 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 last of the five sessions is a panel discussion. To burn or not to burn, what is the proper use of fire in managing forests? I hope you enjoy it. For the last four weeks, we've explored the basics of how fire functions in ecosystems. And we've looked at some of the effects that fire has on things that we value in the ecosystem, such as the soil and productivity, wildlife, and air quality. And we've looked at some of the silvicultural options that have been proposed to mimic the ecological effects of fire or some desired effects that fire has on the forest ecosystem. And today, I think we thought it would be an appropriate way to wind up this seminar series by taking a look at fire as more of a social issue. Ultimately, all natural resources issues are social because how a particular tool like fire is going to be applied or what kind of a management is going to happen on the ground ultimately society decides. That's the way it always has been and that's the way it always will be. And so fire is probably right on top of the list with respect to an issue that people think is important. And so we felt that a good way to finish up this particular seminar series would be to let some folks with expertise on the issue present facts and opinions about whether or not fire should be in the ecosystem here in the Blue Mountains. So we brought together this distinguished panel and we figured we selected them because we realized, at least we hoped, that we would get a diversity of opinions and a diversity of interpretations of fact. Anytime you pick four people, you're probably going to get a diversity of opinions. We realized that but we handpicked these because we knew that we felt as though there would be some a balance, shall we say, in their interpretations of fact. So here they are. Charlie Johnson sits on the left. Charlie Johnson is the, since 1978, the area ecologist for the Umatilla, Malheur and Willow Whitman National Forests. He has a B.S. and M.S. degrees in forest ecology and resource management from University of Idaho and a Ph.D. in 1982 from Oregon State University in range ecology. As an area ecologist, his main duties have been the classification of plant associations in the Blue Mountains over the last several years, ecological training for forest service personnel and forest service project consultation. To his left sits Mark Jakes who is a unit forester for the Oregon Department of Forestry. He has worked for the department since 1976 after his graduation with a B.S. and Forestry from the University of Minnesota. As a unit forester, his main duties are to manage all the department of forestry programs in northeastern Oregon, including programs in forest practices and fire control and in those he primarily works with private landowners. To his left sits Bill Obertofer, notorious private landowner, a co-owner of the smiling old ranch with his wife Margaret. Bill has owned the ranch near Elgin for 18 years now and has lived on it with Margaret for the last 13 years just after retiring from a 32 year science teaching career. He has a B.S. and M.S. in science from Oregon State University and as a private landowner Bill has been involved in many projects related to natural resources issues here in the Blues over the years. His ranch has become, we're proud to say, the first privately owned demonstration project officially approved by the Institute and Bill splits his time between activities at his ranch and serving on committees and natural resource issues such as the Oregon Watershed Improvement Coalition. And finally, last but not least, is Berda Udy. For the past seven years the Nature Conservancy's Northeastern Oregon Stewardship Ecologist. She has been doing rangeland ecology for the past 20 years in the Pacific Northwest during which time she has accumulated two Bachelor of Science degrees in range management and botany. As a stewardship ecologist Berda manages 12 natural areas owned by the Nature Conservancy in Eastern Oregon totaling about 10,000 acres. So welcome to you all panelists. Now first some ground rules. Each panelist is going to be given 10 minutes to answer a question. And the question is, to what extent should fire be used as a management tool in Blue Mountains ecosystems? The panelists will answer the question sequentially with no questions in between, starting with Charlie ending with Berda. We'll open the floor for questions after the fourth and last panelist has finished and questions may be directed at specific panelists or at the panel as a whole. As in the previous four weeks we'll take the first three questions from the live audience here in LeGrand and then we'll go sequentially to the other remote sites. We'll then revisit the live and remote sites one more time. And we recommend that you write your questions down as these of our panelists are giving their presentations because remember there won't be questions in between. We don't want you to forget because part of the reason why we have this panel up here is so that we can get some good exchange going here because we want to know more about what the public thinks about fire as an issue here. And please note that there will be no break this evening. We want to flow directly from the presentations into the question and answer period. So with no further ado, I introduce Charlie Johnson, the area ecologist for the Malahir-Yumatilla and Willow in the National Forest. Thank you, Jim. Before I start I'd just like to say that the topic of the extent of use of fire is certainly to the point I think now in the Blue Mountains among the people who live here and work here is the principle question on their minds because it involves a lot of their space and their places where they like to recreate as well as gain employment. My main thrust will be that fire needs to be used and be used extensively throughout the Blue Mountains to put a key cog which has been missing back in to several different ecosystems. And to address that I'd like to just kind of formally go to some script so I don't miss some key points. I think the management of our national forest landscapes on which I work is really the management of various kinds of ecosystems. As we look at the administration of the national forests in the Western United States I think it's important to take into consideration those factors which directly and indirectly influence the health and well-being of all the organisms of plant and animal as well as the occurrence within that system by the human beings. Now the stirbances are and always have been natural events in east side ecosystems. By east side I mean east of the Cascades and I'm really talking about the inland Pacific Northwest as a place so that kind of keeps us from crossing the northern Rocky Mountains. The vegetation of the east side has a history of natural disturbances as a part of the cycle of ecosystem maintenance. And like other ecosystems elsewhere where stability is measured in centuries east side ecosystems are considered stable when the period between modifying events is more in the realm of decades. The vegetation adapted to periodic disturbances is comprised of plants with reproductive mechanisms capable of withstanding severe perturbations of a relatively frequent nature. The primary events which cycle through the various plant communities of the east side are fire, grazing and browsing by ungulates, insect and disease epidemics, wind throw, flooding and climatic change. It's now widely accepted that forests consist of tree species which are not co-evolved to grow with each other in mutualistic support. In fact many species currently found together have not been together for many tree generations. It is the short lifespan and often shorter memory of human beings relative to tree life spans which gives the mistaken impression of stability and constancy of the forests. Now we want to focus on fire tonight so let's speak about fire as a rejuvenating event. Throughout the pre-settlement period in this part of the country periodic fire was an integral part of the maintenance and function for the majority of east side ecosystems. The seasonal cycling of fire through the landscape was as regular as the incidents of late summer lightning occurrence in the canyon lands and mountains of this region. Now depending on the composition of the community its structural configuration and buildup of dead plant biomass fire resulted in burns of varying intensities and extension across the landscape. The shorter the return interval between fire events the less dramatic would be the result of the fire on the overall plant composition. Within frequent return intervals stands tended to burn hotter and be replaced by a vegetation which was often different in composition structure and age from that which had preceded the fire. The landscape variation its relief and the climatic patterns have all combined to provide a rich mosaic of differing kinds of plant communities across this east side region. As the annual lightning storms would play across this landscape a mosaic resembling a patchwork quilt of varying size patches textures and kinds of vegetation would result. This mosaic would be as resilient and dynamic as the annual play of storm induced fire. The probability of fire in any given place would be a function of chance. The position in the landscape in relation to storm building geographic features and the vulnerability of the plant community to catch fire. The period since settlement and subsequent growth of industry by Euro-Americans has been the curtailment of fire as a periodic magnate periodic modifying event in the vast majority of east side plant communities. Over the past 130 years and even more dramatically in the past 60 years the vegetation has changed from stands dominated by cereal fire species