I came upon a paper that did a 20-year study comparing forested areas in the Sierra Nevada Mountains without any wildfire management practices, with prescribed burns, with mechanical thinning, and with a combination of the two. It concluded,
All three active fuel treatments produced forest conditions at the end of 20 years that were much more resistant to wildfire than the controls, demonstrating that there are different pathways for achieving success in Sierra Nevada mixed-conifer forests … While federal planning frameworks such as the National Environmental Planning Act can slow down project implementation it is still critical to get the necessary work done in these forests.
Though as a recent article quoting the study's lead author and also climate scientist Daniel Swain noted, the mechanical thinning has to be done right. Simply increasing commercial logging, which tends to target the biggest and most economically-valuable trees (which are also the most fire-resistant), isn't the same as effective forest thinning, which targets smaller and less fire-resistant trees. But, US Forest Service wildfire management plans should do this properly.
Logging, he said, can be a viable way to mitigate fire risk, as long as it’s done sustainably and arborists are strategic about what trees they’re chopping down … commercial logging can be done sustainably. But it would have to be severely regulated.
@Dana Nuccitelli
When they do”logging”. They make money.
When they do fuel reduction, that costs money, you have to pay the logger to do it, and Congress would have to apporoaite funds to do it,
is that right ?
Hi @Rob Johnson. No, the paper notes that forest thinning generates revenue because the removed trees can be used for some kind of profitable purpose. And the associated revenue is also enough to pay for controlled burns, when both are done on the same forest area.
Using Mech that included mastication as well as restoration thinning resulted in positive revenues and was also relatively strong as an investment in reducing wildfire hazard … The Mech + Fire treatments may represent a compromise between the desire to sustain financial feasibility and the desire to reintroduce fire. It was near break-even when considering its net cost to the landowner, and was also near break-even as an investment in reducing wildfire severity
Senator Hickenlooper's office pointed us to some relevant research by the US Forest Service as well. A group of researchers tested different combinations of thinning and controlled burns. For the thinning, in 2011 they went to California's Stanislaus-Tuolumne Experimental Forest and tried some low-variability (leaving evenly-spaced groups of trees) and high-variability (more randomly-dispersed clusters of trees) thinning. The high-variability thinning was intended to replicate what the forest looked like in the past, based on surveys done in the 1930s.
And then they also followed up with some controlled burns. They went back around 2020 and surveyed the results, after California had been in the midst of an extreme drought that killed over 150 million trees in the Sierra Nevadas. They found two key results:
- The plots with variable thinning plus controlled burns recreated the historical forest structure that was more resilient to wildfires in the past.
- The thinned plots were also more resilient to the drought because there was less competition between trees for water, nutrients, and sunlight.
What I take from this is that wildfire mitigation efforts like forest thinning and prescribed burns can be effective in making our forests more resilient against both climate-worsened wildfires and droughts. And the US Forest Service is doing some good research in this area and has the expertise to develop smart wildfire management plans 🤓
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