The United States Department of Agriculture announced on March 31 that it is moving the Forest Service headquarters from Washington, D.C., to Salt Lake City, Utah, as part of a reorganization the agency described as "prioritizing common sense forest management" [1]. Embedded in the announcement was a detail that drew less attention than the headline: 57 of the agency's 77 research and development facilities, spread across 31 states from Alaska to Florida, will close [2]. The stations being shuttered include facilities that study wildfire behavior, climate adaptation, drought resilience, pest outbreaks, and the carbon dynamics of American forests [3].

The research stations are not administrative offices. They are field laboratories, often located in or adjacent to the ecosystems they study. The Marcell Experimental Forest in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, has conducted global-leading research on peatland carbon storage and watershed hydrology for decades [4]. The Pacific Northwest Research Station in Portland, Oregon, has studied old-growth forest ecology since the timber wars of the 1990s. California is losing six of its eight Forest Service research facilities, including stations in Anderson, Fresno, Chico, Fort Bragg, Mount Shasta, and Davis -- a devastating blow to a state that lost more than two million acres to wildfire in 2025 [5].

The USDA framed the restructuring as efficiency. The press release cited the need to "reduce bureaucratic overhead" and bring leadership closer to the forests it manages, noting that 93 percent of Forest Service land lies west of the Mississippi [1]. The consolidation reduces nine regional offices to five, eliminates duplicative management layers, and concentrates remaining research capacity in 20 stations [2].

Scientists who work at the affected facilities see the consolidation differently. Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), a watchdog group, noted that "it is unknown how many of the research scientists will relocate to the surviving research stations or resign" [2]. The knowledge held in these stations is not portable. Wildfire behavior models depend on decades of site-specific data collection -- burn severity records, fuel moisture measurements, post-fire recovery observations -- that cannot be replicated by consolidating researchers into distant offices. When a station closes, the longitudinal dataset it maintained often dies with it.

The timing is pointed. The Forest Service's research arm has published foundational work on how climate change is altering wildfire frequency, severity, and season length in the American West. That research has informed everything from evacuation planning to insurance actuarial tables to building codes in the wildland-urban interface. Closing the stations that produce this science does not eliminate the wildfire risk. It eliminates the capacity to understand it.

Twenty of 77 stations will survive. The other 57 represent a century of accumulated field science -- tree ring data, watershed monitoring, soil surveys, wildlife inventories -- that was built one observation at a time and cannot be rebuilt by decree. The Forest Service is moving its headquarters to Salt Lake City. The forests remain where they have always been, and they are burning.

-- KENJI NAKAMURA, Tokyo