new year

A few New Years Eve thoughts:

In a technical sense, the future of restoration is bright. We've learned so much these past few decades, and there's no reason to think we'll stop learning. There have been some very large habitat restoration projects these past few years, and a few more designed and in the permitting stages now, and the big ones especially tend to have the resources to try new things, monitor, and apply adaptive management.

There are some risks. Political changes at the national level have put some pretty conservative folks in positions of power who aren't exactly advocates of what we do; I'm not sure what it is the republicans think they're "conserving" but it isn't habitat. Teddy Roosevelt must be turning over in his grave.

The Obama administration, while saying all the right things, at mid-levels seems to have in some cases reverted to a command-and-control mentality that I thought was outdated and discarded at the federal agency level. It remains to be seen whether all of last years talk about communication and cross-agency collaboration can overcome the petty bureaucracy.

I also have very real fears about an economy that is based 70% on consumer spending, and which at the same time seems to think it's OK for credit card companies to charge 30% interest (and that's for their customers with good credit). This seems like an excellent way to undermine the very customer base that's supposed to be doing all that spending. We seem to be slowly pulling out of the recent economic mess, but I wonder what we're setting ourselves up for in the future. While slower growth means less rapid habitat loss, it also means fewer resources and fewer projects for the next generation of restoration ecologists.

As we enter 2011, I'm going to remain cautiously optimistic and assume that things will eventually swing back to a balance.

rain

I'm just a few hours back from spending a couple of days in the low coastal mountains of Mendocino County... northwest of Ukiah, at about 800 feet elevation. It's been off-and-on raining, with the heavier and more sustained rain at night, and long breaks during the day. The total precipitation has been substantial, with tremendous variation from place to place. Some areas got a lot more than what I saw. There's a fair amount of snow visible above 3,000 feet, although I never got over 2,000 feet on the drive.

The system handled it pretty well. The densely vegetated north coast acts as something of a sponge, to some extent. These "pineapple express" systems (multiple storms backed up all the way to Hawaii) happen a couple of times every winter, so except where humans have messed with the system in a bad way, there's plenty of capacity for the flow. Every once in a great while the water overwhelms the system, and that's part of the longer term process, that's when rich silt gets deposited on the higher floodplain terraces that form prime redwood habitat.

I was in the transition zone this trip, and could look out from the modest cabin I was staying in and see grassland, oak woodland, and mixed evergreen forest (Douglas fir, tanoak, madrone, and various other species) all intermingled on slopes in every direction, with a riparian corridor running through it all. Just a few miles to the west is a redwood grove.

To the south, grassland and oak woodland become more common. To the north, conifers dominate. In the transition, in the constantly shifting (on a geologic time scale) boundary between what's been called (by Raven and Axelrod) the arcto-tertiary forest, and the madro-tertiary system, plants aren't the only things that change. The range boundaries of a number of animals fall in this zone, also.

It's an ecotone I've spent a fair amount of time in, but it's been a while,. I would have like to stay longer this time, spend a while exploring. It will need to wait til next time, but the rain served the purpose of giving me time to stop and look, and remember.

balance

One of the things I need to constantly work at is finding balance; simplifying in a world of increasing complexity. That's true of habitat restoration, and it's true of life in general.

This morning is a good reminder. It's alternating heavy rain and sunshine. Days like this are interesting, and they are, in this part of the country, part of the landscape level process. The rivers will be running high for the next few days, and hillsides will slump and open up places for new successional gaps.

In an effort to move away from complexity and closer to simplicity and minimalism, I'm leaving in about an hour for the mountains of Mendocino County. I won't be there long, without a cell phone signal or internet access; just long enough to live the weather, to reset the mind.

trouble

Last week there was a petroleum spill on a Midwestern site I've worked on for a number of years. It's not a restoration site, at least not yet, although it does have remnant natural communities and at least two federally listed species present.

The spill happened when a buried petroleum pipeline in a highway right-of-way ruptured. My information remains incomplete at this time, but at least some material got through a culvert and into at least one small wetland on the edge of the site. As far as I know, the spill isn't extensive in area, it's a tiny part of a moderately large site.

Still, it's a cautionary reminder that those sorts of risks exist, and it's worth knowing what runs through or adjacent to a site being considered for future effort.

more on fire

From 1997 through 2000, I participated in a prescribed fire study with The Nature Conservancy of Missouri. Teamed with Beth Churchwell of TNC and assisted by a cadre of volunteers, mostly graduate students from Washington University, we monitored the effects of prescribed fire on more than 20 species of amphibians and reptiles on the 6,000 acre Chilton Creek Preserve, near Van Buren.