to stands and communities of plants where fire susceptible species predominate and form unhealthy stand configurations. The classic example has been the disappearance of open park like stands of ponderosa pine trees and the ingrowth of grand fur as a result of fire exclusion in vast areas of east side montane topography. Likewise in grand fur associations where ponderosa pine is not cereal to grand fur fire has not been able to perform its natural role of stand replacement burning. The poor vigor of these stands has contributed to the incidence of increased epidemic levels of insects and diseases which have further increased the probability of large scale fires with greater stand replacing capabilities. I'd like to briefly go over our principal kinds of plant communities and speak to their adaptation to periodic fire. Let's begin by looking at bunch grass vegetation which constitutes up to 30 percent of the total land area administered by the Mount Hurumatil and Willow Whitman National Forest. Canyon and ridge top bunch grass communities are very well adapted and very resilient to periodic burning by fire. It has been our experience in sampling these communities that fires initiate a stimulus to the bunch grass community by providing increased vigor to the herbaceous vegetation. These fires do not significantly modify the composition by the bunch grass. We might detect an increase by forbs and annual vegetation responding immediately after the burns. This is to be expected since annual vegetation and some forbs do respond vigorously and aggressively to disturbance resulting from fire. However the bunch grass vitality and the overall composition of the stand are not negatively impacted. The bunch grass is subsequently respond with more viable seed and the capability to resume dominance of the site. Canyonlands also contain a multitude of shrublands which are vegetatively unable to support tree growth. They're usually on sites where moisture cooler conditions prevail which enables the shrubs to outcompete the grasses. A summary statement about shrublands of the canyonlands in eastern Oregon and southeastern Washington would be that the majority of the shrubland species are rhizometous well adapted to fire and the shrubs are quick to respond following fire. They rapidly provide a new successional stage of vegetation which generally speaking which generally speaking helps enhance the overall biological diversity of our of our grassland and shrubland communities. Fire intervals in the blue mountains range from eight to ten years in ponderosa pine dominated communities under natural conditions. Now following about a hundred years of fire suppression we can expect that eight to ten under burns have been missed in many of these stands. Thus where grand fur is able to succeed successionally and dominate on those associations as a as a direct result of lack of fire we find grand fur saplings and poles reducing the park-like visibility of the over of the understory and we all and also they promote a condition of high fire vulnerability. The dominating older ponderosa pines are now at risk as well since fire can readily leave the ground and go quickly to the crowns via the coniferous branches of the emerging pole and intermediate sized fir trees. As an example of canyon coniferous forest Douglas fir 9 bark communities form a common plant association on steep canyon slopes especially on New Matel and northern Willow Whitman. These communities are especially prominent on north aspects where environmental conditions are conducive to tree growth. Now these Douglas fir 9 bark stringers are essentially replaced and rejuvenated by fire with a natural periodicity of approximately 75 to 125 years. When viewed in the context of the larger landscape these fires provide for a greater landscape diversity when they are successfully set back to earlier cereal stages where grasses and shrubs can once again dominate. At higher mountainous elevations leading up to about 7,000 feet in elevation coniferous forests occur where the tree firs dominate. Tree firs in northeastern Oregon and southeast in Washington are grand fir and subalpine fir. A fire often operates in differing ways in true fir plant associations. Selective burning of fire intolerant species often leaves the more fire tolerant species such as large ponderosa pine and older Douglas fir unaffected by a ground fire. This fire therefore performs a natural thinning. Another kind of burn in true fir dominated communities results from a stand replacement fire. With these stand replacing burns the rejuvenation of the true fir forests is the result of a complete and total mortality of the previous stand. The natural fire occurrence has always helped to promote a new patch in the patchwork quilt of the vegetation cloaking the landscape. The burn creates a different plant composition, a different age structure and provides juvenile vigorous growth in all components of the plant community. Fire thus provides a role in the maintenance of vigorous and healthy stands consumes older vegetation vegetation that is succumbed to insects and diseases and stimulates the rejuvenation of fire serial species. This vegetation is the result of adaptation to fire and responds well to these fire episodes. Our curtailment of fire over the last 80 to 90 years of active fire prevention has allowed coniferous forests to develop tight closed canopies. This has resulted in the loss of hardwood tree and shrub components throughout large portions of those forested plant communities that have a capability of containing hardwood shrubs and trees as part of their earlier serial stages. These earlier serial stages containing hardwood shrubs and trees are best created by fire. Standard placing burns in true fir communities comprised of grand fir and or subalpha fir often provide us with a shrubland containing varied hardwood species of shrubs and trees. These are pioneering the site prior to the reemergence of the coniferous forest. Through the reintroduction of fire in the forested ecosystems we can anticipate that species such as Rocky Mountain Maple, Otters, Cherries, Willows and other hardwood species would take on a renewed abundance and prominence which would greatly enhance the variety of plant communities included within the forested landscape. As part of the forested ecosystem they provide structural and compositional diversity to that landscape. By reintroducing fire into the ecosystem through an approach of landscape level activities it's my contention that we will be allowing fire to resume its natural role in the ecosystems of our national forests. Our approach in order to be successful will need to employ prescribed fire and take advantage of natural emissions to promote landscape patterns and vegetation which is deemed desirable. By focusing on the ecosystem and managing at the landscape level we will shortly enhance biological diversity and improve the overall health and vigor of plant communities included in our national forest landscapes. Thank you Charlie. Mark Jacobs unit forester for the Oregon Department of Forestry. Thank you Jim. My presentation will center on the use or non-use of fire on private forest lands in the Blue Mountains. Although I work for the Oregon Department of Forestry the state ownership here in the Blue Mountains is very minimal. As Jim mentioned earlier most of my experience has been in fire control and forest management practices on private lands. In this short presentation I will not answer the question as to burn or not to burn but rather discuss and present factors affecting this issue on private lands from a practical field application perspective. Before I discuss specific private land issues I have two two more general comments to make concerning prescribed burning. First as a field forester I have a general concern that there's a lack of applied knowledge particularly for private landowners in the area of using fire as a management tool. We have several testaments to the devastating outcomes of wildland fires in northeast Oregon. It has also come to light that some of our past burning practices may have resulted in some less than desired effects that were not understood or anticipated at the time this prescription was prepared. Consequently I have a concern whether or not we have an adequate knowledge base from which to enact successful forest land burning as a management tool. Secondly I believe there are four stands where prescribed burning would be a beneficial cost-effective treatment and should be employed as a management tool. For example under burning may be the most cost-effective and economical approach to maintaining ponderosa pine stands in the blue mountains. However I do have a concern with the recent emphasis on reintroducing fire that fire may be viewed as a panacea for all forest health or forest management issues. Just as not all stands need thinning or tree planting it is my observation and feeling that not all stands need fire reintroduced. It should be considered as one of our forest management tools and not take the place of successful practices we have employed in the past. From a private lands perspective I believe it is critical to look at the land owners of objectives in introducing fire. Are his or her objectives related to reducing fuel loads to decrease the risk of catastrophic fire or is the objective to introduce fire to alter the ecosystem in some way. Further if the objective is to alter the ecosystem then what specifically are the desired future conditions. Is it to improve wildlife habitat, alter plant communities, change tree species composition or some other outcome. I believe it is crucial for land managers to define the objective first in order to determine the answer to the question of to burn or not to burn or the proper use of fire and managing