Fuels Reduction and Restoration Project

From all roads and trails across the Salmon-Challis, it's hard to miss the vast quantities of dead and downed vegetation that has built up across the forest. Whether vegetation died as a result of insect or disease infestation or came down in an extreme weather event, the end result is increased fuels on the forest floor that leave the forest vulnerable to severe or uncharacteristic wildfire events. In the face of this mounting problem, the Salmon-Challis is looking at new ways to increase the pace and scale of our restoration efforts.

The Salmon-Challis Fuels Reduction and Restoration Project is one way we propose to address this issue. This landscape-level project is different than the typical projects stakeholders are used to seeing on the Salmon-Challis. Instead of combining several types of actions in a limited project area, this project proposes to authorize a few low-impact activities over the course of many years on many acres throughout the forest, outside of designated wilderness areas.

Landscape-level projects to improve planning and implementation of vegetation management projects have been successfully used by the Forest Service on other national forests.

Two examples of similarly scaled projects are the  Spruce Beetle Epidemic and Aspen Decline Management Response Project  on the Grand Mesa, Umcompahgre, and Gunnison National Forests and the  Non-Native Invasive Plant Control Project  on the Superior National Forest.

After many years of fire exclusion, an ecosystem that needs periodic fire becomes unhealthy. Trees are stressed by overcrowding. Fire-dependent species disappear. Flammable fuels build up and become hazardous.  

The right fire at the right place at the right time: 

• Reduces hazardous fuels, protecting human communities from extreme fires;
• Removes unwanted species that threaten species native to an ecosystem;
• Provides forage for game;
• Improves habitat for threatened and endangered species;
• Recycles nutrients back to the soil; and
• Promotes the growth of trees, wildflowers, and other plants.

These are all goals of the Salmon-Challis Fuels Reduction and Restoration Project. Additionally, the prescribed burning in this project can help conserve commercial timber opportunities and can minimize spread of pest insects and disease.  

Historically, fire shaped the composition, structure, and function of the many ecosystems within the Salmon-Challis. From 1900-2016, an average of approximately 10,000 acres burned in wildfires each year outside of designated wilderness. This is far less than the average of 77,000 acres estimated to have burned annually in preceding centuries ( Landfire 2019 ). 

Departure from historic conditions is one of the indicators fire managers use to determine fire risk. Currently, 62 percent of vegetation on the Salmon-Challis is considered moderately to highly departed from historic conditions. The swipe map below shows the vegetation that historically existed on the landscape prior to European settlement. The map on the right shows how departed from historic conditions our forest currently is.

Our previous approaches to this problem have not adequately addressed fuels build-up. From 2008 – 2018, the Salmon-Challis treated an average of 3,917 acres annually with prescribed fire. From 1960 – 2018, the Forest treated an average of 2,673 acres annually with thinning, timber harvest, and timber salvage treatments. We hope to roughly double what we have been able to implement in the last few decades.

While the Salmon Challis Fuels Reduction and Restoration Project proposes prescribed burning at a larger scale than previous planning efforts, staff implementing this restoration project will take lessons learned from decades of other prescribed burning activities and apply those lessons at a broader scale. 

We know we have to increase the pace and scale of restoration on the Salmon-Challis National Forest. This multi-year, landscape-scale project is designed to give land managers the flexibility they need to adapt quickly to an ever-changing landscape.

This type of work is necessary because large areas of the forest are currently at risk of losing commercial harvest potential, wildlife habitat, and grazing opportunities to wildland fire. This project is designed to prevent that from happening as much as possible.

Some people consider prescribed fire a tradeoff between merchantable timber and dead, worthless trees. However, prescribed fire can conserve commercial timber for future harvest by:

• eliminating ground fuels at the base of trees
• thinning smaller diameter trees that provide fuel ladders for fire to spark larger trees with greater commercial potential; with an added benefit of reducing competition for nutrients, water and sunlight for the remaining trees, and
• opening the landscape in a way that protects the suitable timber base from disturbance.

Managing for resilient landscapes will benefit most wildlife species by mimicking environmental conditions prior to European settlement, when our landscapes maintained biological diversity primarily through natural disturbance, such as fire and insects  (Keane and others 2009) . If we mimic those conditions with prescribed fire and tree thinning, and follow that up with timber harvest, we will be supporting viable wildlife populations by managing for the habitats that wildlife need (USDA 2010).

An example of how this approach works can be found in the  Boise National Forest Wildlife Conservation Strategy Forest Plan Amendment .

Rangelands also benefit from prescribed fire. In 2011, Natural Resources Conservation Service scientists reviewed 474 rangeland fire studies to assess the use of prescribed fire as a conservation practice. The assessment found that prescribed fire on rangelands helps increases plant-available nitrogen in soil, which improves the quality of forage available for livestock. Increased forage quality following burning was found to increase livestock performance  (Fuhlendorf 2011) . Introducing prescribed fire in these areas will provide long-term resource resiliency that will ultimately benefit the permittees who graze cattle on forest allotments included in the project area.

The Salmon-Challis Fuels Reduction and Restoration Project proposes to change how we authorize prescribed burning so our staff can efficiently implement prescribed fire when and where it's most needed.

Historically, prescribed burning projects have up to 5 years to clear the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) process and another 5-15 years or more to implement. During these lengthy planning and implementation periods, we risk unpredictable wildfires and severe weather events impacting project areas and causing undesirable effects.

To increase the pace our restoration efforts, we are including more acres in the NEPA analysis process upfront. This is not to say that prescribed burning will take place on every acre -- the inclusion of additional acres during the NEPA stage simply allows our land managers the flexibility to respond to changing conditions on the ground so they can implement prescribed burning where it is needed the most.

Current science supports prescribed burning as an effective way to prevent extreme effects of wildfire. The  March 2021 edition of the Forest Service’s Rocky Mountain Research Station’s Science You Can Use  summarized findings of  a long-term study  conducted on the Bitterroot National Forest that found fuel reduction treatments are most successful when land managers use a combination of cutting and burning strategies  (Hood and others 2020) . Initially areas are evaluated for commercial harvest potential, and then regardless of when or if that potential is realized these prescribed burning and thinning treatments serve to open up the landscape, and allow for the potential of long term commercial vegetation management.

In May 2021, the Journal of Forestry published  Pyrosiliviculture Needed for Landscape Resilience of Dry Western United States Forests , an article that makes the case for why more large-scale fire use is needed to restore western forest landscape resilience. The authors of the article boil the issue down to "whether we continue to focus on suppression, propagating more ‘feral’ fire, or become the agents of more beneficial fire under our terms and objectives"  (North, York et al. 2021) .

In June 2021, the Current Opinion in Environmental Science & Health Journal published  Prescribed Fire Management , an article that deemed that prescribed fire "an unparalleled forest management tool that provides maximum ecological benefit with minimum effort"  (Francos and Úbeda 2021) .