominant geologic and soil forming event in the Blue Mountains was the eruption of Mount Mazama about 6,700 years ago. That spread a cloud of ash from Mazama clear up into Montana and deposited somewhere between one and three feet of ash in this area. So these soils are fairly young and the soils are over a bedrock of the salt that was laid down somewhere between 17 and 58 million years ago. This road cut does not show it very well, but there's a thin layer of soil there and then a bedrock of the salt. As such, the soils are deficient in nitrogen and they're deficient in sulfur and this is pretty widespread throughout the Blue Mountains and the deficiencies range from moderate to very severe. Now our conventional wisdom in the past has suggested that the main problem that we have is moisture. What we're finding now is that we have about an equal limitation or an equally deficient moisture level and nutrient level so that we have a dual deficiency to deal with. We can cope with the moisture deficiency by the selection of the tree species we use and by the way we space them in control competition, but that's about all we can do, but we can take a proactive stance in managing the nutrients. The nutrient limitations assume even more importance, the nutrient limitations in the soil assume even more importance when we consider the consequences of the shift in biomass accumulation as we've allowed succession to proceed in the Blue Mountains. We do have some data that shows, that's a typical soil profile in the Blue Mountains. You can see there's very little horizonation in the soil. This shows the distribution of nitrogen, I've contrasted two sites, one in Eastern Washington and one in Western Washington and this is about the only data that we have on nutrient distribution for the interior part of the Cascades and the salient features of this is that we have approximately 40% of our total site nitrogen capital standing above ground, 15% of it in the forest floor or 308 kilograms per hectare which is roughly 308 pounds per acre and we have 24% of it in our standing live and dead trees 485 kilograms per hectare. In terms of the tree component, most of the nitrogen and phosphorus, pardon me, nitrogen and sulfur are in the foliage component and most of the nitrogen and sulfur are the other part of it or the other major compartment is in the forest floor. The bowls are mostly carbon so if we take the bowls off there's very little harm there because we can recapture carbon fairly easily. However, the bowls are also high in phosphorus so we need to take that into consideration. The other part of this study is that or the other part of this study showed that in terms of phosphorus distribution about 60 to 70% of our phosphorus is above mineral soil. In contrast, this is a western Washington site where we have approximately 20% of our nitrogen above ground but even that may raise a flag of concern if you're talking about trying to produce a forest over several rotations where you're removing 20% of your nitrogen with each rotation at a maximum. As I indicated, the forest floor is a very important area of consideration because in our prescribed burning programs this is the area that's going to be most heavily influenced by prescribed burning and these are some of the functions of the forest floor. First of all it's the storehouse for nutrients, approximately 500 kilograms per hectare of nitrogen in the forest floor. It's a zone of arthropod activity. It's an area of the major zone of microbial processing of organic matter. It's a nutrient cycling center. It has importance for soil architecture or the structure of the soil. It has importance for water absorption and retention. It helps moderate soil temperatures and it serves as soil protection from rain drop action and from erosion processes. As I indicated, fire directly influences the forest floor. Now I want to take a look at how fire actually influences nutrients. What does it do to the nutrients that are contained in plant material? What is the fate of the nutrient in the plant? Normally the nutrients in plants and litter in the absence of fire fall to the soil surface are incorporated into the forest floor and are eventually recycled back to the soil and back to the plants. When we burn the site we go through the combustion process. We volatilize nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium and sulfur. The most sensitive of those two or of those elements for volatilization are the nitrogen and the sulfur, which as it turns out in the Blue Mountains happen to be our most critically limiting elements. The remainder are deposited as ash as calcium, magnesium and phosphorus. They're actually deposited as carbonates and are converted to bicarbonates and their fate from there is either to leach into the soil or runoff from the surface and go into the streams. Also those nutrients can be taken back up by the newly emerging plant community. The degree of nutrient loss is going to depend directly on the intensity of the fire and on the amount of organic material consumed. This is particularly true for nitrogen and sulfur. As you increase the amount of organic matter consumed you increase the loss of nitrogen and sulfur. Sulfur is particularly critical. This is the area where I've done, oh that is, is that focused now? Okay I don't have my long glasses on. I've done some work with with sulfur and in this study I did several different combustion temperatures ranging from 375 up to 975 to 1175 centigrade and these approximate the range of temperatures you get with the prescribed fire or almost any any kind of fire in the forest and then I did a series of combustion times and what I found was that the sulfur was very vulnerable to volatilization loss at the lowest temperature and the shortest combustion times. We lost about half of it. This happens to be ponderosa pine litter and the same responses occurred with Douglas fir with red or pardon me with Sittge alder and with general forest litter and also as we increased the temperature of combustion we increased the amount of sulfur that we lost. In terms of nutrient availability yes there is an increase in availability of some nutrients as a consequence of burning. There's an immediate increase in the availability of cations like calcium and potassium. There's an immediate increase in the availability of nitrogen because there's a flux of ammonium directly from the forest floor into the soil as part of the combustion process. Following that conditions are very favorable for nitrification or for nitrogen mineralization in the surface layers of the soil and so about a year after fire we get a flush of nitrate that's available for plant growth and so after fire you often see a flush of plant growth that would lead you to believe that you've almost fertilized the site and indeed you really