A3
THE ASTORIAN • THURSDAY, JULY 28, 2022
US to plant 1 billion trees as climate change kills forests
Trees are a ‘sink’ for carbon dioxide
By MATTHEW BROWN
Associated Press
BILLINGS, Mont. — The
Biden administration said the
government will plant more
than a billion trees across mil-
lions of acres of burned and
dead woodlands in the U.S.
West, as offi cials struggle to
counter the increasing toll
on the nation’s forests from
wildfi res, insects and other
manifestations of climate
change.
Destructive fi res in recent
years that burned too hot for
forests to regrow naturally
have far outpaced the gov-
ernment’s capacity to plant
new trees. That has created a
backlog of 4.1 million acres
in need of replanting, offi -
cials said.
The U.S. Department of
Agriculture said it will have
to quadruple the number
of tree seedlings produced
by nurseries to get through
the backlog and meet future
needs. That comes after Con-
gress last year passed bipar-
tisan legislation directing the
U.S. Forest Service to plant
1.2 billion trees over the next
decade and after President
Joe Biden in April ordered the
agency to make the nation’s
forests more resilient as the
globe gets hotter.
Much of the adminis-
tration’s broader agenda to
tackle climate change remains
stalled amid disagreement
in Congress, where Demo-
crats hold a razor-thin major-
ity. That has left offi cials to
pursue a more piecemeal
approach with incremen-
tal measures such as Mon-
day’s announcement, while
the administration considers
whether to declare a climate
emergency that could open
the door to more aggressive
executive branch actions.
To erase the backlog of
decimated forest acreage,
the Forest Service plans over
the next couple years to scale
up work from about 60,000
acres replanted last year to
about 400,000 acres annually,
offi cials said. Most of the
work will be in Western states
where wildfi res now occur
year round and the need is
most pressing, said David
Lytle, the agency’s director of
forest management.
Blazes have charred 5.6
million acres so far in the
U.S. this year, putting 2022
on track to match or exceed
the record-setting 2015 fi re
season, when 10.1 million
acres burned.
Many forests regenerate
naturally after fi res, but if the
blazes get too intense they
Carlos Avila Gonzalez/San Francisco Chronicle
Destructive fi res in recent years that burned too hot for forests to quickly regrow have far
outpaced the government’s capacity to replant trees.
can leave behind barren land-
scapes that linger for decades
before trees come back.
“Our forests, rural com-
munities, agriculture and
economy are connected
across a shared landscape and
their existence is at stake,”
Agriculture Secretary Tom
Vilsack said in a statement
announcing the reforestation
plan. “Only through bold, cli-
mate-smart actions ... can we
ensure their future.”
The Forest Service this
year is spending more than
$100 million on reforestation
work. Spending is expected
to further increase in com-
ing years, to as much as $260
million annually, under the
sweeping federal infrastruc-
ture package approved last
year, agency offi cials said.
Some timber industry
supporters were critical of
last year’s reforesting legis-
lation as insuffi cient to turn
the tide on the scale of the
wildfi re problem. They want
more aggressive logging to
thin stands that have become
overgrown from years of sup-
pressing fi res.
To prevent replanted
areas from becoming simi-
larly overgrown, practices are
changing so reforested stands
are less dense with trees and
therefore less fi re prone, said
Joe Fargione, science direc-
tor for North America at the
Nature Conservancy.
But challenges to the For-
est Service’s goal remain,
from fi nding enough seeds
to hiring enough workers to
plant them, Fargione said.
Many seedlings will die
before reaching maturity due
to drought and insects, both
of which can be exacerbated
by climate change.
“You’ve got to be smart
about where you plant,” Far-
gione said. “There are some
places that the climate has
already changed enough that
it makes the probability of
successfully reestablishing
trees pretty low.”
Living trees are a major
“sink” for carbon dioxide
that’s driving climate change
when it enters the atmo-
sphere, Fargione said. That
means replacing those that
die is important to keep cli-
mate change from getting
even worse.
Congress in 1980 cre-
ated a reforestation trust that
had previously capped fund-
ing — which came from tar-
iff s on timber products — at
$30 million annually. That
was enough money when
the most signifi cant need for
reforestation came from log-
ging, but became insuffi cient
as the number of large, high
intensity fi res increased, offi -
cials said.
Insects, disease and tim-
ber harvests also contribute
to the amount of land that
needs reforestation work, but
the vast majority comes from
fi res. In the past fi ve years
alone, more than 5 million
acres were severely burned.
Scientists use tiny tags to learn how young lamprey travel through dams
Little is known
about life cycle
‘THIS TAGGING EFFORT HELPS US
IDENTIFY POTENTIAL PROBLEM
AREAS, AND IT HELPS US UNDERSTAND
THE SCALE AND THE MAGNITUDE
AND LOCATION, SO WE CAN IDENTIFY
FIXES THAT ARE NEEDED.’
By COURTNET FLATT
Northwest News Network
Lamprey have been
around for more than 450
million years before dino-
saurs roamed the earth. The
eel-like fi sh survived ice
ages and heat waves.
Now, they aren’t doing
well, and scientists don’t
know exactly why, but they
do know lamprey have
struggled getting around
large concrete dams in the
Pacifi c Northwest.
