Twenty‐five years of the Northwest Forest Plan: what have we learned?

Spies, Thomas A.; Long, Jonathan W.; Charnley, Susan; Hessburg, Paul F.; Marcot, Bruce G.; Reeves, Gordon H.; Lesmeister, Damon B.; Reilly, Matthew J.; Cerveny, Lee K.; Stine, Peter; Raphael, Martin G.

doi:10.1002/fee.2101

Cited by 60 publications

(49 citation statements)

References 44 publications

(79 reference statements)

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“…The Northwest Forest Plan (NFP; Figure 7) provides another example which exhibits the two key requirements for coordinated multi‐agency conservation planning (Spies et al, 2019). Strong political impetus was generated when a judicial decision upended the status quo of timber management on federal lands, finding that it failed to conserve the northern spotted owl ( Strix occidentalis caurina ), whose declining population trends were related to the loss of older coniferous forest habitat (Noon & Blakesley, 2006).…”

Section: Case Study: Opportunities For Conservation Of Climate Refugia and Carbon Under The Northwest Forest Planmentioning

confidence: 99%

Maximizing the effectiveness of national commitments to protected area expansion for conserving biodiversity and ecosystem carbon under climate change

Carroll

Ray

2021

Global Change Biology

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Global commitments to protected area expansion should prioritize opportunities to protect climate refugia and ecosystems which store high levels of irrecoverable carbon, as key components of an effective response to biodiversity loss and climate change. The United States and Canada are responsible for one‐sixth of global greenhouse gas emissions but hold extensive natural ecosystems that store globally significant above‐ and below‐ground carbon. Canada has initiated a process of protected area network expansion in concert with efforts at reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples, and acknowledged nature‐based solutions as a key aspect of climate change mitigation. The US, although not a party to global biodiversity conventions, has recently committed to protecting 30% of its extent by 2030 and achieving the UNFCCC Paris Agreement's mitigation targets. The opportunities afforded by these dual biodiversity conservation and climate commitments require coordinated national and regional policies to ensure that new protected areas maximize biodiversity‐focused adaptation and nature‐based mitigation opportunities. We address how global commitments can best inform national policy initiatives which build on existing agency mandates for regional planning and species conservation. Previous analyses of global conservation priorities under climate change have been tenuously linked to policy contexts of individual nations and have lacked information on refugia due to limitations of globally available datasets. Comparison and synthesis of predictions from a range of recently developed refugia metrics allow such data to inform planning despite substantial uncertainty arising from contrasting model assumptions and inputs. A case study for endangered species planning for old‐forest‐associated species in the US Pacific Northwest demonstrates how regional planning can be nested hierarchically within national biodiversity‐focused adaptation and nature‐based mitigation strategies which integrate refugia, connectivity, and ecosystem carbon metrics to holistically evaluate the role of different land designations and where carbon mitigation and protection of biodiversity's resilience to climate change can be aligned.

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Section: Case Study: Opportunities For Conservation Of Climate Refugia and Carbon Under The Northwest Forest Planmentioning

confidence: 99%

Maximizing the effectiveness of national commitments to protected area expansion for conserving biodiversity and ecosystem carbon under climate change

Carroll

Ray

2021

Global Change Biology

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“…A main finding was that management scenarios that did not reduce densities of small trees and associated fuels resulted in landscapes that were prone to more severe fire events, which then set in motion larger oscillations between poor and good community values and operational conditions. While wildfires can be an effective fuel reduction tool, managers are increasingly concerned that uncharacteristically severe wildfires will result in long-lasting losses of social and ecological values (e.g., Spies et al 2019).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Promoting long-term forest landscape resilience in the Lake Tahoe basin