have. The thing that I think we have to weigh is the short-term benefits gained by burning against the long-term negative aspects of large losses of nutrients and those are questions that we don't really have very good answers to yet. I do want to talk a little bit about how fire affects the forest floor because we do have some information on that and I'm going to I'm going to cite some work that Joan Landsberg at Bend has done. She shows reductions in the forest floor from 32 to 69 percent with moderate to high fuel consumption burns and her conclusion her conclusion is that prescribed underburning in the PNW will have to be justified on grounds other than releasing sequestered nutrients from the forest floor. Then over on the west side Jeff Borchers has just completed a study where he's looked at 10 sites on the Siskiyou National Forest after harvest and burning and the forest floor organic matter is largely absent and not being replenished by revegetation of flare cuts. He concludes that nitrogen and carbon will not be replaced by the end of an ordinary rotation or 80 to 100 years. He also suggests that we need to give consideration to nitrogen replacement which suggests which means that we probably will need to fertilize the sites with nitrogen unless there's some very rapid accrual of nitrogen at some point in the future. Now in terms of actual productivity this gets to be the sticky part because we really don't have a lot of long-term studies that that give us any or we don't have any studies that give us some real strong indications that we have an influence on productivity over the long haul but the studies that are starting to emerge or unfold indicate that burning does reduce productivity. They've just completed a study in Longleaf Pine in the south and they've burned with a low intensity fire on a biennial basis for 10 years and there was a 23 percent reduction in the growth of Longleaf Pine compared to the unburned plants. And Boyer the author of the paper that was in Southern Journal of Applied Forestry comes to the conclusion that there is no sign of a payoff in terms of improved pine growth for investments in burning or other cultural treatments to control understory hardwoods. In a study closer to home Joan Landsberg has just completed her PhD dissertation work which deals with the way ponderosa pine responds to underburning and a single prescribed burn has reduced the growth of ponderosa pine significantly for up to 12 years following burning. These are these are results things are just starting to emerge and the picture indicates that the nutrient cycling part of this is extremely important and then if we disrupt the nutrient cycling process there is a consequence or there is a price to pay in terms of productivity. In conclusion when I showed you the first slide that array of very broad objectives and very broad benefits of prescribed fire or burning that raised a flag with me because those were very broad objectives and they were not very well defined and I think first of all that our actions need to be objective driven at both the site and ecosystem levels or ecosystem scales. I think we need very good very clear objectives before we jump into a burning campaign to say that we're going to improve wildlife habitat for example is just nothing more than words because how are we going to improve wildlife habitat are we going to improve the shrub component which shrubs are we going to improve are we going to burn in the spring or in the fall because some shrubs will be killed by fall burning whereas others will be favored some will be killed by spring burning whereas others others will be favored so we need to be very objective driven in this whole process. Many of our pacific northwest sites are nitrogen and sulfur limited and succession may have shifted the nutrient balance to the point that prescribed burning could cause a substantial reduction in site productivity. So I think that caution needs to be exercised in the way that the above ground materials are managed. The ecosystem or the emphasis on ecosystem management has shown us one thing and that is that the task is very complex. The structure the function and the processes of the ecosystem are very intricate and very highly interwoven and we don't understand them very well and every action that we take is going to have a reaction. This is true for biological systems as well as for physical systems and this is where I have a little bit of a problem with burning with our lack of understanding about the actual effects of burning over the long haul and that is the predictability of the successional trajectory and a very prominent ecologist Ian Noble in Australia is is pretty outspoken about our predictability of ecosystem succession and the trajectory that succession will take after disturbance. He suggests that and well let me back up we do a lot of disturbances and everything that we do can be considered a disturbance harvest, burning residues, planting trees, controlling weeds, fertilizing, seeding grasses, grazing, these are all disturbances and when you start piling these one on top of the other Noble suggests that we reduce our predictability to near zero and this is one of my main concerns at this point because we are imposing a very large array of disturbance factors. I'm going to skip the next one and you have a presentation coming up in the session here I think it's next week that discusses the tools that are available for management and I think we need to make use of all the tools that are available fire's just one of those tools and we've got a whole bag of tricks and I think we need to use the whole bag right now and with that I will entertain any questions. I'll take a couple of questions from LaGrange on the motorcycle to the remote side. Any questions from LaGrange? The preliminary work by the Intermountain Forest Tree Nutrition Co-op in this area indicates that potassium may be a lot more important than we believe from the forest health issue and that where we just applied nitrogen or nitrogen and sulfur in square plots we go at square depth because we increase the sugar levels versus phenols and attracted beetles or increase the armillary area component and preliminary indications indicate that potassium may be extremely important in controlling that relationship. Yeah I'm glad you pointed that out Bob and you're and you're right the the co-op has found potassium to be a very important element when you fertilize with large quantities of nitrogen you start getting limitations of potassium we haven't seen that here in the blues yet most of the studies I've done have shown that potassium is very adequately available we're doing some fertilization studies and we haven't seen any limitations of potassium yet. Okay but then this is true with with fertilization when you apply and it comes back to