Problem Area 1. Environmental impacts of forest herbicides:
a lack of understanding of the environmental risks and benefits associated with forest herbicide practices, as compared to alternatives, jeopardize their continued availability to forest managers.
The use of herbicides offers safe, economical, and effective ways of achieving many goals related to forest health and sustainability. However, they are often perceived by the public to cause harm to the environment. As a result, many public land managers consider herbicides as socially unacceptable and are hesitant to use these tools. The private non-industrial forest owners, who dominate the Southern region, are more accepting of forest herbicides than their public-land counterparts. However, some are still apprehensive about their use. At the same time, the use of herbicides is on the increase on industrial forestland to increase forest productivity.
Forest herbicides are also viewed as critical to solving current and future forest health problems related to the accumulation of forest fuels and the invasion of non-native plants. Yet this effective and safe vegetation management tool continues to be viewed as too risky by some policy makers and managers. There are many forest management objectives for which herbicide use is an appropriate tool. A major problem in managing natural resources in today’s socio-political environment is that there have been too few integrated comparisons of forest vegetation management alternatives, and too few syntheses of information to provide a scientific basis for decision making.
Program element 1a -- Comparing environmental risks and benefits of forest vegetation management alternatives:
Forest management must continue to become more intensive on portions of our forest lands due to increasing population pressure, increasing human needs for multiple use of forest lands, and the concomitant reduction in area available for intensive forest management coupled with ever increasing needs for wood fiber.
In order for those lands under intensive forest management to provide sustained yields and to protect the ecosystems they encompass, research must provide adequate comparisons of the impacts of various methods for accomplishing the most important aspects of forest management on a landscape basis:
- harvest
- site preparation
- stand establishment
- crop-tree release
- fuel management for protection of forest ecosystems from catastrophic fire events.
These impacts include aquatic ecosystem contamination from pesticides and sediment and terrestrial and aquatic ecosystem species diversity and functioning. Studies have shown that use of mechanical vegetation management methods can result in 20 to 400% more sediment than observed on chemically prepared sites. Thus, one can argue that when herbicides are used properly they can help protect water quality by reducing sedimentation in streams and riparian zones when compared to mechanical methods.
Program element 1b -- Forest vegetation management and water quality standards & guidelines:
Water quality standards are codified in several places including the Clean Water Act and the Safe Drinking Water Act. They are affected by regulatory actions such as EPA’s regulations on total maximum daily loads (TMDL), and changes in definitions of non-point source pollution and polluters. Professional foresters are challenged to prescribe silviculturally sound management activities which accommodate individual ownership needs, but also protect forest resource values and minimize off-site impacts to public resources, such as water quality, aquatic habitat and biota.
In order to provide guidance to forest managers and owners and to meet the objectives of the Clean Water Act each state in the South has adopted Best Management Practices (BMP) for the prevention of non-point source pollution from forestlands. Each has instituted programs to encourage the use of BMP when forests are treated with management practices that involve soil disturbance, chemicals or fire. While there is general BMP consistency among the states, significant variation also occurs. Other water quality standards and regulations in the US and around the world are similarly variable and at times contradictory. When technical reasons for such variation are not evident, managers and owners of forestland in affected states are understandably confused and the credibility of these guidelines is diminished. This research and development effort is intended to improve understanding of the technical basis of water quality guidelines and promote regional, national, and international consistency by identifying and describing standards that are based on sound scientific principles.
