Our use of plastics has threatened oceans and the marine biodiversity. But our efforts for plastic cleanup, may well threaten a less-known marine ecosystem. This article was originally published in DW.com
Little is known about the neuston, but marine biologists fear this community of organisms living on the ocean surface could be decimated as nets sweep up plastic pollution.
In May 2017, shells started washing up along the Ligurian coast in Italy. They were small and purple and belonged to a snail called Janthina pallida that is rarely seen on land. But the snails kept coming — so many that entire stretches of the beach turned pastel.
An unusual wind pattern had beached the animals. And for the people who walked the shore, this offered a rare encounter with a wondrous ecosystem that most of us have never heard about: The neuston.
The neuston, from the Greek word for swimming, refers to a group of animals, plants and microorganisms that spend all or large parts of their life floating in the top few centimeters of the ocean.
It’s a mysterious world that even experts still know little about. But recently, it has been the source of tensions between a project trying to clean up the sea by skimming plastic trash off its surface, and marine biologists who say this could destroy the neuston.
A world between worlds
The neuston comprises a multitude of weird and wonderful creatures. Many, like the Portuguese man-of-war, which paralyzes its prey with venomous tentacles up to 30 meters long, are colored an electric shade of blue, possibly to protect themselves against the sun’s UV rays, or as camouflages against predators.
There are also by-the-wind sailors, flattish creatures that raise chitin shields from the water like sails; slugs known as sea dragons that cling to the water’s surface from below with webbed appendages; barnacles that build bubble rafts as big as dinner plates; and the world’s only marine insects, a relation of the pond skater.
Between the Worlds
They live “between the worlds” of the sea and sky, as Federico Betti, a marine biologist at the University of Genoa, puts it. From below, predators lurk. From above, the sun burns. Winds and waves toss them about. Depending on the weather, their environment may be warm or cool, salty or less so.
But now, they face another — manmade — threat from nets designed to catch trash. A project called The Ocean Cleanup, run by Dutch inventor Boyan Slat, has raised millions of dollars in donations and sponsorship to deploy long barriers with nets that will drift across the ocean in open loops to sweep up floating garbage.
Plastic and marine life are moved by currents
“Plastic could outweigh fish in the oceans by 2050. To us, that future is unacceptable,” The Ocean Cleanup declares on its website. But Rebecca Helm, a marine biologist at the University of North Carolina Asheville, and one of the few scientists to study this ecosystem, fears that The Ocean Cleanup’s proposal to remove 90% of the plastic trash from the water could also virtually wipe out the neuston.
One focus of Helm’s studies is where these organisms congregate. “There are places that are very, very concentrated and areas of little concentration, and we’re trying to figure out why,” says Helm. One factor is that the neuston floats with ocean currents, and Helm worries that it might collect in the exact same spots as marine plastic pollution. “Our initial data show that regions with high concentrations of plastic are also regions with high concentrations of life.”
The Ocean Cleanup says Helm’s concerns are based on “misguided assumptions.”
“It’s true that neustonic organisms will be trapped in the barriers,” says Gerhard Herndl, professor of Aquatic Biology at the University of Vienna and one of project’s scientific advisors. “But these organisms have dangerous lives. They’re adapted to high losses because they get washed ashore in storms and they have high reproductive rates. If they didn’t, they’d already be extinct.”
Helm says they just don’t know how quickly these creatures reproduce, and in any case recovering from passing storm is very different from surviving The Ocean Clean Up’s systems which could be in place for years.
Still a lot to learn about the neuston
In December, The Ocean Cleanup and Helm participated in a symposium on the topic hosted by the Institute for Risk and Uncertainty at the University of Liverpool in the UK. Since then, direct communication between them has stopped, says Helm. “They’re not interested in talking to me anymore.”
Both sides agree that much is still unknown about the neuston. But one thing that has been established is that most of the oceans’ fish spend part of their lifecycle in the neuston. “More than 90% of marine fish species produce floating eggs that persist on the surface until hatching,” Betti says.
The Ocean Cleanup has undertaken one of the few studies into this ecosystem, collecting data on the neuston on the relative abundance of neuston and floating plastic debris in the eastern North Pacific Ocean during a 2019 expedition to the Pacific Garbage Patch, an area where plastic pollution has accumulated on a vast scale. But it is not yet sharing what it has found. The information was being prepared for publication in an as of yet unspecified journal, probably some time next year, an Ocean Cleanup spokesperson said.