Liebig's law of the limiting neuter the limiting factor when you apply a large quantity of any one limiting factor of the system other factors then become limiting so if you dump on a large amount of nitrogen it's pretty well stands to reason that phosphorus, sulfur, or potassium or some other element is going to become limiting. Incidentally potassium is another one that we lose to burning goes off at about 700 degrees centigrade which is a moderate temperature burn and we lose very substantial quantities of it at that temperature. Thanks for that comment Bob. Other questions? All right you mentioned that a lot of our nutrient reserve in eastern Oregon today is above ground reflect on how it was in the old days you showed some pictures of some pine stands where were the nutrients then? I think the nutrients then primarily resided in the soil because we had a much lower biomass component above ground and we routinely removed or that the the elements that were in the forest floor were routinely removed by fire the ones that are sensitive to burning. So there's what there's been a shift we don't know how substantial the shift is if I had to guess I'd say that in the ponderosa pine system before succession into the Douglas fir gram fir system there was probably 15 or 20 percent of the nitrogen above ground and we've shifted that to where we've about doubled the amount or the proportion that's above ground we've shifted that to where there's 30 to 40 percent above ground. Okay just for clarification and I'll be brief that then you know looking at the old pictures the forest seemed pretty healthy at that time but you know what was wrong with that I guess is my question. Our objectives are different now we we have a different array of objectives we expect the forest to produce food for cattle wild cover and food for wildlife trees for homes and before nature had no objective nature just survived it was there the plants adapted to whatever came along and happened to them but the objectives have changed. I do think that we will use fire on a on a horizontal basis to create mosaics of ponderosa pine habitat that would be maintained by fire and I think that's probably one of the very desirable uses of fire. I think a lot of the other objectives can be achieved mechanically and probably without a great deal of additional expense compared to fire and if we look at the benefit that we gain by keeping the nutrients in the site in terms of productivity we don't know what those benefits give us but it stands to reason that if we if we have a hundred year rotation compared to a hundred and thirty year rotation because we've conserved a substantial part of our nitrogen it stands to reason it kind of makes sense to move into mechanical management there is a benefit there and we haven't characterized it. One more question up here all right. For the nutrients that are volatiles do they get redeposited in any way? Oh there's a study that Jim Clayton has done over in the inner mountain area basically at the site where there where the burning is no there's very little redeposition of the nutrients the major redeposition or the major deposition is through the asphalt process and most of that is are the cations and the phosphorus and the rest are turned into gas and evacuated from the system and the gases even if they were redeposited would probably not be suitable for plant growth because they are now nitrous oxides and plants don't use the nitrous oxides they use nitrate and ammonium and so the nitrous oxide or the nitrogen has to be converted by the nitrogen fixation process back into something plants can use. Let's go over to burns now does burns have any questions? No thank you. All right thank you very much okay Blue Mountain Community College any questions there folks? We went back to burns somehow. Well we'll go to John Day. Any questions? I have a question. He mentioned that Landsberg found burning decreased ponderosa pine growth and he attributed a large amount of that to nutrient loss. What's the other answer that was due to nutrient loss rather than just direct damage to the trees? That's a good question she makes a supposition that a large part of that was a consequence of the loss of nutrients and it's a good point because as succession proceeds the roots of the trees start to feed closer to the forest floor soil interface because that's where the nutrient cycling is most active and so there could be direct damage to the roots of the trees through prescribed burning once that feeding pattern has been established and you kill those roots. So it's a good point but the major culprit that's been pointed out is the loss of nutrients that have occurred. The the large? Go ahead. Mine's more basic but can you elaborate a little bit on you talked about nitrogen most of it being volatized at the time of burning and then you went on to say a lot of it went as a flush into the soil almost as if it had been fertilized. Can you speak a little bit more in particular to that? The largest component or the largest vector for the nitrogen is the volatilization pathway. There is a rapid conversion during the pyrolysis process whereby ammonium is the the plant materials are converted or the nitrogen in the plant materials are converted into ammonium some of it goes off as a gas some of it goes directly into the soil and in the presence of the moisture of the soil is trapped and made available for plant growth immediately. No I don't. I wish I did. Other questions? I see a few familiar faces in the crowd here in La Grande and I think I saw a familiar face at one of your sites in Monmouth. Good. I'm going to be covering some of the air quality concerns that are related to prescribed burning in the Blue Mountains and touching on some of the air quality issues and concerns the health concerns visibility problems and things like that. I have some slides and I'm on here. Okay. Phil kind of gave a good summary of my experience with DEQ. I've been working on a variety of air pollution issues over the years ranging from field burning to industrial pollution. Now I've kind of come full circle almost back to field burning in terms of dealing with prescribed burning and what we refer to as non-point sources or area sources of pollution. For tonight I'll be basically focusing on this prescribed burning and the smoke that comes from that. First of all let me go over some of the sources of pollution that are typically of air pollution that are typically found in northeastern Oregon and to a certain degree in rural areas throughout the state. You have prescribed burning. You also have open field burning such as that that takes place here in Union County. You also have just general wildfires, various forms of agricultural burning. You have industrial emissions primarily from the wood products industries that are out in this