Catastrophic wildfires are becoming more frequent, more intense and more destructive in California. They are burning in a variety of vegetation types — from high-elevation northern-Californian coniferous forests to southern-Californian chaparral ecosystems — and some (e.g. the Thomas [2017] and Tubbs, Sonoma County [2017]) have been fanned by unusually strong wind events. Despite these differences, however, there is broad consensus that a major part of the uptick in catastrophic fires is the state's failure to adequately manage fuel loading in range- and forested lands.
The state is currently in the process of finalizing a document, the California Vegetation Treatment Program (VTP), which will serve as an update to their 1980s document, “Vegetation Management Program.” This unwieldy document serves as the blueprint for how the state will strategically approach fuels management. Practices such as mechanical treatments (e.g. mowing, mastication), manual (e.g. weed-whacking, weed-pulling), herbicide application, and prescribed fire will be included in the VTP, as they were in the 1980s VMP. One remarkable new addition, however, will be the inclusion of grazing as an approved fuels management treatment. Accordingly, there is renewed effort around the state from the livestock and ranching communities to communicate how domestic livestock can be integrated into a responsible, long-term fuels management program.
Fundamentally, we need to think about two kinds of grazing: 1) what might be called “traditional” grazing, and 2) what might alternatively be named “targeted” grazing. Traditional grazing is how we have always thought about grazing: in California, cattle are managed in extensive rangeland pastures to produce meat. Alternatively, the ultimate purpose of targeted grazing is to have a particular species of livestock graze at a certain density for a specific period of time for the purpose of managing vegetation. In this model, the saleable product is not meat, milk, or fiber, but instead acres of biomass cleared, thinned, or removed.
Importantly, however, it should be noted that both kinds of grazing can and do manage fuel loading in range- and forested lands in California. This is a point the ranching community has worked hard to make in the popular press recently. See, for example, the recent video produced by the National Cattlemen's Beef Association featuring cow/calf producer Richard Atmore of Ventura, California, discussing how grazing on his ranch just outside the city limits reduced impact of the Thomas Fire on urban residents. (https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=2365669617085882). My own experiences conducting soil and rangeland monitoring after the Thomas Fire confirm the same phenomenon. All five of the ranches I sampled had areas of grazed grassland that did not burn at all during the fire immediately next to shrubland areas that burned at a high intensity [see Figure x]. In this way, it is critical to recognize the good work that traditional grazing already does to reduce the sorts of fuels that might otherwise exacerbate fire in wildlands or on the wildland-urban interface.
But again, targeted grazing is different. It is an old idea (livestock grazing) applied in a novel manner. Increasingly, homeowners, private land owners, municipalities, public agencies, and utility companies across the state are using grazing animals where it's too steep to mow, too labor-intensive to hand-pull weeds or run a masticator, too challenging to execute a prescribed burn, or too expensive to apply herbicides.
It remains to be seen, however, how effective targeted grazing with cows, sheep, and/or goats will be on the Central Coast. While there is ample evidence that these livestock species will consume the naturalized annual grass species common in the area, there is less direct evidence of their ability to consume shrub and sub-shrub species common to our local chaparral and coastal sage scrub communities. Certainly, more work and experimentation will need to be done if and when targeted grazing for fuel load modification becomes more widespread. Animal genetics (insofar as it may impact an individual animal's preference for certain plant species) and augmenting the timing of use may both be important factors that will influence success. Research suggests that targeted grazing might be most effective 1) in the years after a wildfire, when large-diameter shrubs have been removed and begin to regrow; 2) as a follow-up to maintain other fuel treatments, like mastication; or 3) as a way to thin fuels — though not necessarily to remove them entirely — to reduce fire intensity and rate of spread.
It is important to recognize that targeted grazing is not exactly like running a traditional ranching operation, and targeted grazing operators face a unique set of challenges. They must be mobile (with their fencing, stock water, handling equipment, etc.), they must provide protection from livestock predators (if running sheep or goats), they must know how to effectively communicate with landowning clients and the general public, and they need to be certain they can provide forage for their livestock year-round (even if the paying jobs are seasonal). As new operators that may or may not have previous livestock experience increasingly offer their services, it will be important to provide resources to ensure their success.
California's decision to formally recognize grazing as an important fuels management practice in their forthcoming Vegetation Treatment Program should have a profound effect on the frequency and scale of use of both traditional and targeted grazing. It is an exciting opportunity for the livestock industry to meaningfully help address and provide solutions for the wildfire threat in our region.
