A Federal Forest Pathologist's Perspective

Inventoried Roadless Areas.  Late Successional Reserves.  Wild and Scenic River designation.  Large contiguous tracks of federal land.  Checkerboard ownership pattern.  Popular hiking trails.  Viewsheds.  Coast redwoods.  Rivers and streams supporting Southern Oregon/Northern California Coast coho salmon.  Northern spotted owl habitat.  Marbled murrelet habitat.  Archaeological sites.  Who are we disturbing?  When are we disturbing?  What are we disturbing?  How are we disturbing?

Early detection in rugged back-country areas.  Other Phytophthoras.  Herbicide choices.  Fire season.  Difficult or limited access.  River and stream crossings.  Trail building.  Steep, rocky, ground.    Brush over your head.  Marijuana grow sites.  Large trees to fell.  Slash piles cheek-by-jowl.  Rolling logs.  Rolling fire.  

Are we responding rapidly?  Who does the work?  Who oversees the work?  How do we do the work?  Can we do the work safely?  What doesn’t get done because sudden oak death treatments take precedence?  Who pays for the work?  Why are the costs so high?  Is it working?  How long will we keep doing this?  Who makes that decision?  Will changing our treatment prescriptions compromise our results?  What do our publics say?  

A thousand acres of federal land have been treated for sudden oak death in Oregon.  Federal land managers continue to cooperate in Oregon’s sudden oak death containment strategy and are committed to a thorough and rapid response.  But often, treatments are constrained by numerous physical, biological or social factors.  Do these factors make containment an impossible goal?

There certainly are a lot of considerations, challenges, and unknowns when dealing with a landscape-level issue.  Other than natural barriers, containment of P. ramorum in an infested landscape may or may not be obtainable, but how do we know unless we try?  How do we not try when we face the loss of millions of trees, potential harm to people and property, and increased fire risks?  At the very minimum, there is a lot to be learned in the effort.

I'd like to hear more about management actions within the Brookings area. In California we're facing many many forests with substantial mortality. In these conditions the question becomes: how do we minimize or mitigate the impacts?

I also think that the issue of cryptic infection makes effective management incredibly difficult. We have seen the quarantine area in Oregon grow fairly consistently likely because of infestations that go undetected because they exhibit no symptoms. I agree with RC that an important question is how do we approach mitigating the impacts, and this will certainly vary with the stakeholder; at the extremes, some may wish to remove hosts and start again with a (hopefully) clean slate, while others will make every effort to preserve as many trees as possible. The disease is certainly impacting forests, but we also must ask if the actions we take when attempting management or treatment are a worthy tradeoff? And, of course this will also depend on the situation.