area. In addition there's smoke from residential wood stoves and I'll be discussing that a little bit more later just in terms of the severity of that problem. It's in the larger communities it's a relatively severe pollution problem. That came out interesting. Looks like a nuclear bomb going on. What this slide is supposed to show is basically airborne dust. What we refer to is fugitive dust which is also an air contaminant and one which is being addressed under the federal ambient air quality standards which I'll be covering a little bit. The situation is the forest health crisis and here's a picture of some some trees that are obviously in a terminal stage. The situation as the Department of Environmental Quality understands at this point and we have been pretty much closely involved with this issue for about the last two years ever since basically the Blue Mountains Institute came out with their study that indicated the severity of the forest health problem in the in the Blue Mountains and the need to address that with prescribed burning. As you've heard earlier by the previous speaker and probably at some of the earlier seminars and I'm probably going to be repeating some of this the situation simply put has been the result of prolonged drought combined with 40, 50, 60 years of fire suppression the combination of which which has resulted in high fuel buildups for a high fire hazard situation and inappropriate tree species developing in the area as art indicated that are prone to disease and insect problems. We have heard that up to 60 percent of the forest of the four national forests in the Blue Mountains may be dead or dying. Clearly returning fire to the ecosystem has been identified as a primary component in restoring forest health and that puts DEQ in the position of basically having to balance the forest health restoration needs with the needs for the public to be protected from smoke and to prevent just the general deterioration in air quality. This graph shows wildfire emissions in the Blue Mountains since 1940 to present and this clearly indicates that starting in 1940 going through there were a couple of big years but for the most part fire suppression efforts worked fairly successfully and then you see that when you get to basically the present day starting about 1986 wildfire emissions have been quite high. The next slide is a comparison of wildfire emissions of those high years compared with the prescribed burning emissions in north eastern Oregon for which records weren't available prior to 1987 trying to focus just a little better. Basically the emissions that this shows about a 25,000 tons of particulate matter per year from wildfire emissions and about 6,000 tons of particulate matter from prescribed burning in the Blue Mountains during this time period. This brings up some of the air quality issues that are related to this forest burning in the Blue Mountains. The Blue Mountains Institute research study from two years ago came up with an estimated 355,000 acres to be burned over a three-year period which is over 100,000 acres per year. This compares to about 20,000 acres currently being burned in the Blue Mountains and this would represent about a three to four three to fourfold increase in emissions. The health risks represented by smoke in general primarily particulate matter and most of that particulate matter is is of a size of 10 micrometers or smaller and this is of a health concern because these this particulate matter can be easily inhaled and lodged in the lungs for a long period of time. There are other pollutants as well such as carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, aldehydes, heavy metals and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. These pollutants are toxic, carcinogenic and can have some severe health effects. The health effects can range from short-term effects such as just simply throat irritation and coughing to longer-term lung damage such as cancer and emphysema. In terms of the risk groups that are that are at a higher risk than just the general population, those would obviously be those people with existing respiratory problems and the elderly and children as well. There's been quite a bit of research done on the health effects of smoke. Most of that has focused on wood stove smoke in towns. Several years ago there was a health effects study done down in Klamath Falls which has some of the highest particulate levels in the country and this study looked at the health effects of this smoke on school children and their ability to basically attest to their lung function during the course of a winter heating season and the results of that study even though it was a relatively small scale study did show that some children experienced some breathing difficulties and some minor respiratory problems just from monitoring for over a winter heating period. There have been other larger scale studies that have been done up in Washington, the Seattle area on wood stoves as well and these have been fairly conclusive that the wood stove smoke is harmful. Getting back to some of the other air quality issues from what we've heard from a lot of the proposed increase in prescribed burning has it has involved a shift away to a certain degree from clear cut burning and from pile burning in terms of a burning activity into more understory burning which probably many as many of you know is kind of a fuel treatment that burns off the lighter duff material that's on the forest floor even though understory burning creates less smoke because less fuel consumption is involved. There is a greater likelihood for there being localized smoke impacts from this that's primarily due to the fact that when you burn a lot of fuel you get a lot of heat a lot of temperature you get a convective column of smoke that goes into the air which is good in terms of being able to get that smoke up to the upper elevations where transport winds and other meteorological factors can disperse the smoke. If you have a lot of low lying smoke you're going to have some significant smoke dispersal problems so a major shift to understory burning could pose some new problems in terms of how to manage the smoke. Obviously a significant increase in prescribed burning could impact some cities like La Grande that are currently referred to as non-attainment areas and could worsen the air pollution problems that are already there. One concern that we have is that in eastern Oregon northeastern Oregon there is currently no extensive smoke management program such as the one that's currently operated in western Oregon which does quite a bit of meteorological forecasting and monitoring of of smoke to avoid smoke impacts in populated areas and that kind of a program does not exist in northeastern Oregon. We at DEQ really have very little air quality monitoring data in