CALIFORNIA FORESTRY ASSOCIATION
CFA Reports
SNEP REPORT: Talking Points
The complete SNEP Report has yet to be released and therefore it is difficult to draw specific conclusions regarding any proposals for managing forest lands in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. A review of the “Summary of the SNEP Report” (Summary) reveals several interesting points worth noting.
The Summary acknowledges that “[p]ublic timber and private recreation are the largest net contributors of funds to county governments both in total dollars and as a percentage of their total value.” 25% of the receipts from Forest Service timber sales go directly to the counties where the sales took place to improve local schools and roads.
The Summary contends that timber harvest, due to a lack of slash treatment, “has increased fire severity more than any other human activity.” However, the report continues, when slash is treated “logging can serve as a tool to help reduce fire hazard.” Unfortunately, it fails to recognize that today’s timber sale operations, whether on federal, state or private lands, require the treatment of logging slash as part the harvesting operations. Sierra timber operators lead the nation in removal of formerly unmerchantable material such as logging slash and small trees, processing the material into chips for cogeneration, particleboard and pulp.
The Summary states that “[c]urrent fuel levels and projected future uses in [the urban interface] are incompatible without active fuels management.” Active fuels management is later defined as establishing defensible space primarily through use of prescribed fire. It provides only a token acknowledgment of the beneficial services of mechanical thinning.
The Summary is inconsistent regarding the size and intensity of wildfires in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. At one point the Summary states that “...contiguous areas of predominantly high- intensity fire larger than a few thousand acres almost certainly were much less common [in the past] than today.” Four paragraphs later the Summary contradicts itself: “[t]he commonly expected consequence of decades of fire suppression- that large, infrequent fires are becoming larger and small, frequent fires smaller- is generally not confirmed by the records for twentieth-century Sierran forests.”
Only three plant species marginally within the Sierra Nevada appear to have become extinct in the past 100 years. “Impacts to plant populations have come largely from settlement, grazing and fire suppression.” Timber harvesting was not listed as a contributor to the extinction of any plants.
Only three modern vertebrate species once well-distributed in the Sierra Nevada are now extinct. According to the Summary, extinction was not the result of timber harvesting activities for any of the three species. One species, the California condor was already rare at the time of western settlement and the grizzly bear was an intentional extermination.
Only 17% of the Sierra fauna are considered at risk by state or federal agencies, as compared to 30% of the statewide fauna.
With regards to native fish, the Summary is consistent with timber industry analyses -- i.e. “native fish populations have been severely reduced or have gone locally extinct, especially at low elevations, primarily as a result of dams and introduction of non-native fish species.”
With regards to anadromous fish, "[d]ams and impoundments, which block fish access to streams” have led to loss of about 90% of the historic habitat in the Sierra.”
Aquatic habitat alterations are often associate with the establishment of non-native species. Historically, only about twenty high-elevation lakes contained fish compared to over 2000 lakes today. The changes in fisheries has caused “drastic reductions in distribution and population sizes” of native invertebrates and amphibians. “Introduced fish seem to be the primary cause for loss of mountain yellow-legged frog populations throughout historic ranges.”
The Summary is consistent with industry analysis of “old-growth” in the Sierra-Nevada mountains- i.e. “extensive uniform stands of even-aged, old trees does not fit the complex and heterogeneous Sierran forests.” Considering all federal lands, 47% are in a presettlement condition, about 19% of the middle-elevation conifer forest types are presently in high-quality old growth condition “and most forested stands have sufficient structural complexity to provide for at least low levels of late successional forest functions.”
It is hard to accept the notion that national parks provide the best benchmark for presettlement amounts of late successional forests when the Summary admits that there has been a significant alteration of the ecosystems within the national parks due to fire suppression (and exclusion).
The Summary concludes that even with all the human activity in the Sierra Nevada mountains, “there remains a high level of continuity of forest cover in middle-elevation forest landscapes.”
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