The SmallWood 2012 conference held May 1-3, 2012, in Flagstaff, Arizona, is about finding technical and economical solutions to the everyday challenges in your woody biomass operation.
The SmallWood 2012 conference being held May 1-3, 2012, in Flagstaff, Arizona, is about finding technical and economical solutions to the everyday challenges in your woody biomass operation.
Wildfires and bug-killed forests are generating enormous quantities of woody biomass from hazardous fuel reduction activities and from salvage operations. These issues are driving the need to create solutions for using low-value and waste wood.
“SmallWood 2012 will supply you with the information needed to adapt to changes and be successful in your business,” according to Susan LeVan-Green, U.S. Forest Service Program Manager and Conference Co-Chair.
The conference includes two days of presentations, an exhibition evening, and an optional day of field trips. On May 1-2, speakers will present the incentives of forest restoration; how to pre-treat woody biomass to reduce hauling costs; techniques for harvesting, processing, and manufacturing; new technologies and markets; and generating energy from woody biomass.
In addition, you will hear from successful business owners. For example, Jim Dooley (Forest Concepts) will explain how they are working to increase the value of forest-grown material that has been shredded or chipped. David Old will tell about his family business that produces high quality Douglas Fir flooring from salvaged forest fire timber. Sherry & Glen Barrow (SBS Wood Shavings) will speak about their animal bedding made from pine shavings and other creative products such as furniture and countertops, using wood processed from forest and watershed restoration projects.
At the interactive exhibit evening, you will also have the opportunity to network with these business owners and other presenters or showcase your new product or technology.
On May 3, three tours will be available: One focuses on how to incorporate fire- and beetle-killed timber in homebuilding and niche markets by going to a small bandmill operation that specializes in serving local markets, a home that incorporated fire-killed material, and a forest recently affected by fire. Another tour will visit a woody biomass energy plant that generates enough electricity to power 18,000–20,000 homes. This tour includes forestry equipment demonstrations and processing activities. The third tour will show how the Ecological Restoration Institute (ERI) at Northern Arizona University uses prescribed burning in conjunction with site-specific thinning treatments to restore forests.
“By focusing on our forest resources as well as the forest products industry, we all will begin to understand key interactions and how to build a true forest restoration for a new economy,” noted Co-Chair LeVan-Green.
SmallWood 2012 takes place May 1-3, 2012, at the Little America Hotel in Flagstaff, Arizona. For program agenda/ hotel information, see http://www.forestprod.org/smallwood/or call 608-231-1361.
Jim Pitts, a Forest Service specialist, surveyed the devastation wrought by the Wallow Fire in eastern Arizona this year. Nearly a half-million acres burned.
Jim Pitts stood on a Forest Service road near the Arizona town of Nutrioso and surveyed the damage in the valley below. It was July, and only a few weeks earlier the Wallow Fire, the largest in recorded history in Arizona, had swept through this section of steep slopes and tightly packed trees.
“This is pretty devastating, both from the forest standpoint and the human aspect,” said Mr. Pitts, a Forest Service silviculturist. “It’s going to take a long time to get this forest back to the way it was. It won’t happen in my lifetime when it’s got to start over.”
Temperatures in the fire could have been as high as 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, Mr. Pitts figured. Heat like that cooks trees to death from across roads. Nearly a half-million acres of forest burned in the Wallow Fire, which followed another huge and destructive wildfire, the Rodeo-Chediski in 2002.
“Certainly, over the last decade, we’re seeing more large fires more frequently,” said Christopher M. Knopp, the forest supervisor of the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest.
I conveyed the magnitude and import of these huge Southwestern forest fires in a video report posted at the Times Web site this weekend. Focusing on Arizona, it was produced to accompany a major article by my colleague Justin Gillis, who reported from Montana about what seems to be a rising trend of forest die-backs around the world.
The article talked about HUGE fires and beetle kills that, aside from their local effects, raise questions about the ability of the world’s forests to keep taking up the carbon dioxide that humans are emitting. Mr. Gillis found that climate change poses a risk to forests, particularly in the already dry climate of the American Southwest.
In Arizona, the most interesting thing I found was that big, destructive fires have caused many groups to seek common ground in reversing the trend. A coalition of land managers, scientists, environmentalists and loggers have come together to combat the fires, making strange bedfellows of groups that fought each other during the timber wars of the 1990s.
The emerging consensus is that the Ponderosa pine forests of northern Arizona and New Mexico have been mismanaged for more than a century. Small ground fires historically burned through these forests with some regularity, keeping the trees widely spaced. But decades of fire suppression have allowed trees to grow so thick that the forests are now referred to as “dog-hair thickets.”
