 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 fourth of the five sessions looks at two subjects. Can silver culture replace the role of fire and effects of fire on wildlife? I hope you find it interesting. Our second speaker is Russ Graham and I'm really looking forward to hearing what Russ has to offer tonight on alternatives to fire. Let's welcome Russ Graham. Well, thank you. It's a pleasure for me to be here this evening. And one of those disclaimers, any time I always speak to a group, you always have these amount of disclaimers. And the best disclaimer I have in the room tonight is two people that I worked with here about 10 years ago and one's a silver culturist and one is a fisheries biologist. So any questions that I can answer in those two subjects I'll direct it a couple people in this room that I know quite well. So it's a fun time to talk silver culture and when we start talking about the... Can silver culture replace the role of fire? And I think the things that we need to start really looking at is what is silver culture first? We heard that term batted around here when John was speaking about what is silver culture. And what is silver culture and what is forest management have in common and how do those two work together? I think we'll explore that a little bit before we get into what fire does and what silver culture can do. And I think the first thing to maybe just start out the definition. And the theory is the theory and practice of controlling forest growth. And I think there is a very operative word in there is forest. Not stand, not tree, it's forest growth. And the other operative words in there is to meet management objectives. The practice of silver culture of course originated in the early 1900s in the United States and it came across from Europe, from England, from Germany and it was pretty much those practices were laid out by the German foresters and English foresters and even an Indian forester who practiced in India for many years laid out a lot of our early silver cultural practices. And we work to some management direction. Remember as the forest service we as a society through our elected officials through our planning process we have management direction. And this management direction then the earliest one I can find a good reference for was the 1926 forest service manual. And you notice there that it says that inferior species will not be pushed on the market. And in other words we won't go out and even manage inferior species we won't push them onto the market. In fact we'll even cut down and kill some of these inferior species. And you think well okay this happened in 1926 what's that got to do with 1993. We were still doing it in 1961 on the Bitterette National Forest. Remember Lodgepole, Douglas fir, Grand fir is not now and never will be a commercial species. And that was in a 1934 management plan for one of our national forests in western Montana. Basically that's what it said. So we went out and we killed these stands. Here's a stand of Grand fir. We went out and we discriminated against them in our management. Now here in the Blue Mountains western Oregon, eastern Oregon and eastern Washington. How many times did we manage Grand fir in the 1920s and 1930s? How often did we feature it in any of our management to look at its civicle characteristics? What species did we harvest then in the Blue Mountains predominantly? In the Bitterette Valley, in the Coraline Valley. It was ponderosa pine. That was the only species that we had out there to manage. And the way we managed it so many times is we went out and cut it down and took it to the mill. So when you look at that, let's go back to about what I think on that slide, I have 1869 as some of the first data that I'm able to find. And you'll notice there that this is just north Idaho. This is north of the Clearwater River in Idaho, a very small area. This is in millions of board feet cut annually. This is the annual cut of ponderosa pine and white pine in the early 1900s. You notice there that in what is that? In the 1890s, we were cutting nearly all ponderosa pine. And that was out of the valley bottoms along the Coraline, some along the St. Joe, some along the Clearwater Rivers around Moscow, Idaho and the Plukes. We cut a lot of ponderosa pine. Then by 1910, you notice, the white pine started coming on real strong. And then by the 1925, more white pine was being cut. And by 1935, the amount of ponderosa pine being cut went down. Now it's sort of a side light. You see that nice big white pine tree there? That's on the Clearwater National Forest. You know what that went to produce? In 1910, 1920, 1930. You know what we cut those trees down to make? Toothpicks and matches. That's what we cut those down and took them to the mill on where Sue Rainville there in the middle of the room used to work. We had a road called the Diamond Match Road. It was built by matches being hauled out of the Coraline National Forest in match blocks about 24 inches long. Remember, that was 351 million board feet a year we were cutting in 1935 through 1938 of western white pine. Remember, there's up to 10 species growing in those forests in the Northern Rocky Mountains. Ponderosa pine, larch, Douglas fir and look at that highly important component of Grand Fir. How much we were harvesting? How about spruce, lodgepole? Subalpine fir didn't even hit the register. But remember, all of these species were being left out there. So now, we looked at this problem and some people said, well, we're overharvesting these trees. We're leaving a lot of disease susceptible to this disease. So, as John mentioned it, the tussock moth, the spruce bud worm, the armillaria root rots, the felinus root rots, all of those could attack the Grand Fir, the Douglas fir, the pine beetles attack, the lodgepole pine. And some people did recognize that we were overcutting some of the pines. And for example, in 1942, Hutchison and Winters here 351 million board feet per year in just north of the Clearwater River by 19, what is that, 1959, we even have it all gone. Well, you know as a society we did a very good job of it. We got rid of a lot of that white pine. Okay, that is the conditions that we as society put into the northern Idaho, the eastern parts of Oregon and Washington. We did that to our forests. We cut out a lot of the cereal species. We cut out the ponderosa pine. We cut out the white pine. We cut out the large. Now fire prior to the 1900s operated pretty freely until about 1910 and the late 1800s. Fire pretty much operated freely throughout the northern Rocky Mountains. And so what did fire, how did fire create some of these ecosystems and what did it look like? Well, natural fire in contrast to silver culture do anything according to management objectives. It's a little more opportunistic and a little more unpredictable. We can predict fires and as a sidebar there Gisborne started his research in northern Idaho in about 1930. He was one of the premier fire researchers and the way he first predicted fire danger would you believe, he stood up on a mountain and held up a gray piece of glass. And the way he had predicted fire danger if that gray piece of glass matched the sky the fire danger was a little higher. If the darker gray got a little higher or excuse me he held up a darker gray glass and it was a little darker and the sky was there, the fire danger was higher because there was more smoke in the air so the fire danger was higher. That was the first fire danger rating systems we had in the northern Rocky Mountains. So like I say, fire is you know we can predict it a little bit but sometimes our methods are a little different in the skeptical side. Okay, fire can remove high forest cover and John mentioned that and showed that we can, we have stand replacing fires. Fire will thin understory vegetation and we had some discussion with John about how could we protect some of those trees if we were running under burned through them. It will prepare a site for regeneration. The two number one seed beds for conifer regeneration in the northern Rocky Mountains is the central soil and burned over surfaces. Those are the two number one seed beds for regeneration of conifers. Stimulates the growth of understory. How about buck brush? Cianothus for elk or deer. Cianothus likes fire. You scarify the seeds with heat and you get a tremendous flash of Cianothus in some of our sites. Cycles nutrients. Fire is a very good at cycling nutrients. If the fire does not burn extremely hot and it can volatilize every piece of nitrogen on the site up into the air, nitrogen can be cycled very effectively and as it does carbon. Maintain site adaptive species. We saw those slides earlier that if Douglas fir or Grand fir is growing on a ponderosa pine site a fire comes through that. It can kill the Grand fir as thin bark less tolerant of the fire and it can maintain species. And also the genetically adapted species are very good at fire relationships. It can operate at the stand level and as John pointed out it can operate at the landscape. 