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Among the 16 national forests of the North … Among the 16 national forests of the Northwest region, the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest (OWNF) is a large and diverse area, encompassing over 4-million acres (16187 Km2) in Washington state, which extends from North to South along 180 miles (290 Km) from the Canadian border to the Goat Rocks Wilderness, in the Northwest region of USA.
For at least 20 years, scientists and managers associated with the OWNF have understood that the forest has become more susceptible to uncharacteristic severe fires and to epidemic levels of insects and disease than the historical norm. Moreover, the characteristic habitats of the late-successional forests are declining (large and old trees, that are the basis of many wildlife habitats, are few in number). In addition infrastructure, as the forest’s road network, affects the conditions of aquatic ecosystems and are expensive to maintain (USDA FS, 2010). The need for a restoration strategy is reinforced by expected climate change, another stressor on the sustainability and resiliency of the forest.
An initial dry forest restoration strategy was developed in 2000. It included practices such as thinning uncharacteristically dense stands of trees, and using controlled burning to remove small trees and shrubs that contribute to large and severe fires. In 2009, a new phase of the restoration strategy began thanks to the knowledge gained from the experience gathered during more than one decade and thanks to the new science findings relative to the landscape evaluation and road network evaluation.
A team of 11 resource specialists (interdisciplinary team, ID team) undertook the revision of the strategy. One of the team members, a scientist at the USDA Forest Service Wenatchee Forestry Sciences Laboratory, championed use of the Ecosystem Management Decision Support tool (EMDS) for analysis and planning related to the new forest restoration strategy. The restoration strategy consists of two main stages, 1) the landscape evaluation (What is the state of the system?) and 2) the planning phase (What are reasonable responses to address the problems revealed from the evaluation stage?). EMDS was explicitly designed to support these two stages of planning, which allowed results from the assessment to be easily passed to the planning stage.
While the restoration strategy considers the whole forest, restoration activities are planned and executed at the scale of subunits called “districts.” Each district is still quite large, so potential restoration activities need to be strategically located. EMDS was used to do landscape evaluations at the scale of 30-50,000 ha and then to locate high priority potential landscape treatment areas (PLTAs) within these landscapes. In this way, each assessment was able to support multiple projects and provide justification for the choice of treatment areas (USDA FS, 2010). The EMDS leads began with a pilot project to develop the restoration plan of a dry forest landscape on the Naches Ranger District. They are now building on this experience to bring the process to other districts.
One of the most difficult problems related to implementation of the restoration strategy is the integration of the diverse data. The interpretation of the interactions among vegetation, wildlife habitats, aquatics, and disturbances (fire and road network) can be done by using specific tools at landscape scale but the description, analysis and quantification of the interactions among the single species and the changes within the forest communities or disturbances phenomena is much more limited (USDA FS, 2010). Moreover, the determination of the strategic placement of treatments have to take in consideration the risk to human communities and the sustainability of habitat for federal listed species. EMDS was used to integrate the results from vegetation pattern analysis, the fire movement modeling, wildlife habitats, aquatic-road interactions and the road network evaluation.eractions and the road network evaluation. +
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