A Student's Forest Paper Sparks One Hot Debate

[Rose Siding]

During tedious days of counting tiny Douglas fir seedlings on blackened slopes west of here, Daniel Donato never imagined his work would put him in the crosshairs of Congress. He was just studying how forests grow back after a fire.

But after his research appeared in the online version of the journal Science in January, the Oregon State University graduate student began to feel like a lightning rod. A federal agency briefly yanked funding for his project, irate politicians and timber interests e-mailed Donato's dean to complain, congressmen grilled him, and professors at his own university tried unsuccessfully to keep the paper from being published in the print edition of Science.
.....
The collision of politics, business and science is vividly highlighted in hundreds of e-mail exchanges obtained and publicly released by a Democratic Oregon state senator. They place Oregon State Forestry Dean Hal Salwasser — a former U.S. Forest Service official who has publicly advocated the salvage bill — at the center of efforts to counter the paper.

"Nice Work!" Oregon state Senate Republican leader Ted Ferrioli sarcastically declared in an e-mail to the dean. Such research, he wrote, amounted to "rifle shots politically directed at resource producers and timber-dependent communities."

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-salvage11jun11,0,5107511.story?coll=la-home-nation

[Evergreen Emerald]

1. cover and lies for the sake of money

Never mind the truth.

[PurgedVoter]

2. K&R

[fasttense]

3. Can't have those scientist publishing the truth and

ruining all that profit big business can make. Better to hide the truth and buy the lies from politicians.

[rodeodance]

12. it is blantant disregard for science ---

[rodeodance]

15. looky at the Dean and his role: "Mafia "protection" tactics."

In an interview with The Times, the dean said he did not quibble with Donato's data but said the authors had overreached in their interpretation. "They found what they found," Salwasser said. "The whole argument is over the conclusions they made."

Nonetheless, his alliances are clear in the e-mails. In one message to a lumber company employee, he called anti-logging activists "scam artists" and "goons" and said their appeals and lawsuits are a variation on Mafia "protection" tactics.

Salwasser has since been faulted for his handling of the controversy by a college committee, which in a draft report last month cited the e-mails and said he had engaged in inappropriate behavior. A no-confidence vote was held last week in the college. Through a university spokesman, Salwasser declined to comment on the committee's work.

In the weeks after the paper's publication, the two leading sponsors of the salvage legislation, Republican Rep. Greg Walden of Oregon and Democratic Rep. Brian Baird of Washington, put Donato on the hot seat at a congressional field hearing in Oregon.

[hootinholler]

41. Blatant disregard my ass!

More like active suppression! The administration makes a few calls and the University attempts to pull the paper? What's the real story there, what form coercion?


His principal finding — that post-fire logging hindered forest regrowth — was hardly revolutionary. But the study, with Donato as lead author, was published just as Congress was considering legislation to make it easier for timber companies to undertake salvage logging of dead trees after fires on federal land. That bill, backed by the Bush administration and recently passed by the House, is based on an underlying assumption that burned forests recover more quickly if they are logged and then replanted.

Hmmm, why must everything be a conspiracy?

-Hoot

[Minnesota Libra]

4. Always attack the messenger and make it sound....................

....political and above all else never stick to the realistic issues or the facts.:sarcasm:

[HereSince1628]

5. Do you suppose the Republicans have heard of Lysenkoism?

As a cold-war era science student Lysenkoism was regularly thrown in our faces as an excellent example of science gone wrong in the service of communist politicians.
Everytime a course got into genetics, Lysenko was dragged out and flogged. And because of the central nature of genetics to my studies that was frequent.

With Lysenko his misdirection fed ideological issue. With the current US misdirection of science it seems it's all about the Republican's favorite issue, profits.

[PATRICK]

14. Idiot-logical science

or reality is what we decide it is has good examples in Soviet mismanagement of a fragile ecosystem and limited arable land. The idea that things will adapt was taken to its convenient extreme and crops were ruined year after year vainly expecting things to get better. One might guess this fairly suicidal logic when applied to more ethereal concepts like the economy and politics would have similar results. After many decades and a ruinous invasion by Stalin's pal, stupidity won out against reality and destroyed the Soviet Union like a misfit jigsaw puzzle waiting for any old tremor.

