Timberati » Forestry

New Forests Company announces suspension of tree planting in Uganda

Timberati — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 21:07:17 +0000

Mubende in 2007. (Image via Wikipedia)

British New Forests Company (NFC) has announced that it has suspended tree planting in Uganda for 2012. The company says that will “result in 560 job losses in the Mubende, Kiboga, Kyankwanzi and Bugiri districts.”

The decision to suspend planting and lay off workers follows the outcry caused by an Oxfam report released September 2011 attacking the eviction of “illegal squatters” by the Ugandan government from NFC’s plantations.

The UK based New Forests Company is the biggest forestry company in Uganda and one of the biggest foreign investors in Uganda’s agri-business sector. The company has planted 27,000 acres (42 square miles) of pine and eucalyptus trees in Mubende, Kiboga and Bugiri districts and has invested more than $23m in Uganda since 2005.

Julian Ozanne, chief executive of NFC said in a media release, “Having planted millions of trees every year for the past six years and led the creation of a modern Ugandan forestry industry, we are very sad to have to suspend planting and lay off workers, forcing people back into poverty. Job creation is critical to poverty alleviation in Uganda and losing jobs is a negative development for Uganda economic growth. We very much regret this but have been put in a position where we had no alternative.”

For its part, Oxfam is calling on NFC and its investors to investigate the events in Kiboga and Mubende, make its findings public, and pay compensation and damages to the affected villagers.

NFC hopes to resume planting next year if they receive a favorable outcome in the International Finance Corporation mediation process.

Preserving California’s old growth

Timberati — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 08:00:52 +0000

On Wednesday you read that private landowners conduct the majority of timber harvesting in California. This is due to the de facto moratorium placed on timber harvesting within national forests (state and national parks do not allow harvesting except for reasons of public safety). And, perhaps you wondered if old-growth timber could be removed. Well, fear not. National and State governments own, and have placed 99.5 percent of California’s 2.56 million acres of old-growth timber in California off-limits to any harvesting.

Nat'l and state govts hold 99.5% of old-growth. Source: USDA Forest Service, "Area of old-growth forests in California, Oregon, and Washington" by Bolsinger and Waddell

If California’s timber industry falls, will anyone hear it?

Timberati — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 03:37:56 +0000

Lands owned by state and federal government now contribute little to California’s wood supply (see the graphic below). Private landowners (the green area) now carry nearly all the burden for California’s timber harvesting and its wood demand. (Source: California Forestry Association CA Timber Harvest Statistics 1978-2009.)

As previously noted on this site:

Our California forests have the capacity to produce all the wood we need and export some as well, yet we import 75% of our wood. You can bet the wood we import wasn’t harvested under restrictions as comprehensive as those within California’s Forest Practices Act. Did any of the harvests have a Timber Harvesting Plan that took water and wildlife into consideration?

And just how much wood do we Californians consume? According to a paper published by the University of California at Berkeley, Californians used somewhere around 8.5-9 billion board-feet in 1999. Given that CA’s consumption grew by ~3 to 4 BBF from 1990 to 1999, we may currently consume 11-12 BBF. How much do we harvest in California? According to data from the California Forestry Association, about 1.6 BBF, i.e., about 15 percent of what we use, leaving 85 percent to come from other places.

Forest Owners to EPA: Massachusetts made wrong choice

Timberati — Fri, 06 May 2011 16:35:18 +0000

The National Alliance of Forest Owners (NAFO) recommended to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that they defer the regulation of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from biomass for three years. the EPA is considering regulating biomass energy the same as fossil fuels. David P. Tenny, President and CEO of NAFO, underscored NAFO’s desire for the EPA to conduct comprehensive reviews of the science and policy, “This week, Massachusetts issued proposed regulations that effectively shut the door on renewable biomass energy in that state. This appears to be what officials wanted when they initiated a study on biomass energy that limited the area and timeframe considered in a way that significantly skewed the outcome. The flawed study resulted in a flawed policy. EPA can learn from the unfortunate outcome in Massachusetts to put in place an even-handed review.”

Tenny noted that EPA’s review is more a question of policy than science, “The science is really a settled question – the cycle of biogenic carbon is biology 101. Carbon released from biomass energy is replaced in real time through continued forest growth without increasing overall carbon in the atmosphere. The question EPA must answer is how policy can best apply this science to meet our renewable energy needs and reduce unrecyclable fossil fuel carbon emissions. Unlike Massachusetts, we are hopeful that EPA will conduct a review of policy options free of arbitrary assumptions or parameters that skew well settled science.”

NAFO’s comments to the EPA provide answers with supporting science to the policy questions EPA must answer:

* Forest carbon is most accurately measured on a national scale over a continuous timeframe rather than applying arbitrary time and space limitations on carbon measurement

* Because forests remove more carbon from the atmosphere than they release through natural and human activities, biomass energy emissions don’t increase carbon in the atmosphere and should be excluded from GHG regulations for stationary sources

* EPA should not impose a regulatory “baseline” or “business-as-usual” requirement on forest carbon that would compel forest owners to continually increase the carbon stored in individual forest tracts.