forest. Going into more detail about reducing fuel loading as an objective for conducting prescribed burning is my belief that fuel loads can often be reduced by means other than fire. These means may be less costly and pose less risk than using fire. We are also entering an age where fuel treatment can be a revenue generating operation rather than an expense. Reducing fuel loading can be achieved by salvage harvesting, chipping and other fiber utilization processes. These civil cultural and technological means can be used to reduce the risk of catastrophic fire in a managed forest. Is my opinion that the value of wood fiber may soon limit future fuel loading concerns. This has become more evident even during this past logging season. In many cases the fuel loading issue must be dealt with before land managers embark on a prescribed burning program. Existing fuel loading conditions on some lands are so critically high that some form of fuel treatment is necessary before any prescribed burning is considered. To do otherwise would be asking for devastating results. A second major objective may be to introduce fire to alter the ecosystem. I believe it is imperative that the desired outcome be known before making decision on introducing fire. What would be the purpose of introducing fire without a preconceived future condition in mind? Once again some forced stand manipulation such as tree species composition and stocking control can be done without the use of fire and probably at less cost and less risk to the land manager. As an example if the objective is to convert a Douglas fir or white fir stand to a ponderosa pine stand this conversion can be and is being achieved on some private lands through selective harvesting. Thinning, planting or through seed tree and shelter wood harvesting schemes. I would caution landowners however to be sure that their conversion is proper management and that it must again meet some desired outcome rather than simply a species conversion. These appear to be simple solutions to the complex issue of utilizing fire as a forest management tool. However at least from a private landowner standpoint the use of fire on their ownerships carries some risks, liabilities and costs. Their benefits from using fire must outweigh these factors and produce an outcome which cannot reasonably be achieved by civil cultural treatments, modern technologies or marketing. It is important when discussing the use of fire and managing forest to address some of the obstacles that private landowners face that government agencies may not. First of all there's a general lack of technical knowledge in conducting such a practice. Further there is a lack of availability and receiving or obtaining this technical knowledge by the forest landowner. Private landowners also for the most part lack the resources necessary to implement this management tool and there is a high cost to them for employing their appropriate resources and finally and probably most importantly Oregon law places financial and lawful abilities on a landowner who is conducting this burning. In addition to these obstacles they also face many of the same obstacles other land managers face such as smoke management concerns public scrutiny and potentially detrimental effects to soil air water and residual trees. Overcoming these obstacles on private lands would require legislative law changes expanded institutional and educational support additional technology transfer and possibly the introduction of cost share incentives. However even by it reducing these barriers some inherent problems exist that add complexity to implementing prescribed burning on non-industrial private lands. These include widely varying ownership objectives, the size of the ownership which range anywhere from 10 acres to 5,000 plus acres, frequent ownership changes and a spatial distribution and intermingled ownership pattern of private property. In addition much of the private land ownership is close to growing urban encroachment which may create more opportunities for conflicts particularly in regards to smoke management and obviously greater risk of fire liabilities. The way I see it the bottom line for private landowners in determining whether or not to incorporate burning into their force management practices is a positive benefit cost ratio compared to other alternatives the availability of technical expertise and resources to implement this practice and reducing liability risks. Utilizing fire will have to not only be more advantageous from a force management or force health perspective but also from an economic standpoint. If means other than burning are more economical in achieving the private land managers objectives then I do not believe the rollo fire on private lands will be significant. So as I mentioned in the beginning I have not answered the question of the proper use of fire and managing force but rather what obstacles are present in adding this management tool to the private land managers options. In summary I believe that the decision on the proper use of fire and force management particularly private force lands in eastern Oregon must address the following concerns or questions. First of all there is a need for additional applied knowledge on fire effects. Secondly and understanding that fire is not a panacea for improving force health. Thirdly landowners must define what objectives will be met in utilizing fire and managing their force and then determine if those objectives are more easily effectively and economically achievable through other options such as civil cultural methods modern technologies or marketing. And finally overcoming the obstacles and using fire as a force management tool such as a financial and lawful liabilities the lack of technical knowledge and smoke management issues. Thank you Mark. The next panelist Bill Overteifer co-owner of the Smiling O Range. Thanks Jim. I heard you talk about the sociological implications or something of that kind in your introduction to this panel tonight and that's what I want to talk about during about the first half of my comments and then I will eventually get to whether we burn or not on our own tree farm. I want to start with a quote a human being is a part of the whole that we call the universe a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest a kind of optical illusion of his consciousness. This illusion is a prison for us restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for only the few people nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living beings and all of nature. Albert Einstein wrote that. When students come to visit our tree farm one of the things that I'm sure to tell them along the way is that they must consider every time they go into the woods whether it's to hunt or fish or just hike camp log whatever they are probably disturbing some organism's home and or its food supply and that they should get used to that idea that they are just one of the organisms out there and to think about who's home and whose food supply they're disturbing. A couple of weeks ago I thought Art Tiedemann had given my talk a couple of a couple of weeks ago. He asked many of the same questions that I asked but Art's a professional forest researcher. He needs solid data upon which to answer his hypotheses and that is as it must be. I'm a tree farmer. I appreciate science. I taught science for many years. I think I understand science but I can't wait for all the answers to be in. I operate upon what I read tempered by what I observe, tempered by what I instinctively think is right. I don't have to please any stockholders because probably my stockholders haven't been born yet. Our panel is asked to discuss to burn or not to burn and that's a question that looks into the future doesn't it? Past speakers have passed four weeks in this series of seminars have dealt mostly with the past. They have dealt with the historical aspects of fire in the forests. The fire formed forests and and so on. What's happened over the last 75 to 100 years? A story is told about a man taking a ride in a taxi cab past the Supreme Court building in Washington DC where he read the inscription or he read the inscription carved in marble quote the past is prologue unquote. He didn't understand it so he asked the cab driver what it meant and the cabbie said oh that means you ain't seen nothing yet. We haven't talked much directly in these seminars about the future, about the most important player in the forest ecosystem, about the most important player in the ecosystem either. I think the most important player is man generically. He lives in our forests makes a living from our forests and has more effect upon our forests than any of his fellow organisms. Whereas the forests of the past were fire formed I believe the forests of the future may be largely man formed. If we could have the overhead please how do I get that is it on? Yeah he just took your get their cameras on. There you go. What do we do? There it is. Okay you seen it? Good. Do all this machinery. There are now three times as many people in Oregon as when I was born in 1919 73 years ago. I left on there for you to guess how many people will come to Oregon during the next 73 years. This is pretty good space in here compared to this space down here. I'm reminded of this when the forest industries assure us that there are more trees in Oregon now than in historical times. Oregon is one of the fastest growing states in the country. How are these thousands of new arrivals going to view fire in their forests? With global population today increasing at roughly 92 million per year per capita ecosystem services will diminish even with no net loss of ecosystems. Restoration ecology is not only practical I think it's imperative. Now how do I turn that thing on? It's turned off. Magic. A persistent