Is the solution inshore?
Helm believes the best way to tackle the marine plastic problem would be to position the barriers closer to land — across river mouths and bays — to catch garbage before it reaches the sea.
“Stopping the flow of plastic into the ocean is the most cost-effective — and literally effective — way to ensure that it’s not entering our environment,” she says. As for the plastic already floating in open waters, she does not believe it is worth sacrificing parts of neuston and wants to see more research first.
The Ocean Cleanup has made barriers across rivers a part of its mission. But it is also going ahead with its original vision of pulling trash from the open water. In late 2018, the project deployed a 600-meter, u-shaped prototype net into the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
The system ran into difficulties, failing to retain plastic as hoped, and needing to be brought shore for repairs and a design upgrade, after which Ocean Cleanup says it gathered haul of plastic that it will recycle and resell to help fund future operations. Over the next two years, the project hopes to deploy up to 60 such barriers to collect drifting flotsam. Helm isn’t the only one concerned about these plans.
“We should think twice about every action we take in the sea,” Betti says. “In nature, nothing is as easy as we think, and often, we’ve done a lot of damage while trying to do a good thing.”
This article was first published on www.dw.com. You can find the full and original article here:
Godwin Vasanth Bosco reports on extreme precipitation that has fallen on the Nilgiri plateau of southern India the last few years. These extreme and unprecedented rain events have led to massive landslides and other ecological damage. Little has been done to address the crisis. Featured image: A massive landslide in one of the largest sholas in the Avalanche region of the Nilgiris, with hundreds of native trees and the stream ecology washed away.
Crumbling Ancient Mountain Ecology
Written and photographed by Godwin Vasanth Bosco / Down to Earth
Thousands of trees lay dead and strewn around the western parts of the Nilgiri Plateau in southern India.
Deep gashes scar ancient mountains slopes, standing a stark contrast to the lush green vegetation that they otherwise support. As conservationists, activists, and concerned people in various parts of India are fighting to protect forests and wilderness areas from being deforested, mined, and diverted to `developmental’ projects, there is another level of destruction that is happening to our last remaining wild spaces. Climate change is causing the widespread collapse of ecosystems.
Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have just hit record-breaking levels of 417 ppm in May 2020. It has never been so high in the last 3 million years. Along with global warming caused sea-level rise and the melting of polar ice caps and glaciers, the steep increase in greenhouse gas concentrations has led to a surge in the frequency of extreme climate events. A region of the earth where climate change caused weather extremities are exceedingly apparent are the coastal plains and the Western Ghats regions of southern India. In the last four years, this region has been affected by eight tropical cyclones and consecutive extreme rainfall events during the southwest monsoon periods of the last two years.
These bouts of intense storms have been interspersed with periods of severe droughts, heatwaves, deficient, and failed monsoons.
On August 8, 2019, the Avalanche and Emerald valley regions, which are part of the Kundha watershed, received an unprecedented amount of over 900 mm [2.9 feet] of rainfall in 24 hours.
It broke the record for the highest rainfall ever recorded in Tamil Nadu, by nearly twice the amount. Over four days, this region experienced close to 2500 mm [8.2 feet] of rainfall. To put this in perspective, the nearest city (100 km east) in the plains of Tamil Nadu, Coimbatore, receives around 600 mm of rain annually. The Kundha watershed bore a deluge that was four times the annual rainfall amount, over just four days.
The upper watershed of the Kundha River is a complex of several peaks above 2400 meters and broad deep valleys. The Kundha River, which is a primary tributary to the Bhavani that feeds into the Cauvery, is fed by numerous streams and rivulets at the headwater sections.
With the barraging downpour, nearly every stream and rivulet burst its course. Vast tracts of precious soil and shola ecology slipped away on either side of the watercourses. Gone are the rich black soil layers topped with spongy humus that line the streams; washed away are dark moss and wild balsam covered rocks that shaped the flow of every stream; lost are the thousands of shola trees, dwarf bamboo and forest kurinji that guarded the streams, saplings, ferns and orchids of the forest floor. In place of these are deep cuts of gauged out the earth, revealing the red underlying lateritic soil layers, and lightly shaded freshly exposed rocks.
