In The News

By Joshua Emerson Smith
San Diego Union Tribune

As a record number of trees stand dead or dying in California’s forests due to drought and beetle infestations, concerns are mounting that the die-off is creating an abundance of fuel likely to trigger wildfires that could threaten homes and lives. However, an emerging body of science finds little evidence to support these fears.

By Joshua Emerson Smith
San Diego Union Tribune

As wildfires burn in Southern California, a debate is smoldering about what to do with millions of dead and dying trees — which have been ravaged by drought and beetle species up and down the state.

Mary Ellen Hannibal
Huffington Post

A little more than a week ago, I drove into Yosemite National Park for a week-long, California Master Naturalist immersion course. I was euphoric, about to sequester in beauty to study deeper levels of what Shakespeare called “nature’s infinite book.” Heading in from Oakdale, mile upon mile of mountainous hillside was covered in rusty brown dead trees. . . . The California landscape evolved with lightning-strike fires, and Native Californians used fire to manage their food sources, both animal and vegetable. We have been suppressing fire and battling fire on the landscape for more than a hundred years, with the idea that it is a destructive force to contain. We have stopped a natural cycle from turning – for the moment.

By Jodi Peterson
High Country News

Congressional Republicans are pushing two bills, supported by the timber industry, that would speed up logging in national forests after wildfires and reduce environmental review, despite science showing timber salvage harms essential wildlife habitat.

By Nigel Duara
Los Angeles Times

During the dry summer of 2011, wind gusts sparked a fire on federal land that burned for five weeks over an area the size of Manhattan. Federal foresters decided the towering ponderosa pines would never return and declared the area dead.

But a growing body of fire research indicates that the federal salvage strategy creates more problems than it solves by stunting tree regrowth, denying habitat to a variety of species and increasing the risk of erosion.

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.