Redwood Reader

Docket number 041123329I-4329-01
RIN number 0649-AO04. 1/18/2005
Dear Sirs,
I am writing to you concerning critical habitat designations. I feel critical habitat designations are stop-gap measures until some real information about why we have so much stream damage is incorporated into the decision making process. However, we need all the protections we have in place until new science gets the recognition it deserves and it can prove it can bear the responsibility of underlying new regulations. The information is available but is scattered among various segments of agricultural and natural resource sciences. It needs to be brought together, critiqued and applied. The new information plays out in the atmosphere but the unknowns are fungi and their products in the precipitation interception zones of forest and grasslands.
Mycorhizzia, symbiotic forest fungi, deposit a glycoprotein called glomalin in the soil as the fungi hyphae spread throught the soil. The short lived hyphae slough off the glomalin as part of a fast paced life cycle. Glomalin binds soil particles into aggregates, allowing more water and air pores in the soil. The fraction of carbon in the soil, previously believed to be mostly humic acid, was about 8% of soil by weight. The discovery of the tough and resilient glomalin increases that to almost thirty percent. Glomalin is what makes topsoil top soil. If you cook the topsoil long enough it will eventually dry out and lose its ability to clump up or absorb water because you have destroyed the soil glue- glomalin. In nature, glomalin is destroyed by sunlight, running water and ambient air.
Mycorhizzia relationships in the forest have been investigated since the seventies. At the same time forest practice rules in California were rewritten because of the incredible damage to the landscape had caused, to a large extent, the floods of 1955 and 1964. Three major changes to the landscape had occurred allowing this massive destruction: the canopy and interception zones had shrunk in height and percent of land cover, the surface drainage patterns naturally worked out over thousands of years had been radically altered by road building and log skidding, and the absorbent sponge layer of the soil had been compromised effectively diminishing the amount of water the landscape could handle. All other considered factors- amount of rain, snow pack, high tides and warming temperatures are common and can be expected to repeat. Ignorance of glomalin has caused streams and rivers in the West to shrink to nearly nothing in the summer. In the East, the reduced area of absorption in two dimensions in greatly exacerbated by the fact that the third dimension, soil storage, is overlooked and under utilized, causing regular flooding. Good understandings of glomalin together with glomalin reserves or production zones can yield fresh water and prevent flooding.
Allowing longer tree life and keeping the forest floor intact can enhance any watershed. Conditions will improve because that is what the system wants to do- defend itself by assuring itself of an abundance of necessities. Extended water storage allows forests to fight fire, drought, insects and disease. Precipitation needs to be invited to stay longer in the regions where it falls, lessening the danger of flooding and maintaining water levels in dry periods. The only way to increase this natural capacity is to grow it, both in the trees above ground but especially in the root zone. The answer to this mess of a riddle is another mess- carbon dioxide, but by combining messes they come into focus. CO2 processing by mycorhizzia which are associated with most all plants, use carbon products made in leaves and exuded through roots to grow into the surrounding environment to gather nutrients and water. These are the hyphae, and are short lived. Every time the hyphae extend, they die back in several weeks, leaving long lived glomalin (7-45 years) in the soil, which aggregates soil particles creating pore space in the soil. Glomalin is quantifiable and several methods for detection are posted on the internet.
The federal government released a statement last summer saying 15 agencies dealing with natural resources were not seeing each others work, they were not standing on each others shoulders, they were not connecting the dots. I concur. USDA Sustainable Agriculture Lab scientists Sara Wright and Kristi Nichols discovered Glomalin in 1996. The discovery has had a huge impact on crops by assuring success of no-till farming, which saves labor, fuel and sure enough, carbon in the form of glomalin. Farmers are actually being paid to sequester carbon while we have a far more efficient carbon storage machine- mycorhizzia and trees. In those years crop research has greatly expanded, but only a few of us recognize this in context of NW forest and stream problems.
Rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have been extensively studied through FACE experiments, published in CO2 Science magazine. Above ground growth doubles, root growth triples and there is a five fold increase in glomalin production at 300 ppm over ambient. With this knowledge in hand CO2 accumulation becomes a meaningful activity, producing water, forest, wildlife, fish and air while protecting from fire and flood.
Douglas fir has several thousand associated mycorhizzia fungal associations, many concurrent, some successional and some opportunistic ones. Suddenly we see old growth as a mass of fungal activity and competition for carbon products that probably really only gets started as the tree reaches adulthood. While seedlings have specific mycorhizzia and other species appear early in a trees life, the volume of soil to be conditioned means it will take a long time for a forest to reach maximum capacity. It is also likely that gases given off by trees are a function of a long life cycle. Some have studied these gases and found them more polluting than many man made gases. However, these particles are what water vapor attached to in order to create fog and rain, critical functions in California coastal forests. It is likely production of these is way down from presettlement times.
Putting it all together, we find atmospheric carbon dioxide to be the very watershed rehabilitation system we have been looking for, as well as explaining why nature always bounces back. These are very powerful tools that allow us to make rules that make sense rather than regulate by guess work, and having a genuine reason for wanting longer rotations. Preservation of old growth gives us an area we can collect baseline data from to form objectives. Carbon sequestration thus becomes a byproduct. This has the critical value of potentially paying off in a carbon credit market that would allow landowners to take longer rotations and select cuts rather than clear cuts- in short, economic incentive. Various seasonal and species specific problems are tackled when the entire watershed holds water back. It is likely that regions below dams can regain some of their flows by restoring the precipitation interface (trees) and storage (glomalin) in their watersheds.
Big problems take big thinking, but nobody has applied this knowledge to forests yet. I have asked Redwood Sciences Lab, a USDA component of the Forest Service, to look into this. It is the kind of new science that deserves to be included in planning because it is a real solution, allows business to function while improving two of our basic human rights and needs, clean air and water, is a quantifiable standard by which priorities can be shaped and results shown while restoring damaged natural resource systems at minimal cost, and providing a use for underutilized lands. This also lessens the need for preservation and provides wildlife habitat. Preservation eventually leads to fuel buildups necessitating expensive risk reduction, as well as purchase price, and losses of income, property and timber tax revenues when working forests are closed off. As an aside, cheat grass is an annual in the Great Basin, a non-mycorhizzial annual seeder, is replacing sage over wide areas. The cheat grass areas go tinder dry every year and burn, and local water sources are diminishing because the storage capacity of the sage’s root zone has been destroyed. The goal is widespread landscape management under various ownership schemes actively seeking to capture carbon in a reduced risk setting.
We can turn all of these problems around with minimal loss or cost. I believe carbon management willl be brought in hand by this knowledge and we will see CO2 as a resource to be captured by landscapes, and that this will enhance national assets globally, causing accelerated tree planting, fallowing of marginal farm land and providing more water storage. I would like to see all affected federal agencies get on the same page with glomalin as a quantifiable rule of thumb. We will then believe restoration is under way and local land use battles will need to be fought only for aesthetic reasons once there is recognition of scale in glomalin capacity in each type of land use. It is such a practical idea that only those who believe in non-sustainable profits could object. This is the science of the twenty-first century. When coupled with genetic modifications whole new vistas of opportunity appear before our eyes. I started a blog to get this idea out. You find my thoughts but also source articles from USDA, CO2 Science magazine and local newspaper articles that illustrate how we struggle with these issues even as the solution is at hand.
On my blog I get a lot more hits from Europe than America, and no person has actually sent in a question or a donation. I have included some of the evolving thinking in DOI area management plans. Scientists need to get together and compare notes and test this hypothesis that seems so simple and appealing. In twenty years of studying watershed repair, this is the simplest and most natural way. Read more on my glomalin-dominated blog at www.redwoodreader.blogspot.com.