northeastern Oregon. Most of our monitoring is done frankly in the more heavily populated areas of the state that have a variety of air pollution problems. We do do monitoring in La Grande and Pendleton but that's pretty much it. It's it's it's fairly limited out in this area so we don't have much existing much of an existing air quality database to go from and I guess the key issue here is will the increase the proposed increase in prescribed burning violate the Federal Clean Air Act and that's when I'm going to go over next. There are numerous provisions in the Clean Air Act that DEQ like other states has the responsibility for for implementing and enforcing. I've already mentioned the first one which are the national ambient air quality standards. There is a national ambient air quality standard for a particulate matter of 10 microns or less like I mentioned earlier. There was a prior standard for particulate matter that took all sizes of particulate matter into account. In the late 80s that was changed to only focus on the small particulate matter because that poses the greatest health risk. So the ambient air quality standard for what we refer to as PM10 has a daily standard and an annual standard. The daily or 24-hour standard being 150 micrograms per cubic meter and the annual standard being 50 micrograms per cubic meter. As I mentioned there are areas that are currently violating the ambient air quality standards. These areas and one of these areas is Lagrand for particulate matter must adopt various controls for the major sources in those areas to that contributes a significant pollution and according to the Clean Air Act come into attainment by December 31st 1994. In Lagrand DEQ has been involved intensely since basically 1989 in working with the city to identify what the primary sources of pollution are and to adopt control strategies for those. Some of those control strategies very briefly here are voluntary wood stove curtailment on days when weather forecasting indicates there's going to be an inversion over the town and significant burning of wood stoves would be a problem. Other smaller measures such as paving unpaved roads to control dust emissions, a different kind of using a different kind of road sanding material that does not get pulverized into a into a finer dust that contributes dust levels into the area. Replacing that material with a more sturdy material that doesn't create those kind of dust problems. Those are some of the controls that non-attainment areas have to do. In terms of prescribed burning Lagrand and most of the other PM10 non-attainment areas don't have significant amounts of prescribed burning impacting those areas. There are special zones that are around each of the non-attainment areas that place some restrictions on prescribed burning during the winter time because most of these practically all of these non-attainment problems are wintertime problems and even though there is very very little prescribed burning going on in the winter time there still is one or two percent of that activity that occurs and so there are some very I don't want to refer to them as minor restrictions but restrictions nonetheless on on prescribed burning around these sensitive areas. I have a map here that shows the state PM10 non-attainment areas and there you can see Lagrand as well as six other areas and for the most part all these areas the primary source of pollution is wood stoves and again prescribed burning emissions are relatively minor. However we do have concerns that if there were a significant increase in prescribed burning in northeastern Oregon that impacts on Lagrand could could pose some some problems in terms of meeting ambient air quality standards. A major portion of the Clean Air Act and probably the most significant portion that really addresses prescribed burning are what is what is referred to as the PSD provisions with the prevention of significant deterioration. That is a section of the Clean Air Act that places limits on the amount of pollution that can be added to an air shed that's already a clean air shed or one that's currently in attainment with standards. It basically prevents a situation where a source such as an industrial source might move into a clean area and pollute up pollute cause pollution levels that go up to the ambient air quality standard or just short of the ambient air quality standard and thereby causing significant increases in emissions yet not violating the ambient air quality standards. The PSD provisions set specific limits such as these indicated here in terms of micrograms of how much additional pollution can be provided to a clean air shed. These provisions also apply to prescribed burning and for class 1 areas and class 2 areas as this slide indicates class 1 areas being the pristine areas of the state such as the wilderness areas and Crater Lake National Park and the class 2 areas being the rural areas pretty much the entire rest of the state that's in attainment with standards. These are specific amounts that sources can add to the existing air shed. Here 17 micrograms on an annual basis and here 30 micrograms on a 24-hour basis. I should point out that this is a new federal PSD increment for PM10 that was just adopted replacing the old particulate increment which addressed basically all of the particulate matter in the air. So this is a concern that could place some significant restrictions on prescribed burning if there were to be a significant increase in emissions from prescribed burning. Additional clean air act requirements there's a lot of them. Visibility protection a significant portion of the act addresses the class 1 areas that I just referred to basically the wilderness areas in the national parks in the country and requires that states adopt programs or strategies to improve visibilities in those in those pristine areas. In Oregon we have 12 class 1 areas three of those are in in the Blue Mountains or in North Eastern Oregon. Here's a map that shows those areas you have the Hell's Canyon National Recreation Area the Eagle Cap Wilderness Area and the Strawberry Mountains area basically all within the Blue Mountains region. We have adopted a visibility protection program here in Oregon that lays out strategies for protecting these areas. Most of these strategies are focused on western Oregon and do not look at the visibility conditions in eastern Oregon thus far. So they're and they primarily focus on the summertime visibility period when visitation period when visitation is particularly high between July 1 and September 15th that's when there's about 90 percent of the visitation to the wilderness areas. And so these strategies focus on specifically that period of time during the summertime. In terms of prescribed burning this has resulted in a shifting of prescribed burning activity over the