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Woodland NOTES - Vol.16, No. 2, Spring/Summer, 2005

In this issue:
 

 

 

 

 

 

Conservation Easements Can Benefit Landowners.

Randy Brooks

Back in February I offered an evening program on Conservation Easements. I was surprised at not only how diverse the audience was, but also by the fact that several farmers with no timber showed up as well. Being an Extension Forester, I originally thought only those with forested lands would be interested in conservation easements. After hearing from several speakers, particularly one from the Natural Resources Conservation Service, I understood why farmers as well as foresters would be interested in this topic.

The first known easements were actually written in the late 1880’s to protect parkways designed by Frederick Law Olmstead in the Boston area. Today, there are over 1,260 land trusts protecting more than 2.6 million acres in the United States. One of the smallest known conservation easements is 0.08 acres in Mantauk Peninsula in New York, while one of the larger easements is a 201,560 acre ranch in New Mexico.

A conservation easement is a legally recorded agreement between a landowner and a land trust or government agency that permanently limits uses of the land in order to protect its conservation values. The conservation easement allows you to continue to own and use your land and to sell it or pass it on to your heirs, while protecting valued features. People grant conservation easements for a variety of reasons, but mostly because they want their property protected from unwanted development while retaining ownership.

Another way to visualize a conservation easement is to think of owning land as holding a bundle of sticks. Each one of these sticks represents the landowner’s right to do something with their property. The right to build a house, the right to farm, the right to harvest trees, the right to hunt game animals, extract minerals, etc, are all rights the landowner has. A landowner may give up certain development rights, or sticks from the bundle, associated with their property through a document called a conservation easement. A landowner may also ensure that certain rights (farming or tree harvesting) will be perpetuated on their property, or that the property will not be subdivided. Public access is not a requirement.

After the easement is signed, it is recorded on the land deed and applies to all future owners of the land. Provided that certain conditions are met, donors of easements may be eligible for income, estate and/or property tax benefits. One condition is that there must be an established, recognizable public benefit.

An additional benefit is that the conservation easement may provide significant financial advantage to the donor. Although the duration of a conservation easement can vary depending on the desires of the landowner, tax benefits are only available for perpetual easements. Many land trusts only accept perpetual easements, since they provide permanent protection by subjecting all future landowners to the same restrictions.

The Internal Revenue Service allows a deduction if the easement is perpetual and donated "exclusively for conservation purposes." The amount of the tax deduction is determined by the value of the conservation easement. Every conservation easement is unique and tailored to a particular landowner’s goals and their land. The value of the gift, for tax purposes, is the difference between the property’s full market value before and after donation of the conservation easement as determined by a qualified land appraiser.

Under IRS code, the donation of a qualified easement may be treated as a charitable contribution. The value of the contribution can be deducted at an amount up to 30 percent of the donor’s adjusted gross income in the year of the gift. If the gift exceeds 30 percent of the donor’s income, the excess can be carried forward and deducted (subject to the 30 percent limit) over the next five years if needed.

Donation of easements, whether during the landowner’s life or by bequest, can reduce the value of the land upon which the estate taxes are calculated. This can greatly benefit the landowner wishing to transfer land to relatives. The estate tax benefits of a conservation easement can often mean the difference between heirs having to sell property to pay estate taxes or being able to keep the property in the family.

The conveyance of a conservation easement may reduce a landowner’s property taxes. However, this can depend on a variety of factors. Typically the land qualifies for a reduction in assessed value. Existing tax basis, assessed value, and current zoning of each piece of property are important factors in determining the potential benefits of any easement. The exact terms of each individual easement also have a bearing on its effect on property taxes.

Accepting a donated conservation easement is a tremendous responsibility for a land trust or government agency. It means accepting the obligation of monitoring and enforcing the easement terms in perpetuity. Once an easement is established, the land trust or government agency documents the site’s conservation values, performs periodic site inspections to ensure all the easement’s terms and conditions are being honored and keeps all future owners of the site informed on the easement agreement.