As science as mistreated by the very corporations that rely on its efforts in their narrow behalfs is suffering the exact same fate in our country and our country and the world will suffer- in shorter order-
the consequences. If this is what the greed besotted megaliths of capitalism think about the environment
you can bet all other pillars of the economic order are similarly built on sand, uselessly renamed "concrete". Bush may have served to expose ALL the lies that will be our undoing and since they are so much richer than the old, primitive Soviet, they needed simplifying before the excuses and finger pointing distracts us.

Greed blinds. You can't run a civil society on greed. Any strict, world re-shaping ideology blinds. You can't operate in the real world, human or the ecosphere, on wishful thinking by the use of a gun or edict. Yet that is who is bending the world to its current fate and the bureaucrats and petty leaders who
bend with it even though they know better. The people granted legitimate power over us are going to get us all killed down to the last. And that group granting of power is simply a set of shared ideas not worth the group fear that enforces the myth. The numbers of money and wealth are also abstracts without as much phsyical reality as a flea. Another idea the group self enforces against the necessity of surtivivng its environment.

Too dumb and too pack-minded to survive if the majority allows the worst and the most blind to lead them at all at any time in any capacity for any reason.

[Peace Patriot]

19. Patrick, you target everything but the mechanism of power by which

the will of the majority has been thwarted: stolen elections, now done by Bushite electronic voting corporations, using "TRADE SECRET," PROPRIETARY programming code with virtually no audit/recount controls ($4 billion boondoggle by the Anthrax Congress--so-called "Help America Vote Act"--engineered by crooks, Tom Delay and Bob Ney). The majority is overwhelmingly in favor of strong environmental protection (up there in the 80% to 90% range), as well as against the Iraq war (nearly 60% before the invasion, up to 70% now), and hates Bush's torture policy (63% opposed to torture "under any circumstances"--May '04), etc., etc. People were flocking to the Democratic Party in 2004 to change all this--Dems had a blowout success in new voter registration in 2004, nearly 60/40. Kerry was winning all day long, then, boom, it got flipped the other way. It's not okay to condemn the majority as "too dumb and too pack-minded to survive" while ignoring the plain conspiracy to disenfranchise them, of which they know very little because the story has been black-holed by the war profiteering corporate news monopolies (who also doctored their exit polls (Kerry won) on election night to force the exit polls to fit the results of the Bushite corporations' secret vote tabulation formulae, changing the outcome to Bush--and DENYING the American people strong evidence of election fraud). They have also been betrayed by collusive or scared Democratic leaders. Instead of calling the majority names, HELP THEM. INFORM them. Give them a fighting chance to get their power back.

Americans are the most propagandized, and the most disempowered, demoralized and disenfranchised people on earth, outside of, say, Saudi Arabia. And they continue to hold onto their progressive beliefs, despite 24/7 fascist brainwashing. They are far better informed than anyone gives them credit for. But it takes TIME and word of mouth for the truth to get around. How is it possible that these looters and mass killers and torturers are still in power? Most people don't know the answer to that--the specific mechanism that was used. Look to the practical things, Patrick. Not just the general issues. The mechanisms of power. How power is transferred, and stolen.

[PATRICK]

43. The mechanisms are out there in broad daylight

and in five minutes most people can be educated enough about any of them poorly covered or spun to a harmless misinterpretation by the media. The early days when these damn machines came out i was no computer expert in the slightest but I knew, as any professional pol worth salt should have known that it was next frontier of fraud, that Florida would shift and all things continue but electronic lockdown would disappear the controversies of 2000, by disappearing forever the chance to recount enough votes to make a difference. And I believe Internet voting lies in the future, although that future as determined by barely computer literate political hacks, is also dumb and exposed.

The purpose is not to dishearten but to arouse. I awoke in 2000 to the realization that we HAD been cheated and as with the response to the Clinton impeachment railroad, the people in the majority are not on the same track as the fraudsters and propagandists of any party- despite everything. But the power to get that across to the fraudsters and to the institutional defenders was left in the dirt, the initiative and the phony legitimacy ceded by a leadership that fails the population of the world everyday. After 2000 the fraud was exposed but no one was allowed to call it that. Settling for bi-partisan reform created a new fraud, HAVA and it is in those details that people in ignorance are led every day down the same path we've been warning about in detail for years.