Thinning forests and conducting prescribed burns may help preserve trees in future droughts and bark beetle epidemics expected under climate change, suggests a study from the University of California, Davis.
The study, published in the journal Ecological Applications, found that thinning and prescribed fire treatments reduced the number of trees that died during the bark beetle epidemic and drought that killed more than 129 million trees across the Sierra Nevada between 2012-2016.
“By thinning forests, we can reduce water stress and make forests more resilient to drought and climate change,” said the study's lead author, Christina Restaino, a postdoctoral scholar at UC Davis in the Department of Environmental Science and Policy when the study was conducted.
The study also indicated that current rates of treatment are not sufficient to reduce the impacts of hotter droughts and large-scale bark beetle outbreaks. Expanding the use of managed fire under moderate fire-weather conditions, along with strategic thinning and prescribed burn treatments, may increase resilience across the forest, the researchers said.
“There are currently too many straws in the cup,” said Restiano. “Denser forests use more water. We're learning that fuel treatments used to reduce fire risk have multiple benefits. Forests that are more open and less dense are stronger in the face of insect outbreaks, too.”
Treatment helps
For the study, researchers collected plot data in 2017 at 10 pairs of treated and untreated sites stretching from Eldorado National Forest to Sierra National Forest in the central and southern Sierra Nevada. They compared the effects of pre-drought thinning and prescribed burn treatments at those sites for four major species: ponderosa pine, sugar pine, white fir and incense cedar.
Treated areas generally had lower stand densities, bigger tree diameters and more pines, which were historically dominant.
Ponderosa pine experienced the greatest mortality of the species studied (40 percent) during the drought and beetle outbreak. But its mortality was significantly lower in treated stands. In untreated areas, the chance any one tree would die was about 45 percent. In treated stands, that chance went down to 30 percent.
Both ponderosa and sugar pine trees died more in places where their diameters were larger, suggesting insects may prefer larger trees, especially when the trees are stressed. The study demonstrates that removing smaller trees through thinning and prescribed burns can help reduce the stress in larger trees, which restoration efforts prioritize.
Be proactive
“It's important to be proactive,” said coauthor Derek Young, a postdoctoral researcher in the UC Davis Department of Plant Sciences. “This is not the kind of thing to start only when the drought starts. It has to be done beforehand.”
The study also notes that forest managers in the Sierra Nevada might consider cultivating a broader variety of species to buffer against insects and disease, as well as shifting from pines to more resilient hardwood species, like oaks and madrone – a transition underway in other semi-arid and Mediterranean climates.
Funding was provided for the study by the USDA Forest Service Forest Health Protection program, the USDA Forest Service Pacific Southwest Region, and the US Geological Survey Southwest Climate Science Center.
Approximate Date for Announcement of Results: July 29, 2014
Award Date (completion of award package): End of August, 2014
The U.S. Forest Service has opened requests for proposals under the 2014 Wood-To-Energy Grant Program (a.k.a W2E, Woody Biomass Utilization Grant). See RFP Here.
Please note that this is a dual announcement and only the Wood-to-Energy portion is eligible to California as the state successfully obtained a grant for a statewide grant last year and cannot apply again.
This program will assist applicants with the engineering design work needed to apply for public or private loans assisting with the construction and long-term financing of wood energy facilities that rely in part on hazardous fuels removed from national forests.
Wood-To-Energy Grant deadline is June 3, 2014.
The UC Berkeley Woody Biomass Group will also be scheduling a webinar in the coming weeks to help explain application guidelines and evaluation criteria. Announcement to follow. However, DO NOT WAIT for the webinar to begin your application and START on your application as soon as possible.
The 2013 Rim Fire that burned across large areas of the Stanislaus National Forest and Yosemite National Park brought national attention to the issue of how to increase the resiliency of forests to survive wildfires. There is considerable well-documented evidence that fuels are no longer limiting fires in the Western US and that they are getting larger and more expensive to manage (e.g. Miller et al. 2009, Miller et al. 2011). For example, a recent analysis concluded that “the percentage of high-severity fire in conifer-dominated forests was generally higher in areas dominated by smaller-diameter trees than in areas with larger-diameter trees.” (Miller et al. 2011). There is also considerable evidence that treatments that preferentially take out the smaller diameter trees (‘thin from below’) and focus on trees with signs of incipient mortality can significantly reduce the fire risk while still preserving most of the ecological characteristics of large tree dominated stands (e.g. Stephens et al. 2009, Moghaddas et al. 2010, Stephens et al. 2012a, Stephens et al. 2012b, Stephens et al. 2012c). In plain English, there is too much kindling in our forests and reducing fuel levels can extend the lifetimes of the big trees in forest stands.
