Discussion
Let us know what you think about any topic related to the Sierra Nevada Adaptive Management Project in the forums below. The Principal Investigators on the UC Science Team cannot answer every post, but they will read all comments in our their areas, and respond to comments as a group at each quarterly meeting. We greatly value your input!
Having just heard from the USFS Regional Forester yesterday that the next round of forest planning will make fisher habitat an issue for all the Sierran national forests, I'd like to challenge the SNAMP science team to be very clear about the ages as well as the sizes and species of forest components in the southern SNAMP site.
The need for such accuracy hit home earlier this week while Harry & I were watching KVIE's "California's Gold" TV program on the Yosemite Sugar Pine Railroad. The operator said 30,000 acres were clearcut in the vicinity of the railroad between 1899 and 1931. Photos showing the landscape backed up the characterization of clearcutting. There's no way the habitats where fishers are being studied in SNAMP classify as "old growth."
Also, I'd like to suggest to all agencies participating in SNAMP that, given the fisher mortality data obtained so far, a roadside signage program and lower speed limit on Hwy 41 similar to the bear signs & speed limits now being deployed in Yosemite might be in order for fishers. Thanks.
At a recent SNAMP presentation, questions were raised if SNAMP science could stand up in court and if SNAMP would benefit from having a legal team working side by side the science teams to ensure this? If the Forest Service fuels treatment projects get sued, doesn't that undermine the entire SNAMP effort which hoped to develop a public process to avoid litigation?
The SNAMP process will clearly document what worked and what didn’t work well for the US Forest Service, the NEPA process and SNAMP itself. However, SNAMP could never guarantee that no lawsuits would ever be filed against the USFS or others. If the USFS is sued over the fuels treatment projects and the science is questioned, SNAMP scientists may be asked to testify. The Principle Investigators for SNAMP were specifically chosen because they are experts in their fields. SNAMP work plans have been peer reviewed by other experts outside of the SNAMP UC Science Team (UCST), so their methods have already been validated. The UCST uses the ‘preeminent rules of science’ – peer review, in all SNAMP research. Because of this, the UCST is not interested in pursuing a legal review. It is also important to remember that the science used in the NEPA process is conducted by the US Forest Service, not SNAMP. The SNAMP teams invite public comments, questions and differing opinions. Disagreement is part of the SNAMP process, it doesn’t stop it.
We've begun posting frequently asked questions and answers for SNAMP. Please check out the the FAQs page to see them!
Thanks Linda, I thought I'd just follow up on that one aspect of your comment "Using aerial photos and LIDAR, can't both public and private lands be roughly classified remotely"...
You are correct, in theory both public and private land could be mapped using remote sensing technology (given that we had all the imagery and lidar data we wanted), but all remote sensing products need to be validated by representative ground data. If management between private and public are different, we'd need to make sure we had representative samples from both public and private lands. I'd also like to reiterate that the SNAMP project doesn't have Lidar data for the Eldorado area due to the prohibitive costs of acquisition.
In response to the comments of Steve Self and Linda Blum on December 1:
ACCESS TO PRIVATE LANDS ON THE EDSA:
In the early 1990s, an industrial landowner on the EDSA did not want the owl
crews to survey along or travel on roads through their land. The Georgetown
District Ranger met with the private landowner and pointed out that the USFS
maintains many roads that allow private landowners to access their land within
the matrix of public and private lands. Without USFS cooperation, private
landowners would incur greater expenses to access their land and may even be
unable to access some areas. His discussion with the landowner apparently
convinced everyone that it was not in the best interest of all parties to argue
about who should be on private or public roads within the EDSA during legitimate
management or research activities. Almost exclusively, however, we do not
access private land per se but simply stay on roads to conduct our surveys. On
occasion, we do cross from public land onto private land when following owls if
there are no boundary markers obvious to field crews. This cannot be helped
because these owl chases generally occur in the dark or relatively far from
roads where identifying markers are extremely difficult to detect or do not
exist at all.
In summary, it appears by historical precedent that we can travel roads passing through private land if the road connects two parcels of public land. We do not bypass gated roads blocking access to private land without first obtaining permission from landowners. However, we respect private land and do not access such land without permission (i.e., don't leave a through road to access private land if we know it is private land). To conduct morning and evening “walk-in” surveys, we currently have no need to access private land because all owl roost and nest sites are currently on public land. When we have had a specific mission to access private land (e.g., find a radio-marked owl, locate a nest, or to conduct an experiment), we have always sought specific permission to access the land. In summary, we believe that our activities over the past 22 years have been consistent with the desire of private landowners to maintain the integrity of their land.