256,000 acres of the boys he burned up. In 1910 a lot of northern Idaho burned up, a lot of western Montana burned up. So then we have those activities now of forests were created by fire up to about 1950-1930s. Also then we had humans. We kept picking and plucking taking a lot of volume off of the tree out of the forests. But at the same time then we decided in the mid-1950s that high yield forestry was going to be some of our answers. And we went back to the basics and said here are some of the people that produced information to conduct that high yield forestry. People like Hague and Davis and Pearson and Schubert, Wellner are some of those people that produced information on forest dynamics, forest growth, regeneration, stand dynamics. All of these people produced information on how to produce timber products. We can manage trees from an individual tree level and look at tree classifications all the way up to stand dynamics. We're very good as civil cultures. We have a lot of information to manage at those levels. We have just started approaching managing at the landscape level. And in northern Idaho we as civil cultures managers could do a very good job. We could clear cut broadcast burn we could optimize rotation ages we can maximize mean annual increments and in 30 years 40 years we could produce stands of white pine like this. But times are changing maybe not like they are in Moscow, Russia this morning and yesterday but times are changing in the forest service. And some of us if we can handle that pressure that's a couple of regional foresters I've talked to recently said if you can stand the internal indigestion that the changes are going in and around us it's the most fun there is to be in the forest service right now is the changes that we're going through. But the things that we did in the past are not necessarily bad. Remember those are management objectives that we were trying to achieve. And Winnie Kessler I think put it together real good here that foresters have served society well in regard and using science as an improved practice is to make the land produce more efficiently and economically. We as silver cultures have done a very good job. But like I say times are changing. Goss hawks, grizzly bears are all becoming important parts and important components of our forests. For example what does white pine blister rust that we introduced in Victoria British Columbia to some place in Maine in the early 1900s have to do with the survival of the grizzly bear. What are those two have in common? White pine blister rust in the grizzly bear. Well it happens to be that the grizzly bear gets a tremendous amount of its food from white bark pine nuts. And guess what disease is now devastating the white bark pine of the Northern Rocky Mountains is blister rust. So those innocuous little things and then we could throw in the nutcracker we could throw in fire all work together everything is connected. Another example I have here is with this goss hawk. What does mycorrhiza the little ectomycorrhiza fungi have to do with the goss hawk? Organic matter supplies mycorrhizal habitat. Mycorrhiza in turn fruiting bodies supply food for the squirrels and the squirrels in turn supply food for the goss hawk. So when we start looking at times are changing we are starting to look at how things are connected. No longer can we just look at trees. So how does silver culture start approaching these new paradigms or these new ideas? We know a lot about managing forests for producing timber crops. We know that we can take and treat forests to management objectives. We are predictable within limits. We can predict quite readily how fast trees grow. What kind of regeneration we're going to get. What kind of successional stages we're going to move through. We can remove high forest cover if that's desired. We can thin trees mechanically. We can thin trees with fire. We can thin trees by girdling. We can manage manipulate vegetation in all methods and means. We can prepare sites for tree regeneration. We can stimulate the growth of understory. We can scarify sites. We have different understory vegetation that we can easily bring on with our management activities. We can maintain sighted after species. The classic example there is white pine blister rust. What we know about the genetics of white pine is once more making it a viable species in the northern Rocky Mountains. Also that we know how to manage the genetics of Douglas fir or lodgepole pine some of those species. We can operate at the stand level and we can operate at the landscape level. But one thing fire does that we as civil cultures and managers have not really figured out is to really how to manage those nutrients and at nutrient cycling real well. We can open up stands to increase decomposition. Decomposition is another form of combustion. Fire, decomposition is combustion. We have a pathology project in Moscow and one of our discussions around coffee and a beer is how about a super fungus? Let's introduce a super fungus or manage for fungus to decompose this material and then we wouldn't have to worry so much about a fire. And we could do that by moisture and aeration and manage those two elements that we might actually increase decomposition in some of our forests. But the one that we I do not think that I know a way that we could manage would be the changes in pH. You have some forests here on the Blue Mountains that Dennis Ferguson calls a mosaic of grand fir. This is a high elevation grand fir site that is understory of cone flower and bracken fir. These high elevation sites are prone to acid soils. The only way to increase that pH then is through some type of burning mechanism as we can understand right now. And this long term increase in pH is a very important factor in some of our forests. But maybe not in all of them. Maybe acid rain deposition or something might make it important. But this is one thing that we probably cannot modify mechanically or with other means. Again, we have done one other thing in our forests. We have managed these forests since 1910. We've excluded fire. This is a very common occurrence in a lot of the Rocky Mountains when we look at these fuel loadings 100, 200 tons per acre of downed material. And we saw some pictures of the Boise earlier this evening. Fire protection is management. It's a conscious decision. Someone asked John about what are we going to do with wilderness areas. I think they should be factored in the equation. We have tremendous volumes of biomass out there in wilderness areas. And we keep putting smoke jumpers in them year after year to put out the fire. One inch of ponderosa pine litter equals 10 to 14 tons per acre of biomass. In three years a ponderosa pine stand can produce 10 tons of biomass laying on the ground in litter. Dense multi-storied stands and John showed as many pictures of that. The species conversion we've already talked about this evening and then meadows turning into forests instead of open meadows. How do we manage and manipulate that vegetation then? Someone asked, well I think on one of the remote sites says who's going to pay for it? Well let's