The small fires of old would generally leave large Ponderosa pines intact; the trees have a spongy bark that resists ground fires. But in an overgrown forest, flames can climb the small trees into the high forest canopy, creating a “crown fire” that can leap with the winds and take out thousands of acres quickly. While crown fires can play an important ecological role in other types of forests, for Ponderosa forests they can be highly destructive and a liability to the forest’s ability to capture and store carbon.
Massive fires like the Wallow and the Rodeo-Chediski not only pour carbon back into the atmosphere; if areas are burned badly enough, the forest can be permanently destroyed. Ongoing climate change makes that more likely, favoring heat-tolerant grasses and shrubs over trees. I visited areas burned in the Rodeo-Chediski fire that are not recovering as forest a decade later, and Mr. Gillis saw the same thing in Montana.
Many now believe the solution, across much of the West, is to cut down the spindly dog-hair trees and restore forests to something akin to historic density levels, at times reducing the tree cover from as many as 800 an acre to fewer than 100.
The White Mountain Stewardship Project, created after the Rodeo-Chediski fire, serves as an example of a way that various stakeholders have been able to nurse some forest areas back to health. In our video, Dwayne Walker, a fourth-generation timber man, speaks of the return of logging and jobs in some of the poorest parts of Arizona.
Mr. Walker and his business partner Rob Davis run a company called Future Forest; they won the White Mountain Stewardship contract to thin 150,000 acres over a 10-year period.
Mr. Davis, who runs a wood pellet manufacturing facility in Show Low, Ariz., has helped to build an economically viable way to put some of the smaller trees clogging the Southwest’s forests to use. Many in nearby communities credit the thinning and the hard work of fire crews with saving their homes and businesses.
Mr. Davis argues that better management preserves forests and their ability to clean the air, filter water and store carbon dioxide. “I don’t think the country gets how much benefit we get from having healthy, sound, sustainable forests,” he said.
Many experts say treating forests pre-emptively could be more cost-effective than fighting huge forest fires. Yet, in tight budget times, the United States Forest Service does not have nearly enough money to do the work. Still, a new program called the Four Forests Restoration Initiative is taking shape and aims to thin more acres.
“The big limitation on all of this, when we’re talking about treating the forest, is economics,” said Mr. Knopp, the Forest Service supervisor. The Wallow Fire “points out that the quantity of material that we’ve been able to treat, even though it was strategic and was logical, it wasn’t enough.”
A helicopter returned after dropping water on the Wallow Fire’s eastern edge near Alpine, Ariz. The radiating heat alone cooked trees to death in some places.
While monsoon rains have reduced the fire danger in the high country, folks in the White Mountains are dealing with flooding in the wake of the huge Wallow Fire. NAU ecologist Dr. Wally Covington calls it the one-two punch of unnatural crown fires. Meantime, the rumble of thunder is striking terror in the hearts of Greer and Alpine residents. Bonnie Stevens for NAZ Today reports. View Wallow Fire Flooding News Story
Flash flooding occurred this past Sunday afternoon in southern Apache County affecting the communities of Alpine, and Nutrioso, AZ and within the burned area of the Wallow Fire.
Flash flooding occurred in Alpine, Tal Wi Wi, and Nutrioso and the Apache National Forest closing Hwy 180 between Alpine and the Alpine divide bringing forest debris of mud, trees, and rocks across the road.
Arizona Dept. of Transportation (ADOT) and Apache County Road crews cleared mud and debris quickly and were able to re-open 180 after a short time.
More flash flood warnings are expected this afternoon.
By Rob Davis - Partner, Future Forest and Patrick Graham - AZ State Dir., The Nature Conservancy, on July 6th, 2011
Alpine, AZ / Wallow fire into treated area
As the smoke clears on Arizona’s largest wildfire in history, the Wallow fire, many are left wondering if this catastrophic wildfire could have been prevented or at least better controlled. Some of the breathtaking scenery has been changed and will never be the same in our lifetime. Valuable resources such as clean water and healthy watersheds may take decades to recover.
The Wallow fire, along with many other wildfires, has burned almost 1 million acres across Arizona in the last month alone. It is a stark reminder that our forests are in dire need of being restored. A fling of a cigarette butt out a window sparks yet another fire in the White Mountains. This one, the Wash fire, raged over the weekend near Heber, closing highways, and doubling in size in one night. How can we keep up? We need to do something and we need to do it now.
