What does forest service do

Representative Sam Farr D-California and conservation groups claim the Forest Service has failed to properly manage the monument. They say the purpose of establishing the monument was to protect, restore and preserve the 33 giant sequoia groves located on , acres.

But the Forest Service has allowed logging in the area, which critics say is unacceptable. Forests Forever. Supervisors of Tulare County, where the monument is located, oppose the transfer to the Park Service. They dispute that too much logging has gone on in the monument, arguing some trees had to go in order to thin overgrown areas and prevent forest fires.

Without this management, fires could have destroyed the giant sequoias. They also oppose the Park Service taking over because the change could mean more restrictions on biking, snowmobiling, hunting, and camping.

USFS fire management policy has been a source of great debate in recent years. As a result of USFS policies, wildfires have gone from being high-frequency, low-intensity events, which provide sustainability for certain ecosystems, to low frequency, high intensity events that make suppression of them futile, writes University of Maryland Professor Robert Nelson in his book, A Burning Issue: A Case for Abolishing the U.

Due to the prolonged absence of fire and the reduction in timber harvests, the abundance of dead and dying trees provide a high fuel load and conditions for high intensity fires that can cause enormous damage to soils, watersheds, fisheries, and other ecosystem components, Nelson argues.

Many environmental groups that view natural fires as an integral part of ecosystem management, have also criticized fire-suppression efforts, claiming that it lacks scientific basis. Meanwhile, firefighters and residents who live on forest land lobby heavily for fire suppression policies.

Nelson, the Independent Review. Forest Roads or Forest Fires? Buck, U. Forest Service, pdf. Old-growth trees can net significant profits for a timber company and, although most are exported whole, many are processed by domestic mills, where communities have come to depend on national forest trees.

Recent divestiture in timberlands worries communities dependent on the system. Environmentalists are also concerned and have scrambled to buy up lands and implement conservation efforts, at times even partnering with traditional adversaries, such as the timber industry, to practice sustainable ecological timber cultivation. Gorte, Congressional Research Service. Dale Robertson and George M. Leonard Forest History Today pdf.

Dead Wood: Reform of the U. For-Sale Signs Pop up on U. Timberlands by Laura Mandaro, Market Watch. Playground or Preserve? Abigail R. Kimball , Dale N. Bosworth , Michael P. Dombeck Jack Ward Thomas Dale Robertson Max Peterson John R.

McGuire Edward P. Cliff Richard E. McArdle Earle H. Clapp Acting Ferdinand A. Silcox Robert Y. Stuart William B. Greeley Henry S. Graves Gifford Pinchot Bernhard E.

Fernow Nathaniel H. Egleston Franklin B. Hough Like those before him, Thomas Tidwell has risen up through the ranks of the U. Forest Service during his year career before being appointed chief of the agency on June 17, , by Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack.

Main Menu. Back to Departments Back to Department of Agriculture. United States Forest Service. Overview: The U. History: The U. What it Does: The U. The top recipients and their percentage of all contracting include: 1. Controversies: Roadless Rule Controversy Conservationists hailed a federal appeals court ruling that backed a U. Forest The USFS proposed in to ban the controversial method of drilling known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, in the George Washington National Forest, which covers one million acres spread across Virginia and West Virginia.

Forest Service H. Suggested Reforms: USFS Rules to Reform Agency Management An ambitious overhaul of Forest Service management of national forests was unveiled in , much to the delight of environmentalists and to the consternation of the timber industry. Forest Service, pdf Clearcutting and Logging Old-growth trees can net significant profits for a timber company and, although most are exported whole, many are processed by domestic mills, where communities have come to depend on national forest trees.

Former Directors: Abigail R. Kimball , Dale N. Bosworth , Michael P. Dombeck Jack Ward Thomas F. Dale Robertson R. Max Peterson John R. McGuire Edward P. Cliff Richard E. McArdle Lyle F. Watts Earle H. Clapp Acting Ferdinand A. Silcox Robert Y. That is a role taken on by the U. Park Service. In the late s, the United States was growing fast.

The nation was selling off publicly owned land to private citizens for farming, ranching, and railroad construction. Most people thought forests could never be used up. Others, however, contemplated ruined landscapes and worried about the future. The turn of the century brought a change in public attitudes about clearing large tracts of land. Congress established the U.

The new federal agency was charged with mapping, maintaining, and protecting forests. Growing Our National Forests Initially, the United States had 60 forest reserves—tracts of forested land belonging to the federal government. A little more than a century later, there are national forests and 20 national grasslands. From Allegheny National Forest in Pennsylvania to Willamette National Forest in Oregon, these reserves add up to about 77 million hectares million acres , an area bigger than the state of Texas.