see, the foothills fire are 256,000 acres. How much money did we spend to put that fire out? How much money do we spend every year to put fires out? How much money do we spend to try to ameliorate conditions that we've created? Maybe there's some kind of helicopter method that we could develop. There's a engineer over in Seattle that used to doodle on the back of napkins and have all different kinds of methods to move vegetation out of forests. So, can silviculture start replacing fire? I think that silvicultures can operate to any kind of management objectives we're giving for sustainability and functions of forests. We cannot totally replace the rule of fire but we can come very close to it by all types of mechanical means. Species selection, thinning, biomass removal, etc. The one that we might have to very consider so much and that's what John brought up is protect that soil resource. Fire didn't run around with a D6 trying to scalp or scarify sites and somehow we need a method to bunch up material haul it out by a skyline or like they do in Europe. This skyline I watched over in Europe and I believe this is Switzerland in the morning they brought down milk cans and the afternoon they brought down logs off of the same standing skyline. So there is ways that I think that we can manage this vegetation but this is not the way to do it. I wish this was one of our cuts that I could show you from 1930s but this is one of our answers for wildlife, scenic values in northern Idaho and I think this picture I'm dating but it's only about 8 to 10 years old. This was our answer instead of clear cutting we left a bunch of this out here and we called this forestry. We did some of that in the Blue Mountains to guarantee you also. So the alternatives I think proactive we need to start addressing some of these issues and we have. It's expensive, the value of the products won't pay for it. Maybe the gauze hawk maybe wildlife money is going to have to start footing some of the bill instead of always timber management maybe fisheries forest product values are increasing. One of my acquaintances at the University of Idaho says that if the value of or the cost of material keeps going up that we will be able to artificially produce a tube of four like we do I beam 2 by 10s and the 2 by 4 is not too far away out of just chip material. No management except fire protection is is management and we got property value in lives and as a society are willing to risk that because these fires do burn maybe as a as a fatalist you say well in my watch it's not going to but it might. So instead of attempting to totally replace fire let's write a good silviculture prescription and remember a silviculture prescription is defining a silvicultural system is a planned set of activities through the entire life of a quote forest and by using innovative techniques I think that we can accomplish a lot of this but you know what maybe these problems and as a summary of what we're looking at is not maybe that difficult to grasp the picture that has been drawn this far can be hardly called satisfactory we saw pictures of the the Boise we spent a tremendous amount of money here on the east side of Oregon and Washington addressing forest health problems overcutting the pines and uncutting of other species I think that's very obvious to a lot of us there's an unbalanced drain on a lot of our forests then this last one the confusion is added by the fact that the public, local, state, federal governments have not come to an agreement on the problem the approach and the division of responsibility it's the game in fish's fault for managing elk and not my fault for providing hiding cover but there's really no shortage of solutions we know what they are the problem is to select one that's going to upset the apple cart the least and to transform it into an action program and to recognize that the course which bests from a pure local standpoint does not serve the best in the national interests these last two slides I wish that I could take credit for them I wish I could take credit for this verbiage but there's the answer those words came out in December of 1942 by Hutchison and Winters to recognize the problem we're 50 years later and we're talking about the same problem it hasn't changed we still are batting around the same problem that we did 50 years ago so therefore civil culture is the iron and science and managing forests to meet a management objective so when you shave in the morning comb your hair what have you in the mirror ask yourself as a member of society do you want to change or not also I think you have to address what are we going to do is keep importing our wood from British Columbia Brazil or Siberia are we going to find some way to manage our forest for sustainability and function and still produce some timber crops any questions thank you go ahead push the button Jim I guess I'm just a little concerned about the I know you haven't said this you haven't said that civil culture can replace fire when you lifted a number of things that fires do ecologically do you ever worry that you you haven't or won't ever be able to identify all of the things that fire does ecologically well I think John introduced the topic as best as that we could on a landscape level and he pointed out his pie chart of the Boise National Forest if he only attempted this on one quarter of the Boise Forest there's so many other of that mosaic out there so to be more exacting is that if we started today to do everything on every acre of national forests in the west your lifetime and my lifetime and our kids and our grandkids lifetimes would expire before we made the entire circle so I don't think that that's really a problem that there's going to be enough wildfires and other fires operating within our systems to maintain that functionality but at the same time I think that if we protect that soil we protect that organic matter that I think that we can sustain these forests that's the bottom line in my own opinion that we it can be accomplished is there any discussion when you're talking forest plans and you said there currently isn't any plan in terms of the wilderness areas is there any move to include wilderness areas in the management so we don't have another yellowstone basically so that they can do like small prescribed burns to reduce fuel loads selectively as a researcher I opened my mouth one time in a meeting and I said I would like to see the next forest plan and I have a district ranger here in the room that he would just sign his name and say I will sustain my district in the forest plan in the district plan and that would be the ideal but we as humans and society don't trust that district ranger and that forest supervisor to do it so by gosh we want to make sure that we tell him and prescribe what we can do and we want to reserve those wilderness areas or what have you I would like to see him be included in some ecosystem package the bitter it is my best example this system analysis go from the top of the bitter roots to the bitter root river and that includes all the way from wilderness areas through forest ground all the way to private land would be the ideal way to do it but in reality of where we are going to reach that until we burn down a few more yellowstones I doubt it push the button you got to hold it down you mentioned that Hutch had some of the answers or identified the problems in 1942 I'm just wondering from your experience in research if you feel that management is using research results to its maximum is research is management using research to their maximum I guess the best way as I can answer that is my career as a researcher right now in the last four years of my life and I just told some my acquaintances here in the room I've only spent five full weeks in Moscow in the last four years and I have spent a tremendous amount of time with management and if anything I see that the managers that I deal with are so hungry and so willing to work with us that I have to make sure I don't compromise my own values and say this is the facts you know and stay to the facts