While federal agencies often depend on prescribed fire and light thinning to increase fire resiliency, private and public land managers who produce sawlogs destined for renewable building products are interested in a wider range of approaches. Burning up trees that could have provided sustainable building products, renewable energy, and sufficient revenue to cover management costs is not a scenario favored by most forest landowners. Often lost in the discussion of the impact of the Rim Fire in Yosemite National Park is the opportunity to integrate fire risk reduction with sustainable and profitable forest management.
From our surveys of family forest owners we know that half of forest landowners want to do vegetation management to reduce fire risk (Ferranto et al. 2012). They want to work together with their neighbors and local fire districts. We noted that most of these landowners also value environmental attributes such as fish and wildlife habitats, native plants, and aesthetics in addition to the revenue generating potential of their lands. However, most of these owners are wary of using prescribed fire by itself or in combination with thinning treatments. Not surprisingly, landowners are also averse to losing money on any major resource management activity. They often reinvest timber revenues to reduce risks in areas but they will rarely borrow money from other assets they have and invest in fire risk reduction (Stewart et al. 2012, Stewart and Nakamura 2012).
The 4,270 acre Blodgett Forest Research Station is owned by the University of California and is managed to demonstrate the full range of management approaches that can be used by forest land managers and owners to accomplish their unique goals. We have worked hard to make the results on a wide variety of forest related themes available on our web sites, through publications, and with field trips for landowners, professionals and other interested parties. At Blodgett, one project that always gets considerable attention on field trips is our twenty year effort to create a fire resilient corridor into the office and residential area within the Blodgett Forest Research Station.
Figure 1: Blodgett manager Rob York explaining how the treatments to create the more open stand on the right reduced fire risk and still maintained a fast growing stand. The denser stand to the left of this photo has not been managed since it grew back a century ago.
Following extensive logging with railroads and steam engines from 1900 to 1933, the young stands at Blodgett were compartmentalized and assigned to a wide range of even-aged, uneven-aged, and reserve management. Harvest activity on the regenerating forest began in earnest in 1962 and has continued annually to the present. The wide range of treatments applied consistently over time, coupled with comprehensive permanent plots established beginning in 1974 has enabled the longest available empirical assessment of diverse forest management impacts and tradeoffs in productive forests of the Sierra Nevada.
An ever present challenge is the fact that in the high fire season we house up to 45 researchers in the middle of our forest. In the mid 90’s, we recognized the risk of having 45 non-fire fighters in the middle of a dense forest is risky and decided that public safety must trump research goals around the buildings and along the access road. We used a combination of commercial harvests coupled with surface fuel treatments and have now thinned these stands from below (keeping the large health trees) three times. Our detailed inventory data shows that we have been able to maintain high growth rates, large average tree size, high biomass volume per acre, and good separation between the crowns of the large trees. This will allow us to successfully evacuate if a wildfire ever swept through.
The comparison of the 1993 aerial view and the 2012 aerial view after three harvests clearly shows the four historical images with the project unit outlined in white at the end of this document show the progression of the fuelbreaks in between our other research treatments.
Figure 2: 1993 aerial view of Blodgett Forest and the main entrance road
Figure 3: 2012 aerial view of the fuel reduction corridor along the entrance road
From our detailed records of the forest conditions as well as what we harvested, we know that these treatments have paid for themselves. Even with a only 40, and now 30 large trees per acre, these stands are still capturing much of the growth potential as the large and healthy trees continue to put on girth and height.
Lessons
While Blodgett was able to design the fuel breaks under a larger timber harvest plan (THP) that covered many other units, other landowners could be dissuaded from undertaking this public safety oriented actions due to the complexity of filing for a full blown THP. State and federal agencies often spend $500 to $1,500 per acre to reduce fire risks, but public funds are scarce and the task is large. Much greater sums can be spent putting out fires. As a public policy, making it easier for forest landowners to invest their own revenue in risk reduction and improving the quality of their stands to get larger trees, better habitat, and protected water quality makes sense.