*** Welcome to piglix ***

Biscuit Fire publication controversy


The Biscuit Fire publication controversy was an academic and political controversy in the United States in January 2006 about publication of an academic paper titled Post-wildfire logging hinders regeneration and increases fire risk. The U.S Forest Service and a group of professors, including six at the Oregon State University College of Forestry, wrote a letter to the prestigious scientific journal Science requesting that publication of a short forestry paper written by an OSU Forestry graduate student and others be delayed until the authors could respond to it, arguing the article was "short on qualifiers and context". The group requested alternatively that Science publish a sidebar illustrating their concerns alongside the paper. Science refused, and the paper, which had already undergone peer review and been approved for publication, appeared in the January 20, 2006 issue. The paper had been published in the online edition of Science before the letter was written.

The paper, written by graduate student Dan Donato and several colleagues, concerned the effects of logging in the aftermath of the 2002 Biscuit Fire, a massive wildfire which burned nearly a half million acres (2,000 km²) in southwestern Oregon. Some forestry scientists, and the Bush administration, proposed that salvage logging—removal of dead trees, many still usable as timber, after a fire—was necessary for fire safety and forest regeneration. Donato et al.’s research provided some evidence contradicting this view. They compared sections of the burn which were burned severely and then salvage-logged to sections which had only been burned. They found the unlogged portions had significantly more conifer seedlings than were found in the logged portions. The paper suggested that soil disturbance and materials left over from the logging process may have disturbed the growth of seedlings. The paper also reported elevated surface fuels in the logged sites, which they concluded elevated the risk of future fire.


...
Wikipedia

...