If a violation is found, the landowner is notified about documenting procedures and steps taken to repair any damage. Most easement documents contain language that defines the process for resolving disputes between grantor and grantee. The grantor has the right and responsibility to take legal action, if necessary, to enforce easement restrictions. A stewardship fund is often established along with the conservation easement agreement and is used to cover the expense of monitoring, enforcing compliance and legal defense of the easement.

For more information on conservation easements, check out the following web sites:

 

 

Introducing Co-author Bob Powers

Dr. Robert F. (Bob) Powers is Program Manager and Senior Scientist, at the USDA Forest Service PSW Research Station in Redding, California. The tables and figures in Silvicultural Decisions IX, and much of the content, are drawn from Bob’s recent presentations and articles. Bob has researched and documented solid evidence that growing trees and manufacturing wood products is a bright, sustainable, and environmentally responsible activity with a competitive future in our region. In addition to the information outlined in this article, Bob has published:

  • World Trends in Forests, Forest Use, Wood Supply: The Irony of California – The Challenge to Our Profession.
  • On the Sustainable Productivity of Planted Forests.
  • The Role of Planted Forests in a "Green Certified" Century.

If you would like a printed, mailed copy of any of these articles, please contact Ron Mahoney, as they are not available electronically. These articles provide thoughtful, documented evidence on the question of the future of timber, as well as introduce the topic of our next Woodland Notes article for the Fall/Winter edition Silvicultural Decisions X: Sustainable Forestry in the Inland Northwest: Do Plantations have a Role?

 

Silvicultural Decisions IX: Is there a Future for

Growing and Processing Timber in the Inland Northwest?

Ron Mahoney and Robert F. Powers

Many landowners, management professionals, and manufacturers have long nurtured an expectation that growing timber and processing it into products will be a sustainable opportunity in the Inland Northwest. Some professional resource managers, wood products manufacturers, and university professors suggest that only the most productive regions can compete in the global timber basket, and that regions such as the Inland Northwest, particularly public lands, are destined for caretaking with little timber emphasis, except as a by-product of ecosystem management.

One only has to look at truly marginal U.S. timber regions such as the Mid-South and Northeast to challenge these statements. There, timber productivity is about 1/3 that of Inland Northwest forests, yet they have viable timber manufacturing industries and significant acreages of family forests managed for timber. Why are they choosing to grow timber in such a low-productivity environment (compared to global regions) and why has timber remained economically viable in these low-productivity regions? The answer is complex, and stems from alternatives to wood use and land use, entrepreneurial incentives and opportunities, and private ownerships’ greater response to market economics than public lands. Family forests are often closer to main roads, mills, and markets, making their timber ventures more profitable. Favorable timberland taxes, reforestation and management cost sharing, and tax credits for forest production provide additional financial incentives. Productivity on formerly agricultural family forests is often enhanced by soils that are usually as good as or better than local "wild" forests. In most of the U.S., any land that could be was farmed at some time, usually based on having tillable soil and relatively gentle terrain.

Another part of the answer is the species of trees grown and the scale of processing facilities. In New Hampshire and Tennessee, for instance, private forests primarily grow furniture-grade hardwoods. They compete with global furniture production and sometimes export their best logs, but still find a financially lucrative niche because of their small-scale, high value-added mills and furniture manufacturers. Because these mills are near the supply AND markets, escalating global transportation costs strengthen their market position and the incentives to grow and process timber. While the softwood species that dominate the higher production areas of the Southeast and Northwest have more global competition, some of these same factors still apply.

Other forces attempt to discourage wood use, especially opposition to using trees for products. Many studies document that all of the current alternatives to wood as a building material, especially metal, plastic and concrete, use vastly more energy with additional environmental costs. This applies to a lesser but significant extent to straw and adobe as well. Wood-based composites also use more energy and chemicals (usually bonding agents), but they have superior engineering properties and lower financial and environmental costs than non-wood alternatives. Wood, grown well, is the most environmentally friendly resource on the planet.