theme at the forestry for the 21st Century Conference recently held in Portland was the necessity to listen to the general public. John Gordon wrapped up the three days of conference with a suggestion that we bury the phrase sustainable management and substitute the term stewardship. So what does all this have to do with burning? When visitors come to our tree farm they invariably ask if we burn. The answer now is no. We used to burn because that was what everybody else seemed to be doing. Now we have decided that we can't afford to burn and I've got to get some slides here to show you why. It's amazing what they do over the 73 years I've been here. Have you got a dimmer there Bill? A dimmer from the room lights? No. There you go. We can't afford to waste organic materials that natural processes have taken years to create. So on our operation we run all of our slash through chipper which throws it back out where it came from in small chips to help keep the soil moist. It acts like a covering of peat moss that you might use in the city somewhere on your garden. Or we chop up the small limbs and this is just a very small sample of the result of chop and leave and it was liked well enough by a calypso orchid to still grow there and those of you that know the calypso know that it won't grow up where there isn't sufficient moisture. But in walking around the place just in the last few days I've been finding lots of last years and this year's tree seedlings because we're trying to create an environment which promotes natural reproduction. We don't want to have to plant trees. And we're saving material like this instead of sending it to the chipper down in Elgin. We don't have enough to make it profitable anyway but we want hollow logs like this for homes and I look at old rotten logs out in my woods like this one and I wonder where are the rotten logs 75 or 100 years from now going to come from unless I leave something in the woods of course material as they're calling it these days. There's another thing that this picture is intended to show and that is that during the heat of any summer that gets pretty hot in here in July and August as a lot of you know you can reach underneath one of those rotten logs and find wet material. You can squeeze out moisture from that wet material those are moisture sinks for many of the small invertebrate animals that need that moisture. We don't have very many nurse logs in this country compared to down on the Oregon coast but this one has given about eight or ten trees an excuse for life and of course we don't want to waste soft snags like this. We're also making new snags to take the place of this one when it falls over and becomes a part of the forest floor and we don't want to burn up Jim's ant nests. These ant nests that are against the law to destroy over in western Germany and they're important carnivorous insect to help us control things like this Bruce Budwerp. Lastly perhaps we're saving the organic material for abundant fungi of many many kinds. Okay now I went too far didn't I? I can't turn the slides off can I? Well another reason that we don't burn is that we can't afford to pollute the air unnecessarily and that gets driven home very very closely when one of the owners of the ranch has severe asthma for the last 32 years and we talk a lot to asthmatics and people with breathing problems and another reason that we can't afford to burn is that we can't afford to accept the liability as Mark has previously mentioned. We have seven fence line neighbors with forests and homes which we would be liable for if a set fire got away from us not to mention the possible loss of life. Burning is a part of a whole silvicultural prescription so how do we get along without burning? Last summer last summer I had the good fortune to visit the Flathead Reservation in Montana to study their forest management well what happened? Okay back on track. I went to visit the the Flathead Indian Reservation up north of Missoula and the tribal council there has told their Bureau of Indian Affairs foresters that they don't want any more clear-cutting they have had some in the past they want nothing but individual tree selection and when they're through logging they want the woods to look like a complete woods like you see right here. I think the kind of forest they have looked very very much if not identical to what I see around here this forest had beautiful big yellow belly pines some furs some camorack this particular forest had been logged four years before I took these pictures there's a good complement of shrubs in there for a wild game there were cattle in the area grazing it looked to me like a good-looking complete forest as the result of individual tree selection compare this slide with the next slide which was taken on a long highway 84 between here and Meacham that's right alongside of highway 84 you can't see into the forest at all something's happened there to change the management of that forest here's uh some private land here in union county which was logged on a selective basis just last year trying to promote a forest of uneven age a multiple species and just 180 degrees for where I took this picture across the road was this same kind of a stand so I'm inclined to feel that management whether it's by fire or by mechanical means certainly is needed in most of our forest stands whether they're public or private I threw this in just to show you a bird's eye view of our 240 acres in which we have 20 site specific forest management areas each one has a number in it which you can't read but within those 20 site specific areas they include eight wildlife areas what did I do okay that's all right that's fine that shows one of our logged off areas looks pretty bad you have to devastate a forest to log it we got about five loads of logs out of what you see in the picture there and there's another logged area and this is a little bit of a logged area on the right hand side some reprod coming in alongside of it we have a landscape pattern to the place from some events in the past we know not what events but we're keeping the landscape pattern this particular class that was visiting us last year was standing in a favorite spot of mine because in the darkened portion on the right there is not enough light gets through the canopy for plants to grow on the ground and in that particular place that's the way nature is choosing to manage it in the spot beyond the students it used to be the same and also to the left of the students but there has been managed because my objectives are different than nature's nature has millennia to achieve her objectives I don't have that long I'm just trying to get it ready for the next guy we live less time than a single tree that makes it somewhat difficult to think about doing a good job of management during your lifetime this is a before picture after a clear cut in 1895 this area had not been managed until I got it in 1974 and I didn't manage it until about three years ago so it looks now like that and shrubs are coming back in so that uh today while we were up there working this morning we had about seven deer that were eating all around us they love the hardwoods and the shrubs that we're allowing to grow now because they're getting light we have some specific wildlife areas and this is one of one of our larger ones it's only about 50 yards wide maybe about 300 yards long but it's on a steep north face where it's hard to walk through it and I took this picture in the spring when there was still snow in there because if I took it at any any other time of the year you wouldn't see any detail you just see a black picture even in the middle of the day time I had to get something in there for a background but this is a place that the rabbits and the weasels and all the small games just love and there's a lot of beds in there of deer and elk and one deer one elk that was wounded by someone nearby chose to come in there to die just a couple of years ago some of the wild game that we have uh the weasel this little northern flying squirrel got bounced out of his nest when we fell the tree that had a big witch's broom in it mist mistletoe in a in a Douglas fir tree and we found that after we'd done that for three or four of those trees like that and bounced young ones out that we better quit doing that at that time of year or we better leave some witch's brooms here and there so that they could have them for nesting purposes and this is uh bufoborius the rocky mountain toad that we find all over the place he makes burrows and this luna moth it is a luna moth isn't it yeah hello here's an animal just sitting right down here in front i gotta check with him uh and uh in uh the time we've been there over 240 acres we've identified 96 different species of birds and there's lots and lots of nesting goes on on the place in the springtime uh there's one nest from last spring and uh this is just taken from inside our house looking out through one of the windows and this is taken from inside our barn looking at some elk that don't come by as often as the deer but they are on the place a lot and wild turkeys have just begun to visit us last year so we're interested in keeping homes and food around for all of those and many more that i don't have time to show you we know that fire uh natural fire uh is perhaps inevitable accidental fire is perhaps inevitable and so we have our own fire department figuring that if we get seven lightning strike fires going at one time like i could see a few years back from my front porch why uh mark and his fire crews aren't going to be able to attend them to all of them right away all at once and so we want to get two hours as quickly as we can and up in the woods we have fire barrels scattered here and there where we're up to be working so that if we get a fire started