Conservation Northwest

Gaining ground Dave Werntz Science and conservation director, dwerntz@conservationnw.org For Forests Climate change resilience Restoring forests can increase their resilience to climate change. © Dave Moskowitz This year, the Pacific Northwest avoided some of the strange weather that gripped the rest of the county—a snowless winter in the upper Midwest; extreme summer heat and shriveling drought across the corn belt; the surging megastorm Sandy—but that luck won't last forever. Climate change is a global phenomenon, and temperatures in our state have risen about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit over the last century. Despite increased spring precipitation, snowpack declined by 30-60 percent. Because things dry out earlier, our summer drought is getting longer and increasingly severe. Wildfires across the West are getting larger. Model projections for eastern Washington suggest these trends will continue. By the middle of this century, models indicate that portions of eastern Washington may not be able to climatically support Douglas fir, a widespread and common species, and ponderosa pine could become increasingly vulnerable to mountain pine beetle. Researchers predict that the area burned by wildfire could double or triple. Forest Restoration At Eightmile On our national forests, the management emphasis has gradually changed from timber production to forest restoration. In my time here, I can tell you that Conservation Northwest has been part of this positive change. We did it in slow, incremental pushes, shaping each project with our engagement—from written comments to field visits to the occasional strategic appeal. Although not always the sexy side of our work, the ground game has paid off in policy and in place. 12 It's not just the climate that changed. Over the last century, forest and landscape structure has been transformed by fire suppression, livestock grazing, and logging. Large old trees prized for lumber value and inordinately important as wildlife habitat mostly have vanished from eastern Washington, and dense understories have grown up and across large areas. Historically complex and diverse forests are now greatly simplified. Although national leaders seem paralyzed about what to do, Conservation Northwest has joined locally with federal and state officials to take action. As science and conservation director, I'm helping to enact a strategy to protect large carbon-packing and fire-tolerant trees and restore landscape patterns and stand structures that are more resilient to inevitable insect and fire events. While this includes careful forestry, it also means allowing some natural fires to freely burn under certain circumstances, and igniting more prescribed fires when conditions are right. This isn't easy work, and the path isn't always straight and clear. Progress can feel elusive. Each fire that burned this summer in eastern Washington was aggressively attacked and suppressed, regardless of whether it was near homes or in the remote backcountry. Now that the smoke has cleared, we'll have the chance to see exactly how completed forest restoration and prescribed burn projects affected fire behavior. We'll apply that information to further shape policies and projects that increase forest resilience to climate change. This evolution in management is hard to see without focusing on a specific landscape, so let's consider Eightmile Creek in the Methow Valley. Twenty years ago, it was inconceivable that a forestry project in the Eightmile area could provide net benefit to the watershed. Instead, we focused on minimizing the damage. Historically, at Eightmile, the large, valuable trees had been removed and little remained. Beginning in 1992 with the Burgett Sale and later in 2005 with the Flatmoon sale, the agency attempted to reverse the mess that past management George Wooten Conservation associate, george@conservationnw.org had left behind. Conservation Northwest's aim was to retain large, old stands and move projects toward restoration. The Burgett sale was delayed with appeals, while the Flatmoon sale stayed out of roadless areas. In 2009, the Buck Project was proposed in Eightmile Creek. We supported restoring the damage of past management, but we needed a paradigm shift in the agency that would favor restoration. That shift happened in 2010 with the Okanogan-Wenatchee Forest Restoration Strategy. With this new policy Winter 2013www.conservationnw.org

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