In our region, we average about ½ the productive capacity of West Coast and Southeast commercial forests, although our better sites come close to their top sites, especially compared to the Southeast. There, early productivity for fiber or small sawlogs greatly exceeds many Interior Northwest sites, but this high productivity peaks by about 30 years, and longer rotations producing higher quality products in our region can rival long-term Southeastern returns on investment. In fact, our current productivity statistics are based on our largely natural forest stands that have had little or no management to optimize growth and value. We are just beginning to explore high-production, short-rotation plantations here. The forests along the Pacific Northwest coast boast exceptional growth and exceptional quality. However, the species mix is limited and is dominated by Douglas-fir for construction lumber. In the Interior Northwest, we also grow lots of Douglas-fir and other construction lumber species, but western redcedar and western white pine grow in greater abundance than in other areas, and traditionally command the top market price for their specialty properties.

The number and size of Inland Northwest mills and their distribution has certainly been impacted by global competition and federal timber

withdrawals from the market. Some forest-dependent communities, primarily those in less productive areas of drier, higher elevation timber sites, have seen mills decline to the point where the last commercial lumber mill accepting logs in Idaho south of the Salmon River is closing. Little public timber is harvested, and private timber is insufficient to sustain the old-style mills requiring 60 million board feet or more of logs to sustain a single mill that produced construction lumber but no final products. However, based on other rural states such as New Hampshire and Tennessee, smaller-scale mills with value-added manufacturing could be sited in these areas where wood quality is high and landowners and skilled labor desire to sustain their timber-based lifestyle. In this region, local and global economic realities demand more value-added to pay the higher costs of growing and manufacturing timber. Sometimes it takes awhile to move from large, high-volume mills to smaller, locally operated value-added mills, but this is already happening in the Inland Northwest where at least eight new or remodeled mills have come into production in the last 10 years, and one is in the works for the mill-deficient area of SW Idaho mentioned above.

The impacts of global wood production and global economies on the demand and price for our wood products are large, real, and are increasing. We must consider the full context of global competition and our domestic situation, before drawing conclusions about the future of timber in our economy. Ultimately, successful planning for an economically viable, socially and environmentally acceptable Inland Northwest forest industry using local wood will require a global perspective on what we grow, where and for how long, and how we process wood and make it into higher-value products.

Imports provide a significant percentage of our domestic wood consumption, dominated by softwood construction lumber from Canada. Most people think softwoods from Asia and Central/South America are the second largest source of imports. In fact, the second leading imports are hardwoods from Germany! Some believe that cost efficiency makes this possible, but the truth is that German wood is a high-cost, but very high quality, consistent product destined for fine furniture manufacturers.

To put some current aspects of the global "wood basket" into perspective, consider these figures showing the status of global land bases and USA wood demand:

           

Notably, Europe, Canada and the USA have increased forest cover slightly (Mexico has lost forest cover). Some forest is lost to urbanization in the USA, but other areas, primarily abandoned or converted farms, are increasing forest cover. More critical is the significant (nearly 11%) decline in forest cover of Central America and the Caribbean due to shifting agriculture, and poor management of ecologically fragile tropical forests. South America and Africa also show significant declines.

U.S. demand for softwoods, primarily housing construction lumber, continues to rise, but currently imports and private family forests make up for the decline in harvest on national forests. As transportation and other import costs continue to rise due to energy scarcity and rising standards of living in developing countries, domestic timber production and processing become more financially attractive. In addition, green certification standards should shift global wood production to the most environmentally resilient regions, such as the Inland Northwest.

Per capita wood consumption is gradually declining, primarily due to reduced use of wood as fuel in developing countries and better utilization of wood resources. However, wood use will dramatically increase with population growth. We will need about 1/3 more wood by the middle of this century – just 45 years from now! Where will we get this wood? An area the size of Europe would have to be reforested immediately and produce this wood on a short rotation, to meet the demand with average "natural" forests.