that I don't get involved into some kind of management decision so yes I would say that they're using it and even demanding more of our time all the time as best as they can go to Wallowa Valley questions that what is your confidence in the ability to control logging and what is your confidence in the ability to control fire tell it I'll tell you the truth maybe a facetious answer to that I have more confidence sometimes in controlling fire than I do the logging but that is probably a facetious answer to your question I think one of the one of the positive things that I see coming online in the Forest Service is what's something they call stewardship contracts and that very possibly could be that we put the onus on the logger from not only cutting the trees down but also for a long term commitment to the forest and I think that that has some validity that we might be able to control the logger but until we get better methods of contracting or selling trees and administering contracts it's always going to be a problem it's just like when you wake up in the morning and understand that the nuclear power plant in your backyard was built by the lowest bidder and that's the same way with logging the person that we are assigned to be the custodial of our processes is sometime the lowest bidder in many contexts so I think that we have a lot of work that we could do there but at the same time there's very good logging and extremely good logging and the same way there's extremely good management of fire in the northern rocky mountains we have some people that are able to under burn very thin bark species the grand fur, the white pine the hemlock and be able to maintain that nutrient base to maintain the organic matter and then other places the application of fire is much less as a science and we have very poor results so in any of the tools I mentioned sometimes we have very good results and sometimes we can have very poor results alright any more questions from Malawa and I would like to suggest that that was due to the fact there was no market for the fur and since then in the last 50 years I've seen not only the pine hydrated but also the fur cut the best and leave the rest and all my dollars dictated the management out there we left all the trash the mistletoe, the forked, the crooked trees and the genetically inserted was to reproduce that will be our biggest problem today well you just stated it in a little more terse terms than I did other questions? no more questions ok thank you we'll go to western western Oregon college then in Monmouth no questions? ok thank you ok we've made the rounds to the remote sites do we have any more questions from LeGrand? well I'm a little confused last week Art Tiedemann spoke and he talked about nutrient cycling and he said fire was actually detrimental to several of the nutrients that you mentioned tonight as being beneficial for instance nitrogen can you elaborate a little bit more? well I know arts work and I've read it and I agree with him to the point that it depends on the fire nitrogen volatilize at 400 degrees C and if you take a fire through a forest and you have that a high intensity fire and let's go to the southwest or to a ponderosa pine stand where we have, remember how many tons I said at an inch equals that's 10 tons per inch we have depth depths in the southwestern United States approaching a foot deep around the base of big trees we light that on fire do you think that underground is going to reach? extremely high temperatures and the nitrogen disappears and flushes down the stream or goes up and volatilize if you would burn that when the duff moistures are very high and you had plenty of soil moisture you can actually get condensation down in those layers so like I said earlier every tool that we use, fire can be good or bad remember nitrogen is the main one that we can flush off the system potassium, phosphorus, sulfur some of those are volatilized at much lower temperatures so the key to not totally not using fire is to use it properly I guess is my answer to that and in a previous talk someone asked well we'll burn up all the course woody debris if you burn that course woody debris and run your fire through my moisture contents it doesn't burn it'll stay there other questions if none let's thank Russ for his presentation and for coming I'm going to talk about forest health and wildlife and it's a priority in our forest this forest health concerns and I think I'll go over some of the things that we've been experiencing for the last seven years and what I think the ramifications are to wildlife on the Boise and first let me start by the Boise National Forest is one of the more southern forests in Idaho it's one of the more drier forests and as a result it's particularly vulnerable to drought type conditions which are cyclic for our area and it's 2.5 million acres and 1.9 of that is forested acres and about 90% of that or a little bit less is a dug for habitat type or dug for ponderosa species are found in the last six years the Boise has been plagued by a number of pests affecting all of Idaho forest but particularly hard on the Boise and those include Douglas fir bark beetle and tussock moth spruce beetle and as this map shows the pink there shows the areas where we've particularly hard hit by the dug for beetle and as you can see on the Boise National Forest it's been particularly hard hit and that's another indication that we're a dry forest compared to some of the more northern forests this shows a relationship with the number of trees killed and basically shows the results of the drought we've gone through in the epidemics and from beetle I'm going to go through these fairly quickly because I want to set the background as to what is happening in the forest this shows a tussock moth epidemic that's now over on the Boise it was a three year event and again you can see that when looking at the intermountain region in Idaho the Boise was particularly hard hit as compared to the surrounding forest defoliation acres of the spruce budworm on the Boise and the trees killed by bark beetle in relation to average precipitation and again you can see that the primary peaks associated with tree mortality related to the decline in precipitation over the last few years of drought and this shows the trees killed by insects in the intermountain region which is composed of southern Idaho, Utah, Nevada Wyoming and you can again see that the Boise has been particularly hard hit again trees killed by bark beetle and I'm going to go through these real quick because I think you get the picture that we've had a lot of epidemic and problems but we're talking about fire here and one of the things I wanted to bring up is looking at the the pattern of fire disturbance on the Boise and over the last several decades we've had an average fire disturbance of approximately 2,000 acres up until 1986 in which our fire disturbance increased to approximately 56,000 acres per year and that's the substantial increase in in effects on our forest and it represents significant change and what we anticipated to occur when we started looking at again the precip in relation to fires you can see that as a downer that's logical to assume that our fires went up and it also represents a departure from our forest plan which assumed that we would have approximately 10,500 acres a year and the figure on the left shows what we've how we've departed from it basically in salvaging timber from these fires what I want to talk about is a little bit about what we think is going on in terms of stand dynamics because we don't think what we're experiencing the last few years in terms of the epidemics in fire the increase in fire size of stand replacement fire and the epidemics of insect and disease is something that's natural for our forest it was certainly brought about and aggravated by the droughts but we think that there's some other things that have occurred on our forest over the last 100 years that have brought this about this particular slide shows fire scars that Bob Steele had tracked through in the Boise Basin of our