This is a cry of rage in an ugly war, a war against our own apathy and bewilderment, a rage to get moving because as real as this game against crooks is in exposing the fragility of our myths and the strengths of our common decency, we have greater global crises of a more pressing and physical nature rushing upon us. It is only in stepping back and seeing the picture one realizes that surrendering years is surrendering countless millions of lives, civilizations, species. Several decades of communism, several decades behind a Berlin Wall. Can't do that. Not now. The only ones rushing are the ones most empowered to send our troops into Iran, the FBI into our homes, our money into the pockets of corporate renegades. Waiting to vote in the more rigged system isn't near enough. Trying to be heard in the phony corporate news forums certainly isn't enough. Taking down criminal enterprises and enforcing law is working. Slamming the truth into the mix via radio and the net and soon the TV. Debating whether the world is round, intelligent design, "conservative" economics, belittles where the people are and where they want to go.

All the mechanisms are known by many, some of them high in the leadership of the party who ALL should know better for several reasons. That the race for survival and the justification of our existence as a species should devolve on a bunch of moronic vice-aholics on private power trip is not a matter of pride or pity or rationalization. Troops cannot stop people anymore. Ignorance can't. Propaganda can't.
And if someone needs help the entire eco-system is giving us a united kick in the pants more than the glacial national debt freezing over our granchildren's hope.

We are a rational race upside down, wanting to think we've arrived halfway down the road, wanting to believe smiling assurances and imagery of strength rather than the proper instincts we have for trust especially when the chips are really down personally, wanting to delegate and not share the burden of knowledge, freedom and social effort, wanting heroes and rituals to manufacture a mystical super-nature called the world but not tend the planet that sustains us.

Spring is the cruelest month and this is humanity's springtime, finally, and it has to break out of the rot of past centuries to blossom. It's dynamism, not a slide show. It used to be radical to discuss nationalization of industries, especially ones associated with the common welfare. Now we are supposed to star in old reruns of the Inquisition, nineteenth century robber barons vs. labor, and the War of the Roses? We should be obliterating this debate with the merest beginnings of progress, not defending humankind against imbecility and malevolent selfishness of our very worst. And people will agree very quickly and people in general all want the same just things and people hate being manipulated for their worst instincts, but someone merely has to stop the jail house lawyer of history from turning every good against itself with lies and fraud. Momentum is on the side of this consciousness, but so far it has not changed the power alignments.

I expect the push will continue to be very hard and who knows what the price will be simply in the time lost. The power of truth added to the powers given to this generation are more than any advantage the 'other side' can dream of. The skill of human frailty is that when truth wins it always falls short and relaxes and accepts the bad spin away from understanding enough. Eventually the price for that must become obvious and fatal.

[rodeodance]

6. Rec.

[rodeodance]

11. here is the research (science) finding (brief)---which Bush does not like

.....His principal finding — that post-fire logging hindered forest regrowth — was hardly revolutionary. But the study, with Donato as lead author, was published just as Congress was considering legislation to make it easier for timber companies to undertake salvage logging of dead trees after fires on federal land. That bill, backed by the Bush administration and recently passed by the House, is based on an underlying assumption that burned forests recover more quickly if they are logged and then replanted.

Donato's results provided ammunition to the bill's opponents — and more broadly to environmentalists fighting salvage logging, which makes up roughly a third of the timber sales from national forests across the country. They argue that dead trees provide not only wildlife habitat, but the nourishment for a new forest that will ultimately provide a richer, more diverse ecosystem. That is anathema to timber advocates, who see dead wood left to rot unharvested as not only counterproductive but a waste of resources.

Donato, 29, and his five co-authors knew they were entering a fraught debate. Still, the reaction has stunned them.

"It's a one-page research note," Donato said, referring to the paper published in Science. "It's not that earth-shattering, and it really would be very easy to put the paper in context and sort of almost trivialize it.

"Instead," he said, "it's been turned into this giant political thing. It just blows me away. I never anticipated that."