with a chain saw or something of that kind where we've got 50 gallons of water there in the bucket that we could use to put it out right away and uh that's a nice sunset we don't want to see that color from a nearby forest fire wildfire you're on brother thank you bill i'll just turn this off bird and uti uh stewardship ecologists for the nature conservancy thanks jim oh my friend bill overtough is a hard guy to follow but i know you're all awake now i'm here this evening to present the nature conservancy's perspective on prescribed fire most of you know that the nature conservancy is a non-profit private conservation organization dedicated to the protection of biological diversity the conservancy managed manages the largest private system of natural areas in the world in oregon we manage 51 sites over 50 000 acres in most cases our objectives are to manage for a naturally functioning ecosystem in pre-european settlement condition and fire is an important component of our natural area management program fire plays a significant role in the functioning and dynamics of most specific northwest ecosystems fire effects processes associated with population dynamics vegetation succession nutrient cycling and soil structure and stability most rare species on our reserves are adapted to periodic fires some are dependent on periodic disturbance which historically resulted from fire we cannot rely on wildland fire alone to promote these species and ecosystems prescribed fire has been used by the conservancy as a management tool for over 20 years last year the conservancy burned 36 000 acres in the united states in oregon most of our experience with fire has been in the management of grasslands in western oregon fire management is important on all our reserves but due to our limited resources we have been unable to implement many of our fire programs the nature conservancy uses an adaptive management approach to developing fire management programs biological and ecological information about fire regimes and the effects of fire on many rare species communities and ecosystems in oregon is limited so much research is needed this is especially true given the significant ecological changes that have occurred over the past 150 years development of fire management programs must have consider how the presence of non-native species the reduction and fragmentation of populations and natural communities and the alteration of fuel loads will affect the results of fire management we conduct small test burns and monitor results before entering into large-scale programs the nature conservancy supports the reintroduction of fire in ecosystems throughout oregon the need for fire is especially evident in eastern oregon forest ecosystems fire suppression has had a number of ecological consequences increasing fuel loads changing changes in stand structure and changes in forest insect population dynamics these changes not only alter our natural ecosystems they have complex interactions that result in increased potential for high severity fires while other management tools may be able to mimic certain aspects of the role of fire in the ecosystem none can replace all aspects fire management programs should be designed as closely as possible to the natural fire regimes as determined from fire history information and current climate conditions consideration in the reintroduction of fire should be given to the recent ecological changes in the ecosystem fire research and monitoring programs should be expanded to improve our ability to predict interpret and evaluate the effects of fire other management tools or restoration steps may be necessary before reintroducing fire into the ecosystem for example on our middle fork of the john day preserve where our fuel loads and understory species are great a fire might endanger our ponderosa pine mature ponderosa pine in that case we might need to come in and do some pre-commercial thinning and silviculture techniques before reintroducing fire fire should be reintroduced to as much of the landscape as possible the conservancy recognizes that fire management is complex and must include social as well as biological considerations in some areas fire management may be too dangerous or logistically too difficult to implement in others smoke management concerns may limit its use in these areas other management tools may be needed to replace certain aspects of the role of fire in the ecosystem on many of our small preserves which are surrounded by residential or somewhat dense rural populations fire is no longer an option the conservancy would like to form partnerships with people in the blue mountains and we'd like to gain more experience at at burning some of the ecosystems on our preserves thanks thank you birda and now we'd like to entertain questions from the grand audience i don't hear any mention of management having an effect like on the way the trees have regenerated and so forth and from that same standpoint because of the big change in in the forest structure of management management by man more than just suppressing fires this will also make a difference in what happens when you reintroduce fire in the pre-settlement days fire was natural and it did it had certain consequences but now with this big change in the forest structure fire now would have a different consequence have we do we have any knowledge of what the difference might be would you like to direct that question you kept looking at birda birda mentioned adaptive management and we've been writing a lot and talking a lot about adaptive management as something we need to do because as bill mentioned we probably can't wait long enough for the research community even if we were to pour a lot of money into the research community to give us the answers that would allow us to have all of the information to make decisions that were going to be 99 percent safe so now take some risks and we recognize that through the retardation of fire as a periodic event and through manipulation of the stand structure through harvest techniques that have come from selective management to clear cutting and everything in between that fires aren't going to respond naturally as they did in the pre-settlement era and we're going to have to figure out ways to quickly monitor behind large scale burning programs to interpret the effects of those fires and be on top of the prescriptions that we we set in future endeavors and the other thing i'd like to point out is to me silvicultural treatments will be different than what we've seen as silvicultural treatments in the past if we employ silvicultural treatments as part of a process or a set of processes to reinstall fire on a periodic basis and what i mean by that we don't want fires to burn so hot that they're destroying the inherent capability of sites to produce a certain kind of vegetation and i know i'm a vegetation person but keep in mind when we talk from an ecosystem point of view we're also talking about macro and micro fauna and the inherent ability of soil and water to produce living things so we've got to utilize silvicultural treatments in a way that help the main project in my perspective which is burning not the other way around where fire comes in as an event following a treatment of an area where we harvested products and now to fix the site up for the next round of product production we just employed burning after the fact it's kind of changing which is the horse and which is the cart one thing i might add is perhaps we might need to to have cooler fires and monitor the effects on these species because we do know conditions are different and some little onion out there might not be able to to take the effects of a of a fire now so if we come in and do test burns and and cooler burns and make sure we're not going to have some dental mental effects that might be a another thing we could do this is ferberta before you said where fire could get out of control or smoke could be a problem other methods would have to be used do you know the ratio of where you could burn to where you can't in Oregon um as far as smoke management or um both for fire and smoke i think of conditions on some of our preserves that are in more urban areas um we wouldn't be able able to burn one of the areas where we do have a large program going actually is in the eugenia area and you know that eugenia has a problem with grassy burning and and smoke management but we've been able to get permission from the epa to do prescribed burning on our natural areas there does that answer your question or go ahead Chris um this is for my good friend bill and and both mark up there um from the private landowner's perspective i i looked through my past notes for the first session a gentleman steve steven sackett i believe and um he made an interesting comment it just kind of caught it on the side and he said we might not be able to afford not to burn and bill you made a lot of comments and said you i mean for not to go ahead with prescribed burning you made a lot of comments and said we we couldn't afford to burn and i'm kind of struggling with that i'm a little bit confused in and maybe we could think about uh what are some of the consequences for the private landowner if they don't start managing managing with burning uh you and i and what i'm thinking of maybe you might comment on is aren't we taking big risks he said we can't control fire it's a it was a mistake to think we can control fire with firefighters and planes and those things and we have these catastrophic conditions so if we don't start using the tool of fire what are we setting ourselves up for is it a Russian roulette for you guys out there in the private lands i i think perhaps the speaker that you referred to was talking about not being uh able to neglect the use of fire if we wanted to really do a good