Numerous large landslides have occurred on intact grassland slopes too.
Uprooted and washed away trees, and dead Rhododendron arboreum ssp nilagiricum trees in a broad valley near the Avalanche region.
Native shola trees and stream ecology completely washed away on either side of tributaries of the Kundha River
Shola-grassland mosaic in danger
The cloud forest ecology, known as sholas, is specialized in growing along the folds and valleys of these mountains. They are old-growth vegetation and harbour several endemic and rare species of flora and fauna. These naturally confined forests are already some of the most endangered forest types, because of habitat loss and destruction.
The recent episode of extreme precipitation caused landslides, have dealt a telling blow on these last remaining forest tracts. What is even more shocking is that montane grassland stretches have also experienced large landslides.
The montane grasslands occur over larger portions of the mountains here, covering all the other areas that sholas do not grow in. Together, the shola-grassland mosaic is the most adept at absorbing high rainfall amounts and releasing it slowly throughout the year, giving rise to perennial streams. Over a year they can experience an upwards of 2500 to 5500 mm of rainfall, which is intricately sequestered by complex hydrological anatomy that carefully lets down most of this water, using what is needed to support the ecology upstream.
The native tussock grasses especially are highly adapted to hold the soil strongly together on steep slopes. However, even this ecology is now giving way under pressure from extreme weather events. The shola-grassland mosaic ecology cannot withstand the tremendously high amounts of rainfall (over 2400 mm) that occur in significantly short periods (over 4 days). Worsening climate change is driving the intensity and frequency of extreme weather events, resulting in a level of ecosystem collapse, never witnessed before.
An example of intact shola-grassland mosaic in the hills of the Nilgiri plateau, with the sholas growing in valleys and grasslands covering the slopes.
In the southwest monsoon season of 2018, similar events of unusually high rainfall occurred over the highland districts of Idukki, Wayanad, and Coorg, causing hundreds of landslides. A predominant view was that this was primarily because of the indiscriminate construction of roads and proliferating concretization of the hills.
However, even within the highly stable shola-grassland ecology, a large number of landslides have occurred in spots with no apparent forms of disturbance such as roads and pathways cut through them. This signifies that climate-change has reached a level that is beyond the capacity of the ecosystem and land resilience.
What is causing the collapse of the last remaining wild spaces is the culmination of every action that has contributed to the climate crisis.
These actions invariably stem from places that have long lost their plant ecological cover—urban-industrial-agricultural complex. There is fatally no time to keep ignoring this primary cause. Even if we ignore this and look to safeguard the last remain wilderness areas from being deforested or `developed’, they are vulnerable to climate change-related destruction.
Threats closer to the last remaining ecological spaces must be also curtailed. For instance, despite the consecutive years of extreme precipitation over short periods, in the Nilgiri Biosphere region, there are hardly any steps being taken to address ecological security. Building regulations stand to get eased and road expansion works continue in full swing.
However, worryingly similar to what happened in the last two years when much of the annual rainfall was concentrated over a few days later in the monsoon period, this year too, 2020 has be no different. The onset of the monsoon was delayed, and large parts of peninsula experienced a significant deficiency well into the monsoon period. This year’s monsoon has brought intense, short bursts of extreme rainfall, not only in the Western Ghats regions and southern India, but all across the Indian subcontinent.
Destruction by dams and tunnels
Neela-Kurinji or Strobilanthes kunthiana flowering in the grassland habitats of the Nilgiris. This spectacle takes place only once in 12 years
The Kundha watershed region can be broadly divided into two sections – the higher slopes and the descending valleys. Hundreds of landslides occurred in both these sections, with shola-grassland ecology dominating in the higher slopes, and various types of land-uses such as tea cultivation, vegetable farming, villages and non-native tree plantations dominating the descending valleys. The descending valleys are also studded with several dams and hydroelectric structures.
The Kundha Hydro-Electric Power Scheme is one of the largest hydropower generating installations in Tamil Nadu-with 10 dams, several kilometers of underground tunnels, and a capacity of 585 MW. In addition to this, this system is now getting two more dams and a series of tunnels, to set up large pumped storage hydropower facilities. The claim is to generate 1500 MW, of electricity during peak demand hours, but while using almost 1800 MW in the process.
