Daily Archives: January 14, 2019

More than 800,000 workers are furloughed during the current government shutdown, which has been in effect since Dec. 21. As a result, many of the nation’s parks have been left unprotected. One of the most glaring effects is in Joshua Tree National Park, where the namesake trees are being destroyed by visitors, causing the park to announce a temporary closure (which was later averted “by immediately utilizing revenue generated by recreation fees”). “There have been incidents of new roads being created by motorists and the destruction of Joshua trees in recent days,” park officials said in a statement. The park was able to use Federal Land and Recreation Enhancement funds to bring in maintenance crews to address the ongoing issues at the park. …the trees are at risk of being affected by climate change in the coming years. The park alone may lose many of its trees by 2100 due to rising temperatures… 

Controlled burns have been put on hold. Fire training sessions have been canceled. The hiring of hundreds of seasonal firefighters has been delayed. The nation’s wildland fire service — trying to regroup this winter after two of the biggest and deadliest fire seasons on record — has instead been cast into a state of anxiety by the three-week-old partial government shutdown. That’s because some firefighters with the Forest Service, National Park Service and Bureau of Land Management are among the approximately 800,000 government employees either furloughed or working without a guarantee of pay. The shutdown has affected hundreds of regular fire and support personnel at those agencies, along with seasonal “hotshots” and others who swell the fire lines during the forest and brush fire emergencies … with increasing intensity … according to wildfire experts. A Senate Appropriations Committee report estimates that as many as 5,000 Forest Service firefighters may be working without pay.

MISSOULA, Mont. — The public is unable to view final updates to a northwestern Montana forest management plan due to the federal government shutdown. The Missoulian reports Flathead National Forest Supervisor Chip Weber published the final record of decision of the Forest Land Management Plan and an amendment to grizzly bear recovery management policies in the Federal Register on Dec. 27. The plans and amendments are available on the Forest Service website, but the record of decision was not released. Swan View Coalition Director Keith Hammer provided a copy of an email exchange he’d had with Weber. The supervisor wrote, “We have regional direction not to send this out or post until shutdown ends and we have funding.”

Aspen-area forests took a beating this year from drought and hot temperatures while parts of Basalt Mountain suffered severe enough fire damage that it could take centuries for some vegetation types to recover, according to an assessment by Aspen Center for Environmental Studies. ACES released its annual State of the Forest Report on Friday. …Blue spruce and subalpine fir destroyed by the fire are unlikely to bounce back quickly, if at all, McCurdy said. Lodgepole pines have adapted differently to fire and depend on it to open their seeds. Aspen trees tend to bounce back well and there’s potential they could spread on the mountain, McCurdy said. The recovery is going to show how forests are dynamic places where change happens in spurts, he said.