There's a reason for recent posts about forests and fire . . . it's fire season. We've already had one local fire, a typical tourist fire as the urban camper Jims flock to the mountains and set them ablaze. A section of the flume that brings water to town down below was destroyed. The same thing happened the summer before last. I watched the fire and suppression efforts from my front deck, though it was on the other side of the river and no real threat to me. I can still smell it in the morning when the air is heavy and moist with dew.

Forests are more vulnerable to fire for several reasons - past suppression efforts that prevented natural fire from maintaining tidy forest floors, drought, encroachment by homes, tourist and insect plagues. Management plans are controversial, most recently due to concerns about carbon sequestration.

Widely sought efforts to reduce fuels that increase catastrophic fire in Pacific Northwest forests will be counterproductive to another important societal goal of sequestering carbon to help offset global warming, forestry researchers at Oregon State University conclude in a new report.

Even if the biofuels were used in an optimal manner to produce electricity or make cellulosic ethanol, there would still be a net loss of carbon sequestration in forests of the Coast Range and the west side of the Cascade Mountains for at least 100 years – and probably much longer, the study showed.

"Fuel reduction treatments should be forgone if forest ecosystems are to provide maximal amelioration of atmospheric carbon dioxide over the next 100 years," the study authors wrote in their conclusion. "If fuel reduction treatments are effective in reducing fire severities in the western hemlock, Douglas-fir forests of the west Cascades and the western hemlock , Sitka spruce forests of the Coast Range, it will come at the cost of long-term carbon storage, even if harvested material are used as biofuels."

The study raises serious questions about how to maximize carbon sequestration in these fast-growing forests and at the same time maximize protection against catastrophic fire.

"It had been thought for some time that if you used biofuel treatments to produce energy, you could offset the carbon emissions from this process," said Mark Harmon, holder of the Richardson Chair in the OSU Department of Forest Ecosystems and Society. "That seems to make common sense and sounds great in theory, but when you actually go through the data it doesn't work."

Using biofuels to produce energy does not completely offset the need for other fossil fuels use and completely negate their input to the global carbon budget, the researchers found. At the absolute maximum, you might recover 90 percent of the energy, the study said.

"That figure, however, assumes an optimal production of energy from biofuels that is probably not possible," Harmon said. "By the time you include transportation, fuel for thinning and other energy expenditures, you are probably looking at a return of more like 60-65 percent. And if you try to produce cellulosic ethanol, the offset is more like 35 percent."

"If you take old, existing forests from these regions and turn them into almost anything else, you will have a net loss in carbon sequestration," Harmon said.

No mention of charcoal. I suspect that if the biomass removed for fire management was pyrolyzed and used as a soil amendment that carbon sequestration would rise rather than fall as when used for fuel. This has long seemed to me to be an emerging best practice. It accomplishes multiple objectives by helping to correct past management blunders with fire suppression which have degraded forest conditions and made them more fire prone, while helping to restore soil carbon lost due to cultivation, which in turn helps with problems of water use and nutrient management.

Forest cleanup and management also seems like it would be a boon to local communities that have suffered from reduced production of forest products. Some of the skills and forest culture would be suited to such work, and they'd have valuable products to support a forest based economy while not consuming the forest. Rather, the forest would improve.