In The News

By Louis Sahagún
Los Angeles Times, Science & Medicine

In the latest round in a 15-year legal battle to keep the California spotted owl safe from U.S. Forest Service logging policies, federal wildlife authorities have agreed to reconsider an earlier decision to deny the timid raptor protection under the Endangered Species Act.

New research, [ ], indicates that thinning and post-fire salvage logging are “the main threat to the spotted owls’ survival,” according to a petition for listing filed late last year by the Wild Nature Institute and the John Muir Project of Earth Island Institute.

By David Downey
The Press Enterprise

Not many would suggest that it was lucky the Lake fire torched nearly 50 square miles of the San Bernardino National Forest this summer. But Big Bear ecologist Chad Hanson called it a “wonderful stroke of luck for the aspen.”

Barely two months after flames incinerated a rare Southern California aspen grove, lush, waist-high and knee-high trees with fat leaves are shooting up through the charcoal-black ashen bed of the forest floor.

By Dave Danelski
The Press Enterprise

A new study led by Forest Service researchers asserts that fires are reshaping the varieties of plants that return to our woods. But the study has been criticized because it lacks sufficient data to establish such a global trend, and only states what scientists have known for decades: the influx of manzanitas and other sun cravers after a fire is simply a forest’s natural cycle of life.

By Guy McCarthy
The Union Democrat

Republicans in Congress are pushing The Resilient Federal Forests Act of 2015. But rather than improving forest, watershed or wildlife health, as its authors claim, the Act will streamline the destruction and removal of forest habitat, including the majority of the most biodiverse habitat found in the forest – mature and old forest which has burned at high-intensity.

By David Downey
The Press Enterprise

Chad Hanson tromped uphill through blue-green shrubs, over charcoal-black logs and around fire-red wildflowers. Then he stopped.

With tiny rivulets of water dripping off his nose and head in a light rain, Hanson issued a challenge: See any pine seedlings? Slowly, a pair of visitors craned necks and pointed to a 6-inch baby pine tree here, a 1-foot seedling there.

By Scott Smith, Associated Press
KSL News

Steep declines in owl populations and unchecked logging of mature/old forest and post-fire “snag” forest necessitate the listing of the California Spotted Owl under the Endangered Species Act.

By Scott Smith, Associated Press
The San Diego Union-Tribune

Environmentalists filed a lawsuit Thursday against a federal agency, saying it aims to protect the California spotted owl living in the burned forests marked for logging after the third-largest wildfire in state history.

By Chris Clarke
PBS SoCal

33 breeding pairs of the declining spotted owls have taken up residence in burned forest in the Rim Fire area, will these homeranges be destroyed by logging or protected?

By Christie Turner
High Country News

The Pacific fisher, a small, carnivorous forest-dwelling mammal, is a candidate for listing under the federal Endangered Species Act this year, and big wildfire could be to blame – or rather, the lack of it.

By Scott Sonner, Associated Press
Missoulian

Scientists using field notes from surveys first conducted by the government before the Civil War believe they’ve gained a better understanding of how Western wildfires behaved historically.

By Scott Sonner, Associated Press
The Spokesman-Review

Smokey Bear has done such a good job stamping out forest fires the past half-century that a woodpecker that’s survived for millions of years is in danger of going extinct.