With the level of destruction that extreme precipitation events are bringing to the Kundha watershed, it is disastrous to add more large dams and tunnels. The intensity of floods has turned so strong that even the largest dam complexes in the world, face threats of being breached.
An Aerides ringens orchid growing on a shola tree.
Safeguarding the last remaining zones of ecology and biodiversity from threats of direct destruction is crucial. Concurrently, the larger world-wide urban-industrial-agricultural complex, from where the climate crisis stems from needs drastic change. The constant incursions into more and more ecological spaces in the form of new dams, roads, and buildings, are also connected to this complex.
Whether it is the landslides in the grasslands of the high elevation plateaus in southern India; the melting glaciers of the Himalayas in northern India; the dying coral and rising sea levels elsewhere in the planet; the global coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic that has brought about unimaginable changes – we have to understand the interconnectedness of these dire effects and learn from nature.
Godwin Vasanth Bosco is an ecologist working to restore shola and grassland ecology in the Nilgiri Biosphere. He is the author of the book Voice of a Sentient Highlandon the Nilgiri Biosphere.
This piece was first published on Down to Earth. All the photographs were taken by the author himself.
Award winning author and veterinary epidemiologist David Waltner-Toews has published seven collections of poetry, one of which includes recipes, a collection of short stories, a murder mystery, six books of popular science, and several texts and manuals on ecosystem approaches to health. From meditations on the origins of feces to elegant terzanelles on the meaning of life, from human diseases we get from other animals, to what food, sex and Salmonella share with each other, DWT celebrates the whole complex mess of life. A University Professor Emeritus at University of Guelph, he was founding president of Veterinarians without Borders–Canada and of the Network for Ecosystem Sustainability and Health, and a founding member of Communities of Practice for Ecosystem Approaches to Health in Canada. He is the recipient of the inaugural award for contributions to ecosystem approaches to health from The International Association for Ecology and Health.
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Editor’s note: The following is the testimony of Dr. Dominick A. DellaSala, Chief Scientist of Geos Institute, Ashland, Oregon, before the U.S. House of Representatives Natural Resources Committee, Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, “Exploring Solutions to Reduce Risks of Catastrophic Wildfire and Improve Resilience of National Forests,” on September 27, 2017.
Chairman Westerman, Ranking member Hanabusa, and subcommittee members, thank you for the opportunity to discuss wildfires on national forests. I am the Chief Scientist of the nonprofit organization, Geos Institute in Ashland, Oregon. Geos Institute works with agencies, landowners, and decision makers in applying the best science to climate change planning and forest management. As a scientist, I have published in peer-reviewed journals on fire ecology and climate change, I am on the editorial board of several leading journals and encyclopedias, and I have been on the faculty of Oregon State University and Southern Oregon University. A recent book I co-authored with 28 other scientists outlined the ecological importance of mixed-severity fires in maintaining fire-resilient ecosystems, including ways to coexist with wildfire (DellaSala and Hanson 2015).
Wildfires are necessary natural disturbance processes that forests need to rejuvenate. Most wildfires in pine and mixed-conifer forests of the West burn in mixed fire intensities at the landscape scale that produce large and small patches of low to high tree mortality. This tapestry of burned patches is associated with extraordinary plant and wildlife diversity, including habitat for many big game and bird species that thrive in the newly established forests. From an ecosystem perspective, natural disturbances like wildfires are not an ecological catastrophe. However, given there are now 46 million homes in naturally fire-prone areas (Rasker 2015), and no end in sight for new development, we must find ways to coexist with natural disturbance processes as they are increasing in places due to climate change.
In my testimony today, I will discuss how proposals that call for increased logging and decreased environmental review in response to wildfires and insect outbreaks are not science driven, in many cases may make problems worse, and will not stem rising wildfire suppression costs. I will also discuss what we know about forest fires and beetle outbreaks in relation to climate change, limitations of thinning and other forms of logging in relation to wildfire and insect management, and I will conclude with recommendations for moving forward based on best available science.
I. WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT RECENT FOREST FIRE INCREASES
Recent increases in acres burned of forests are mainly due to a changing climate – Scientists have known for sometime that fire activity tracks regional weather patterns, which in turn, are governed by global climatic forces such as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO – a recurring long-lived El Niño-like pattern of Pacific climate variability– see chart 1). For instance, the very active fire seasons of the 1910-1930s, occurred during prolonged drought cycles determined by the PDO that resulted in much larger areas burning historically than today (Powell et al. 1994; Interagency Federal Wildland Fire Policy Review Working Group 2001; Egan 2010) (chart 1). In fact, compared to the historic warm PDO phase of the early 1900s, most of the West is actually experiencing a fire deficit (Littell et al. 2009, Parks et al. 2012). However, with warming temperatures, early spring snowmelt, and longer fire seasons over the past few decades more acres are burning each year (Westerling et al. 2006; Littell et al. 2009) (chart 1).
For instance, wildfire season in the West has lengthened from an average of five to seven months, and the number of large wildfires (>1,000 acres) has increased since the 1980s (Dennison et al. 2014) from 140 to 250 per year (UCS 2017). This is occurring as average annual temperature in the West has risen by nearly 2 degrees F since 1970s and winter snow pack has declined (UCS 2017). If measures are not taken to stem greenhouse gas emissions, wildfire acres are projected to increase further in dry areas as annual temperatures are expected to rise another 2.5 to 6.5 degrees F by mid century (UCS 2017). Some researchers estimate more than half of the increase in acres burned over the past several decades is related to climate change (Abatzoglou and Williams 2016). This increase is expected to continue with additional warming leading to even greater suppression costs if the agencies continue to suppress fires across the landscape (Schoennagel et al. 2017).
Increasing Human Development is Lengthening Wildfire Seasons and Adding to Fire Ignitions – The direct role of human-access via roads and development in the Wildlands Urban Interface (WUI) is increasing wildfire activity. Scientists recently evaluated over 1.5 million government records of wildfires nationwide from 1992 to 2012 (Balch et al. 2015). During that time, human-caused fire ignitions have vastly expanded the spatial and seasonal occurrence of fire, accounting for 84 percent of all wildfire starts and 44 percent of the total area burned nationally. We now have the phenomenon of a human-caused fire season, which was three times longer than the lightning-caused fire season and added an average of 40,000 wildfires per year across the US over this 20-year period of time. Ignitions caused by people – whether accidental or arson – have substantial economic costs. This will only worsen with continued development of the WUI adding to the 46 million homes (Rasker 2015) already in these fire-prone areas.
Thus, given expansion of homes in the WUI, the best way to limit damage to homes is to reduce fire risks by working from the home-outward instead of the wildlands-inward (Syphard et al. 2013). For instance, if a fire-brand travels miles ahead and lands on a flammable roof that home is very likely to burn compared to a home that has a fire resistant roof and cleared vegetation within a narrow defensible space of 100-200 feet immediately surrounding the home (Cohen 2000). Logging outside of this narrow zone does not change home ignition factors.
II. WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT FIRE AND FOREST MANAGEMENT
Wilderness and other protected areas are not especially prone to forest fires – proposals to remove environmental protections to increase logging for wildfire concerns based on the assumption that unmanaged – or protected areas – burn more intensely are misplaced. For instance, scientists (Bradley et al. 2016 of which I was a co-author) recently examined the intensity of 1,500 forest fires affecting over 23 million acres during the past four decades in 11 western states. We tested the common perception that forest fires burn hottest (most intensely) in wilderness and national parks while burning cooler (less intensely) or not at all in areas where logging had occurred. What we found was the opposite – fires burned most intense in previously logged areas, while they burned in natural fire mosaic patterns in wilderness, parks, and roadless areas, thereby, maintaining resilient forests (see chart 2). Consequently, there is no reason for reducing environmental protections.
State lands are not at lower wildfire risks compared to federal lands – there is much discussion about whether state lands are being managed in a way that reduces fire occurrence and intensity. However, in a recent report of wildfire risk (that included acres likely to burn), scientists (Zimmerman and Livesay 2017) used the West Wide Wildfire Risk Assessment model, an important assessment tool of the Council of Western State Foresters and Western Forestry Leadership Coalition. They evaluated risk for western states based on historical fire data, topography, vegetation, tree cover, climate, and other factors. According to the Center for Western Priorities analysis, state (22%) and federal (23%) lands have approximately equivalent levels of fire risks in the West, and for some states, risks were higher than federal lands. Notably, allegations of higher fire risk based solely on the number of federal acres burned in a fire season are misleading as there are over 7 times as many federal lands (362 million acres) in 11 Western states as compared to state-owned lands (49 million acres) (Zimmerman and Livesay 2017).
