Cumulative Watershed Effects of Fuel Management in the Western United States Elliot, William J.; Miller, Ina Sue; Audin, Lisa
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
United States Department of Agriculture Forest Service Rocky Mountain Research Station General Technical Report RMRS-GTR-231 January 2010 Cumulative Watershed Effects of Fuel Management in the Western United States Elliot, William J.; Miller, Ina Sue; Audin, Lisa. Eds. 2010. Cumulative watershed effects of fuel management in the western United States. Gen. Tech. Rep. RMRS-GTR-231. Fort Collins, CO: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Research Station. 299 p. ABSTRACT Fire suppression in the last century has resulted in forests with excessive amounts of biomass, leading to more severe wildfires, covering greater areas, requiring more resources for suppression and mitigation, and causing increased onsite and offsite damage to forests and watersheds. Forest managers are now attempting to reduce this accumulated biomass by thinning, prescribed fire, and other management activities. These activities will impact watershed health, particularly as larger areas are treated and treatment activities become more widespread in space and in time. Management needs, laws, social pressures, and legal findings have underscored a need to synthesize what we know about the cumulative watershed effects of fuel management activities. To meet this need, a workshop was held in Provo, Utah, on April, 2005, with 45 scientists and watershed managers from throughout the United States. At that meeting, it was decided that two syntheses on the cumulative watershed effects of fuel management would be developed, one for the eastern United States, and one for the western United States. For the western synthesis, 14 chapters were defined covering fire and forests, machinery, erosion processes, water yield and quality, soil and riparian impacts, aquatic and landscape effects, and predictive tools and procedures. We believe these chapters provide an overview of our current understanding of the cumulative watershed effects of fuel management in the western United States. Keywords: cumulative effects, watershed, wildfire, fuel management, water quality, soil erosion You may order additional copies of this publication by sending your mailing information in label form through one of the following media. Please specify the publication title and series number. Fort Collins Service Center Telephone (970) 498-1392 FAX (970) 498-1122 E-mail [email protected] Web site http://www.fs.fed.us/rm/publications Mailing address Publications Distribution Rocky Mountain Research Station 240 West Prospect Road Fort Collins, CO 80526 Rocky Mountain Research Station 240 W. Prospect Road Fort Collins, Colorado 80526 FOREWORD This document is the result of a major interdisciplinary effort to synthesize our understanding of the cumulative watershed effects of fuel management. This document is the product of more than 20 authors and 40 reviewers including scientists from four Forest Service Research Stations and numerous universities. Chapter outlines and contents were first reviewed at a workshop in April 2005. Authors then drafted chapters that were peer-reviewed over the next two years. We edited all chapters twice before submitting them for a third round of editing by RMRS publication specialists. Chapter topics include overviews of the effects of fuel management on both terrestrial and aquatic watershed processes. The other editors and I are grateful to all authors and reviewers for their considerable efforts in the development of this document over the past four years. We wish to acknowledge the Stream Team and the National Fire Plan for financial assistance. As with all syntheses, science will continue to generate new knowledge, which will in time supersede the contents of this document. Readers are encouraged to seek updated and locally derived information to supplement the contents of this document. My personal thanks go to all the authors, reviewers, my coeditors and RMRS publishing staff for the considerable effort necessary to develop and publish this synthesis. William J. Elliot, PE, PhD Supervisory Research Engineer CONTENTS Foreword i CHAPTER 1. Introduction to Synthesis of Current Science 1 Regarding Cumulative Watershed Effects of Fuel Reduction Treatments Douglas F. Ryan CHAPTER 2. Fire Regimes and Ecoregions 7 Robert G. Bailey CHAPTER 3. Fuel Management in Forests of the Inland West 19 Russell T. Graham, Theresa B. Jain, Susan Matthews CHAPTER 4. Tools for Fuel Management 69 Bob Rummer CHAPTER 5. Fuel Management and Erosion 79 Pete R. Robichaud, Lee H. MacDonald, Randy B. Foltz CHAPTER 6. Cumulative Effects of Fuel Treatments on 101 Channel Erosion and Mass Wasting Leslie M. Reid CHAPTER 7. Fuel Management and Water Yield 126 Charles A. Troendle, Lee H. MacDonald, Charles