[Demit]

7. The editor of Science sounds levelheaded, by calling the paper

"sound, peer-reviewed research". All the other screaming meemies have a vested interest in one way or another. God, I hate these times we live in.

[Benhurst]

8. As it is written ...

"It's a one-page research note," Donato said, referring to the paper published in Science. "It's not that earth-shattering, and it really would be very easy to put the paper in context and sort of almost trivialize it.

"Instead," he said, "it's been turned into this giant political thing. It just blows me away. I never anticipated that."

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-salvage11jun11,0,5107511.story?coll=la-home-nation


THE GUILTY FLEE EVEN WHEN NO ONE IS PERSUING.

[Rainbowreflect]

9. Sometimes I think it is things like this that scare me the most.

There are so many horrible things happening right now, but the idea that the truth & reality take a back seat to profit in our county, scares the hell out of me!

[Rainbowreflect]

10. Sorry, double post!

[alarimer]

13. More ammunition in the Republican war on science

And it is a war. I encourage everyone to read the book by Chris Mooney.

This also illustrates how dangerous it is for science departments at any university to accept funding from corporations. They have a vested interest in seeing certain results. If the results are not what they want, they can easily pull funding or make a big deal out of it like they have here. I was astonished to read that the forestry department accepts money from paper companies! I know funding is tough but that is outrageous.

[Patiod]

16. Fascism 1, Science 0

The "opposition" research, conducted by a "distinguished professor"/obvious industry whore, funded by a county that was heavily dependent on the timber industry, concluded that "unless burned trees were logged and the slopes replanted, much of the forest might never return to its former state"

I'm not a forest scientist, but it seems to me that, if timber industry research were correct, then the entire planet would have been de-forested by forest fires long before man arrived on the planet since it seems forests are unable to return after a fire without the intervention of logging companies.

[rodeodance]

17. A Dem got the funding restored:

Kennedy, a former president of Stanford University, pointed to the brief suspension of the research project's funding by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management as part of a broader discord between science and politics. (The funding was reinstated after a Democratic congressman complained and the bureau said it was satisfied with the Donato team's responses to its concerns.)

"I do think there's a kind of attitude in administration that … prefers to constrain scientists to talk not about their own views and their own conclusions, but to stick to an administration line about many of these issues," Kennedy said.

The paper's critics deny any attempts at censorship and say they are simply reacting to a shoddy, incomplete piece of research.

[daleo]

30. I like your last paragraph

Very logical.

[Igel]

35. That's not completely implausible, but

I'd want to see how he said it and what he meant by it.

When I lived in Oregon in the '80s, frequently you could tell the areas that had been subject to small-scale fires. They were dominated by mostly deciduous trees, and the suspicion was that a bit of climate change might have lead to conditions that disfavored re-establishment of coniferous forests.

Donato et al. seem to show otherwise in their squib, most of the seedings were Douglas fir, but that might not be a fair conclusion. (I think it is, but I'm no forestry expert, either.)

[jeffreyi]

18. another article

http://www.hcn.org/servlets/hcn.Article?article_id=16133
or

http://tinyurl.com/rpfcf

Of course the response to disturbance (e.g., logging, fire, etc) depends on the climate zone and forest site/type that you're in, as well as geology, geomorphology, soils, environmental setting, site conditions, etc. And I remember that point being made rather well by forest ecologists when the paper came out, and that's a fair comment. But the paper quickly became politicized and the whole thing went downhill from there. That student probably got an education he never bargained for!

[Rex]

20. Typical Repuke response.

"rifle shots politically directed at resource producers and timber-dependent communities." Leave it to a Puker to find a way to bring violence into the argument. :eyes:

[Gregorian]

21. Logging is the George Bush of industries.

I can't say it any other way. It's little George Bushes running around with chainsaws. They have the same accent. The same swagger. The same sense of inconsiderate destruction. The same disregard for anything but money. Even the same facial expression. The same level of intelligence. However, like anything, there are anomalies. I have a friend who's a progressive Democrat who used to be a logger. It was before he knew better. We both shake our heads in disgust. The way logging is practiced is nothing short of vandalism.