The preserve is located in the Ozarks, on the Current River. Mostly it's oak woodland, with areas of shortleaf pine, glades (openings of exposed bedrock and sparse grasses and herbaceous vegetation located mostly on xeric ridgetops), and graminoid fens bordering high-gradient streams. There is a small area of floodplain forest along the river, and at least one cave. The woodlands range from relatively mesic areas on lower north or east facing slopes, to stunted and gnarled post oaks on well drained south or west facing ridges with loose cherty soils. Layers of dolomite and sandstone alternate and are exposed in various parts of the preserve, which consists of alternating ridges and valleys with about 300 feet of local elevation change.

TNC had already designed their burn program when I became involved, and we had only a short time to gather pre-burn baseline data. The preserve had been divided into six burn units using existing roads and trails as firebreaks, with control units located around the periphery of the site and not scheduled for fire. The treatment units were burned on various rotations; annually or bi-annually in some units, or on a randomly determined and variable frequency in others.

We established sample plots in both treatment and control units, and sampled all of them pre-treatment and for two years after the onset of fire management. Thus, some plots were burned once and some twice during our study, and the control plots remained unmanaged.

We sampled three times per year, in early spring, late spring, and fall. Typically we'd spend three days on site each visit, camping within the preserve to maximize field time. Given the rugged nature of the site and the fact that plots were randomly located and thus often far from trails, it was grueling work. We couldn't spare time off for bad weather, so we sampled in heat, cold, thunderstorms, and more.

I obviously can't go into a detailed analysis here, in this limited space. Suffice it to say that after two years, we could see the differences in the vegetation structure... mostly a reduction in the shrub layer and an increase in the herbaceous layer. On part of one plot, a too-intense fire left a shrub thicket two years later, but in most of the preserve it became easier to walk through the woods because of the more open understory.

In treatment units, we saw reductions in numbers of only two amphibian species, two types of Eurycea which are characteristic of streams and seeps, which were and still are among the most abundant amphibians on the site, and which we hypthesize had been allowed to expand beyond their original habitat niche by tree canopy closure. If we're right, then fire basically forced these species to pull back toward their original stream-associated habitat and abandon the drier uplands.

Some other species increased in numbers. These included, unsurprisingly, certain types of lizards and snakes adapted to drier and more open and sunlit conditions. They also included at least one type of frog, possibly as a result of increased ground cover associated with expanding and denser herbaceous vegetation. However, the duration of the study wasn't really great enough to determine the full extent of potential benefit to some species. This is particularly true for longer-lived species, which respond more slowly to environmental change.

One conclusion can be stated with certainty: There were no catastrophic losses of amphibians or reptiles, despite the relatively aggressive fire frequency. Burning was done both spring and fall (unlike many Midwestern sites, Native American fire was apparently mostly in the spring here, and associated with the hunting migrations of native peoples), but was done under appropriate conditions and by experienced burn crews. Most of the fires were low ground fires, and exceptions were limited to small areas.

It appears that returning prescribed fire to the oak-pine woodlands of the Missouri Ozarks resulted in increased diversity, both in vegetation communities and in the herpetofauna. In the latter case, it did this by reducing numbers of some (but not all) of the most abundant species, while increasing numbers of some less common species.

Perhaps someday I'll return to the site. We recorded GPS coordinates for all sample plots, so even if the landscape changes, which it likely has after more than a decade of fire, it will not be difficult to find the same locations. Whether that happens or not, I have many fond memories from that study, had an opportunity to work with some great people, and learned a lot that I've since applied on other sites.

smoke and fire

Among other things, I sit on the board of the North Coast Unified Air Quality Management District, which covers Humboldt, Trinity, and Del Norte Counties, in northwestern California. At yesterdays board meeting, we had an interesting discussion on an aspect of prescribed fire that land managers may sometimes be unaware of.

First, a little regional context. Relative to other places I've worked, in much of California there is a fear of fire... in many ways, a legitimate fear. Here, where it doesn't rain at all for half the year, fire at the wrong time and place can be catastrophic to both human and natural features.