job with the ecosystem that he was referring to uh and when i say that i can't afford to burn i'm thinking about it entirely from the economic standpoint i'm not referring to the ecosystem that i have on my tree farm now that brings in a point that mark made in his initial comments about the differences between private landowners objecting i am not interested in recreating the historical forest on that tree farm of mine first place i don't know what it was for sure and i'm not interested in recreating it at all and i don't use the word nature like most people use it uh what i'm interested in having on that tree farm is all of the plants that want to grow there in a reasonable balance and all of the animals vertebrates and invertebrates that want to be there in a reasonable balance and if it turns out to be an ecosystem that has never been there before that's fine with me because i think that's the evolutionary process that's taking place i'm not sure that the ecosystem was here when the when the covered wagons came through the blue mountains it was the same ecosystem that was here a thousand years before that it's changing and you know i i'm perfectly willing for it to be changed i'm not trying to change species of trees to species that i can sell for more money i'm concerned maybe mark can answer about the risks that we take because down in ben we've had catastrophic wildfires that come and consume homes and urban areas and if those forests were managed differently would we have not had those conditions that we can't fight you because those those fires were basically my understanding put out by nature we kind of stood around and bombed them a lot with those planes and squirted water on them but those are out of control and and aren't we setting ourselves up for those conditions without doing aggressive management of fire i get i agree a lot with what bill saying i don't think it's a case of russian rollout and you know you refer to some of the fires that occurred in a bend area in urban development areas and uh i think that's one picture of the landscape that's changed quite a bit since uh pre-settlement days is that we have homes now on five and ten acre parcels right in the forest and i think that the the potential of those fires was more so from the aspect of those the values at risk the homes that were involved uh then maybe it was from the forest standpoint uh i think that's what made those fires more catastrophic was you know we had these high value homes involved uh i believe that there are some opportunities to reduce the as i mentioned earlier to reduce catastrophic the potential for catastrophic fires through properly managing a forest now that may not evolve into the ecosystem that was here in pre-settlement days as bill is alluding to as charlie mentioned earlier in his talk that may not result in that ecosystem change but i think that will have as big an impact uh in reducing catastrophic fires through proper forest management fuel treatment um those type of practice implementing those type of practices would reduce that risk and so i i guess i to sum that up is i don't see it as a russian roulette i just see it taking advantage of the opportunities to reduce catastrophic fires through proper forest management fuel treatment and uh you know realizing that we have another set of uh issues over here as far as homes in the urban interface areas and you know more people uh in in the woods and and probably some more fire risks than we we've had in the past i don't know if that answered that question okay we'll uh visit the remote sites uh first burns no questions yeah we couldn't hear you there in burns are you saying no questions no questions okay thank you uh we'll try blue mountain community college in pennilton no we don't have any questions no questions we'll try john day our two questions first of all bill over to for paints a nice picture of biodiversity without fire what components of the ecosystem or or processes of the ecosystem are not on his tree farm now that would be there with fire and i direct the question to charlie johnson could you restate your question i was thinking you're redressing at the bill yeah could you restate your question please the the question would be uh if you if fire was being used on bill over to first tree farm what components or processes of the ecosystem that are not there now would be there wow i'm not real real sure what bill over to first tree farm looks like we saw some some slides and we saw some stands that he has managed stocking level control using using harvest techniques and and is not employing fire my first thoughts would be what's happening to species composition is it changing with just the primary change in growing space and more light are our fire dependent species uh continuing to take a back seat perhaps with more vigor and vitality being employed by later serial species and in this case i'm mainly looking again at uh douglas and true furs that might be present at at his at his place so uh i don't i don't like to do it a black and a white view of of the situation i know i promote fire a whole lot simply because i think it's been to reiterate a point i made earlier the key element that's been removed from forest grassland and shrubland ecosystems in northeast oregon i do believe that civil cultural help is needed to employ fire and to get the kind of burning that that we want and we will have to manage species composition when we do that in other words we will have to uh accentuate certain species and uh segregate out other species prior to burning and to get the kind of achieve the kind of burn that we want to then bring back species and just so we're not all thinking trees remember that a large majority of our landscape that we administer to doesn't grow trees and fire is part of that ecosystem as well and so when i'm talking about species composition i'm really referring to a lot of plants that will change and uh become part of a different community configuration once we remove some of the kind of stands which have a tremendous a tremendous amount of biomass right now that i think is wholly unnatural for the questions from john day yes i have one it's a four-part question to charlie um first off we've been talking the last five uh sessions here this last one also i think there's one component we're not talked about and that's the cattle lotments during the burning process in this landscape burning um we found that uh trying to get some of our burning done and uh working it in with the cattle lotments has been somewhat difficult and also some of the research i've read is that after a burn um they like to you like to see a at least a three-year time period where there's a rest period if we do do this uh landscape burning i guess my question would be how do you plan to deal with the calla situation the lotments with the callamen and what kind of rest periods would you see after these burns another part of the question is uh talk about standard placement fires possibly in these uh ecosystem burns and it seems to me that the timber has a value there and if they are standard placement fires what kind of situation you're going to do with the timber there we're going to just let it sit there or we're going to go in and deal with it before or come back in later and tell the logger or whatever we've got uh burnt trees out here we want you to get it off here to hurry the other situation i would ask is uh how many acres do you see in an ecosystem type burning on the wild weapon umatilla and the malher uh been talked about five thousand acres per district on the malher that would mean somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 thousand acres and if you look at that what kind of a smoke situation are we going to be looking at and how are you going to deal with that with the general public where that um it's pretty pristine the um value of the air quality here and i guess the last question would be from a civil culture standpoint have you looked at a mortality were you willing to accept an ecosystem type burn could you state the last question yeah from a civil culture standpoint have you looked at a mortality that you're willing to accept um say uh through the ecosystem type burning if you're looking at large landscape type burning i guess i still need clarification on the last one the mortality that we would be willing to accept mortality of what okay from a civil culture standpoint brought in burn and uh we haven't ever talked about that we talked about it somewhat in farm management a little bit and someone somewhat uh with civil culture but uh every time it seems like um we go out and burn we kill some trees or we burn up something like that and looking at a landscape uh burn are we going to talk about the uh willingness to accept some type of mortality from a civil culture standpoint if we go out and burn 5000 acres we're going to be willing to say we're going to lose 15 percent to burn and leave it there and what are we going to do i guess uh there must be another value there that we need to look at i guess i'm looking at okay i'll try to go through the four questions uh and and maybe some of the other panelists might like to chime in first of all uh you asked about cattle allotments that uh pretty much cover the federal landscape with with activity uh that's generated somewhere between the middle portion of june through uh usually sometime in september or even early october and i think your point is uh following a landscape level burn uh if you continue if we continue to permit animals on those on those allotments that are in a recovering uh mode from um the activities that have transpired after the burn whether it's either uh induced uh seating for restoration purposes or letting natural development take place i think you're pointing out the fact that cattle