Guest Viewpoint: Biscuit fire salvage will harm forest

As scientists with extensive experience in forest ecology and direct knowledge of the Siskiyou region both before and after the Biscuit fire, we are troubled by the misrepresentation of science by Sen. Gordon Smith in his Sept. 19 guest viewpoint.

The senator proposes legislation that would mandate widespread salvage logging and tree planting on the Biscuit. We believe this bill would forever change a landscape considered to be the Yellowstone of the West Coast.

The Biscuit fire burned through the Siskiyou Wild Rivers area of Southwest Oregon, home to an astonishing array of rare plants, wild salmon and the largest expanse of unprotected roadless areas along the Pacific Coast. For thousands of years, fire has shaped the region's unique ecology.

Smith calls the post-fire landscape a "moonscape," and tells us that only logging and tree planting can transform burned areas to green forests.

The wasteland image was broadly placed in Americans' minds another time - after the Yellowstone fires of 1988. Yellowstone was never salvaged, never planted and never treated with chemicals; the forest has recovered.

The Biscuit is recovering rapidly, too, although the two forests are quite different. Such regional differences are what ecologists warn against in making the kind of apples-to-oranges comparisons Smith evokes when linking the Biscuit to another high-profile Oregon fire, the Tillamook forest.

The Tillamook is a coastal, temperate rain forest where trees grow much faster and fire is infrequent. The Biscuit is drier, and tree farms have a history of failure due to more severe climate, recurring fires and thinner soils. Widespread tree planting is unwise there; it would disrupt native plant communities fine-tuned by nature for quick recovery after fire.

Also rarely mentioned: Fires do not typically burn within the entire perimeter with the same intensity. In fact, agency assessments show that the vegetation on 150,000 acres (30 percent) within the Biscuit burn perimeter experienced little or no change.

The pockets of live trees, as well as the dead standing trees remaining after fire, form what ecologists call "biological legacies," seed banks and soil anchors that aid fire recovery. The contention that managers must intervene or be left with thickets of shrubs where large conifers once stood is a gross exaggeration.

Many of these woody shrubs create the conditions needed for conifer establishment by enriching the soil through release of nitrogen from their roots. In most cases, controlling woody shrubs to speed the regeneration of densely planted conifers is not only ecologically unsound, but also totally unnecessary to restore old growth. Furthermore, these practices are risky business - research shows that tree plantations burn more severely than natural forests.

The existing post-fire management plan has been characterized as modest; salvage logging is planned for only 4 percent of the area. But more than 370 million board feet is anything but modest; only 18 million board feet typically was logged annually on the Siskiyou National Forest before the fire. The effort would be one of the largest combined timber sales in U.S. history, with more than 80 percent of the volume coming from old-growth reserves and roadless areas.

To suggest that environmental lawyers are impeding widespread scientific opinion also misstates the facts. Many scientists both inside and outside federal agencies have expressed legitimate concern about the scientific flaws in the Biscuit plan, but their comments have been largely ignored.

Let's be clear: No scientific evidence supports the position that salvage logging benefits forest ecosystem health. In fact, existing studies show that such activities virtually always damage recovering soils, native plants and salmon. Salvage has everything to do with economics for a few, and little or nothing to do with forest health.

It is time for a real public debate about post-fire management on public lands. Smith should heed lessons learned from 35 years of fire science: Haste often makes ecological waste.

Our duty is not to streamline the system so a few profit from wildfire, as the senator proposes. Our duty is to ensure the long-term sustainability and health of Oregon forests guided by sound science.