forest and basically what he's found is that prior to settlement European settlement into the on the Boise National Forest within the Dougfer Ninebark Dougfer Spyria habitat types we had fires that range in frequency from one every nine ten years to every 30 years in the wet sites an average of around 15 to 20 years and those fires created totally different kind of stand conditions that we have than we have right now they left stands that were predominantly mature and old trees that were sparsely we think sparsely sparse density and approximately somewhere around 12 to 15 trees per acre and a very large old ponderosa trees with a light understory and this kind of shows a light burn that would go through and the resistant bark that ponderosa had would be able to sustain itself into these kind of fires we think there was three reasons why well basically there was a number of reasons why we had these number of fire frequencies and one was Native Americans influence on the area and lightning strikes and lack of fire suppression but since settlement what we've seen is a dramatic change in our stand conditions and I think this slide shows some of the conditions that are really prevalent on our forest and that's basically the remnant stand of ponderosa dominated by an immature stand of Doug Furre and obviously I picked a slide that shows our point not all stands are like this but all of them have these kind of characteristics and basically that's a change in the understory composition and the intensity and laddering fuels that take fire up into the crown and those changes had a number of effects and one of the effects is increased competition for available water and so in periods of drought we think we're seeing a totally different response in terms of the influence of disease and insects this happens to be tusic moth infestation here the other effect we feel we're seeing on our forest is an increase in what we call stand replacement fire those are the crown fires that eliminate all the trees basically and I'm not here to talk about whether fire is good or bad but basically what we think is the changes in the pattern of fires and what that means in terms of wildlife because as we've gone from that light understory burn which maintain an open stand with patches of old growth where there was traditional old growth climax for us where there was fuel breaks we've now gone to stands of mature or remnant stands of ponderosa dominated by Doug Furre and we'd like to think about that in terms of what we call the natural range natural historic range of variability and this slide shows kind of a concept we have for one of our areas in our forest the log and gulch area and it's a comparison of past present and future successional stage diversity across from a landscape perspective and the long long line shows the natural historic range of variability which we estimate occurred in the landscape the star excuse me the little circle dot there gives an idea where we think we are now in relation to what that successional stage represents in the landscape and the star there the asterisk represents where we think we're going to go in the future on some of these stands and as you can see one of the most dramatic changes is the old growth ponderosa pine serial stage which once represented somewhere around 25 to 35-40% of the landscape and now is almost non-existent that was that stand that had the frequent understory fires open conditions light fuel loading in the understory and fairly low density tree densities the also the other one that appears outside the natural range or natural pattern of disturbance is the immature stands and those again are those the acres haven't changed they're the same place but they're the remnant stand of ponderosa pine which is now dominated by immature Doug Furre and what we're trying to do is look at the characteristics and the changes that we're seeing in the forest in three levels and one is what I have here the project watershed and landscape you can look at the project as a stand level analysis looking at the composition of each one of these stands and how that's changed over time and obviously with the change if you believe the assumption that we had frequent understory fires and now have changed that to very infrequent high intensity canopy fires then the change in stand structures we've gone from a load tree density fairly uniform stand to one that has a lot more trees a lot more canopy layers a lot more snags a lot more understory fuels but is also highly vulnerable to greater intensity fires and what this has implications of wildlife and I apologize for these slides they didn't come across as well as I wanted and so I'll try to draw on here and show what I'm what my intent was but basically coming to the wildlife section on the Boise National Forest we're looking we're required to maintain viable populations for all desired native and non-native species and that's part of the National Forest Management Act requirement and the National Forest Management Act defines viable populations as having a distribution of reproductive pairs across the planning area and so ability to maintain that distribution and interconnections between suitable habitats is one of the essential portions of viability analysis and we look at three different components of viability analysis one is the demographics or the population characteristics how well they are able to reproduce the other one is the distribution patch size of suitable habitat and the third one is it's influenced how it's influenced by environmental factors such as insect disease and fire and today I want to talk primarily about the changes in fire from what we think existed pre-settlement to current and what that means in terms of the ability to maintain viable populations of such species as Piliated Woodpecker Flammulated Owls Whiteheaded Woodpeckers and whatnot an example I use is Piliated Woodpeckers because it's a species I think that's increased its range considerably on our forest since settlement and is affected severely by stand replacement fires and this this slide shows Piliated's have a maximum five mile dispersal distance and this is what this circle here shows and I tried to show I don't know if they show up in the TV but there's some habitat sections out here it has a 300 acre patch size requirement and when we go out and do our analysis the first thing prior to making any decision about how to use that piece of ground we look at the linkages or the ability of breeding pairs to disperse out to other suitable habitats and what this is showing is that currently we have a well distributed population or at least well distributed to suitable habitat across our planning area within that five mile dispersal capability when we come in here and prior to 1986 our average fire size was 2000 acres and particularly I'm looking at is logging Gulch if you took that average fire size for logging Gulch over a 30 year period that's shown here what you see is that depending on you don't know where the fire is going to occur but depending on where the estimate it may occur it would only take out one or two of these patches and still maintain linkages through the rest of the planning area to suitable habitat and so we feel like we would have maintained a high likelihood of persistence over time given this scenario but what has changed over time is that our fire size has increased dramatically and again using the same example but yet the fire pattern that we've experienced um last seven years what you see is is that where the fire pattern previously only affected maybe one or two patches the current fire pattern that we have is influencing quite a few of the suitable habitat patches out there and actually threatening our ability to maintain distribution and dispersal breeding pairs across this particular landscape um the foothills fire which we had last summer was 256,000 acres and I don't know if anybody's seen that this we're in Oregon here but that had virtually no mosaic um very very even pattern across the landscape very few islands of any kind of habitat other than and