Tenny reminded the EPA that NAFO, “stands ready to work with the Agency to establish a policy recognizing the full carbon and landscape benefits of forest biomass as an energy source.”

NAFO’s comments were submitted as part of the public comments for the proposed rule entitled, “Deferral for CO2 emissions from Bioenergy and Other Biogenic Sources under the Prevention of Significant Deterioration and Title V Programs.” NAFO full comments on this rule and the Call for Information are available on their website.

Trees ain’t thermometers

Timberati — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 08:00:56 +0000

I used to work on Mountain Home State Forest in the southern Sierra. MHSF has about 3000 specimen-sized sequoia within its boundaries. Dendrochronolgists often visited to see the stumps from logging in the mid to late 1800s. These were often over 2000 years old when they had been cut.

The Dendrochronolgists were interested in the tree-ring patterns. Trees grow fast or slow in response to many factors and these seasonal factors (light, water, nutrients) created ring signatures or patterns. Certain years might have been favorable for growth with plentiful water, light and nutrients (each favorable year would be marked a large, wide ring) and certain years might have had poor conditions for growth–drought, late spring conditions, early winter–marked by thin (in some cases–microscopic) rings. In general, the wider the ring the more favorable the growing season, the narrower the ring the poor the growing conditions. These ring patterns can be distinctive and can be used to date archeological sites (where wood is present).

Oxford’s Tree-ring Laboratory put it this way:

The way dendrochronology works is relatively simple. As a tree grows, it puts on a new growth or tree-ring every year, just under the bark. Trees grow, and put on tree-rings, at different rates according to the weather in any given year: a wider ring in a favourable year and a narrower ring in an unfavourable year. Thus, over a long period of time (say 60 years or more) there will be a corresponding sequence of tree-rings giving a pattern of wider and narrower rings which reflect droughts, cold summers, etc. In effect, the span of years during which a tree has lived will be represented by a unique fingerprint, which can be detected in other geographically-similar tree-ring chronologies.

Using tree rings as a proxy for temperature however is fraught with caveats and pitfalls.

Mike D.‘s of the Western Institute for Study of the Environment comment (on William M. Briggs’ blog) about using tree ring data as proxies for temperature is an excellent explanation of the problems of using tree ring growth for temperature. He starts with how tree rings are laid down:

Diameter growth on any tree is theoretically a sigmoid growth function. No tree puts on constant radial growth year after year. Trees grow by adding a layer of new wood at the cambium, under the bark. Each year a larger surface area is added. If growth is constant, the rings get narrower. But growth is never constant. There is significant deviation from ideal (model) sigmoid diameter growth in individual trees regardless of the weather. Even when sigmoid growth models are used, the natural variation adds statistical error.

Two sigmoid curves. The taller is the period annual increment for cubic feet; the lower smoother S curve is for mean annual increment of cubic feet.

So as the diameter expands, the amount of material put on would need to be more if the ring’s width was to stay the same as the previous season. Think of a clay disk that you add the same amount of clay to in successive rings. The volume of clay would be the same but the thickness of each new ring would decrease. The ring growth is S-shaped (sigmoid) because initially the tree has little foliage for photosynthesis and often puts its initial years into root development for survival. Then once roots are deep enough the tree puts its growth into height and width.

He then points out that tree-to-tree competition for light, water, and nutrients also affects the ring growth:

Dense stands exhibit narrow rings on individual trees, sparser stands may have wider ring growth, yet both stands may have equivalent gross growth. That’s why only open-grown trees are supposed to be selected for ring studies. But nobody knows what the tree density surrounding an individual tree was 100, 200, 500 years ago. Competitors could have arisen and died without leaving evidence of their presence so long ago. More error.

Besides competition, disease and injury can affect growth.

Trees can sustain injuries that affect growth, such as top and branch damage, that are difficult to detect 200 years later, especially a few feet off the ground where the rings are sampled. There are very few pristine, undamaged trees. I know, having searched for such across broad acreages. Open grown trees at high elevations are always damaged. A heavy winter snow can snap off branches and the tree will exhibit reduced diameter growth for a few years, even if growing season conditions are ideal.

This makes using tree ring data as stand-ins for temperature problematic.

Ring width has all but been abandoned as a temperature proxy. Instead, the latest technique is sampling rings for O18 ratios, under the assumption that O18 varies with temperature. Regardless of the ring width, the O18 ratio is supposed to have recorded growing season temperature. But that theory is fuzzy and mushy, and O18 ratios in living trees correlate very poorly with known growing season temperatures. In other words, it calibrates with much error at best.

Trees are not thermometers, but even thermometers have some serious measurement error problems.

Tree ring studies are a fad akin to phrenology and other discredited pseudosciences that has not dissipated as it should have decades ago.