last oh 10 years or so shifting to the spring time. Again speaking primarily for western Oregon although that's also the case here in eastern Oregon as well. This has produced some additional benefits in that this has produced some additional benefits in that burning conducting slash burning under the higher fuel moisture content under a higher fuel more fuel moisture content has resulted in fewer emissions per acre because less material is burned. That has basically been something that has helped reduce emissions from prescribed burning in western Oregon significantly since the mid-80s. And of course burning during that time period also significantly reduces the risk of wildfire. These visibility protection strategies also require that the large-scale summer agricultural programs the open field burning programs in the Willamette Valley in the area around Madras and central Oregon and out here in Union County that there be considerations given to under the smoke management program to avoid impacting the class one areas in those areas. Getting back to the Clean Air Act requirements there is additional provisions that are referred to as the NEPA requirements. This involves the National Environmental Protection Act and this basically requires that all federal agencies must assess the environmental consequences of any federal action that could cause air pollution water pollution and such. In terms of prescribed burning if there is an increase in prescribed burning it must go through the NEPA process and this means basically working with the Environmental Protection Agency and preparing a what's referred to as a NEPA document that provides an analysis of air quality impacts that can occur from the proposed federal activity and a full analysis of all non-burning alternatives such as lash utilization, various low emission burning techniques and such. So the NEPA requirements are a very important element. Something that DEQ at the state level is not that much involved in but something that at the federal level involves the Environmental Protection Agency and the federal and the particular federal agencies such as Forest Service or BLM. Finally there are requirements that each state have a state implementation plan. We refer to this as our SIP and our SIP basically contains all of the provisions and requirements that the state is going to impose on all the air pollution sources within the state that will demonstrate that the provisions of the Clean Air Act will be met. Now let me review some potential solutions having laid out all of the air quality concerns and what appear to be all of the constraints that may be imposed on prescribed burning. There are some solutions that DEQ has been working on in conjunction with the Forest Service in conjunction with the Department of Forestry, BLM, other state federal agencies through a series of meetings that we have been having which initiated basically last fall with these agencies as well as representatives of other states concerning the potential increase in burning in the Blue Mountains. We've been working on a plan that might meet the air quality requirements yet still allow the majority of the proposed prescribed burning to occur. The next slide kind of illustrates how this might take place. This basically represents a no net increase approach to future burning and looking at past emission levels and I don't know how clearly you can see this maybe I can zoom in on it a little bit. One of the elements that can greatly simplify meeting all of the the various air quality requirements and in particular the prevention of significant deterioration requirements is to be able to show that future burning will not increase emission levels over past levels basically a no net change and we have been looking at past emissions in terms of wildfire emissions which I showed you earlier the past 15-year average combined with the emissions from prescribed burning in northeastern Oregon have come up with a total here that if this served as a basically an emission cap or an emission limit for future burning could provide a significant amount or a significant increase in prescribed burning providing and the key point here is providing future wildfires can be kept at an emission level that's relatively low that allows for no increase over the previous levels. I've indicated on this chart the amount of prescribed burning that has been identified by the Forest Service and by the Blue Mountains Institute for future burning. This indicates approximately about 21,000 tons of PM 10 per year under this kind of an approach this would allow about 70 percent of the desired burning to be burned. The real key here there's two there's two real keys one is whether or not this kind of an approach is acceptable to EPA and whether they think this would be consistent with with the federal rules and whether or not this kind of approach is consistent with our rules we're still in the process of discussing that the key is whether or not the future wildfire target level can really be met the emissions that's represented on on this particular graph indicate the average emissions from the previous slide I can't really go back to that but the previous slide that showed 1940 to present wildfire emissions if you remove the recent wildfire high wildfire year emissions and take an average from basically 1940 to about 1980 or 1978 this level here represents basically that level a successful fire suppression program and if future efforts are are are made in concentrating on prescribed burning to minimize wildfire potential and other alternative approaches are taken to remove straw remove slash from those areas through biomass utilization efforts and those kinds of things this may be an achievable goal and again this is something that we're we're still working on and hopefully this this might provide a partial solution to the problem getting back to some of the other solutions that that might work work to address the situation clearly expanding the western Oregon smoke management program to eastern Oregon would be very advantageous that would allow basically smoke management evaluations to take place on a daily basis that would be able to minimize smoke impacts in the communities in northeastern Oregon such as as currently done in western Oregon another positive element would be establishing what we refer to as a real-time air quality monitoring network which is basically a series of of monitoring equipment set up throughout northeastern Oregon that would be able to provide relatively instantaneous measurements of smoke levels that could be provided to a smoke management center that would allow adjustments to be made in the burning activity for that day and would also serve as a tool for identifying the smoke impacts that are occurring in the area another element would be to again protect the