forestry

In recognition of their nearly 70 years of combined service to the Pacific Northwest Ski Areas Association, Garth Ferber, Kenny Kramer, and Mark Moore are sharing the group’s 2012 Partner of the Year awards.

The three are meteorologists employed by the Northwest Weather and Avalanche Center– a unit of the U.S. Forest Service located in National Weather Service Forecast Office in Seattle, Wash.

The Partner honor is reserved for a Forest Service employee who significantly and decisively helps to improve the quality and safety of Pacific Northwest winter sports facilities. This year the Association broke with tradition and presented three awards.

Forest Service Chief Tom Tidwell recently threw out the first pitch at a Potomac Nationals baseball game during their Forest Service Night Out in Woodbridge, Va.

The event publicized the Break a Bat/Plant a Tree partnership between the Potomac Nationals—a Class A Advanced Affiliate of the Washington Nationals—and the Forest Service.

The agreement calls for a tree to be planted on the George Washington-Jefferson National Forest for each bat broken during Potomac Nationals home games. Through the first 17 home games this season, 18 bats have been broken at Pfitzner Stadium – a pace that could mean 80 trees planted after the season.

This post is part of the Science Tuesday feature series on the USDA blog. Check back each week as we showcase stories and news from USDA’s rich science and research portfolio.

People often get confused when observed weather patterns run contrary to climate projections.  For instance, those living in the Mid-Atlantic States hear from experts that the region has now moved into a dry savanna-like climate zone, but yet two winters ago over 40 inches of snow fell in a single month.  But weather is highly variable regardless of the state of the climate.  Individual weather events like this one are different than "climate," which refers to long-term trends over decades.  And further, climate change could produce more extremes at both ends of the weather spectrum even while a region shifts into a seemingly contrary climate state.

In an attempt to make science and technical concepts of projecting climate change clearer to the public, the U.S. Forest Service has published a report simplifying complex information and resources.

Consider the bat - you know, the flying type that swoops out of urban eaves or rural caves usually at dawn or dusk. What do you know about the central roles they play in controlling insect populations, balancing ecosystems or pollinating flowers, fruits and vegetables?

Last week, students in grades four through eight and educators from around the country did more than just consider the bat. They met a number of live bats via an hour-long Washington, D.C., Bats!LIVE distance learning seminar (view online video) including a little brown bat, a vampire bat and a straw-colored fruit bat with a six-foot wingspan. They asked questions of bat biologists, learned about threats to bats and what everyone can do to help bats in their own communities.

When President Obama recently called on federal agencies to help young people find more work in the great outdoors, the U.S. Forest Service – with 193 million acres of prime outdoor space —responded quickly with jobs for hundreds of underserved youths.

The America’s Great Outdoors: Developing the Next Generation of Conservationists initiative will fund 20 projects, providing more than 500 young people with the experience of a lifetime working on public lands this summer work season. The Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management and the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation recently announced $3.7 million in competitive grants through the initiative.

The Weeks Act 100-mile Legacy Trail has recently been unveiled as a virtual self-guided driving tour of the White Mountains in New Hampshire.   The tour is named after the watershed conservation legislation of 1911 known as the Weeks Act that led to the creation of national forests east of the Mississippi River.

Rappellers are firefighters who are delivered to remote and inaccessible wildfires by means of dropping down a rope from helicopters hovering 250 feet high.

Earlier this month over 50 veteran Forest Service rappellers throughout the West prepared for a new fire season with training and recertification classes in Oregon and Idaho.

On any given day during grazing season, Black Angus cattle amble across areas of the Oglala National Grassland in northwestern Nebraska. Yet they play a bigger role than just grazing for their daily meal.  They help support the local economy, are the lifeline of a family business and have a role in a healthy rangeland ecosystem.

The USDA Forest Service, along with our Federal, state and local partners operate the largest wildland fire management program in the world. To help manage these wildland fires the partners have created interagency incident management teams. These teams have responded to many incidents including major fires, insect infestations, the shuttle recovery and hurricanes. These incidents have tested the management skills and abilities of the agency and its partners.

On September 11, 2001, within hours of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, interagency incident management teams were dispatched to New York City and Arlington, VA. I served as an Incident Commander of the California Incident Management Team that responded to the Pentagon.

More and more folks live fulfilling lives well into their senior years but it’s especially noteworthy when an octogenarian is still working on environmental conservation issues like Florence LaRiviere. This year the Environmental Law Institute honored LaRiviere with its 2012 National Wetlands Award for “Wetland Community Leader” and asked U.S. Forest Service scientist and Associate Deputy Chief for Research and Development, Dr. Deanna J. Stouder, to present the award.