The Pacifi c lamprey
are culturally important to
Northwest tribes. In addi-
tion, young lamprey help fi l-
ter river water as they feed
on algae in the sediment.
After adult lamprey die, their
bodies provide key nutrients
to river ecosystems.
Scientists know very little
about the lamprey life cycle,
including how young Pacifi c
lamprey pass through dams.
“The more we can learn
about lamprey as they’re
passing through dams, that’s
kind of the big black box
right now,” said Bob Muel-
ler, an earth scientist with
Pacifi c Northwest National
Laboratory.
However, that lack of
knowledge could soon
change with the innovation
of tiny batteries that will
allow scientists to track the
young gray, toothy fi sh as
they migrate to the ocean.
“This is the very fi rst
acoustic telemetry study
with juvenile Pacifi c lam-
prey on the main stem of the
Columbia River s ystem,”
said Kate Deters, an earth
scientist with the lab.
With this study, scientists
hope to learn more about
the behavior and survival of
these young lamprey as they
pass through dams on the
Snake River.
“In the past, the tags just
haven’t been small enough
to tag in these very small
fi sh,” she said.
Gobs of information
In addition, this transmit-
ter provides gobs of infor-
mation about where each
fi sh passes through the
dams, from the spillway to
bypass systems to through
the turbines. Moreover,
Deters said, scientists might
learn more about where lam-
prey like to travel within the
Aaron Jackson | lamprey project leader for the
Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation
Dave Herasimtschuk/U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
An adult Pacifi c lamprey.
river, like how close they
swim to the bank.
The tag that’s gathering
this information is powered
by a tiny battery, said Dan-
iel Deng, a lab fellow. This
microbattery took roughly
three years to develop,
building on years of earlier
mircobattery work. The bat-
tery for these tags lasts about
30 days when the transmit-
ter sends information every
fi ve seconds, Deng said. In
that time, it will help gather
invaluable information, he
said. New designs scien-
tists are working on should
improve the battery life,
Deng said.
“Hopefully, we can pro-
vide some good information
for policymakers and other
stakeholders, so they can
use this information to have
even better dam operations,”
Deng said.
Hydropower dams on the
Columbia River s ystem have
been fi ne-tuned for salmon,
said Steve Juhnke, a fi sh
biologist project manager
with the U.S. Army Corps of
Engineers. However, those
fi sh passage have sometimes
neglected other anadromous
fi sh, such as lamprey, and
resident fi sh, such as Amer-
ican shad, he said.
“It’s encouraging to get
to the point where you can
include those fi sh in your
studies and consider them
in the operations of the proj-
ect,” Juhnke said.
Moreover, he said, lam-
prey are poor swimmers,
which makes it a challenge
for them to migrate down-
stream, as well as for adult
fi sh to swim up ladders.
“There have been a lot
of assumptions made about
juvenile lamprey in the past,
and now we’re able to either
prove or disprove those
assumptions,” Juhnke said.
One of those assumptions
includes the water depths
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that lamprey migrate in the
river, he said.
Information from this
study will help the Army
Corps improve lamprey pas-
sage if possible, he said. This
pilot project cost around
$1.1 million, he said. The
Army Corps plans to fund
this project for up to four
more years, moving around
to study diff erent dams, he
said, each of which have
unique passage challenges.
A fi rst food
It’s been a long road
studying these fi sh in the
natural environment. For
Northwest tribes, years
of studying lamprey have
helped shine a light on these
culturally important fi sh,
often called eels.
Lamprey are a fi rst food,
said Aaron Jackson, the lam-
prey project leader for the
Confederated Tribes of the
Umatilla Indian Reservation.
“Lampreys are, in my
mind, the fi rst food,” Jackson
said. “I’ve had them grilled.
I’ve had them smoked over
cherry wood. I even have a
friend who has made lam-
prey pate with them. That’s
quite good.”
Jackson called lam-
prey a unique and acquired
taste, with a high lipid con-
tent and lots of oil, similar to
mackerel.
Indigenous people used
to eat lamprey often for
nourishment, he said. Now,
the fi sh are far less abundant.
The Confederated Tribes
of the Umatilla Indian Res-
ervation
now
harvests
mostly at Willamette Falls
instead of all throughout
its ceded lands in north-
eastern Oregon and south-
eastern Washington and at
Celilo Falls, before the con-
struction of The Dalles Dam
fl ooded the historic fi shing
area and marketplace, Jack-
son said.
“Getting these lamprey
back up into these areas that
they once were will pro-
vide those increased har-
vest opportunities for tribes
and that cultural and tradi-
tional connection that has
been missing for quite some
time,” Jackson said.
It will take a lot of work
to attain sustainable and har-
vestable populations of lam-
prey. To start, tribes have
translocated adult lamprey
from the lower Columbia
River hundreds of miles to
waterways that historically
supported lamprey, such as
the Umatilla River.
Those adults spawn, and
their off spring need to make
it past dams and to the ocean.
That’s why it’s import-
ant to learn more about how
these young lamprey swim
downstream, Jackson said.
“This tagging eff ort helps
us identify potential prob-
lem areas, and it helps us
understand the scale and the
magnitude and location, so
we can identify fi xes that are
needed,” he said.
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