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Forests are the West’s most ignored reservoir

Posted by: Maven on March 15, 2008 at 4:48 pm

From the High Country News Goat blog:

In California and throughout the West everyone seems to be talking about global warming. Dominating the conversation are dire predictions about diminished water supplies that will result from shrinking snow pack in the West’s mountains. Conspicuously absent from the debate has been discussion of the impact of forest management on dry season water supply – “baseflow” in the lexicon of hydrologists.

The Western US may be the only place in the world where the connection between trees – or more precisely upland forests – and water supply is not recognized. Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai’, whose organizations have planted millions of trees in Africa, claimed in an interview with Sierra Magazine that everyone knows that where there are trees there is also water. She was wrong. With a few notable exceptions, the Western US is in denial about the connection.

This denial is reflected in research programs and management plans being crafted to address global warming. The Forest Service, for example, has a massive global warming research program underway with a focus in California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains. One would think that the relationship between forest management and water supply would figure prominently in that research. But one would be wrong. The connection is not a focus for research and is barely even mentioned on the research programs web site. You can check it out for yourself at http://www.fs.fed.us/pnw/pep/climatechange/.

Forest Service climate change research has instead focused on how climate change will change forests and habitats. Most prominently, the Forest Service projects larger and more intense fires and prescribes intensive forest management to reduce fire risk. Is it just coincidence that this emphasis coincides with the Forest Service long standing institution bias in favor of cutting trees?

Intensified forest management would result in increased compaction of forest soils and forest soils, it turns out, are the West’s #1 reservoir. On average 1/3 of healthy forest soil is empty spaces. These spaces fill with water during the wet season and release that stored water to groundwater, springs and streams throughout the dry season. Logging involves soil disturbance which compacts forest soils diminishing their ability to store water; the more intense the logging, the less storage capacity and the greater the negative impact on base streamflow and groundwater.

Read the rest of this post on the High Country News GOAT blog by clicking here.

March 15, 2008 · Filed Under Water Quality

Comments

One Response to “Forests are the West’s most ignored reservoir”

  1. Michael on March 15th, 2008 7:56 pm

    Hi, Chris.
    About a year ago I heard the PNW USFS Regional Hydrologist give a talk about how much PNW water was produced from forestlands, especially national forests.

    And the USFS apparently has appointed a bona-fide ground water hydrologist to a high-level position to coordinate and implement USFS ground water programs.

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