Thinning is Ineffective in Extreme Fire Weather – thinning/logging is most often proposed to reduce fire risk and lower fire intensity. Thinning-from-below of small diameter trees followed by prescribed fire in certain forest types can reduce fire severity (Brown et al. 2004, Kalies and Kent 2016) but only when there is not extreme fire weather (Moritz et al. 2014, Schoennagel et al. 2017). Fires occurring during extreme fire-weather (high winds, high temperatures, low humidity, low fuel moisture) will burn over large landscapes, regardless of thinning, and in some cases can burn hundreds or thousands of acres in just a few days (Stephens et al. 2015, Schoennagel et al. 2017). Fires driven by fire weather are unstoppable and are unsafe for fire fighters to attempt putting them out, and, as discussed, are more likely under a changing climate.
Further, there is a very low probability of a thinned site actually encountering a fire during the narrow window when tree density is lowest. For example, the probability of a fire hitting an area that has been thinned is about 3-8% on average, and thinning would need to be repeated every 10-15 years (depending on site productivity) to keep fuels at a minimum (Rhodes and Baker 2008).
Thinning too much of the overstory trees in a stand, especially removal of large fire-resistant trees, can increase the rate of fire spread by opening tree canopies and letting in more wind, can damage soils, introduce invasive species that increase flammable understory fuels, and impact wildlife habitat (Brown et al. 2004). Thinning also requires an extensive and expensive roads network that can degrade water quality by altering hydrological functions, including chronic sediment loads.
Post-disturbance salvage logging reduces forest resilience and can raise fire hazards –commonly practiced after natural disturbances like fires or insect outbreaks, post-disturbance logging hinders forest resilience by compacting soils, killing natural regeneration of conifer seedlings and shrubs associated with forest renewal, increasing fine fuels from slash left on the ground that aids the spread of fire, removing the most fire-resistant large live and dead trees, and degrading fish and wildlife habitat. Further roads that increase sediment flow to streams triggering widespread water quality problems (Lindenmayer et al. 2008).
III. WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT BEETLE-KILLED FORESTS AND FOREST MANAGEMENT
Beetle Killed Forests are Not More Susceptible to Forest Fires – forests in the West are being affected by the largest outbreaks of bark beetles in decades, which has caused concern about forest resilience and wildfire risk and led to proposals for widespread tree removals. Such proposals stem in part from the rationale that bark beetle outbreaks increase wildfire risks due to dead trees and that logging in beetle-affected forests would therefore lower such risks. However, beetle-killed forests are not more susceptible to forest fires (Bond et al. 2009, Hart et al. 2015, Meigs et al. 2016). This is mainly because when conifers die due to drought or native bark beetles, the combustible oils in the needles quickly begin to dissipate, needles and small twigs begin to fall to the ground. Without the fine fuels that facilitate fire spread, potential crown fires are actually lowered in forests with beetle mortality (Donato et al. 2013). The beetle-killed standing dead trees (snags) are the least flammable part of the forest and act more like a large log in a campfire, rather than kindling which is what causes fire spread.
In fact, studies of beetle-killed forests in the West found that when fires occurred during or immediately after the pulse of snag recruitment from beetle kill, fire severity consistently declined in the stands with high snag densities in the following decades (Meigs et al. 2016). In pine and mixed-conifer forests of the San Bernardino National Forest (CA), fires occurred immediately after a large pulse of snag recruitment from drought and beetles. However, scientists (Bond et al. 2009) found “no evidence that pre-fire tree mortality influenced fire severity.” In studies of beetles and wildfires across the western U.S., scientists (Hart et al. 2015) stated “contrary to the expectation of increased wildfire activity in recently infested red-stage stands, we found no difference between observed area and expected area burned in red-stage or subsequent gray-stage stands during three peak years of wildfire activity, which account for 46 percent of area burned during the 2002–2013 period.” And finally, in a comprehensive review of fire-beetle relations in mixed-conifer and ponderosa pine forests of the Pacific Northwest, scientists (Meigs et al. 2016) found: “in contrast to common assumptions of positive feedbacks, we find that insects generally reduce the severity of subsequent wildfires. Specific effects vary with insect type and timing, but insects decrease the abundance of live vegetation susceptible to wildfire at multiple time lags. By dampening subsequent burn severity, native insects could buffer rather than exacerbate fire regime changes expected due to land use and climate change.”