pretty much reduce that whole area into an even age class in the timber and as a result not only eliminated habitat eliminated habitat for the Piliated Woodpecker but also for the Flammulated Owl and for the White-headed Woodpecker um species that are tied to the open forest types as well as those tied to more climax closed forest conditions in addition that fire um and again I want to be careful here I'm not trying to talk negatively about fire but it had some pretty uh severe ramifications to our watersheds because it was so extensive far more extensive than what we think historically occurred the level of sediment going into the streams was also far um far greater and what we saw was significant areas where we had dry ravel landslides that particular fire burned up so much the watershed there was actually certain portions where fish died in the stream because uh the heat was um so great a fire storm condition where the fuels just went through the area and killed all the in this case a bull trout area uh we had one area near Tipton Flat that had a fire storm they estimated the winds at around 80 to 100 miles an hour and they lost 200 head of livestock 60 elk um 30 deer I had never seen that in a fire that I'd been associated with traditionally wildlife was pretty much unscathed maybe a few minor species that were tied to localized areas but never where we had uh died primarily prior to the flames from just heat moving through the um stands and pre pre-heating conditions so where do we go from here I think what I've tried to present is that that we want to on the Boyce Nelson Forest we're trying to understand what the dynamics of the forest are in terms of uh uh how they have influenced the seasonal stages and what that means in terms of wildlife and we think that we've gone through a change from pre-selement conditions in that we've increased our stand densities we've increased the stand structures and we've changed the disturbance patterns that influence the seasonal stages across the landscape we think that that has an influences on wildlife habitat as as those events become greater and greater in size and more and more severe we think that those have influences on our ability to manage for viable populations of mid and and late-seril stage species wildlife species and the example I gave was a Piliated Woodpecker that as the stand size as a as a fire stand replacement fire event increases in size the ability to maintain just uh breeding pairs across the landscape is reduced so the Boyce has initiated a forest health strategy and there's actually three parts parts to it um and I'm going to talk about those a little bit because I think they're important the first part is salvaging dead and dying timber and that's a short term effect it really has nothing to do with forest health it doesn't change the stand characteristics it doesn't reduce the um tree densities but it does recapture the loss of timber value values and um basically we're going to the areas identifying trees that were either influenced by fire or by insect and disease and taking and taking those areas and uh eliminating the dead trees taking out the dead trees basically on the foothills fire we had three hundred approximately three hundred million board feet of salvageable timber but we only harvested approximately a hundred and forty the remaining uh volumes were left for shading purposes for watershed purposes uh we cross felled a lot of it to try to help the watershed and also for um we're doing some studies on neotropical bird reestablishment in some of these areas and so we're leaving some strips uh not actually strips they're quite large patches out there and um we're trying to analyze whether the whether uh what the changes will be with a control area adjacent to uh timbered uh non-burned areas but we have harvested and aggressively harvested uh 140 million board feet we have a short term window in which those values will stay approximately two years is all we have and we should be done the fire occurred in last summer we should be done this December the other thing we're looking at is our stand densities and this is a majority of the thing I talked about looking at the characteristics we have in our on our forest and how they've changed and how we can apply civil cultural prescriptions um to help reduce the risk of our stand replacement fires and try to bring ourselves back into a more um I don't want to use the word natural but uh uh back into the natural historic range of variability of our disturbance patterns and by that I mean try to to uh bring it more into the less vulnerable to the severe stand replacement fires and we're doing that through pre-commercial through commercial thinning and extending the um harvest rotations um let me go back to that and understory fire the Boise National Forest will be looking at our stand characteristics and trying to reduce the stand densities to try to reduce the amount of competition for available water and in addition we'll be implementing um understory uh prescribed burning and we're going from about a thousand acres per year to about ten thousand acres per year is our goal we'll be learning a lot as we go along and trying to implement that and uh hopefully gaining uh public support as I'll have to live with some of the smoke that that'll produce but the other thing is that we're going to be looking at um excuse me one of the concerns is that we're going to apply this prescription uniformly across the landscape in an attempt to uh to basically get timber volumes out and that is not the case we recognize that there are certain uh there was a certain patchwork or diversity across the landscape depending on what portion of the forest you look at that was natural and inherent in the landscape and uh so we we'll be looking at different prescriptions to meet other resource needs on our forest this this slide kind of shows the breakdown of our forest and about 25 percent of it is suitable for timber management and of that 25 percent we will probably only be intensively managing a smaller portion we can't apply that same prescription across that whole 25 percent amounts to about 656 thousand acres we'll also be looking at pre-commercial thinning and and we're going to have to look at understory management and prescribed fire because it's only a short length of time uh the fire frequency in our drier sites is every 10 years pre-settlement so if we go back to uh we go in there and commercially thin and then leave it alone for 30 40 years we'll be back in the same situation we're in now these show some pictures on our on our forest of some of the conditions we're trying to create and we hope that these stands are more resilient or more resistant to stand replacement fires they don't have the laddering fuels but also more resistant to epidemic uh insects we recognize the role that insects play in producing snags and what we want to avoid is the epidemic role epidemic events not the uh endemic events I guess is the way we're we're at and that concludes my uh presentation do you want to go to questions now? let's go to question to LeGrand and then we'll rotate around the remote sites anybody have any questions here? gee y'all agree with that and everything I said I have a question you've indicated there's a correlation between habitat and the wildlife species that occur in that habitat if we were to go back to the historic forest landscape patterns that we presume existed before the European people got here would the public like the wildlife mix and is that would that wildlife mix be acceptable with your current forest plan standards? we're still going to have to mix in social values and I don't know whether that mix will be acceptable or not I know that the consequences of not doing it there are consequences of not doing it and that's one of the things I probably should have brought on my talk is another thing we're looking at is what we call the no action alternative and trying to develop that fully in the past I think we throughout we consider the no action alternative as if it was status quo maintain the current