The U.S. Forest Service has been conducting training for their own burned area emergency rehabilitation (BAER) team leaders every year or so since 1992. This past May the 3-day course held in Sparks, Nevada, was opened up to attendees from other, mainly federal, agencies. It also took advantage of expertise from the National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management and a local fire District in California.
After introductory topics on authorities and policy, the session focused on techniques - first those associated with repairing fire suppression damage, then with watershed treatments. The latter included upland, in-channel, and road and trail fixes. There was a day long field trip, then wrap-up topics covering public affairs, fund-tracking, and monitoring.
Sue Fritzke of the Park Service wowed the audience with impressive illustrations of suppression damage repair. The Park Service has MIST guidelines, a pleasing acronym for Minimum Impact Suppression Techniques. One practice is to keep a bucket moving during aerial bucket drops to minimize erosion. Yosemite Park practices total recontouring of firelines vs. constructing the ubiquitous waterbars found elsewhere. And they do not seed because of problems with exotic invaders. Instead, they favor sediment catchment structures lower down in the watershed. The Park Service emphasis, which she stressed, is on naturally functioning ecosystems over protection of property - even of human life. This is in contrast to other land management agencies' policies such as the Forest Service emphasis on upslope treatment first. This typically means seeding wherever necessary to prevent soil loss. This distinction was highlighted later in the channel storage presentation by Robbie Van de Water, who noted that catchment structures are a treatment of last resort per Forest Service policy. She showed examples of different types of structures from all over California, then outlined the rationale for prescribing each structure. She discussed costs of construction, maintenance and reclamation, and weighing environmental costs with benefits.
The traditional upslope treatment strategy was demonstrated by Steve Howe's talk on aerial seeding. Steve, who is from the Northwest Region of the Forest Service, is among the most experienced team leaders on large BAER seeding operations. He had lots of examples, and lots of do's and don'ts. He touched on the current trend toward the use of cultivars such as winter wheat and Regreen to get away from the long term effect of seeding exotics, and how critical seed purity is. A war story he shared was star-thistle contamination of an aerial seed mix applied over Hell's Canyon National Recreation Area on the Oregon-Idaho border. It eventually cost the taxpayer around a million dollars to eradicate the star thistle. Afterward, Steve had over a dozen questions from the audience about native seeding, which the next speaker largely answered.
Jim Johannson, who is with the BLM in Boise, Idaho, gave an excellent presentation on vegetation management. He manages the BLM's national seed cache, and has been using native grasses and forbs for over a decade. He emphasized that the guidance for when to use natives vs. exotics comes from the applicable land management plan. Most of the BLM plans have called for using natives. The biggest issue he sees for burned watershed recovery is the ability of native vegetation communities to survive noxious weed competition. This is especially true where annual rainfall is less than 10', as cheatgrass invariably moves in. Still, Jim feels that land managers too often underestimate the resiliency of native plants, and want to seed to 'play it safe'. The second half of Jim's talk was on everything you would ever want to know about rangeland drilling techniques for revegetation.
Annetta Mankin from the Shasta-Trinity National Forests gave a comprehensive series of talks on upslope and in-channel treatments, covering lots of design criteria, logistics and costs. She then led a full-day tour of two restored burn areas near Reno; on the Toiyabe National Forest and on BLM land, to illustrate and evaluate many of the treatments she had presented.
A number of speakers emphasized how critical it is to gather baseline information as soon as possible. Max Copenhagen, who heads the FS burn rehab program in Washington DC, explained the new interagency national policy which, among other things, authorizes expenditure of BAER funds for effectiveness monitoring. Leah Juarros, from the Boise NF, gave a convincing presentation on how monitoring is achievable by spelling it out through her main points. She touched on minimum monitoring to consider, including social considerations; the need to request funds in the BAER report; the three types of monitoring: implementation, effectiveness and validation (and that the latter is probably not eligible for BAER funding) and why the objective of all monitoring should be adaptive management.
Probably the most controversial presentation was by Cavan Maloney, Boise NF, on the combined FS-BLM efforts following the fires above the city of Boise. The area was on steep, weathered granitic slopes. The treatments, including hand-dug 'cup trenches'; tractor built contour trenches; and contour ripping of 4' wide swaths, were the subject of a field trip the last day of the WMC conference in Boise last fall. (See sidebar on monitoring by Jan Wessman's team.)
Organizers Gary Schmidt (Sequoia and Sierra NFs) and Wayne Patton (Boise NF) not only recruited participants from across the US, but worked with the FS International Forestry Program Director Jan Engert to bring land managers up from Mexico. This delegation was from FONDO, which is a Mexican national park/nature conservancy agency which is part of the Mexican Environment, Natural Resources and Fishery Agency (SEMARNAP). FONDO represents around a dozen biosphere reserves throughout the country which are each grappling with different challenges stemming from wildfire made more extreme by recent climatic events such as El Niño. The group was able to interact with presenters and others via volunteer translators and a couple of topnotch professional interpreters.