eastern Oregon class one areas in the same manner that the western Oregon class class one areas are protected during the summer months providing that this proposed increase in prescribed burning remains primarily as a springtime activity and doesn't carry over into the summer this should not be that much of a problem and finally the the final element here would be simply finding new economical methods of being able to get the forest debris out of the forest and finding some some market use for it slash utilization has been a research item for for 10 20 30 years and there is currently a relatively meager market for slash debris wood chips for pulp mills and paper mills and that kind of thing but we feel that that additional research efforts could be focused on this to find some new markets and also perhaps to find some inexpensive ways that haven't been tried before to simply get the material out of the forest so that it doesn't burn up in wildfires and with that that finishes my presentation with a nice sunset picture just kind of to show that smoke doesn't have a constantly bad consequences any questions yeah i have a question i've been led to believe that smoke incursions from wildfire as far as epa is concerned don't count against you but any prescribed fire and regardless of source ignition on wildfire but any prescribed fire does and i just kind of question the logic of that i see i'm pleased with the approach i see you're trying to take but i i question the logic of that particular approach since it seems to be a pay me now or pay me later proposition that's that's a good point we've we've questioned the logic of that ourselves and a few other requirements of epa from where they're coming from on that particular issue there they're looking at simply what kinds of pollution sources or emissions are controllable and they look at wildfires as being primarily acts of god and something that basically cannot be controlled we've been in discussions with the forest service about how simply minimizing the amount of a forest debris on the forest could at least lessen the impacts and in some cases perhaps not result in impacts or wildfires at all it's a good point there's a lot of issues like that that we are still trying to to discuss with the forest service and with epa we're kind of in the middle between dealing with epa's cleaner act requirements and some of the some of the elements about prescribed burning any other questions yes yeah you mentioned that the protection of four class one wilderness areas or class one airshed areas in western oregon is different than that in eastern oregon could you elaborate on that a little bit why they're different um primarily that's kind of been a historical development oregon uh began a visibility protection program in the mid eighties primarily by focusing on the areas where there was a greatest amount of burning and the greatest impacts in the wilderness areas and that was primarily western oregon um there's been a mandatory smoke management program in effect in in western oregon that um has been modified to a certain degree to avoid impacting the class one areas that are up in the oregon cascades there's been restrictions placed on willamette valley field burning uh to not allow that activity primarily on the weekends during high visitation periods so primarily it was simply a function of being able to address areas where there were more existing controls in place for prescribed burning and other sources of burning but also areas where there were some significant impacts occurring and a real need to be able to reduce those impacts and improve visibility in those areas okay we're tuned into burns does burns have any questions for brian no questions all right thank you we'll go to blue mountain questions at blue mountain well you folks are dark over there let's turn the lights out early any questions all right thank you we'll go to john day maybe john day still has the lights on sure enough now i have a two-part question one did i understand your charts in your uh talk right that the no net change was focused on on degree burning and and wildfires and only to that source of pollutants and it didn't consider uh field burning or uh wood stoves or anything that's correct um again this this idea came out of trying to simplify having to deal with with the prevention of significant deterioration requirements those requirements if there is any kind of an increase that starts to use up some of those psd increments consume those increments epa requires an extremely thorough air quality analysis to be done the first thing that occurred to dq in terms of a simplified approach to this was maybe the uh maybe an approach that looks at a no net increase might be something that would be workable something that looks at the total emissions in the past and and and sets a limit for future emissions if if if that is something that is basically acceptable to the us forest service and other agencies then that would avoid those agencies having to go through a significant amount of an air quality analysis which would be very expensive and also very time consuming and of course one of the keys here is trying trying to get on the forest health issue relatively soon and to get some to reintroduce fire back into the ecosystem on a relatively short term need the other part of question ties in more into the last part of your presentation where you're relating to the amount of burning that was required for debris removal slice removal and then greater utilization to offset the need for burning earlier you spoke of the under burn and the number of acres that had to be increased that some folks are thinking wise in the forest health situation and the acres are 100,000 300,000 acres are under burned and have nothing to do the utilization the current trend is to use less wood do less utilization in the forest and more more burning okay uh i don't think i understand your question well let me run back up the question being is how are we going to cut down on the the pollutants from smoke by doing less forced utilization and more straight under burning to go back to the natural range of variability back into the 1800s it seems like you're going to end up with more more smoke more burning and your discussion of trying to increase utilization is not going to help solve the problem well i guess my only response to that is that uh from what we have been hearing in discussions with the forest service even before a significant amount of prescribed burning can be uh can be done in response to the forest health situation there's going to be quite a bit of mechanical removing removal going on anyway uh of the of the debris from the forest simply because of the extremely high fuel loadings loadings that are out there now uh from what we've heard there's simply no desire to go in there