There is no foreseeable possibility that a new area the size of Europe will become a thriving forest. There also no evidence that this demand will be reduced or met by wood alternatives, and little expectation that resistance to using trees, in the long run, will cause a more expensive shift to wood alternatives, because their environmental costs will be increasingly unacceptable. Ultimately, we need to grow more wood, more efficiently under close environmental guidelines, to sustain our economies and accommodate inevitable global changes in populations and standards of living.

The answer to this apparent dilemma lies in plantations - only 1/5 of this area would be required if it was in plantation, not natural forest. Even more possible, this plantation target can be met only if 13% of current global forests were in plantations. Today, only 5% of world forests are plantations (slightly higher in the U.S., but only 8% of our western forests are plantations). In our next article, we will discuss where these plantations might be located, and environmental aspects of plantations including biodiversity, sustainability, global economics, and the potential and desirability of plantations in the Inland Northwest. We’ll also include some facts and figures of our current plantations. In the meantime, consider this: New Zealand recognized as early as 1914 that their small country could not meet its wood needs from natural forests. Their early pioneering of establishing plantations to meet their wood needs resulted in preservation of about 35% of their original natural forests, with money available to study and manage these national treasures. They are also net exporters of timber. Much of the globe no longer has this opportunity, but here in the Northwest we still do, by focusing our timber operations on a smaller, appropriate land base, by more intensively managing some of our current forest stands, and by expanding our forests by replanting once forested marginal farmlands. We must understand and respond to global changes if we want our forests and forest dependent communities to be economically and environmentally sustainable.

 

Variable Retention Harvesting?
Chris Schnepf

A relatively new silviculture term is popping up with increasingly regularity. At first blush, the term variable retention harvesting strikes many as a fancy new term to replace logging selectively. While variable retention (VR) does fit into the broad array of silvicultural practices that could be called selection, it goes a step beyond traditional silvicultural systems.

A brief history of clearcutting in the Pacific Northwest. Historically, some foresters held it as an article of faith that the objective in managing old growth forests (outside wilderness areas, parks, or other formal preserves) was to convert them to young forests – with primary emphasis on wood yield. For many years, the preferred stand regeneration method in many Pacific Northwest coastal forests has been to clearcut and plant. In these high-rainfall, very productive forests, this approach usually yields young stands of fast growing Douglas-fir.

As with any silvicultural treatment, clearcuts have potential positive and negative ecological outcomes. But the public reaction to clearcuts is unenthusiastic, especially when clearcuts are repeated across a landscape. Rightly or wrongly, the term clearcut has become shorthand for exploitive timber harvesting to many, even where these sites are quickly reforested in ways that mimic natural regeneration of sites burned in stand replacing fires. This sentiment is captured by variations of the often repeated phrase: "a tree-farm isn’t a forest".

Concern about clearcuts came to a head when the spotted owl was listed under the federal endangered species act and wildlife biologists said spotted owl required old growth characteristics. Many forest ecologists spoke to the other functions that old growth forests contributed to forest ecological structure and function across the landscape.

Variable Retention Harvesting (VR). Forest ecology has always been a key part of foresters’ training, research, and practice. But, in response to concerns about the social acceptability and the ecological sustainability of widespread clearcutting, some scientists began experimenting with silvicultural practices that retained more of the structures and functions of old growth forests. These efforts gained national attention in the early 1990s, when the media labeled such efforts "New Forestry".

That research and experimentation has continued, and is now described as variable retention (VR) harvesting, which can be defined1 as: "an approach to harvesting based on the retention of structural elements or biological legacies (trees, snags, logs, etc.) from the harvested stand for integration into the new stand to achieve various ecological objectives ...". Some common themes to VR harvests include:

Biological legacies. A biological legacy1 is "an organism, a reproductive portion of an organism, or a biologically derived structure or pattern inherited from a previous ecosystem. Biological legacies often include large trees, snags, and down logs left after harvesting to provide refugia and to structurally enrich the new stand".