I'll spare my experiences. Just know that I am not prejudging. I have been closely involved in the industry. I've even worked in the industry. You do not try to tell or even ask a logger anything. Freeper mentality prevails. Stay away and let them make their money. I mean, vandalize the forests.

The stories I could tell. You wouldn't want to hear them.

[Lorien]

44. And we could solve all of our paper pulp needs by growing hemp

(not the sort that gets smoked, but the sort that our forefathers grew for making rope and oil), yet that will happen as soon as the big three auto manufacturers start mass producing electric cars again and solar panels come standard on new homes. Oil and logging interests are republican interests, and they'll be happy to destroy the planet to satisfy their greed. Of course, they anticipate the rapture after they've amassed their riches (nobody ever told them that they can't take it with them).

Here's a sickening fact; it's KLEENEX who is lobbying the government for the rights to take down the last old forests in the West (so everyone can blow their nose and wipe their ass in luxurious comfort), and OFFICE DEPOT who is lobbying to take down the largest forests in the East to create massive tree farms for copier paper. Both of these corporations could have turned to hemp instead, but they'll destroy every last stand of untouched land on the planet before resorting to such a fast growing renewable resource.

[Gregorian]

45. Some people resist change.

It's a simple thing that is the cause of such great problems. I have this argument with people who are close to me. I recall after Bhopal I told my mother, who has always been a user of Raid, that it's the result of each person with a can of that stuff that made Bhopal a possibility. But it's just "me and my one little can" mentality. I say it over and over, that this world is not about me anymore, but about us. Each person adds up. She just won't do without her Raid. There are alternatives to the choices forced down upon us by the corporations. In fact, even with those ants that have caused so many people to grab a can of poison. By simply being patient, ants will usually go their way. Or there are many other ways.

The bottom line is that people need to know. And Noam Chomsky has been saying for ages that the lack of media on these things is done on purpose to keep people from knowing. And so the earth suffers, and people of places that are impacted by the consumption suffer.

It's frustrating because you know all of this. I know all of this. And the point I was making is that even though some people know, they still won't change. And that really gets me. My mother wouldn't change her life for global warming if she were treading water. A lot of the people who were raised in the early 1900's were fully converted by advertising to be good consumers. I find it very saddening. I recall spending a lot of time with my mother, and yet not really being with her. It's America's dark side.

My neighbor has 10,000 acres. He's a millionaire. So why did he cut the 20 acres of beautiful forest in front of my house? I'll never forgive him. I'm still raging mad about it. Now I'm looking at bare dirt, where there were branches flowing with the breeze. The bastard! And he's 87 years old. What the hell's he going to do with his newly earned, what, $50k?

I guess that's enough anger for the morning. Maybe with a little luck I'll find my own private world. It's selfish, but without it, I'll die. I'll never buy Kleenex. I never have. I didn't ask to be part of seven billion. I try to walk as softly as I can.

[pooja]

22. To tell you the truth

This was a pretty basic research project to undertake. It was a simple ecological research paper... take a site mark it out and report the growth then do a simple statistical analysis. It doesn't surprise me that this was a one page paper in the end. The results were expected to support the hypothesis because it is relatively known that fire burns spurt new growths by clearing the underbrush and the naturally taller "shade" trees. This isn't a new idea... but his timing didn't coincide with bushco.

[nealmhughes]

23. Evidently none of these Republicans have the slightest idea of how grad

student research is published or why. One begins with a "problem." In this case it was "Is there an impact on post-fire logging on regeneration?" Then there is a literature search. Then there is actual field work. The "problem" is then presented as a hypothesis with research backing it up and presented as a seminar paper, or an academic paper at a conference or else accepted for publication. All except for the seminar paper (which is only in house) are then subjected to peer review. If accepted, they are now fodder for an increased scrutiny in the "problem" area. This can come in the form of a new paper/article which refutes the original findings or else finds a nuance to it being universal/not being universal or else supporting it. This goes on and on until the issue is "resolved." However, nothing is ever "resolved" for long, which leads to a new examination ad infin. Why is this important one might ask?
The problems might not seem very important to a lot on a macro level, but it is the way in which academics are trained. Their processes are rigorous and time consuming. They should not be considered as "canon" until they are demonstrated as canon!
These five students were doing an academic exercise that actually has some serious ecological and economic impact potential. Don't blame the messengers for the prelim findings! Try to refute it! That is how "problems" are solved and Ph.D.s made. Once one gets to an emeritus, then the revision starts in and then the "Oh, Gee, she was right after all! After the popularizer has been dead for 50 years...
Most congressmen are not holders of research degrees and even attorneys are pitiful except for using LexisNexis and WestLaw. They have no idea what goes into a graduate research article. In short, leave the fancy book learnin' to the fancy book learners!