conditions and in fact it's not it's a greatly different scenario and so what we're trying to go back to the public and say here's your options we can do nothing we can leave that let that stand develop to climax conditions and in addition the extent of those climate conditions will probably extend over large portions of our forest and the consequences of that will be that will be greater vulnerability to stand replacement fires over an extensive portion of our forest or we can go in there and apply some civil cultural prescriptions try to mimic some of the patchwork that we think existed out there in pre-settlement times to meet some of those mid and late serial stage species and that's the way we're going to the public and asking them and that we do hear some concerns about that open forest characteristics and its influence on elk vulnerability and how vulnerable those are elk to being shot but there are other ways around that including addressing access and that kind of thing and I think what we found is that the public does not like a 256,000 acre burn that eliminates all to one age class and we've heard that pretty clearly so within that context we're trying to manage for a variety of different values and we'll have different prescriptions we won't be able to duplicate pre-settlement conditions did that answer your question today? Yes sir Any other questions? Yeah Push your button, no you're it Oh Jim You're right Good point, we should correct the director My question is in your old growth areas on your national forests that have had insect damage, how are you managing those or are you? We've set aside in our forest plan what we call dedicated old growth a certain amount to assure that we have maintained old growth species and to be real honest I think that was a a mistake because it didn't recognize the dynamics of these stands so we'll have to look at that where we had dedicated old growth we did not go in and alter the stand structure because of insects and disease and the primary reason for that was we're going to break the trust with the public that we would maintain the snags and the down woody material and this kind of thing outside of those areas what we did was we used the Region 4 old growth guidelines and looked at the number of snags per acre that would be maintained in a different certain habitat type and tried to assure that there was at least that many snags left after harvest of the dead trees of at least 20 inches what we call a diameter of breast height so for example in a dug for nine bark habitat type which we identify a climax would have approximately two plus snags per acre we would leave at least three snags 20 inches or greater and then take the rest increased number of snags doesn't we don't believe we don't believe increasing this number of snags left out there will increase the length of period that the benefit of snags will exist it simply increases the number of well the number of snags out there there's a certain point at which there isn't a benefit to the cabinistic species any other questions yes in one of your last slides where I think you indicated a picture of something that you were trying to accomplish it looked like an uneven age stand are you consciously trying to create uneven age stands now I don't think that under the forest health initiative will have uneven age stands at the stand level when you look at the individual stands but when you look at the landscape I think you could see different stand ages across what we call the landscape but I think if you go back and look at what we think occurred pre-settlement you'll find that there wasn't a lot of diversity in age classes across that landscape it was dominated by mature and old and old ponderosa pine again I'm going to come find my comments to the Dougfer habitat types in the drier sites because it's totally different when you go further north in our forest and so that civil culture prescription for forest health will be pretty much even age have you made any estimates of how your shift to very low density stands of slow growing cereal species will influence your total site productivity and more specifically will you then be able to meet your timber output goals I didn't hear the you said the site productivity is it is this mic working it should be I was wondering how your emphasis is on very low density stands of cereal species pine and large which are very slow growing how will this influence your total site productivity and how will this influence your merchantable fiber production okay I got to preference my comments I'm a biologist not a forester so I may mistake this but in the Dougfer habitat types a lot of these sites I believe are now experiencing a negative site site productivity I guess what I mean by that is more trees are dying than they are growing and through commercial thinning it will actually turn into to a positive where we'll have an increase in growth rates I don't know what that will mean to the ASQ and we were analyzing it now for our forest plan I guess my best guess would be there would be an initial increase followed by a slight decrease but I don't know that we're analyzing that let's go on to the remote sites we're tuned in to burns do you folks have any questions for John you talked about 10,000 acres of prescribed burn and pre-commercial thinning that's a good question and initially we can use KV funds for that for site prep and for understory management in the long term that'll be difficult it will require more intensive management than understory and we're trying to address that by being more efficient with our burning program and emphasizing the need for addressing forest health right now there's a bill before congress look at a forest health and address some of these aspects and we're hoping that it'll also have be able to address the funding needs for understory management we're not looking at wilderness areas to go in and do any kind of management of this type in the primary area that's 656,000 acres and so the logical conclusion is the remaining three-fourths of forest will be subject to the same conditions that got us to this point and I think it'll be difficult enough in the next 10 years just to address those 656,000 acres thank you any other questions from burns or from Ontario here we go okay we'll go on then to Blue Mountain no questions all right thank you we'll go on to John Day okay our primary focus in this is looking at the non-game species because they're the ones where we have a concern for maintaining the viable populations and that's basically where my focus has been in answering your question about deer and elk from a biological standpoint I don't think we're going to have I think it's the stand replacement fires haven't been an adverse effect and going to a thin stand more open stand will not have an adverse effect and possibly even a beneficial effect but it's my opinion and I want to emphasize that it's my opinion that management of elk is primarily a social question rather than a biological question and that is the size of the bull and the length of the harvest, the hunting season and that's where the elk vulnerability question comes in there's no question that as you open up a stand make it make sightability inside that stand easier that it's easier to shoot the animal and that has an effect adverse effect on the vulnerability and if you open up our entire forest you would have to do something else such as close access or something to maintain the same level of the vulnerability that existed prior to harvest and I I'm sure that I'll generate some thoughts about what the relative importance is of elk and other species but I view that as a social question and less of not a biological question and social in that you're trying to address public demands for hunting which you still maintain the viability of the elk high elk numbers on our forest even though roads have increased and timber harvest has increased and our fires have increased the elk numbers have increased and I think that the biggest concern that Idaho Fish and Game has is the ability to maintain their hunting