TL;DR
The Forest Service will shutter 57 of 77 research facilities across 31 states, ending decades of wildfire and climate science.
MSM Perspective
Forest Service consolidates research under reorganization plan as it relocates headquarters from Washington to Utah.
X Perspective
Closing 74% of wildfire research stations right as wildfire season intensifies is one of the more spectacular own-goals in recent memory.
The US Department of Agriculture announced this week that the Forest Service will close 57 of its 77 research and development stations across 31 states, retaining only 20 facilities under a sweeping reorganization plan. The agency will simultaneously relocate its headquarters from Washington, D.C., to Utah and close all nine of its regional administrative offices.
The closures affect facilities that have spent decades studying wildfire behavior, forest regeneration, water quality, and the effects of climate change on forest ecosystems. California loses six stations; Mississippi loses five. Minnesota, where research on the northern boreal forest and freshwater systems has been conducted for generations, loses two facilities, including the Grand Rapids lab whose work on carbon sequestration has been cited in federal climate policy.
Scientists whose work is being terminated describe knowledge that cannot easily be relocated or replicated — long-term data sets that depend on continuous presence in a specific place, relationships with local land managers built over years, and institutional memory that resides in people rather than servers.
The agency describes the move as consolidation, not elimination. Critics describe it as the elimination of the science that would tell us how fast our forests are dying.
-- KENJI NAKAMURA, Tokyo
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