A collaborative effort to restore the forests in the White Mountains, the White Mountain Stewardship Contract, was put into affect back in 2004, partially as a result of the Rodeo-Chediski fire which burned just under ½ million acres and was then known as the largest wildfire in Arizona’s history. Under the WMSC, Future Forest was charged with managing the reduction of tree densities to more natural levels within 150,000 acres of Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest over a 10-year term. In its 7th year of the contract, Future Forest has treated only 50,000 acres, due to a change of commitment and resulting reduction in funding. Even so, it has still built an infrastructure to perform restoration, support the use of the wood residue, including renewable energy, and has created more than 300 jobs directly and indirectly. It accomplished the tree thinning around the towns of Alpine, Greer and Eagar that were in the middle of the Wallow fire and became the true testament that treatment works. The Forest Service, The Nature Conservancy, Future Forest, legislators, and other environmentalists and scientists recently toured the areas devastated by the wildfire. What we witnessed was amazing; a ring of green, healthy trees where treatment had taken place. These trees and communities were saved by the work completed by the WMSC. This is our silver lining; this ring of green in the midst of a charred forest. But our time is short.
A decade-long drought and winds, along with overgrown and overcrowded forests, have created unnatural, large-scale fires that torch and rage through tens of thousands of acres in a day. It is time to widen that ring of green; to help our forests become resilient against fires, insects and disease. We have demonstrated the solution in large-scale restoration with the White Mountain Stewardship Contract that is being succeeded by the unprecedented Four Forest Restoration Initiative. An initiative aimed to restore all 2.4 million acres across Arizona’s four forests by thinning 1 million acres over 20 to 30 years. But, time is of the essence, and the initiative is slow going with outdated processes and lack of funding.
We ask congress to focus funding on proactive restoration efforts instead of fighting wildfires and post-fire rehabilitation. Fire officials estimate the cost just to fight the Wallow fire at $80 million.
But the real cost of these fires could be up to 30 times more than what is initially calculated, according to a 2002 report by the Western Forestry Leadership Coalition, comprised of state and federal forestry officials.
In its report, “The True Cost of Wildfire in the Western U.S.,” the coalition figured the total cost of the Rodeo-Chediski Fire, which scorched more than 467,000 acres, was more than $308 million. The costs included the $122.5 million for loss of homes and property, $139 million for rehabilitation to stabilize the vegetation stripped by the flames and $8.1 million in indirect costs in the form of sales tax revenue and job losses. And none of these values our lost trees and resulting degradation of air and watersheds. When you see these staggering figures, restoration not only makes ecological sense, but economic sense.
Healthy forests are vital for Arizona’s economy, wildlife and for everyone’s quality of life. Businesses invest in wood products and other resources, such as clean energy, created from the trees we harvest. Forests serve as home for wildlife and serve as a playground for many of us, where families experience the outdoors together and create memories that last a lifetime. Forests also act as nature’s water reservoirs, soaking in snow and rain and slowly distributing it into our streams and rivers for Arizonans’ clean drinking water, as well as a natural air filter for the fresh air we breathe.
We know restoration works. The collaborative efforts create healthy forests, safer communities and stable economies. To clear a path forward there must be funding, long-term commitments and quicker processes to help ensure industries can confidently invest in these projects.
We can save our forests with the help from Congress.
We need congress to support full funding for the implementation of the Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Act and Southwest Forest Health and Wildfire Prevention Act so we can get effective, science-based, large-scale restoration.
Congress must continue to fund the White Mountain Stewardship Contract, supporting the existing industry that is vital to continued work in the White Mountains as well as larger scale, across all public lands across Arizona.
Congress needs to enable these processes to move faster by streamlining the environmental assessment process allowing for on-the-ground monitoring instead of completion of all assessments upfront.
It’s time for a new approach. Fire won’t wait for the current National Environment Policy Act procedures and review process. We need government agencies to work collaboratively through the NEPA procedures and move through the process faster. We’ve seen it first-hand the devastation of a slow process.
Now that we have proven results that restoration works and we’re all together on the same page as what needs to happen, we must act quickly. Our beautiful forests, a precious resource for everyone, are burning up before our eyes. We need to do something before it’s too late.
Efforts aim to reduce catastrophic wildfires – A recent opinion article in the Arizona Republic, written by U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack. Read Full Article.
Future Forest & The Nature Conservancy recently sat down with FOX 10 News in Phoenix to discuss the Wallow Fire and the need for forest restoration. Take a look. Newsmaker Sunday
Newsmaker Sunday on Fox 10 talks with our own Rob Davis from Future Forest, and Patrick Graham, director of the Nature Conservancy on forest restoration and the need to thin our forests to more natural levels to protect our forests and our communities.
A recent press release from the Center for Biological Diversity states that forest restoration work completed by Future Forest through the White Mountain Stewardship Contract, lessened severity of the Wallow fire and helped firefighters save towns. Read Full Story.
