In search of phantom forests - Forest Service overstatements of trees in federal lands

Sierra, July-August, 1992 by Joan Hamilton

Every year the Forest Service tells Congress how many trees it thinks it can sell. And every year a chorus of criticism follows from those concerned about how the proposed cutting will affect forests, watersheds, and wildlife.

Less controversial, until now, has been the agency's estimate of the total amount of wood growing on its lands. But at a House Appropriations Subcommittee hearing this spring, a timber worker provided compelling evidence to suggest that the Forest Service deliberately overstates the number and age of the trees on its lands to support its requests to Congress for timbering funds.

"They've fabricated a paper forest," Leroy Lee of Santa, Idaho, told the subcommittee in March, "and used that made-up version to convince Congress and local communities that the forest could sustain an unrealistically high level of logging."

Lee has been employed for the past five years as a seasonal "stand examiner" for the U.S. Forest Service. The agency pays him to identify trees on public land by species, measure their heights and diameters, and determine their age and growth rate.

Curiosity about how the data he gathered were being used led Lee to the realization that the Forest Service keeps two sets of books. The System 2000 Timber Inventory Database to which he was contributing sets the parameters for timber sales and tree-planting work, and is updated at least yearly. But he discovered that another assemblage of figures, now more than a decade old for most forests, is fed into the agency's FORPLAN computer program and served up annually to congressional budgetmakers.

The differences between the two sets of data are sometimes dramatic. In the Palouse District of Clearwater National Forest in north-central Idaho, Lee found FORPLAN's estimates of standing timber 36 percent higher than the up-to-date System 2000's. In the Kootenai Forest in northwestern Montana, the FORPLAN figures ignored 75 percent of the clearcuts. To back up his numbers, Lee showed the subcommittee aerial photos revealing clearcuts in places depicted as mature timber on Forest Service maps.

After several years of poring over numbers the agency supplied him from both databases, Lee concluded that the Forest Service was, for budget purposes at least, living in the past. Hundreds of thousands of acres of trees have been cleared from its forests, but not from the FORPLAN computer program.

The problem in the Kootenai is compounded by a flawed method of classifying trees. If a 500-acre plot within the forest is 35-percent plot 25-percent pole-size timber, and 40-percent mature trees, Kootenai planners assume for statistical purposes that the entire unit is covered with the category best represented - in this case, mature timber. Because Kootenai planners define the "mature timber" class broadly and the younger classes narrowly, mature timber predominates more often than it should, and the Kootenai's FORPLAN printouts make the forest look woodsier than it actually is.

A month after Lee testified, Forest Service officials responded to the charges with a resounding shrug. "We know there are going to be differences [between FORPLAN and System 2000]," acknowledged Kootenai public-affairs officer Bob Krepps. "We've had 18 years of harvest and other management activities since our FORPLAN data were collected in 1974."

Clearwater spokesman Bert Kulesza admitted, "We haven't spent a lot of time correlating these two sets of data. Where we see problems on the ground, we will take a closer look."

Lee's findings are consistent with the Forest Service's historical bias toward overcutting. Numerous agency efforts to keep the cut level high by ignoring environmental laws and making fantastic growth projections are well documented. (A few years ago forest economist Randal O'Toole publicized FORPLAN timber-yield tables that assumed tree growing to heights of 658 feet - about 290 feet higher than the tallest known tree in the world.)

"If you pretend there is more wood out there than there is, you can justify cutting more," says the Sierra Club's Larry Mehlhaff, a close observer of the forest-planning process in the northern Rockies. "It's not pure chance that every number that's off is off on the high side."

Lee has not attempted to determine whether all the nation's forests hype their wares at budget time. That, he says, is a job too big for a maverick stand examiner. But he has recently joined with three environmentalists to form the Forest Inventory Project, which is scrutinizing agency data throughout Montana and northern Idaho and teaching like-minded volunteers how to do it elsewhere.

"I may be wrong on a few numbers," Lee says. "But even if I am, the Forest Service is going to have to come up with the right ones - something they never would have done if we hadn't challenged them."

Getting at the truth will require heavy number-crunching in local Forest Service offices, encouragement from higher-ups, and perhaps a swift kick from Congress. "You talk to Forest Service people at the lower levels," Lee says. "You stand with them at the top of a drainage that's hacked to pieces and say, |How can you do this?' And they say |Congress makes this decision. Go to Congress.'