INFORMATION ON PRIVATE LANDOWNERS: We have recently acquired information on private land ownership from the Placer County Assessor’s Office and are converting it into a shapefile for GIS analysis. All of the Last Chance Study Area and most of the EDSA are located within Placer County. A portion of the EDSA is located in El Dorado County. To obtain land ownership information from the El Dorado County Assessor’s Office, we will need to visit their office in Placerville and we plan on doing so when we resume field work in the area during spring 2009. Again, we note that the identity of landowners is not central to the analysis, only that we know the types and amount of activity that occur within owl territories so that we account for it in our modeling.
Within the EDSA, Lone Star Timber Properties is the primary private landowner. We contacted the company that manages Lone Star’s property and are hopeful that they will provide timber harvest information during the SNAMP study. We will contact other private landowners as needed once we determine which landowners own land near owl territory centers. If we can not obtain information directly from private landowners, we will use information derived from Timber Harvest Plans that have been filed with CDF (as noted in our previous post).
In response to Ms. Blum’s question on December 1, a former graduate student of RJG created a EDSA habitat map in 2004-05 using aerial photos. We also plan to use aerial photos to create a habitat map for the Last Chance Study Area and to update both maps over the course of the SNAMP study. Unfortunately, LiDAR data would be prohibitively expensive to acquire for the entire EDSA. However, there are typically time gaps of 3-4 years between available aerial photos. Thus, we will require more detailed information from landowners or THPs to identify the specific years that various harvest activities have occurred within owl territories in order to evaluate the status of forests within each owl territory.
Owl Team Response to Linda Blum's comments of November 9:
PRIVATE LAND OWNERSHIP ON ELDORADO STUDY AREA: There are two aspects of our response. First, private land constitutes about 37% of the Eldorado Density Owl Study Area. The Owl Science Team had been under the mistaken impression that most of this private land was owned by Sierra Pacific Industries (SPI). After being alerted to our possible error by Ms. Blum, our preliminary inquiries indicate that she is correct. Much of the private land may actually belong to Fruit Growers Association. Our assumption that most of the private land belonged to SPI had its genesis by the large land transactions that occurred within this region during the 1990s when the major private landowners were Fruit Growers, MichCal, SPI and others. RJG was told during a field site visit with Fruit Growers that they were in the process, along with MichCal, of liquidating their land to SPI. RJG simply assumed that was true, but apparently the transactions never occurred. We have recently requested detailed information on private land ownership within the Eldorado National Forest from agency personnel, and we will provide an update once we obtain this information. RJG never pursued the veracity of this information because specific land ownership was not of central relevance to our study objectives (see next comment). Second, although we appreciate Ms. Blum’s attention to detail and pointing out our error in terms of land ownership, the topic is not relevant from a scientific perspective or the design of the SNAMP study. In our recollection, we have never noted in any publication the explicit land ownership by a company, corporation, or individual on our study area except perhaps in general statements. Rather, we simply have noted that our study area is 37% private (this percentage may vary slightly in our historical publications because of changing land ownership patterns or as we acquire better information) and that the distribution of public and private land is in a “checkerboard” pattern, which is roughly true, but not geometrically true.
"CONTROL" VS. "TREATMENT" TERRITORIES: When the Owl Science Team refers to “control” and “treatment” territories, it implies the expectation that the owl territory will either experience a fuels reduction treatment executed by the U.S. Forest Service (“treatment”) or not receive one (“control”). This designation has nothing to do with the distribution of landownership or the past harvest or forest conditions (although this can be considered in the modeling of treatment effects). We use this terminology because our stated research questions are directed toward estimating the effects of SPLATs on spotted owls. At the November 5 meeting, DT stressed the importance of documenting private timber harvests within all of the owl territories, regardless of their designation as “control” or “treatment” territories. We stressed this because we recognize the potentially important confounding factor of “control” territories receiving “treatments” by private landowners and of “treatment” territories receiving multiple treatments (both USFS and private timber harvest within an owl territory). Therefore, we are in agreement with Ms. Blum that the effects of private timber harvest on spotted owl habitat represents a potentially important confounding factor, and thus we plan to incorporate data on private timber harvest into our analyses. We plan to contact the actual private landowners on our study area (once we determine their identity) and request information on the locations, size, and types of harvest (clearcut, selective removal, etc.) conducted during the course of our study. If we cannot obtain this information directly from a private landowner, we will obtain the information from Timber Harvest Plans on file with the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. Our approach will be to model SPLAT treatments so that the treatment will be considered both a categorical (owl territory receives a treatment or not) and a continuous (owl territory receives a specific amount of treatment) effect.
