North Platte - Pine Beetle_Water Project - Overview - Section 4

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Water From Colorado's Bark Beetle Forests -Project Overview Elder, Rhoades & Hubbard; USFS Rocky Mountain Research Station; 5/15/08 consequences of various management alternatives require managers to base their actions onwell-designed research that evaluates multiple land management alternatives. OBJECTIVES The North Platte Basin Roundtable and citizens of the Colorado high country have identified large-scale bark beetle outbreaks and forest management activities as priority concerns for the management of water resources for the next 30 years. In response, our proposed research will address how the current bark beetle outbreak and subsequent management practices influence the delivery of clean water and forest recovery in the North Platte and Upper Colorado Basins. Specifically, this study will compare the consequences of four distinct management options that are currently employed to treat extensive bark beetle outbreaks in Colorado forests. The alternatives comprise a gradient of treatments that span from no action to intensive mechanical fuel reduction, and as such they create distinct amounts of forest structure, surface roughness and soil disturbance. At one end of the spectrum, No Action (Option #1) retains standing dead pine snags, large downed wood and maximum surface roughness. Salvage logging conducted using Watershed Protection (Option #2) goals retains logging residue and existing understory vegetation to maintain roughness and avoid soil disturbance. Traditional Fuel Reduction (Option #3) practices remove post-harvest slash, and harvesting aimed at maximizing Forest Regeneration (Option #4) combines slash removal with mechanical site scarification to create mineral seedbed that promote seedling establishment. We propose to evaluate the utility of each of these management approaches to guide forest management decisions that are appropriate for the complex mountainous terrain of North Platte and Upper Colorado basin headwater forests. RESEARCH APPROACH Our research will take an operational-scale approach to evaluate management options on Colorado State and US Forest Service lands situated at the headwaters of the North Platte and Upper Colorado Rivers. Our scientific and management outcomes benefit from links to on-going, multidisciplinary watershed-scale research on MPB outbreaks and management activities conducted at the Fraser Experimental Forest and the Colorado State Forest. Involvement of CSFS and USFS land managers in the design and implementation of this research will establish auser-participatory framework that focuses research on useful questions with practical applications. Research findings will comply with Healthy Forest Restoration Act provisions that require the USFS to track fuel reduction activities (USDA/USDOI 2005). Such information will contribute to development of guidelines for management of beetle-killed forests to sustain watershed resources. To capture landscape variability in bark beetle and management effects we will conduct work at replicate study areas throughout the upper portions of each basin. We have identified four candidate study areas on the Colorado State Forest, the Routt NF and the Fraser Experimental Forest/Arapaho-Roosevelt NFs that provide opportunities to compare uncut and salvage logging treatments on adjacent sites with uniform forest and