Particularly in Trinity County, which is a little inland and thus warmer and drier than the coastal counties, every summer is wildfire season. Weaverville has burned twice in its history, and the threat remains that it could happen again. There and in many smaller communities, residents wear masks for several days each summer as particulate matter and smoke from fires miles away descends on the town. Obviously, these folks pay attention to fire policy. And they vote.

The wildfires happen in part because of many decades of land management decisions, including fire suppression and a resulting tinderbox of brush and even-age stands of Douglas fir. In this context, returning fire to the land in a controlled manner seems to be smart policy. Properly implemented, it is.

The danger comes when land managers get overenthusiastic. The tendency is to want quick results. But 150 years of bad land management can't be fixed in three years. These things take time. Unfortunately, some land managers are trying to push prescribed fire into the late summer and early fall period, before the rains come, to get hotter fires and kill more trees. This is an accident waiting to happen, and it also betrays impatience and a misunderstanding of how natural systems function.

The diverse forests that early white settlers found in this region were burned often. The structure of those forests had resulted not from hot fires killing trees, in most cases; instead, they were the result of millennia of survival. Low ground fires killed most seedlings in most years, but usually some seedlings survived. The ones that survived long enough grew to a large enough size to be fire resistant. As old trees died and fell, some of these saplings grew into the canopy. Fire frequency and intensity drove survival rates and locations, in many places resulting in diverse multi-layered canopies, open grown structure, and the presence of a low herbaceous understory.

Local native elders have told me that, at least near the Humboldt-Trinity County line, their ancestors burned in the late fall, right after the first rains. Conditions would have been right for safe fires, easy to control, yet the ground would still be dry enough to carry the fire. I've watched lines of fire, flames only six inches tall, creep up wooded hillsides. Smoke and particulate matter from these low fires is minimal outside the immediate fire line.

The hot, intense fires that happen today during summer wildfires are very different. In even age stands, they can become devastating crown fires killing most trees and spewing huge amounts of particulates into the air. Even prescribed fires, if they're done too early and with the goal of killing some mature trees and shrubs, can have adverse air quality impacts far outside the region of the fire. Not only do these intense fires encourage a different kind of community structure... often the regrowth is a thicket of shrubs and saplings which is even more fire prone... but they can also jeopardize local support for fire management.

Thus, I counsel patience. If the goal is to knock back Douglas fir that are encroaching into oak woodland or grassland habitat, perhaps some of that work should be done mechanically. Cut small saplings, or girdle larger trees thus creating valuable standing dead snag habitat. Follow up with low intensity fires over time, later in the fall when air quality is better. Take a long term approach. Write management plans that look at spans of decades in detail, and consider the implications over centuries. Consider what will be there when todays forest is dead and gone, and saplings which have not yet sprouted have grown into the canopy.

headwaters

Until 11 years ago, Headwaters Forest was allegedly the largest remaining stand of privately owned old-growth redwood forest. It was being cut rapidly, and the area had become a flashpoint between treesitters and environmental NGOs, and the Pacific Lumber Company. As part of a controversial HCP deal, the over 7,000-acre site (about half old growth) was purchased and is now managed by BLM.

Yesterday I visited the fringes of the site, one of the access trails that parallels the Elk River. I didn't have time to get very far into the site, although I'll try to change that soon. Still, it was interesting to see regenerating forest in the river corridor. A lot of work is apparently going into management, including removal of old logging roads, planting of redwood seedlings, and local thinning of over-dense second growth Douglas fir.

I was never out of sight of the trail. Although the site is six miles from anywhere, there were plenty of people out on a mild but rainy day. it's a considerable hike to the old growth, five miles each way, but apparently lots of folks think it's worthwhile to make that walk.

next gen

I spent part of this evening mentoring Humboldt State University students, mostly answering questions about consulting careers.

This bunch has more of a wildlife focus, they aren't specifically in school to learn about restoration. But several mentioned habitat restoration as among their interests, and most perked up when I used the phrase.

This was a sharper bunch than in past years. They had a plan, at some level, at least a rough goal. When I asked the standard question, what would you like to do, I only heard the dreaded "anything" from one person. Last year, most of them said that. They probably think that helps their odds, but as far as I'm concerned the conversation is as good as over at that point. They need to think for themselves, I'm not going to do it for them.

So it was a refreshing change this time. If I could have, I would have hired one of them on the spot, and others would get an open minded interview if they asked. This bodes well for getting some habitat put back the way it should be. Yeah, I know, it's a small sample size and maybe an aberration, but it raises hope. There are some good ones out there and almost done with school.