The problem is big, but the cupboard is nearly bare.
A state task force assigned to provide ideas to reduce the number of large wildfires has found the U.S. Forest Service lacks the money to appreciably restore forest health and reduce wildfire danger in Arizona in the next 20 years.
Logging, climate change, cattle grazing, drought, development and fire suppression have choked out old-growth trees and led to higher-than-usual wildfire danger for 65 percent of the Western Mogollon Plateau, a report by the task force found.
Forests will grow more unhealthy and fire seasons more active if nothing more is done, the authors said.
They called on Congress to provide more than $30 million per year to safeguard Arizona communities and boost wood-consuming industries.
They also want the Forest Service to set measurable goals in restoring forest health, the Department of Energy to find uses for little-used trees like pinyons and junipers and the state of Arizona to utilize biomass in its buildings.
The Arizona Legislature should develop incentives for homeowners to maintain fire-defensible homes. And cities and counties should all draft and enforce fire codes designed to reduce wildfire danger, the authors said.
And each community should have people dedicated to recruiting timber-consuming industries of the right scale and educating the public about forest health, the participants said.
The authors included a state lawmaker, university researchers across the state, a local rancher and Game and Fish.
Wally Covington, Pete Fule and Diane Vosick, of Northern Arizona University's Ecological Restoration Institute and Ethan Aumack, of the Grand Canyon Trust, were among the statewide participants.
Among the report's findings:
-- Large, mature "old growth" trees are significantly underrepresented across the state, and the remaining large, old trees are dying at a far greater rate than they are being replaced. According to a U.S. Forest Service analysis, only 5 percent of the original old growth ponderosa pine forest remains in the Southwest.
-- The Western Mogollon landscape (which includes Flagstaff) has undergone significant environmental change over the past 120 years due to both human and natural forces. These include domestic livestock grazing, fire suppression industrial logging, development, predator extermination and climate variability. Resulting changes include extirpation of wildlife species, increased abundance of exotic species, and encroachment of urban areas into wildlands.
-- By removing grasses that limited tree seedlings and carried frequent fires, livestock grazing and fire suppression helped to increase tree densities, and ladder and surface
fuels on the Western Mogollon Plateau. This has increased the threat of uncharacteristic crown fire -- threatening human and ecological communities. Industrial logging has contributed to declines in old growth conditions and associated biodiversity.
Natural resource values at risk include forest and woodland communities, watershed function, soil productivity, stream erosion and flooding, aquatic systems, air pollution from wildfire, and wildlife and endangered species habitat. The past decade's drought caused die-off in pinyon-juniper, ponderosa, aspen and mixed conifer forests, contributing to increased fuel loads in the forests.
-- In southwestern ponderosa pine forests, wildlife habitat structure has become more homogeneous over time because of fire suppression, timber harvest strategies, and grazing pressure on the understory vegetation. These pressures have caused a reduction in large old trees, an increase in pole size trees, reduced age and size class diversity, more even spacing of trees, and a simplification of the understory. The lowered diversity in structure and vegetation composition has had a major impact on wildlife habitat in these vegetation communities.
Flagstaff has been implementing a community wildfire protection plan for the past several years. After already thinning in Fort Valley and outside Kachina Village, a project to thin the Doney Park and Timberline area in east Flagstaff will be the final phase of this plan.
Additionally, two entrepreneurs have proposed building an oriented-strand board plant in Winslow that could help thin thousands of acres per year in the local forests.
Ponderosa forests typically burn every 8 to 10 years, according to ERI.
That has not been the case recently on the Coconino National Forest, but has a been a point of discussion for both forests in conducting prescribed burns.Arizona Daily Sun
