The Northwest Forest Plan, adopted in 1994, helped quell mounting tensions between timber companies and environmentalists. It protected large swaths of old-growth forest in Washington, Oregon and California to preserve habitat for endangered species, including the Northern spotted owl and marbled murrelet.
While the plan is largely considered a success, researchers and land managers have begun to question whether it adequately protects forests threatened by climate change. Wildfires of increasing strength and severity sweep through Northwest forests every year, both on the east side of the mountains where conditions are drier and in wet mossy western forests.
In a recent study, researchers looked at more than 2,200 fires over several decades to evaluate how wildfire is impacting Northwest Forest Plan lands. They observed a steady uptick in area burned and severity of wildfire in both dry and moist protected forests during the study period.
Federal and state representatives have been in conversation about amending the plan for several years now. A new iteration of the Northwest Forest Plan could lean on more active management, including intentional burning and Indigenous cultural burning, which involves strategically introducing fire to maintain ecosystem health.
UW News asked the study’s lead author, Gina Cova, a UW senior research scientist of environmental and forest sciences, what the new research means for the plan.
Why did you do this study?
Gina Cova: For several years now, people have talked about revisiting the Northwest Forest Plan to incorporate amendments that account for the effects of recent wildfires and climate change. Some of these conversations were inspired by executive orders emphasizing the importance of old-growth forest protections. Others followed new research documenting the effects of climate change across the region.
We’ve seen more fire within the Northwest Forest Plan area, both in dry, fire-prone forests, but also in moist forests that we consider less likely to burn. Those events included a few really high-profile fires, such as the 2020 Holiday Farm Fire that burned close to 175,000 acres in western Oregon and raised questions about land management strategies in this era of climate change. We started to think about evaluating these past fires to inform plan amendments aimed at management strategies to sustain old forests across the region.
What were some of the key takeaways from the study?
GC: A broad theme is that these are dynamic landscapes and they need to be managed as such. We looked at the environmental factors driving burn severity for 2,200 different wildfires and studied the forest patterns resulting from those events. The effects of wildfire in some areas were surprising. For example, we found that high severity fire affected around 60% of pine-oak woodlands in federally protected reserves throughout the eastern Cascades and Klamath regions. These forests are adapted to frequent, low intensity fires. We know that they need fire, but the severity of these fires reflects a long history of fire exclusion — or lack of fire — across the landscape.
What do you mean by a lack of fire? Aren’t we supposed to stop wildfires?
GC: Because enacting changes to management strategies has been difficult to do in practice, parts of the Northwest Forest Plan inadvertently reinforced the idea of preserving a static forest condition. This approach is analogous to drawing a boundary around a forest to prevent disturbance. It is rooted in conservation ideas from the early and mid-20th century, but we know that disturbances — especially fire — are important for forests. So, you get this kind of fire paradox where many of these forests need fire, but the longer they go without it the more devastating it ultimately becomes.
These frequent-fire forests — like pine-oak woodlands and dry mixed conifer forests — can ultimately fare better in a warmer climate, so it is really alarming to see how much dry forest cover we are losing to fire under current management strategies.
What about other forests? How can one plan account for both dry and moist forests?
GC: It’s going to require a bit of creativity, combined with place-based, local approaches. The past three and a half decades have been relatively quiet in terms of fire activity in moist forests west of the Cascade Mountains. However, over the past 10 years, we observed an increase in area burned and area burned at high severity, indicating more loss of forest cover. This trend reflects some of these big fire years that have occurred in the last decade.
It can be harder to predict future wildfire activity in moist forests. When fires do occur, our study documented several occasions where high severity fires affected entire forest reserves. This creates gaps in this network of old forest habitat the plan was designed to create. If recent wildfires have compromised that original goal, how might future management strategies need to adapt? This could look like adjusting the boundaries of existing forest reserves, implementing protections for forests outside of reserves or building flexibility into pre-and post-fire management strategies to protect forests.
How can we keep the plan current when conditions are changing so quickly?
GC: When you manage land with a focus on a single issue, or a limited set of issues, you’re going to run into problems. The plan accounted for the effects of wildfire as it was in 1994, but did not anticipate how wildfire would shift with climate change. We don’t necessarily need to know exactly what the landscape will look like in the future, but we need policies and management strategies that will allow us to adapt to changing and novel conditions.
We have pretty strong evidence that the next century will be warmer and bring more fire. Can we create a plan that incorporates adaptive management to anticipate some of these changes instead of just responding to them as they occur.
Co-authors include Susan Prichard, a UW research scientist and Van R. Kane, a UW research associate professor, both of environmental and forest sciences; Harold Zald of the USDA Forest Service, and William Gaines of the Washington Conservation Science Institute.
This research was partially funded by the USDA Forest Service.
For more information, contact Cova at cova@uw.edu.