seasons and still maintain the reputation of a five point bull harvest average harvest where do they fit into natural range of variability the populations I think they're well above does that answer your question maybe more detail than you wanted any other questions from John Day okay let's go on then to Lane Community College and see who's there oh did you have one one more question did that last time to him okay nobody's at Lane are you packing me in that place I'm not sure if we have anybody at Mount Hood or even if they're on this time I think I can make a comment here I also I told you two parts of our forest health strategy and I forgot the last part and the last part is to share the information the assumptions and the things we're learning with the public with groups like this and to try to bring back feedback that we receive from so that we can continue our learning process we've been working with the University of Idaho with the American Foresters and try to work with the public in forums like this to bring back their comments their concerns and some of their thoughts and challenged by some of the statements that we make so that we can be more responsive and let science be the driving factor in what we're trying to do that was a third stage I identified two okay we're over to Treasure Valley do you have any comments of Treasure Valley well I'm not sure where this is located that's Ontario Ontario and you're putting out seed and not seedlings putting out seed my experience has been with seeding like that is that you've made rodents real happy and we do not we do not broadcast seed bitter brush we had the opportunity to do that with the foothills fire and the public wanted us to do it and I went up in front of them and said no we won't do it because broadcast seeding lets you get the seed in the ground you have a very poor chance of success and gets gobbled up by rodents sagebrush we had excellent success in reseeding sagebrush but it's a species that the seed ripens in November and it's a windblown, wind carried species and is adapted to that kind of regeneration into a burn site but bitter brush is you got either planted in the ground or put it in the seedlings to have any kind of success okay let's go to Wallowa Wallowa Valley one comment we have had good success by using seed dribblers on tracks of cats and working them in that way that works out fairly well Wallowa Valley any questions for John that's where it is in our forest they're in a lot of ticker stand what you're showing I just wonder how you're going to play burning up their food well certainly I think also let me answer that in two parts we can't go in there and burn without first going out and thinning out the stand and reducing the fuels because we'll simply have a stand replacement fire that will take out the whole tree structure the second portion is yeah we're going to reduce the amount of in some areas the amount of affiliated workpecker habitat and I think that the point I was trying to make I probably didn't say specifically is that we have some species in our forest that are well above have benefited from the trend towards more dense tree species but those same species are also very vulnerable right now to the kinds of events we're having and so what I think we're going to have to do is look at the vegetation characteristics across the landscape and use commercial thinning and understory burning to what I call insulate certain stands that we want to allow to go to climax for these species such as Piliate Woodpecker by insulated I mean that you'd actually designate certain areas where you would hope to make them less susceptible to stand replacement fires by making the surrounding area a fuel break I would expect I have more questions I'm not sure what the composition of this crowd would be but I would think that that would be I think it makes biological sense but I think it scares a lot of folks when they start thinking about managing intensively at that level more questions from Malawa the other side of that also is as you open up those stands you're also benefiting other species such as flammulated owls and white headed woodpeckers and we talked today about goss hawks and the sustainability for those species so there's another one of the problems that you saw with the forest service is that in our documents we prepared in the past was that they tended to display the wildlife effects as being all negative to any kind of action alternative and the reality is that there are some negatives and there are some pluses depending on which group of species you want to look at and there are some negatives and pluses to doing nothing to all those species ok let's go to western Oregon at Monmouth and see if we had anybody come over there tonight do you folks have any questions of John? alright, thank you we'll go back to John Day I think we had one question there that we didn't answer do you folks have any more questions for John? no questions ok, I saw the gentleman there in the front alright hearing no more questions there do we have any more from LeGrand that came up? go ahead yes, I had a quick question when you're doing the understory burning it fire is not specific to the seedlings that burns all of them including the ones that presumably you want that are genetically adapted to that site over hundreds of years are you looking at eventually those large trees are going to die what kind of stand replacement are you looking at and are you looking at replanting hoping that some will survive? let me ask our next speaker about that because it's a silver cultural question I'm a biologist but you're right, it does take all the species and you can't have it both ways you can't have a thick stand of regeneration and have an open park-like stand of mature trees and yet you do have to have recruitment and I think that we're going to be looking at um we have the capability now with a lot of our tools that we didn't have even three years ago to look at the stand distribution stand characteristics across the land I keep using the word landscape I hope you know the large piece of ground out there and um addressing where we're going to have extended rotations where we would be looking at managing that understory and reducing and suppressing um regeneration of dense stands over a long period of time 200 years possibly um and in other areas we probably will uh go to higher densities not not severe densities we have right now but higher density stands with the anticipation that in 80 years or so we'll harvest in there and um so I'm not trying to leave the impression that we're going to manage the whole area for a mature stand of ponderosa pine um but we got to know where and how we're going to do that and certainly some seedlings have to have to make it up and I think if you look at the pattern of how those seedlings established and became old trees they did it during those periods of wet years when um your fire frequency extended out to say 20 30 years and uh and there were a few trees that were able to make it up to to the height where they would um have the resistant bark and I think that's what was happening and I think that that same thing will occur with our management because we're not going to be able to be consistent every for 250 years to go back every 10 20 years there'll be some things we'll lengthen out other questions? yeah so I was wondering if uh mechanical methods have been considered to reduce the understory instead of prescribed burns yeah I think we had the capability to do that but you know the Boise National Forest occurs on the Idaho Bathlet which is a extremely relative uh piece of ground that's decomposed granite and um uh I can't rule that out but we have to do it in such a way as to not increase the sedimentation on the in the area um so I you know I think there's opportunities to do that but we have to be real careful how we apply it other questions? any more questions from the remote sites if anybody has any we sure and uh let us know tell us where you are alright hearing none uh let's uh thank John for coming and he'll be leaving now