[mantis49]

24. I don't know what is so surprising about this.

How do these ignoramuses think forests survived before human intervention? :mad:

From the article:

In contrast, two years after the fire, Donato's team found abundant natural regrowth on land that had been left alone and far fewer tree seedlings on plots that had been logged. The researchers also found fallen wood from timber operations that could fuel future fires. From this, they concluded that "post-fire logging, by removing naturally seeded conifers and increasing surface fuel loads, can be counterproductive."

[nealmhughes]

26. Read "Change in the Land" by Wm. Cronon.

It is an historical examination of land use from pre-Puritan through early Colonial New England. He shows how fire was used to clear dense timber stands by the First Americans in order to facilitate larger and taller and more widely scattered stands for ease of hunting/travel and as a sidebar, to farm. Then the erradication of these native techniques resulted in the horrid farming techniques on the English model with English colonization. The deforestation of NE was swift and brutal and results in the famous "Rock Farms" of NE today.
Also, does anyone recall the terrible Yellowstone fires about fifteen years ago? It looked like the Western Front in Belgium in WWI after the fires were out. In a year the conifers were beginning to sprout and the NP service took a strict "Hands Off" policy to allow "Nature take her course." Guess what. It worked.

[DBoon]

25. we study reality - they "make" reality

O'Brien silenced him by a movement of his hand. 'We control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull. You will learn by degrees, Winston. There is nothing that we could not do. Invisibility, levitation -- anything. I could float off this floor like a soap bubble if I wish to. I do not wish to, because the Party does not wish it. You must get rid of those nineteenth-century ideas about the laws of Nature. We make the laws of Nature.'

- 1984

[Bjorn Against]

27. Notice how the article buries the actual findings...

and gives the timber industry way more time in attacking the paper than they give others in defending the paper. You have to read three quarters of the way into the article to find a small paragraph discussing the findings that caused the controversy. This article was definately written in a way that would make industry leaders proud.

[Protagoras]

28. If the truth offends you

guess the motto is "suppress it or kill the messenger" these days. But we have a government who thinks global warming is a myth too so none of this should suprise us at this point.

[The Deacon]

29. The REAL Problem I Have

Is all those books I picked up in Yellowstone, written by the Forest Service, which support the conclusions made by this paper. NOW the Forest Service says this is shoddy research? Can I get my money back from the Forest Service for those books? How embarassed I am that I quoted Forest Service research to my friends when I said that it was good to let fires burn, it cleared land for new growth. And when I told my son, sorry the burnt trees in Yellowstone aren't as scenic as they might be - the Forest Service says that research tells them that the forests return more quickly if the burned trees are allowed to stand.
Perfect example of how the GOP twists science to support whatever they want to do.

[leftyclimber]

42. It was the BLM

who pulled his funding. Under the Gale Norton Department of the Interior (one of the multitudinous reasons I'm glad she's decided to become a private-sector world-raper instead of a publicly appointed one). The Forest Service is part of Ag, although I don't know that Mike "March for Jesus Day" Johanns would be much better in this regard if such a study came to pass. JFWIW.

The no-confidence vote results on Salwasser are expected to be made public next week. As an OSU alum, I'm particularly interested to see what the results are. His presence, even prior to the Donato incident, has not been a positive one.

I won't go back there for my Ph.D. unless he's gone, and he was one of the main reasons I didn't stay there for my Master's.

[xchrom]

31. and this is what makes republicans dangerous.

they have no qualms about attacking -- and DOING something about this.

they don't just let it lie -- they mold and shape the reality in the wake of this paper.

they KNOW they are lying -- they KNOW the regulations they want damage teh eniviroment.

in fact they even KNOW that it is better to leave as much land pristine as possible.

but that isn't what they are going to do -- they want money -- money for themselves and other{cronies}.

