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FORESTS: Ariz. ponderosa pine to be target of sweeping restoration effort (Land Letter, 02/03/2011)

April Reese, E&E reporter

After years of collaboration among a wide range of forest interests, the Forest Service has released a proposal that should kick-start a groundbreaking plan to restore ponderosa pine forests across a huge swath of northern Arizona.

The proposal -- crafted with input from environmental groups, forest ecologists, timber industry representatives and the public -- calls for restoring ponderosa pine across about 750,000 acres within the Kaibab and Coconino national forests over 10 years.

The proposal is the first in a two-step planning process to implement the Four Forest Restoration Initiative, a landscape-scale effort aimed at improving forest health, reducing the risk of large, unnaturally hot fires and boosting wildlife and plant diversity in the state's ponderosa pine forests.

The other two forests included in the initiative, the Tonto and Apache-Sitgreaves national forests, in eastern Arizona, will issue a companion proposal next year.

Arizona is home to the largest contiguous tract of ponderosa pine forest in the world, stretching from the New Mexico border northwest to the Grand Canyon. Almost all of the area is under Forest Service management, and much of it is in poor condition after a century of fire suppression and years of drought.

"With thick stands of unhealthy small-diameter trees crowding the landscape, our once open, park-like forests are in a state of crisis susceptible to unprecedented bark beetle infestations, the drying effects of climate change and monstrously large crown fires," said ponderosa pine researcher Wally Covington, who heads the Ecological Restoration Institute at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff. "Using the best available science, the Forest Service is boldly taking action on a scale never before attempted to create resilient ecosystems for future generations."

Typically, the Forest Service has approached restoration one small project at a time. The Four Forest Restoration Initiative allows for a big-picture, long-term restoration effort across an entire landscape.

Henry Provencio, the Forest Service's team leader for the Four Forest Restoration Initiative, said the ponderosa restoration proposal takes the initiative from vision to action.

"Really what it does is it takes us out of the planning mode into implementation, where we're actually doing restoration and bringing fire back to the landscape," he said. "Instead of [sitting] at our desks looking at a screen, people are getting out into the woods doing what we need to do."

Restoring resilience

Under the new proposal, trees will be cut to thin out the forest and remove hazardous fuels. The thinning will also stimulate the growth of Gambel oak and aspen, improving wildlife habitat. The Kaibab and Coconino forests also plan to conduct prescribed burns to clear and maintain openings and will restore riparian areas and decommission closed and unauthorized roads.

Historically, the Southwest's ponderosa pine forests were open and spacious, thanks to regular, low-intensity fires, but a century of suppression under previous forest management policies allowed too many new trees to spring up, resulting in overcrowding.

Making the forests more resilient also will help them survive disturbances such as insect infestations, disease and climate change, according to forest experts.

"This project really is one of national significance given the unprecedented scale at which we're working, the level of social agreement we've reached, and the ecological and economic benefits we expect to see through the initiative," said Ethan Aumack, the Grand Canyon Trust's director of restoration programs and one of the architects of the initiative.

Favorable economies of scale also could help revive the forest products industry in northern Arizona by providing the kind of long-term, guaranteed wood supply that local sawmills need to make a comeback.

"Appropriately scaled businesses will likely play a key role in the effort by harvesting, processing, and selling wood products," the Forest Service noted in the proposal. "This will reduce treatment costs and provide restoration-based work opportunities that will create good jobs."

The need to lower the cost of treatments and move restoration projects forward was driven home last summer, when several fires burned through ponderosa pine stands around Flagstaff. Those fires could have been less severe if planned fuel treatment projects had been done, but the high cost of planning and carrying out the projects had kept them on hold (Land Letter, June 24, 2010).

"After years of collaborative efforts, for the first time in the Southwest the Forest Service is proposing restoration at the same scale as catastrophic wildfires: hundreds of thousands of acres," said Pascal Berlioux, president of Arizona Forest Restoration Products Inc., who called the proposal "a quantum leap forward."

"It creates an opportunity to build an appropriate-scale small-diameter wood industry as an economic engine to help pay for restoration."

The initiative is rooted in the ashes of 2002's Rodeo-Chediski fire, which burned 470,000 acres in the Apache-Sitgreaves and Tonto national forests as well as on the Fort Apache Indian Reservation. That conflagration -- the worst fire in Arizona's history -- spurred environmentalists, foresters, researchers and federal land managers to begin discussions about how to reduce the risk of such massive fires and restore forest health.

Navajo County Supervisor David Tenney, whose county was hit particularly hard by the Rodeo-Chediski fire, said he's confident the Forest Service's proposal will help achieve that goal. "I embrace the Forest Service efforts to move the Four Forest Restoration Initiative forward," he said. "The [initiative] is our best hope for healthier forests, safer communities and a stronger economy in northern Arizona."

The Forest Service is holding several workshops this month to gather public input on the proposal.

Click here to read the proposal.

Reese writes from Santa Fe, N.M.