are perhaps injurious to the young succulent plants that are coming up um that's a little bit tough but i would think that in any kind of landscape level planning activity uh we would take into consideration more than trees and and forest stands we would take in the totality of the landscape and probably be employing fire across a segment of that landscape which would take in many different communities with varying effects um therefore there would be places that would go lightly burned unburned as well as and as intensively burned depending on the kinds of communities and the intensity of those burns and what we would envision to be the response by vegetation that we need um to to accentuate through it through this practice we would probably have to make some adjustments with permatease to help use the grazing animal animal as a tool and also in other cases to try to discourage use by grazing animals for a period of time there's an unknown quantity in there and that's the wild ranging uh ungulates and certainly uh we know following burns how uh especially elk can can camp on some some succulent uh young vegetation i think that's part of our um uh learning curve that we'll be going through as we employ uh burning and uh other projects on larger scales the second question dealt with timber values uh from stand replacement burning and i think the question was kind of geared at uh would we employ stand replacement fire and uh and not go in in advance to remove some product that we could utilize and i think the the question would would get answered in a multitude of ways depending again on civil cultural input uh we would want to wind up with certain amount of biomass on the site following a burn and we wouldn't necessarily want to have all burns being real clean burns so um therefore we wouldn't want to go in and clear cut everything either but to say that we couldn't employ stand replacement civil cultural operations as part of a landscape management scheme would be wrong um i think we would still employ everything from uh patch clear cutting to shutter wooding seed tree treatments uh as well as part of a multitude of activities going on across the landscape the third question dealt with a number of acres which i really can't answer the question of smoke management uh each ranger district and i believe i stand uh uh was with a true statement that the now here where you're located has increased its acreage on each district and if you're saying that they're talking on the level of 5 000 acres per district to a possible round number figure of 20 000 acres per year uh i can only add to that that we're really behind uh what we think we need to do to reintroduce fire and uh have it continue as a cyclic event means that we need to do some catching up so therefore we need to start employing more acreages um one reason that i push fire as as the way to help withstand uh um composition and structure is simply because we can do more acreage quicker i think through fire then if we were to continue with our traditional way of putting together projects and working primarily through silvicultural treatment that that implies of course a lot more smoke and particulates in the air i can't get into the legal aspects of things because i don't know enough about them but also uh i think that that needs to come along that needs to be something that we need to work very very seriously on if we're going to have that much fire burning once again in the blue mountains it needs to be accepted as part and parcel to life within the blue mountains uh we live within the complex of certain kinds of plant communities which have been uh created and adapted and kept healthy and vigorous over a long long period of time by periodic fire and that fire has always created smoke so in our planning activities we need to take smoke into consideration around our urban areas and continue to look out for public health however the idea of having blue summer skies and especially blue indian summer skies might be just a pretty artificial thing that we've witnessed in our relatively short lifespan um last but not least your mortality question i just don't have a handle on that unless you unless you can state it in a different way you're not communicating that well to me okay that's fine thank you go for the questions from john day okay let's go to mount hood community college see if there's anybody there nobody there let's try treasurer valley in ontario any questions sir no questions thank you now to willow valley yeah i uh i'd like to compliment the bill i agree with him on the private there i would like to ask one i'd like to ask a question uh my experience every time a fire goes through you have a tremendous amount of thistles and noxious weeds and so forth and uh i was wondering what the future follow-up after you prescribe burn is going to be leo do you want to direct that question well either one of those people who are advocating prescribed burn okay burda or charlie why don't you cover not please i'll talk about this um that is a problem i feel like on most of our our preserves um the plant communities are in good enough condition that there isn't a lot of seed source right in the area um for bullfizzle and canadian fizzle um so we don't have that i don't think that we're going to have that much of a problem alone in the forest i know it's a problem it also seems to be a problem after silviculture techniques um seems like um after uh logging or um these new techniques to uh cut down on compaction it just seems like the whole understory um goes through these not noxious thistles uh what we're going to do about it um i think a lot of these species are early successional and they might not be a problem i think not just weeds um are mostly a problem when they uh alter the site and do not allow succession to go on naturally charlie you want to add or maybe just from a general point of view um weeds are just plants growing in a place that uh we have categorized them as as being weeds um i think a lot of weeds a lot of the species that show up in the booklets about weeds the identification of weeds or something the necologist really looks at as those opportunists who take advantage of of severe disturbances in a community and uh we only throw the noxious category on of course when they become problematical and many of those are not not at all native or complimentary to the to the ongoing successional processes of a particular area so they become noxious um many of those weeds are short-lived in the in the successional uh stage setup from pioneering through towards uh some endpoint or or climax state so uh again we we humans tend to to get alarmed and worried about weeds that seem to be taking over particular sites whether it's from uh logging activity uh churning of the soils at landings and skid trails or whether it's following uh uh some intensive uh burning where where there's been a particular amount of heat generated at a particular spot within uh a place that fire has visited and i i would just caution everyone that that's depending on the the plants that we're talking about um i think a lot of ecologists don't get too concerned about that it's it's too short life if if we have a commodity seeking individual there who gets nervous because the timeframes aren't on his terms or her terms then uh that's something outside of the sphere of what i'm talking about a bull thistle for example is a is a thistle that i don't consider noxious other there are some other thistles i consider noxious but not bull thistle yeah it's a plant taking care of a of a of an injury and helping to heal that site in its own special way i just want to add that um plants that are noxious um on our preserves we um i probably spend 50 percent of my time in the field season trying to control noxious weeds after we some noxious weeds either um because they're on a county list and uh legally at the private landowner we need to control these weeds and some that we feel that do alter the natural succession stages and um are invasive and competitive against native species um either um in some cases uh if we need to we'll use herbicides in most cases we use mechanical control on most of our our problem weeds thanks just one last point on noxious weeds i believe that again we're looking at this disturbance ecology and that disturbance can be from wind throw flooding road building logging fire overgrazing and noxious weeds are a problem basically i believe whenever disturbances are severe enough by any of those activities so i wouldn't want to just necessarily necessarily focus on singling out fire just because we tend to be focused on that tonight at this particular seminar i have uh this just a comment but this matter of noxious weeds being short lived just isn't true behind nez but but uh keep pressing down your button bob bob can you hear me yeah i think maybe i is there's something i messed yeah bob could you repeat a question please uh over 10 years ago there was a prescribed burning uh behind net the idea was to get they got rid of the subalpine fur but uh today the dominant uh vegetative species is thistle and uh the dominant vertebrate use out there is uh a cattle in the late grazing season that uh after most of the other grass in the area is gone and up there at tapapus lake i find still a problem with thistle and that was cut in then 1967 and there was some burning uh there uh i think that we need to uh to quit saying that weeds are short lived species and to come up with some time frame for which we're willing to accept it any comments charlie on that no i i i value your uh your observations i've been to nez but but i can't speak to tapapus lake and i can't speak to the exact place you're talking about but i've seen the same uh or think i've seen the same um where i've been around just long enough to to