New rumbling over salvage logging

GRANTS PASS, Ore. — Oregon State University scientists who tried to delay publication of a study that found logging after wildfires both delayed forest recovery and increased the risk of future fires said Monday they were following their code of ethics and trying to clarify the findings.

In peer-reviewed papers to be published in the Aug. 4 edition of Science, researchers from OSU and the U.S. Forest Service criticized the original study on areas burned in the 2002 Biscuit fire as lacking context and supporting information. "I hope the record is clearer now on why we did what we did," Mike Newton, OSU professor emeritus of forest ecology, said from Corvallis. "We were following our professional code of ethics and attempting to instill rigor" in the findings of the original study.

The brief description of the study as it was originally published, "left the reader, whether it be the public or the policy makers or the land managers, vulnerable to misinterpreting the results that the scientist found," Steve Tesch, head of OSU's Forest Engineering Department, said from a conference in Idaho. The authors of the original study published in January, OSU graduate student Daniel Donato, Forest Service researcher Boone Kauffman and others, defended their work with an expanded explanation.

Their study found that two and three years after the fire, naturally sprouting seedlings were plentiful, and logging the dead trees killed as many as 71 percent of the seedlings. Logging also left more fuel on the ground for future fires unless it was burned off.

The conclusions were supported by independent statistical evaluations, and the rebuttals "provide no compelling evidence to refute our findings," they wrote.

"We are pleased that they eventually chose this proper form for scientific discourse," Donato said from Corvallis. "It gets peer-reviewed, our response gets peer-reviewed, and we get to respond to all their perspectives."

The millions of acres of national forests that burn every year, particularly the site of the Biscuit fire where the Donato study was conducted, have been a political and scientific battleground.

Conservationists and some prominent forest scientists have said that salvage logging can be justified only on economic grounds, and does not help forests ecologically.

The timber industry and other scientists argue that logging the dead trees pays for controlling brush and hardwoods that would otherwise choke out commercially valuable pine and fir seedlings.

The Donato study led to a congressional hearing on a bill to speed up evaluation of salvage-logging projects on national forests and an OSU investigation into the efforts of some forestry faculty to delay and alter the original publication.

The House has passed the salvage-logging bill, and a Senate forestry subcommittee has scheduled a hearing on the bill for Wednesday.

In the journal Science, the rebuttal article said the Donato research failed to recognize that on some sites, the increased amount of fuel found on the ground after logging may have been the result of Forest Service prescriptions to reduce erosion and provide wildlife habitat.

It added that the study assumed that increased fuel on the ground amounted to increased fire danger, without using any fire-behavior models to analyze the condition.

The Donato study also failed to consider how many of the naturally sprouting seedlings would die in the future from natural causes, such as lack of rain and encroaching brush.