HYPOTHESES/TIME SCALE OF STUDY: The Owl Team does not have a premise that the Framework will be detrimental to the owls. It is one working hypothesis that SPLATs could have a negative effect, but the alternative is also possible given our lack of understanding of owl responses to these treatments at the current time. Finally, we wish to clarify the time scale of the owl SNAMP study, as this may be another source of confusion for Ms. Blum. While current forest conditions on our study landscape have been greatly influenced by historic timber harvests (on both public and private lands), our study objective is not to assess the effects of past activities on spotted owls, but to assess the effects of activities that occur during the course of the SNAMP study (2007−2013). Thus, we will create a habitat map to quantify forest conditions at the beginning of the study. At the study’s conclusion, we will update the habitat map, which will allow us to quantify any habitat change that occurred during the study. Although we are specifically interested in habitat change due to Forest Service SPLATs, we will control for habitat change due to other reasons (private timber harvest, wildfire) as noted above. In addition, we will undoubtedly consider the habitat conditions of each territory prior to their receiving any treatment because owl territories having different starting conditions might respond differently to SPLAT treatments.
Linda, thank you for this question and your ongoing interest in SNAMP. We apologize for the delay in response from the UCST. Please know that Rocky is working on a response and hopes to get back to you as soon as he is able. Please contact Kim Rodrigues directly with any immediate concerns you may have related to this matter.
Kim Rodrigues
karodrigues@ucdavis.edu
I'd like to correct a misimpression that was cast in last Wednesday's SNAMP meeting in Sacramento. It was reported that the Eldorado Spotted Owl Density Study Area includes a "checkerboard" land ownership pattern that intermixes national forest and Sierra Pacific Industries timberlands.
I came home from the meeting and checked with a QLG member who works for SPI, and he confirmed that the private lands in the Eldorado density study area do not belong to SPI, except perhaps 2,000 acres in the northeast corner of the 87,000-acre Density Study Area.
I find it odd that the "control" owl sites in this study lie on the
checkerboarded lands, where literally half the landscape is and has been
actively harvested for a long time.
The premise of the SNAMP owl study is that habitat alterations caused by 2004 Framework timber harvests/fuels treatments will be detrimental to spotted owls. Yet the "control" landscape is one that has a population of owls spread across it, studied by Dr. Gutierrez and his bands of itinerant wildlife biologists (and I salute you all!) for two decades or more, checkerboarding and timber harvests included.
During last Wednesday's discussion circle, someone asked how the study would account for the effects of activities that have been or are occurring on the private timberlands in the checkerboard. I would suggest that Doug Tempel's slideshow map of owl treatment territories and owl control territories offers a starting point for the answer: the cumulative effects so far have resulted in a well-distributed breeding population spaced such that individuals are capable of intermixing.
Maybe I don't understand the control concept in this application. Can someone please clarify?
Hi Linda and George,
I am emailing to respond to your email comments of several weeks ago that brought up the issue of the current design of the Strategically Placed Area Treatments on the American River District that are being studied by SNAMP. At that time, I made the commitment to you by email that the UC Science Team would consider your comments and respond to them.
The UC Science Team discussed the issue of SPLAT implementation on our conference call on September 4th, 2008. The Science Team concurred that this is an important issue, however, they reaffirmed that it is not appropriate for the researchers to comment or give input to the USFS on treatment design. A key element of our experimental design is to evaluate the impact of forest management treatments as they are implemented by the districts. One agreed upon foundation of the SNAMP project is that project design and implementation is the exclusive role of the Forest Service while evaluating the effects of these projects is the domain of the UC Science Team.
Although we are not able to address your comments about the strategic rationale of the treatments, or whether or not they truly qualify as SPLATs, UC researchers will most definitely be evaluating the spatial pattern of the treatments. Specifically, the Fire and Forest Health Team will be evaluating how the spatial arrangement of the treatments, as implemented, will affect fire behavior at the landscape scale. Results of the effectiveness of the treatment's strategic placements will be reported on by the science team after project implementation and post project data collection.
I believe that the Principle Investigators will also personally respond to your comments now that they have been posted on our website - http://snamp.cnr.berkeley.edu/.
I'd also like to thank you again for your constructive comments and involvement in SNAMP. Conducting a research project of this size and complexity with multiple partners and multiple roles is very challenging. Engagement of the public in some of these difficult issues has been important to the evolution of the project and has served to improve the study plan and hopefully the final product,
Sincerely,
Susie
The following question was submitted to the Water team for their consideration: Has SNAMP considered 'adapting' and having the water team take a 'side trip' to the Moonlight Fire perimeter to estimate sediment rates from the burned area? It is possible that this 65,000 acre perimeter is an ideal lab to quickly obtain valuable sediment information, particularly since this fire had a high percentage of high severity burn.
While the Moonlight fire has good potential to be a study area, it is not feasible for SNAMP to include this area due to the time/budget/objective constraints of this project. The Moonlight fires high severity burn was not part of a prescribed burn, so it is not comparable to fuels treatments conducted by the Forest Service with no potential for forest management recommendations.