Most importantly, climate change is allowing more insects to survive the winter, triggering the rash of recent outbreaks (Meigs et al. 2016).
Thinning cannot limit or contain beetle outbreaks – once beetle populations reach widespread epidemic levels, thinning treatments aimed at stopping them do not reduce outbreak susceptibility as beetles over run natural forest defenses with or without thinning (Black et al. 2013).
IV. CLOSING REMARKS AND RECOMMENDATIONS
In sum,
Recent increases in wildfires and insect outbreaks are a result of a changing climate coupled with human-activities including expansion of homes and roads into the WUI that will only continue to drive up fire suppression costs.
Policies should be examined that discourage continued growth in the WUI; any new development must include defensible space and construction from non-flammable materials.
The most effective way to protect homes is to create defensible space in the immediate 100 feet of a structure and use of non-flammable materials. Wildland fire policy should fund defensible space, not more logging and thinning miles away from communities.
No amount of logging can stop insect outbreaks or large fires under extreme fire weather. Logging may, in fact, increase the amount of unnatural disturbances by homogenizing landscapes with more even aged trees, residual slash left on the ground, and compounding cumulative impacts to ecosystems.
Thinning of small trees in certain forest types, maintaining canopy closure and in combination with prescribed fire can reduce fire intensity but treatment efficacy is limited in extreme fire weather, and by the small chance that a thinned site will encounter a fire during a very narrow window when fuels are lowest.
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Featured image: Caleen Sisk, Chief and Spiritual Leader of the Winnemem Wintu Tribe, speaks at the Oil Money Out, People Power In rally in Sacramento on May 20. Photo by Dan Bacher.
On August 17, a California Indian Tribe, two fishing groups, and two environmental organizations joined a growing number of organizations, cities and counties suing the Jerry Brown and Donald Trump administrations to block the construction of the Delta Tunnels.
The Winnemem Wintu Tribe, North Coast Rivers Alliance (NCRA), Institute for Fisheries Resources (IFR), Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations (PCFFA) and the San Francisco Crab Boat Owners Association filed suit against the California Department of Water Resources (DWR) in Sacramento Superior Court to overturn DWR’s approval of the Twin Tunnels, also know as the California WaterFix Project, on July 21, 2017
”The Winnemem Wintu Tribe has lived on the banks of the McCloud River for thousands of years and our culture is centered on protection and careful, sustainable use of its salmon,” said Caleen Sisk, Chief of the Winnemem Wintu Tribe near Mt. Shasta. “Our salmon were stolen from us when Shasta Dam was built in 1944. “
”Since that dark time, we have worked tirelessly to restore this vital salmon run through construction of a fishway around Shasta Dam connecting the Sacramento River to its upper tributaries including the McCloud River. The Twin Tunnels and its companion proposal to raise Shasta Dam by 18 feet would push the remaining salmon runs toward extinction and inundate our ancestral and sacred homeland along the McCloud River,” Chief Sisk stated.
The Trump and Brown administrations and project proponents claim the tunnels would fulfill the “coequal goals” of water supply reliability and ecosystem restoration, but opponents point out that project would create no new water while hastening the extinction of winter-run Chinook salmon, Central Valley steelhead, Delta and longfin smelt, green sturgeon and other imperiled fish species
The project would also imperil the salmon and steelhead populations on the Trinity and Klamath rivers that have played a central role in the culture, religion and livelihood of the Yurok, Karuk and Hoopa Valley Tribes for thousands of years.
The tunnels would divert 9,000 cubic feet per second of water from the Sacramento River near Clarksburg and transport it 35 miles via two tunnels 40-feet in diameter for export to San Joaquin Valley agribusiness interests and Southern California, according to lawsuit documents. The project would divert approximately 6.5 million acre-feet of water per year, a quantity sufficient to flood the entire state of Rhode Island under nearly 7 feet of water.
