Peg Crim of the Lincoln National Forest has confirmed the action by the Department of Justice, but she said she is not at liberty to talk about the suit. “It’s not going to change anything we have now,” she said. “We are going to continue working with the county and state.”

According to a statement from U.S. Attorney Kenneth J. Gonzales on February 7, the Department of Justice Environment and Natural Resources Division and the U.S. Attorney’s office for the District of New Mexico, on behalf of the USDA Forest Service, filed a complaint asking for a declaration from the court on whether Senate Bill 1 and an Otero County resolution are pre-empted by federal law and, therefore, unconstitutional.

The statement says the legal action follows efforts by the Forest Service and U.S. Attorney’s office to find a way to legally satisfy the concerns of Otero County commissioners and collaborate with federal agencies to mitigate fire risk due to extreme drought conditions in the county’s forests.

From Las Cruces Sun-News

“I commend the Kentucky Division of Forestry and its employees for serving the Commonwealth with purpose, dedication and commitment for the past century,” Gov. Beshear said. “Through fighting wildfires, providing technical assistance to landowners and communities and protecting forest health, Kentucky is committed to ensuring the sustainability of our forests for another hundred years and beyond.”

KDF, originally known as the Board of Forestry, was established in 1912 by the Kentucky General Assembly to protect forest resources from being destroyed by wildfire and depleted from over-harvesting. Although KDF has changed considerably over the years, the initial priorities have remained the same: protecting forests from wildfire, assisting landowners with forest stewardship and producing tree seedlings for reforestation projects.

“This is a significant milestone for our agency and for forest conservation in our state,” said Leah MacSwords, director of KDF. “A century of hard work and dedication by the division employees has helped sustain our forest resources for a multitude of benefits including scenic beauty, clean air and water, wildlife habitat and an economically-important forest industry.”

“John Shannon has helped develop the Arkansas Forestry Commission into a widely respected agency that Arkansans count on, especially in times of crisis,” Arkansas Governor Mike Beebe commented. “However, after Legislative Audit’s review of the financial troubles at Forestry, I agree that a change in management is needed. I thank John for his years of dedicated service to Arkansas.”

The Arkansas Forestry Commission will make a recommendation to Governor Beebe for an interim agency head. Shannon’s resignation does not change Beebe’s supplemental request for the rest of the fiscal year and will not alter plans to rehire 15 firefighters with reallocated Agriculture Department funds.

Prices for woody biomass in the U.S., whether sawmill byproducts, forest residues or urban wood waste, have been sliding for most of the past three years but were still higher in the 4Q/11 in most regions than they were five years ago, according to the North American Wood Fiber Review. The price drop seen in 2010 was mainly the result of lower prices for fossil fuels, particularly that of natural gas, and reduced demand for energy. This declining price trend has reduced the interest by both commercial and residential energy consumers in switching to more expensive green energy.

The two major sources for woody biomass are bark from sawmills/plywood plants, and forest residues left after logging operations. In the major biomass-consuming regions of the U.S., prices for forest biomass have been $10-20/odmt higher than for mill biomass during most of 2011. The region with the lowest biomass prices in the 4Q/11 was the West, while Maine and New Hampshire continue to have some of the highest prices in the country. In the U.S. South, prices have fallen 15-20% since early 2010 and forest biomass prices in the South Central states in particular have come down lately thanks to favorable weather conditions.

As long as prices for natural gas and oil are relatively low, there will not be much increase in demand for biomass and biomass prices will continue to stay relatively low throughout the country, according to the North American Wood Fiber Review.

The publication is based on a synthesis of each western state and Pacific Island Forest Action Plan, which revealed common issues across the West and strategies for achieving success.

Forest Action Plans, collectively, represent the first-ever collaboratively-developed strategic plan for the nation’s forests. In 2008 Congress tasked U.S. states and territories with crafting assessments of forest resources within their boundaries and developing strategies to address threats and improve forest health. With the completion of these Forest Action Plans in 2010, the WFLC commissioned a review and analysis of the western state and Pacific Island Forest Action Plans. The synthesis revealed detailed findings, trends, issues, and opportunities. Across the Western Landscape: Priority Issues and Strategies for Western Forests focuses on priority outcomes addressing landscape-scale issues, thus guiding us toward conservation, protection, and enhancement of our western forests.

Beth Pendleton, U.S. Forest Service Alaska Regional Forester and Federal Co-lead for the WFLC, commented on the meeting, “the WFLC facilitates rich dialogue with concrete outcomes. If we want to have an impact across the landscape we must bring all partners together, including federal, state, tribal and private landowners.”

On the other end of our western landscape, Nebraska State Forester, Scott Josiah, and State Co-Lead for the WFLC, gave his impression of the gathering, “the discussions among state and federal forestry leaders were productive, open and candid. It is clear that forests and their management across all land ownerships are essential to solve larger economic and environmental challenges.”

You can read Across the Western Landscape and the Five Year Strategic Plan at: www.wflcweb.org

The new Eldorado Brasil pulp and paper mill is the world’s largest, and when production is commissioned in the last quarter of 2012, Eldorado Brasil will have an annual output of 1.5 million tons of bleached pulp. The raw material will be sourced exclusively from eucalyptus plantations.

Komatsu Forest has also recently signed important contracts in Uruguay. The Montes del Plata (MDP) pulp mill has purchased Komatsu 941.1 harvesters and Komatsu 890.3 forwarders.

The Forest Legacy Program has protected 2.2 million acres through public-private partnership using federal and leveraged funds of more than $562 million. The program works with private landowners, states and conservation groups to promote sustainable, working forests. Forest Legacy is an important component of the President’s America’s Great Outdoors initiative’s goal of conserving rural working farms, ranches, and forests by accelerating locally-driven landscape conservation priorities.