Es¹,

Km²,

Am³

et al. 2021

Preprint

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Rapid environmental changes expected in the 21st century challenge the resilience of wildlands around the world. The western portion of the Lake Tahoe basin (LTW) in California is an important ecological and cultural hotspot that is at risk of degradation from current and future environmental pressures. Historical uses, fire suppression, and a changing climate have created forest landscape conditions at risk of drought stress, destructive fire, and loss of habitat diversity. We prospectively modeled forest landscape conditions for a period of 100 years to evaluate the efficacy of five unique management scenarios in achieving desired landscape conditions across the 23,600 hectares of LTW. Management scenarios ranged from no management other than fire suppression to applying treatments consistent with historical fire frequencies and extent (i.e., regular and broadscale biomass reduction). We developed a decision support tool to evaluate environmental and social outcomes within a single framework to provide a transparent set of costs and benefits; results illuminated underlying mechanisms of forest resilience and provided actionable guidance to decision makers. Sixteen attributes were assessed in the model after assigning weights to each, derived through a survey of stakeholder priorities, so that the contribution of each attribute to evaluations of scenario performance was influenced by the combined priorities of stakeholders. We found that removing forest biomass across the landscape, particularly when accomplished using extensive fire-based removal techniques, led to highly favorable conditions for environmental quality and promoting overall landscape resilience. Environmental conditions resulting from extensive fire-based biomass removal also had nominal variation over time, in contrast with strategies that had less extensive and/or used physical removal techniques, namely thinning. Our analysis provided a transparent approach to data assessment, considering the priorities of stakeholders, to provide insights into the complexities of maintaining optimal conditions and managing landscapes to promote ecosystem resilience in a changing world.

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“…The Cascade Mountain Range divides both states into long Pacific Coastlines and wet temperate forests in the west and dry forests and shrub-steppe in the east of the state. Timber, agriculture, and tourism direct these states' rural economies (Spies et al, 2019). However, the lands and waters making up the Puget Sound region, also called Puget Trough, contains a naturally protected inland sea unique to Washington, though many of its terrestrial ecosystems function similarly to coastal ecosystems and western forests of Oregon.…”

Section: Tidal Wetland Restorationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Leveraging the potential of nature to meet net zero greenhouse gas emissions in Washington State

Robertson

Randrup

Howe

et al. 2021

PeerJ

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The State of Washington, USA, has set a goal to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, the year around which the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recommended we must limit global warming to 1.5 °C above that of pre-industrial times or face catastrophic changes. We employed existing approaches to calculate the potential for a suite of Natural Climate Solution (NCS) pathways to reduce Washington’s net emissions under three implementation scenarios: Limited, Moderate, and Ambitious. We found that NCS could reduce emissions between 4.3 and 8.8 MMT CO2eyr−1 in thirty-one years, accounting for 4% to 9% of the State’s net zero goal. These potential reductions largely rely on changing forest management practices on portions of private and public timber lands. We also mapped the distribution of each pathway’s Ambitious potential emissions reductions by county, revealing spatial clustering of high potential reductions in three regions closely tied to major business sectors: private industrial forestry in southwestern coastal forests, cropland agriculture in the Columbia Basin, and urban and rural development in the Puget Trough. Overall, potential emissions reductions are provided largely by a single pathway, Extended Timber Harvest Rotations, which mostly clusters in southwestern counties. However, mapping distribution of each of the other pathways reveals wider distribution of each pathway’s unique geographic relevance to support fair, just, and efficient deployment. Although the relative potential for a single pathway to contribute to statewide emissions reductions may be small, they could provide co-benefits to people, communities, economies, and nature for adaptation and resiliency across the state.

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Twenty‐five years of the Northwest Forest Plan: what have we learned?

Cited by 60 publications

References 44 publications

Maximizing the effectiveness of national commitments to protected area expansion for conserving biodiversity and ecosystem carbon under climate change

Maximizing the effectiveness of national commitments to protected area expansion for conserving biodiversity and ecosystem carbon under climate change

Promoting long-term forest landscape resilience in the Lake Tahoe basin

Leveraging the potential of nature to meet net zero greenhouse gas emissions in Washington State

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