The mission of the Forest Service has also grown. Besides forests, the agency also manages grasslands where cattle and other livestock may graze. The Forest Service also shares its expertise with individual landowners, states, and with countries all around the world. More than Forest Management Forest research is another major activity. The Forest Service Research and Development unit employs researchers at seven research stations and 81 experimental forests. One important area of study is developing new sustainable energy sources.

Another is figuring out how to make forests more resilient —able to adapt and keep growing—in the face of climate change. Within the Forest Service, members of the Ecosystem Services Evaluation Framework group and the Ecosystem Services Practitioners Network hold regular calls to connect people doing this work. Attention to ecosystem services in the Planning Rule is likely to encourage consideration of these services at the project level.

The Marsh Project in the Deschutes National Forest and the Cool Soda Project in the Willamette National Forest were motivated by interest in highlighting the goods and services provided by forests to people; encouraging integrated, outcomes-based resource management; and supporting collaborative project development and implementation. Compared to the Planning Rule, NEPA provides little explicit direction on and regulation of project-level incorporation of ecosystem services.

However, NEPA is inherently aligned with an ecosystem services approach because of its requirement that the public participate in environmental analysis and decisionmaking regarding natural resource management to achieve a diverse set of objectives.

The ecosystem services concept supports public involvement by explicitly addressing public values and benefits in project proposals. An ecosystem services approach also supports the use of interdisciplinary teams by addressing multiple objectives across resource disciplines.

Project-level applications of the ecosystem services concept in Oregon have been highly collaborative. Several states have expressed interest in state-wide ecosystem services assessments. Reports on the non-market ecosystem services values of their forests have been written for Texas, Georgia, and Virginia.

Southern forest stakeholders appear to have three main motivations for quantifying and valuing ecosystem services at the state level:reporting measures needed by the state legislatures for appropriations , decisionmaking understanding of the consequences of converting forests and other land uses and practices , and communication a narrative to capture public interest.

The majority of state forestry agencies included discussion of ecosystem services benefits and values in their state forest action plans of Because state forestry agencies have had considerable latitude in how they prepare forest action plans, the types of ecosystem services and benefits they have evaluated and the valuation methodologies they have used have varied widely, making cross-state comparisons and compilation of summary statistics difficult. To address the difficulty of making cross-state comparisons of the value of statewide forest-based ecosystem services, nine southern states Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Kentucky, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia were awarded a regional investment competitive grant from the USDA Forest Service in The grant has allowed researchers from the Forest Service Southern Research Station and North Carolina State University to partner on a forest ecosystem services valuation project.

The project is bringing together stakeholders and experts on ecosystem services and valuation to develop a process and methodology for standardizing the quantification, valuation, and reporting of forest ecosystem services across the southern states and perhaps the nation. This effort will help the Southern Group of State Foresters and other members of the forestry community to provide accurate estimates of the total economic and environmental contribution of forests as well as to understand the consequences of converting forests to other land uses.

Specifically, through stakeholder meetings, literature reviews, and meetings of expert panels, the researchers will. At a meeting in Raleigh, North Carolina, in February , approximately 40 southern forests stakeholders discussed standardizing methodologies for quantifying and valuing forest ecosystem services. They represented private industry, non-governmental organizations, academia, and federal and state agencies in 10 of 13 USFS Region 8 states.

Panels of ecosystem services valuation experts are in the process of identifying accurate and cost-effective methods for state-level valuation and developing standardized guidelines and methods to produce reliable, accurate, verifiable and comparable estimates of the quantity and value of the priority ecosystem services and benefits from southern forests.

It provides science, tools, and data that are fundamental to much of the USFS work on ecosystem services. Research is undertaken by five research stations, the Forest Products Laboratory, and the International Institute of Tropical Forestry. Opportunities fall into three categories: 1 analysis and decisionmaking, 2 measurement and reporting, and 3 investment in ecosystem services. An ecosystem services approach can support and be supported by integrated, outcomes-based budgeting and performance measures by articulating the goods and services provided by ecological systems and coordinated management across resource program areas.

Integrating ecosystem services into national Forest Service policy and operations describes Forest Service efforts to integrate ecosystem services in planning, performance and partnerships. What people value: an ecosystem services approach to managing public lands describes how the Forest Service is integrating ecosystem services into national policy and operations, related to decision making, prioritizing, measuring, reporting, communicating, and investing in forest management.

Integrating Ecosystem Services into U. Forest Service Programs and Operations describes efforts within the USFS to institutionalize and coordinate ecosystem services activities. Browse Agency Use. Department of Agriculture Approach of the U. Home - Agency Use - Approach of the U. Forest Service. Approach of the U.