and start burning when you have 100 tons or 50 tons per acre of material there now so some some removal is going to be taking place we're hopeful that there's going to be a lot more of that taking place and in terms of understory burning um that's like a double-edged sword that has positive elements in terms of being much less in terms of emissions but does have some smoke management problems associated with it and frankly i i think we can figure out some ways to to uh address the smoke management problems through a smoke management program if there were if there were one implemented in eastern orient does that satisfy your question yeah that's fine thanks any other questions from john day i have a question um if we were doing a NEPA document and we wanted to know whether we were violating prevention of significant deterioration standard is there is there any kind of model or anything that would tell us whether we're doing that well probably that doesn't appear to be any model available right now one um project that is an ongoing project that's being done concurrently by us forest service epa deq and a few other states is trying to develop a prescribed burning model that can estimate the air quality impacts currently there is no model that really does the job uh and that was that was another concern that we had in terms of trying to satisfy the psd requirements it'd be very difficult with the with the current models that are available and most of those models were developed for industrial point sources it'd be very difficult to to be able to use those models to estimate the air quality impacts um but there is work going on right now for refining some of those models uh to be able to use them for for prescribed burning any other questions from john day have a comment um i was wondering if you've seen the new uh NEPA document you have to put into NEPA that speaks to smoke management um i looked at that thing it looks like a ruby cube to me and i was wondering why when we go and do these things we make them so difficult to work through them that possibly people were given our NEPA documents too that they won't be able to understand what we put in there well you probably have to speak to epa on that one i'll i'll pass judgment to them in terms of in terms of the uh the detail of of the analysis they require um from what i've heard that that's kind of been an ongoing uh concern in terms of how to satisfy all the various requirements that are in the uh the NEPA regulations thanks folks we'll go on now to uh ontario and treasure valley no question no questions okay thank you we'll go to walla yeah do you have any information or feeling on what pre-settlement or pre-fire suppression um air quality levels or like yes we do uh we looked at that uh when we were analyzing this this potential solution uh to prescribe burning and um we got our hands on a document that was relatively recent uh that analyzed uh pre-settlement emissions and in the entire northwestern area oregon and washington um and uh got some information in terms of what was the fire return interval uh for the different regions in oregon uh in northeastern oregon it was a relatively frequent fire return interval uh something in the nature of about uh once in every 20 years um this study indicated that in pre-settlement times there was a lot of wildfires in northeastern oregon um uh such that there was a lot of acreage being burned uh quite frequently but that the fuel loadings because of all these fires were extremely low but the net result was quite a bit of air pollution uh back in those times any other questions that's it all right thanks we'll go over to western oregon now it's the monument uh oh we lost one participant any any questions there no questions all right thank you very much thank you don all right uh any way more from the grand while we're here uh with brian okay i just got one question um brian what would it take politically to implement in eastern oregon a western oregon smoke management plan well frankly we've been discussing the possibility of that with forest service and the state department of forestry for the last year practically and we've seen quite a bit of indications that that would be feasible and agreeable so we we kind of consider that that's going to be something that we're going to be seeing out in this area um along with uh an air quality monitoring network that tracks the smoke impacts and uh allows adjustments to be made in the burning and and that kind of thing any other questions does anybody have any more questions for art from the remote sites as well as the grand remote sites you can uh let me know here okay i have a question for our taterman all right go ahead and get up there if you would please um he dealt with um the uh visualization losses how does burning affect nitrogen fixation it will would that offset the nutrient losses due to volatilization or leaching at all it's a good question the the conditions there that are created by burning uh a high ph in the soil a large load of cat ions does enhance the nitrogen fixation process by the free living organisms the estimates that we have on that at the present time suggest that that rate of input is very small maybe one to five kilograms per hectare per year and would take quite a long time for the replenishment process however when we look at higher plants in the blue mountains for example we have thermopsis montanus which is a very potent nitrogen fixer probably putting in somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 kilograms per hectare per year so on sites where we had adequate coverage of thermopsis or synovus valutinus we would probably have adequate nitrogen or nitrogen replenishment that would very quickly replace what was lost by burning so that's one of the options that we need to look at is to enhance the cover of the nitrogen fixing species especially those that we know are very good at it does that answer your does that answer your question thank you yeah could i catch you on one while you're up there um that's from john day if we didn't get us turned on right uh you have a publication coming out on the work that you talked about in your speech here before long hopefully within the next year jim plemetson and i will have a paper that deals with not only the productivity issues but also the issue of seed reserves in the forest floor in the soil diversity issues and a whole array of things that we look at as objectives and benefits of prescribed burning and we're going to be asking questions about each of these issues in the publication unfortunately what we're finding is that there are very few definitive answers for almost any of the questions that we ask so what we've got are a whole bunch of questions but we're going to come out with a publication anyway any other questions all right that's good thank you