H. Luce, I.J. Larsen CHAPTER 8. Effects of Fuel Management Practices on 149 Water Quality John D. Stednick CHAPTER 9. Cumulative Effects of Fuel Treatments on 164 Soil Productivity Deborah S. Page-Dumroese, Martin F. Jurgensen, Michael P. Curran, Sharon M. DeHart CHAPTER 10. Potential Effects of Fuel Management 175 Activities on Riparian Areas Kathleen A. Dwire, Charles C. Rhoades, Michael K. Young, ii CHAPTER 11. Biological Responses to Stressors in 206 Aquatic Ecosystems in Western North America: Cumulative Watershed Effects of Fuel Treatments, Wildfire, and Post-Fire Remediation Frank H. McCormick, Bruce E. Riemen, Jeffrey L. Kershner CHAPTER 12. Landscape Scale Effects of Fuel Management 234 or Fire on Water Resources: The Future of Cumulative Effects Analysis? Charles H. Luce, Bruce E. Rieman CHAPTER 13. Tools for Analysis 246 William Elliot, Kevin Hyde, Lee MacDonald, James McKean CHAPTER 14. Understanding and Evaluating Cumulative 277 Watershed Impacts Leslie M. Reid APPENDIX. Workshop Participants and First Round Reviewers (2006) 299 iii THIS PAGE IS BLANK Cumulative Watershed Effects of Fuel Management in the Western United States CHAPTER 1. Introduction to Synthesis of Current Science Regarding Cumulative Watershed Effects of Fuel Reduction Treatments Douglas F. Ryan, Aquatic and Land Interaction Program, Pacific Northwest Research Station, USDA Forest Service, Olympia, WA Introduction This report was produced by a group of scientists who were invited by the U.S. Forest Service to synthesize the current scientific literature to answer an important ques- tion facing the managers of federal and private lands in many parts of the country. The question was: What potential cumulative environmental effects at the watershed scale might be caused by implementing land management activities that reduce forest fuels on large scales? The main body of this report is a compilation of what they found, including both what can and cannot be concluded from the current science. The scientific principles reviewed in this report are intended to be general. The examples of fire environments, land management practices, and vegetation types are drawn primarily from the western continental United States, roughly the region west of 100o W longitude. A follow-up report is planned to address the same question but with a focus on examples from the Eastern section of the continental United States (Lafayette and others, under review). In this chapter, I broadly describe fuel reduction treatments on wildlands and the concept of analyzing cumulative watershed effects. For perspective, I have referred to some of the primary legislative and policy direction that influences the way that federal land managers apply fuel reduction treatments and analyze cumulative effects. Fuel Reductions Treatments and Policies and Laws Related to Them Fuel reduction treatments are land management actions taken to reduce the threat posed by severe and/or intense wildland fire by manipulating live and dead vegetation to reduce the loading of fuel on the landscape that can support wildland fire. Fuel reduction can be accomplished in a number of ways with the most common involving mechani- cal removal of fuel material (usually brush or trees) and/or consumption of fuel using prescribed fire. These two types of treatments may be applied alone, sequentially, or in USDA Forest Service RMRS-GTR-231. 2010. 1 CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION TO SYNTHESIS OF CURRENT SCIENCE REGARDING CUMULATIVE WATERSHED EFFECTS OF FUEL REDUCTION TREATMENTS various combinations. Treatment of wildlands to reduce fuel was given a national man- date when Congress passed the Healthy Forests Restoration Act of 2003 (P.L. 108-148) (HFRA). Efforts to reduce the risk of severe wildland fire may receive additional impe- tus from studies that attribute recent increases in the frequency of large wildland fires to changing climate (Westerling and others 2006), raising the possibility that this threat may further increase in western forests with expected climate changes in future years. To effectively reduce the risk of wildland fires, fuel reduction treatments will need to be applied to large areas of federal lands each year in the form of mechanical fuel removal and/or prescribed fire. In most cases, vegetation can regrow after treatments, meaning that, in many areas, maintaining low fuel stocking will require repeated treatments to reduce fuel stocking at intervals ranging from several years to a few de- cades. Where they are well designed and implemented, fuel reduction treatments will probably create a relatively low intensity of disturbance, for example, by disturbing only a small amount of surface soil per acre. However, because they will be carried out over many acres each year and entail return treatments at regular intervals, there remains the possibility