The groups pointed out that this “staggering” quantity of water – equal to most of the Sacramento River’s flow during the summer and fall – would “exacerbate the Delta’s severe ecological decline,” pushing several imperiled species of salmon and steelhead closer to extinction.
Stephan Volker, attorney for the Tribe and organizations, filed the suit. The suit alleges that DWR’s approval of the California WaterFix Project and certification of its Environmental Impact Report violates the California Environmental Quality Act (“CEQA”), the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta Reform Act of 2009, and the Public Trust Doctrine.
“The Public Trust Doctrine protects the Delta’s imperiled fish and wildlife from avoidable harm whenever it is feasible to do so,” according to lawsuit documents. “Contrary to this mandate, the Project proposes unsustainable increases in Delta exports that will needlessly harm public trust resources, and its FEIR dismisses from consideration feasible alternatives and mitigation measures that would protect and restore the Delta’s ecological functions. Because the Project sacrifices rather than saves the Delta’s fish and wildlife, it violates the Public Trust Doctrine.”
Representatives of the fishing and environmental groups explained their reasons for filing the lawsuit.
“The…Twin Tunnels is a hugely expensive boondoggle that could pound the final nail in the coffin of Northern California’s salmon and steelhead fishery,” stated Noah Oppenheim, Executive Director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations (PCFFA). “There is still time to protect these declining stocks from extinction, but taking more water from their habitat will make matters far worse.”
Larry Collins, President of the San Francisco Crab Boat Owners Association, stated, “Our organization of small, family-owned fishing boats has been engaged in the sustainable harvest of salmon and other commercial fisheries for over 100 years. By diverting most of the Sacramento River’s flow away from the Delta and San Francisco Bay, the Twin Tunnels would deliver a mortal blow to our industry and way of life.”
Frank Egger, President of the North Coast Rivers Alliance, stated that “the imperiled salmon and steelhead of the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers are one of Northern California’s most precious natural resources. They must not be squandered so that Southern California can avoid taking the water conservation measures that many of us adopted decades ago.”
Chief Sisk summed up the folly of Brown’s “legacy project,” the Delta Tunnels, at her speech at the “March for Science” on Earth Day 2017 before a crowd of 15,000 people at the State Capitol in Sacramento.
“The California Water Fix is the biggest water problem, the most devastating project, that Californians have ever faced,” said Chief Sisk. “Just ask the people in the farmworker communities of Seville and Alpaugh, where they can’t drink clean water from the tap.”
“The twin tunnels won’t fix this problem. All this project does is channel Delta water to water brokers at prices the people in the towns can’t afford,” she stated.
The lawsuit filed by Volkers joins an avalanche of lawsuits against the Delta Tunnels. Sacramento, San Joaquin and Butte Counties have already filed lawsuits against the California WaterFix — and more lawsuits are expected to join these on Monday, August 21.
On June 29, fishing and environmental groups filed two lawsuits challenging the Trump administration’s biological opinions permitting the construction of the controversial Delta Tunnels.
Four groups — the Golden Gate Salmon Association (GGSA), the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), Defenders of Wildlife, and the Bay Institute — charged the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Marine Fisheries Service for violating the Endangered Species (ESA), a landmark federal law that projects endangered salmon, steelhead, Delta and longfin smelt and other fish species. The lawsuits said the biological opinions are “arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion.”
On June 26, the Trump administration released a no-jeopardy finding in their biological opinions regarding the construction of the Delta Tunnels, claiming that the California WaterFix “will not jeopardize threatened or endangered species or adversely modify their critical habitat.” The biological opinions are available here: www.fws.gov/…
Over the past few weeks, the Brown administration has incurred the wrath of environmental justice advocates, conservationists and increasing numbers of Californians by ramrodding Big Oil’s environmentally unjust cap-and-trade bill, AB 398, through the legislature; approving the reopening of the dangerous SoCalGas natural gas storage facility at Porter Ranch; green lighting the flawed EIS/EIR documents permitting the construction of the California WaterFix; and issuing a “take” permit to kill endangered salmon and Delta smelt in the Delta Tunnels.