The shelterwood silvicultural system leaves green trees after the harvest, so isn’t it VR? Maybe. Normally a shelterwood system would remove seed trees after regeneration is established. It could only be classified as VR if you left the seed trees through the next rotation or longer. VR also emphasizes leaving other legacies of the previous forest intact, such as snags, logs on the ground, and undisturbed forest floor.

Aggregated versus dispersed retention. Retained green trees often get the most attention in discussions of VR. Two general types of retention are discussed and they are frequently combined in the same harvest unit. Dispersed retention1 is the "retention of structures or biological legacies in a dispersed or uniform pattern". It would be superficially similar to a shelterwood harvest.

Aggregated retention1 is "the retention of structures or biological legacies as (typically) small, intact forest patches within the harvest unit". Aggregates are usually smaller than 2.5 acres in size. Aggregated retention has a number of advantages including leaving portions of the forest floor intact, leaving soft snags in a way that does not threaten logger safety, and allowing more light into the unit for shade intolerant species.

Aggregated vs. Dispersed Retention (from Franklin et al, 19972)

Substantial area influenced by green trees. Some foresters look at VR harvesting concepts and immediately look to apply them on a landscape scale - that is, retaining stands of trees across the landscape. Retaining different stand structures across a forested landscape is frequently discussed in the context of VR, but VR is fundamentally about leaving green trees within the area being harvested. This is usually phrased in terms of area influenced by green trees. For example, a Canadian author specifies that VR harvests must " ... leave more than half the total area of the cutblock within one tree height from the base of a tree or group of trees, whether or not the tree or group of trees is inside the cutblock"3 In other words, at least half of the harvest area must be within 100-200 feet (the height of a dominant mature tree for that site) of a tree.

VR for Inland Northwest Forests.

Did Inland disturbances leave as many green trees as coastal disturbances? Variable retention proponents point to the number of green trees left scattered through coastal forests after stand replacing fires. While we share many of the same species as coastal forests, Inland Northwest precipitation and disturbance patterns are different. Moist forests in the Inland Northwest burned in a mosaic pattern, but green trees left after these fires were distributed differently. In most Inland Northwest mixed fire events, there would have been many 5 acre or larger (sometimes much larger) patches in the landscape with no green trees left. To the extent VR’s goal is to mimic historical disturbance patterns, we may need to leave some areas that do not fully meet the green tree influence standards commonly discussed in coastal applications of VR.

Deadwood. One disturbance characteristic Inland Northwest forests share with coastal forests is deadwood. Fire events here left many more snags and more coarse woody debris on the ground than is customarily left after a timber harvest. To the extent a forest owner wants to provide a lifeboat for a wider variety of ecosystem functions, leaving more snags and coarse woody debris will move the forest towards that goal. Remember, Idaho slash hazard laws do not consider woody material larger than 3 inches in diameter to be a fire hazard that must be removed. For more for on coarse woody debris, search the publications section of the UI Extension Forestry web site and look under "Snags and Forest Organic Debris"

VR: an excellent recipe to grow grand fir. Retained trees will influence the trees coming up in the understory. One of their larger influences will be shade – and for a many more years than under seed tree or shelterwood systems, where overstory trees are removed after regeneration is established. More shade gives an edge to shade tolerant species such as grand fir and Douglas-fir – "species-non-grata" to most Inland Northwest foresters, because they host a broad array of tree-killing insects and diseases. Retained trees will also slow the growth of regeneration to some degree.

Some of this may be countered by aggregating retention and aggressively pre-commercial thinning against shade tolerant species, but there may be limits to how much you can compensate, especially on shadier north slopes. Advocates of VR emphasize its flexibility for different contexts. For growing shade intolerant species such as larch, that may require opening stands up more than typical VR prescriptions for coastal forests.