[Odin2005]

32. I think I'm going to be sick

[The Stranger]

33. Then keep those "rifle shots" coming.

[Trillo]

34. This was one intent of the First Amendment,

the proliferation of science. It dovetails with the limited-time protections offered to inventors and artists.

Simple test: Anyone who attempted to obfuscate the publishing of this data is seeking to undermine the idealistic foundation that so many around the world at one time praised.

[Igel]

36. It says less than everybody thinks it does.

OK, 770+ natural seedlings per hectare two years after the (Biscuit) fire, and most of the dead wood was still standing, so there was less on the ground to burn.

After logging, there were 224 seedings/hectare, and a heck of a lot more branches and chunks of wood around to burn. Of course: loggers and logging equipment would run over seedlings, and downed trees are sort of by definition on the ground.

If the area caught fire, as one reference (from 1993) suggests they do at a certain frequency, the fire's hotter than otherwise would be the case, and there's more damage. And prescribed burning's the usual way of dealing with the debris, even with logging live forests; but the debris may be 'fluffier' and scorch the ground less, dunno. In any event, IIRC, the Biscuit fire was a hot one, because prescribed burnings hadn't been carried out and the underbrush/deadfall had built up. Not that it matters in the general case.

Short term, it looks like logging burned areas is a bad thing. But that's just the short term, a few years at most. And it was before reforestation. So reforestation isn't needed; but presumably logging burned areas reduces the logging of unburned areas.

That complicates matters, however. And it's too bad they didn't log any after the Oxbow fire; the woods there have reached maturity by now and it would've shown what happens longer-term.

[depakid]

37. Oregon State's reputation has suffered over this

People familiar with higher education in Oregon have long known about the shady politics and financing in that department- but now that this has been receiving national press, one suspects some heads might roll.

[jody]

38. Link to the published paper below. Paper is simple and sound.

Post-Wildfire Logging Hinders Regeneration and Increases Fire Risk

"Our data show that postfire logging, by removing naturally
seeded conifers and increasing surface fuel loads, can be
counterproductive to goals of forest regeneration and fuel
reduction. In addition, forest regeneration is not necessarily in
crisis across all burned forest landscapes. The results
presented here suggest that postfire logging may conflict with
ecosystem recovery goals."

[Lisa]

39. Kudos to him for getting a paper published in Science!

To accomplish that, while still a graduate student, is a tremendous thing! It's a very prestigious journal which has a rigorous screening process. I know tenured profs who would be totally thrilled if they could get published in Science ... and most of the people on my campus have never had anything accepted by that journal (let alone as first author!). That would be enough to clinch him a faculty position at most universities, from what I've heard.

His department should be very proud of him. And any administrator or prof who attempts to dump all over this guy ought to be ashamed.

p.s. not to downplay Dr. (or soon-to-be-Dr.?) Donato's work, but it has been known for some time that there are situations in the boreal forest where fire isn't always a good thing. If the burning is very deep and/or extensive, or in areas with vulnerable soils (e.g. along the treeline), it can be detrimental to tree regrowth. This is why the Northwest Territories has reversed its policy on burning of logging slash in some locations. Anyway, congrats to him for what sounds like very interesting and useful research. (Resource companies that whine when scientists learn more about how ecosystems work are forgetting that better understanding is essential, to learn how to be more efficient in the future. For example, if some guy on Vancouver Island has discovered a way to extract more large timber over a half-century than he would have gotten by clear-cutting ... and he still has an intact forest that didn't need replanting ... if they can't figure out that this would help their long-term viability, they evidently don't care about being in business for the long haul.)

[NashVegas]

40. There Are Little Gallileos Running Around All Over the Place

Telling us what we don't want to hear.

[WhiteTara]

46. think of the new industries that can be created

if they ban logging burned forests and force a cut back in logging altogether. We would be forced to be more resourceful and reuse some the the stuff we "through away"... or more appropriately, fill in landfills in the earth.

Recycling could really come of age. Come on entrepreneurs!

Of course, the timber barons only want to cut more trees 'cause that's what they know. sigh.