witness uh both thistle stands that are still very vibrant uh very dominant and uh i believe what i'm saying is that those are places on some pretty deep soils where we did a fair amount of uh churning of the soil uh more than anything else and uh so maybe some of those practices are are uh needing to be checked out as far as uh they're uh they're impeding the ongoing uh successional opportunities whereby the thistle would be replaced by other more desirable plants later on down the scale more desirable from a from a human point of view and a utilitarian point of view it seems to me that what you're describing bob is that you're continuing there's continual disturbance on that site too um first you had fire um now there's uh grazing so it hasn't had it hadn't a chance to go through the the natural succession okay thank you willow valley any another question there yes i've noticed uh several times in last year or last several years there's been prescribed burns have gotten out of control and i just wondered if any prescribed burns get on the private property is the forest service liable for the damages you don't answer that question charlie i kind of like to answer that question because uh i have that happened happened to me actually uh the forest service was conducting a prescribed burn on the deschutes national forest and um i had been involved in the eis process um had ridden the forest service asked them not to put the fire out on our property asked them not to put heavy equipment on our property and uh the fire got away and burnt 35 acres on our wild haven preserved we put in a claim to the forest service because we were um interested in restoring the site to native vegetation it wasn't the fire that caused the damage it was the uh the fire control uh equipment and the fire line and the fire service uh told us that they weren't liable because uh they were within all their prescribed burn uh requirements and we uh were not able to collect on that fire any comments charlie i have no comments i might just add um i don't know from a forest service standpoint but from landowner to landowner they would certainly be both civil and potentially criminal uh uh aspects to uh escape prescribed fire and um yeah i see what robert is saying the uh we've also had landowners who had 35 acres and that might be all they own and um if that was the case they may not be nearly as excited uh about a prescribed fire um aspect and we've we've encountered that also where stop it whatever the uh bottom line might be to prevent the fire from entering their property so we've had that i see i see it as a you know both positive for some landowners would uh probably buy into the program pretty good size and other ones uh would do whatever they could to stay out of that arena okay all right let's make a stop in uh western orian and monmouth nobody there okay that's our rounds any further questions from la grand yes bob i have a question that may relate to an earlier question from john day i think it was and to this last talk about prescribed fires that get away it seems like we've been talking all evening about trying to start using fire as a tool yet i think that's fire has been applied quite a bit in the last few years as a tool in a lot of new ways such as um you know a seed seed tree removal or a shelter would cut where a lot of the younger trees or a lot of the young granford are laid down and then burned after the commercial timber has been taken off some of these uh under burns like this are carrying up into the crowns of the trees that have been left and i could see how somebody coming along and looking at one of these might wonder if prescribed burn is really under control in these situations is it intended to burn standing live trees and um or is that part of the prescription uh maybe that's just part of what is accepted as mortality of the fire these standing trees that are some of them will always go up how many of those are acceptable i think that might be what the person was getting at before and because of this kind of mortality and the loss or the escape of prescribed burns on the private lands is this tool really something we have control of now i don't know if charlie's the one to direct this to i think forest service is really applying it so charlie i guess you're it i don't know i can't i don't feel comfortable talking about the escapement uh because i'm a my scientist that focuses on the needs of the community the plant community and the ecosystem so when we put political stuff on that landscape whether it's public private blm forest service or whatever uh it's not it's not kind of my job to to track with how we're going to deal with managing at a landscape level when our administer lands a butt with lands administered by other public or or private entities uh i'd feel more comfortable addressing your question though about we'll call them crop trees that take a take a a loss in in growing potential or or actual mortality that were envisioned to be there after the fire event and we had an event uh that i'm more familiar with because of the kind of precedent generated that happened on the baker ranger district near phillips lake near phillips reservoir right beside the road where everybody drives by and uh i was kind of callous to to some of those concerns that were raised because i see the employment of of fire under prescription in a lot of ways that we employed civil culture under prescription and having been once a september sale administrator and my job was to take care of when things went wrong not look so much as when things went right that i was into that negative pot all the time when actuality in the bigger scope of the timber sale things were going right most of the time and yet and yet in a way my job was to focus on the things that weren't going right and i think that's analogous to what i see with prescribed burning uh everybody that that i've talked to that really knows a lot more about the actual act of burning knows that they're taking a risk when they drip torch down the line but i went to a real good fire symposium last spring in montana which was a nationally acclaimed symposium i mean folks from all kinds of organizations were there and the numbers were great and one of the things that that went away from that symposium that i recall were top leaders going to try to make a fundamental change in what happens to an employee when things go wrong because there's some people living a little bit with fear for a career in in just things that they really could not control taking off and and creating what was then something out of prescription as far as the biological loss of those crop trees i'm not concerned any more than i would be concerned with the faller who dropped a large tree in an overstory removal setting and the tree didn't fall where where he had planned for it to fall and it took out two or three crop trees we are talking about something that's so fundamentally more important in a in a scale dimension of scale that's so much greater that the focus on those relatively small issues gets away from the bigger the bigger job of dealing with a larger problem we're going to have a workshop and in just a couple of more days a three-day workshop in the blue mountains which is the first and it's going to focus on managing at the landscape level and doing things that we feel and we hope are more in tune with processes that keep ecosystems healthy and whether or not uh a few trees that were envisioned to be there after the barn wound up not being there probably won't make that much difference in the bigger context of things any other questions i appreciate bill's view on uh i guess on his own ecosystem so to speak there uh you know one as we've seen from the pictures somewhat different than i guess that of the park like yellow pine stand that i guess we perceived to have been present you know prior to european man and i guess uh knowing a little bit about what bill's done out there and some of the objections he's achieved yes i have to ask the question uh maybe to charlie anybody else like to answer what's wrong with what he's done out there what's wrong with an altered ecosystem something different than that with what we perceived to have uh you know been present prior prior to european man you know bill has a fairly healthy forest and he's got a lot of things going for him and i guess again i asked that question what's wrong with with uh that sort of way bill's gone and uh with his force management out there i'd like to say nothing's wrong with it if he's meaning his objectives and what he's doing is right out there i mean we all have different objectives and we need to keep that in mind i'd like to throw in there the the idea that that charlie brought out just a few minutes ago and that's of scale charlie's dealing with millions of acres thinking about millions of acres working with millions of acres and i'm working with 240 i think there are things that i'm doing that could be used by the forest industries and could be used by the state and federal forests and i know that in some places they are but it's it's really a matter of scale and it's it's a matter of uh how much money congress is willing to appropriate for restoration compared to building roads and this sort of thing they the problem is not simple when it gets into the federal forest okay i think we look pretty tired how about joining me in a round of applause for these folks and remember that the natural resource news our quarterly newsletter will contain the full text of all of the presentations of the series this winter so we'll be looking for that finally stay tuned for information about our next seminar series next spring and this the topic for next spring will be water resources so it should be of of interest to a wide variety of people thank you all and good night