Is VR another way to highgrade? One can leave some small trees to meet VR standards, but advocates emphasize that VR is not highgrading. The emphasis is on leaving dominant trees as biological legacies – not only for genetics, but also for what they contribute to forest function as they age, die, become snags, then eventually fall to the ground and provide large pieces of coarse woody debris.

"Use the forest Luke". Many Idaho forest owners are already practicing some degree of VR if they have a stream going through their property. Idaho forest practice laws require leaving some green trees along streams to sustain riparian function. This points to a key VR theme: locating the most strategic places to retain trees, sometimes referred to as control points or anchor points. For example:

  • Which areas of the site are wetter and can better support shade tolerant regeneration?

  • Which areas are challenging to plant, or have wildlife habitat features to keep (more snags, talus slopes, or other habitats)?

  • Where would retained trees fit best with the most efficient and least damaging paths to remove logs?

  • Are there areas with unique plant habitats that you want to protect (e.g., bogs).

VR is worth a look. The public aversion to clearcuts is so culturally ingrained that some believe keeping a "social license" to practice forestry requires leaving more green trees in stand regeneration harvests, even to the extent that form of disturbance departs from local historical ecological disturbance patterns. VR may not fit with all owners’ objectives, but elements of VR are appealing to family forest owners who do not like clearcuts. Many family forest owners like having some large legacy trees on the property simply for their testimony to the grandeur of nature.

Since VR is a relatively new practice there isn’t a lot of research on it yet, especially on Inland Northwest forests. For more detailed information on VR, see citations listed at the end of this article.
________________________________________

1 Dictionary of Forestry, Society of American Foresters

2 Franklin, J.F., D.R. Berg, D.A. Thornburg, J.C. Tappeiner. 1997. Alternative silvicultural approaches to timber harvesting: variable retention harvest systems. In: Kohm, K.A. and J.F. Franklin (Eds.) 1997. Creating a Forestry for the 21st Century. Island Press, Washington, DC, pp. 111-140

3 Mitchel, S.J. and W.J. Beese. 2002. The retention system: reconciling variable retention with the principles of silvicultural systems. The Forestry Chronicle 78(3): 397-403

 


Yellow Shirts

Daniella "Donna" Lorincz, SCA Fire Education Project Leader.

Warm weather is on its way, and with the warmth comes the bright colors of the season. The Nez Perce Indian Reservation will be hosting two teams from The Student Conservation Association’s fire program again this year. Early this summer, eight interns and two project leaders, clad in bright yellow t-shirts, will be ready to get to work.

The Student Conservation Association (SCA) Fire Education Corps is a major initiative designed to help property owners protect their homes from wildland fire. Fire Education Corps teams are made up of volunteers from around the country, trained in wildland-urban interface education and property evaluation. The Fire Education Corps primary focus will be to communicate with homeowners on fire prevention techniques and fuel reduction efforts throughout local neighborhoods through community outreach and education, fuels reduction projects, and data collection for fire fighting agencies.

The SCA Fire Monitoring Corps is working to measure the effects and impacts fuel treatments have on fuels loading across the Nez Perce Indian Reservation. The Fire Monitoring Team will be surveying vegetation on tribal lands before and after fuel treatments. Permanent fuels plots are installed and measured with a modified Brown’s downed woody transect. The plots are being established to monitor the short term and five year effectiveness of treatment areas versus adjacent control "no treatment" plots. The collected data will then be loaded into a computer program (JFIREMON) to compute fuel loading by tons/acre. Survey plots are also being recorded with GPS and GIS to document the plot locations for future remeasurements. Fire knowledge will be communicated to the public throughout the year, and fuel treatment effectiveness will continue to be monitored.

These teams are here for you and your community’s safety, so please contact them and utilize their resources to help better protect your community. To set up a free home evaluation or to ask for advice about wildland fire prevention, please call the local SCA Fire Education Project Leader, Daniella "Donna" Lorincz, at 208-860-6303