“The Forest Legacy Program helps keep working forests working across the country,” said Chief Tom Tidwell. “These projects will support rural economies and American jobs while protecting some of our most beautiful landscapes for our children and grandchildren.”

Intact forest lands supply timber products, wildlife habitat, soil and watershed protection, aesthetics, and recreational opportunities. However, as these areas are fragmented and disappear, so do the benefits they provide. Roughly 57% of the nation’s forests are privately owned yet the country has lost 15 million acres of private working forests in the last 10 years with an additional 22 million acres projected to be at risk from development, wildfire and other threats in the next decade.

The Forest Legacy Program uses a competitive process to strategically select ecologically and socially important projects facing the greatest threat of conversion to other land uses. Projects that protect clean air and water, provide recreation, protect wildlife habitat, supports large-scale land conservation partnerships, and provide forest-related rural jobs receive strong consideration.

For a full list of the projects visit: http://www.fs.fed.us/news/2012/releases/01/working-forests.shtml

USDA and the Forest Service carefully considered nearly 300,000 comments received on the proposed rule and draft environmental impact statement issued last February, to develop the agency’s preferred course of action for finalizing the planning rule. This is included in the PEIS released as USDA’s preferred alternative.

“The most collaborative rulemaking effort in agency history has resulted in a strong framework to restore and manage our forests and watersheds and help deliver countless benefits to the American people,” said Secretary Vilsack. “Our preferred alternative will safeguard our natural resources and provide a roadmap for getting work done on the ground that will restore our forests while providing job opportunities for local communities.”

The preferred alternative emphasizes collaboration and strengthens the role of public involvement and dialogue throughout the planning process. It also would require the use of the best available scientific information to inform decisions.

Highlights of the preferred alternative include:

•    Plans must include components that seek to restore and maintain forests and grasslands.
•    Plans would include requirements to maintain or restore watersheds, water resources, water quality including clean drinking water, and the ecological integrity of riparian areas.
•    Plans would be required to provide habitat for plant and animal diversity and species conservation. These requirements are intended to keep common native species common, contribute to the recovery of threatened and endangered species, conserve proposed and candidate species, and protect species of conservation concern.
•    Plans would provide for multiple uses, including outdoor recreation, range, timber, watershed, wildlife and fish.
•    Plans would be required to provide opportunities for sustainable recreation, and to take into account opportunities to connect people with nature.
•    Opportunities for public involvement and collaboration would be required throughout all stages of the planning process. The preferred alternative would provide opportunities for Tribal consultation and coordination with state and local governments and other federal agencies, and includes requirements for outreach to traditionally underrepresented communities.
•    Plans require the use of the best available scientific information to inform the planning process and documentation of how science was used in the plan.
•    The planning framework provides a more efficient and adaptive process for land management planning, allowing the Forest Service to respond to changing conditions.

Developed by the U.S. Forest Service’s western research stations, the four-part framework details a practical and credible management approach, grounded in strong partnerships between local resource managers and scientists, that will help national forests meet their management mandate. The guidelines are published in Responding to Climate Change on National Forests: A Guidebook for Developing Adaptation Options, a new report published by the U.S. Forest Service’s Pacific Northwest Research Station.

“This guide lays out an important foundation and provides useful, real-life examples to help managers and citizens build their climate-smart adaptive capacity,” said David Cleaves, the Forest Service’s climate change advisor. “It will be an important source for practices and tools for enhancing the future of our nation’s forests.”

The new adaptation guidelines support this process by providing managers with specific information about decision tools, models, and planning instruments and by offering guidance on setting priorities, assessing resource vulnerabilities, and developing goals. Central to the guidelines are four steps – reviewing, ranking, resolving, and observing – that managers can follow to localize climate change science, evaluate sensitivity of specific natural resources, develop adaptation options, and monitor their effectiveness. This approach makes the guidebook flexible enough to apply to all national forests, regardless of which ecosystems they contain or what their management priorities are.

“There is no one ‘recipe’ for adapting to a warmer climate, but there are things that can be done to build resilience and help manage forests sustainably,” said David L. Peterson, a research biologist with the station and the guidebook’s lead author. “The adaptation guidebook provides a toolkit from which various tools can be selected, all based on current science. We expect the toolkit to evolve over time as we learn more about the effects of climate change and about which adaptation techniques are effective.”

The guidebook is available online at: http://www.treesearch.fs.fed.us/pubs/39884

Josef Kellndorfer and Wayne Walker of the Woods Hole Research Center (WHRC) recently worked with colleagues at the U.S. Forest Service and U.S. Geological Survey to create such an inventory for the United States. The map below was built from the National Biomass and Carbon Dataset (NBCD), released in 2011. It depicts the concentration of biomass, a measure of the amount of organic carbon, stored in the trunks, limbs, and leaves of trees. The darkest greens reveal the areas with the densest, tallest and most robust forest growth.

Over six years, researchers assembled the national forest map from space-based radar, satellite sensors, computer models and a massive amount of ground-based data. It is possibly the highest resolution and most detailed view of forest structure and carbon storage ever assembled for any country.

Forests in the U.S. were mapped down to a scale of 30 meters, or roughly 10 computer display pixels for every hectare of land (four pixels per acre). They divided the country into 66 mapping zones and ended up mapping 265 million segments of the American land surface. Kellndorfer estimates that their mapping database includes measurements of about five million trees.

“Forests are a key element for human activity,” says Kellndorfer. “Resource managers need to see forests down to the disturbance resolution, the scale at which parking lots or developments or farms are carved out by deforestation. We have to know how much we have, and where, in order to conduct sound management and harvesting.”