You Can’t Manage Forests Without Understanding Them

This post originally ran in SciLight. Reprinted with permission.

The U.S. Forest Service (USFS) is undergoing one of the most consequential and likely disruptive transformations in its 121-year history. The agency plans to relocate its headquarters from Washington, D.C., to Salt Lake City and overhaul its structure and management. According to a Forest Service press release from March 31, the overhaul aims to bring leadership “closer to the forests and communities they serve,” replacing the agency’s long-standing regional model with a state-based structure.

At first glance, the rationale seems intuitive. Forest management should be informed by local conditions, local relationships, and decisions made closer to the ground. But that premise raises a more fundamental question: what happens when the scientific infrastructure that informs those decisions is dismantled at the same time?

The proposed restructuring would eliminate regional offices and establish six primary “Operations Service Centers” that will absorb many functions previously handled by regional offices that are being eliminated. Additionally, “15 state directors will be distributed throughout the country to oversee Forest Service operations within one or more states”, replacing career USFS personnel with political appointees. Critically, the changes include closing 57 research stations and eliminating an unknown number of forestry scientists, as well as those who will not be able to (or are not willing to) relocate.

Speaking to Newsweek, a U.S. Department of Agriculture spokesperson said that “Effective stewardship and active management are achieved on the ground, where forests and communities are found—not just behind a desk in the capital.” Which triggers an immediate question: how does the dismantling of the entire USFS structure and closing the whole of the scientific place-based infrastructure help with ‘on-the-ground’ management? It won’t. And that’s the point.

How will this affect USFS scientific work and decision-making?

The USFS changes do more than reorganize an agency. They reshape the role that science plays in how public lands are managed. For more than a century, the USFS has relied on a distributed network of research stations, experimental forests, and laboratories to understand how ecosystems function and how they respond to stress. That work underpins fire management plans, timber sales, watershed protection, and ecosystem recovery efforts in approximately 193 million acres of public land across the country.

This is echoed by PEER (Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility), a nonprofit organization that protects the rights of public employees and elevates their voices on important environmental issues. Scientific research is vital to the successful management of our nation’s forests. More importantly, the organization stated that the current administration has not conducted an inventory of the scientific research needs of the National Forest System before deciding to collapse its entire research capacity, creating a knowledge gap and a set of unknowns that will impact forest research and management for years.

The existence of an extensive network of research stations is precisely what allows the Forest Service to consistently monitor local conditions. By deliberately destroying this scientific, institutional, and physical infrastructure, USFS is severely weakening its ability to study forest ecosystems and track the impact of its own interventions. Most likely, this move will lead to a medium and long-term situation in which there is a total abandonment of research on the impacts of climate change in forest ecosystems, less scientific research into effective forest management techniques, and perhaps more damning, a complete lack of contextualized nuance to the management approach over vastly different forest systems.

This shift has practical consequences. The move means less agency capacity to perform other critical tasks, such as wildfire mitigation, environmental reviews (a process that has already been ‘streamlined’ by the Trump administration), and oversight of commercial logging and other high-impact activities. Critically, the overhaul comes in the aftermath of a push to dramatically increase timber cuts across national forests via Executive Order and the rescission of the Roadless Rule (this move is being mirrored by the Bureau of Land Management, which is already creating tensions). It will be almost certainly impossible for the Forest Service to increase timber targets without sacrificing forest health and increasing wildfire risk.

The overhaul will also affect communities. The Forest Service relies on a strong local presence, a decentralized bureaucracy, and local relationships to fulfill its mission. For example, wildfire mitigation rarely happens in isolation. The presence of the Forest Service directly affects landowners living on or near lands in the National Forest System. All across the country, communities in the wildland-urban interface (WUI) coordinate with the Forest Service to mitigate critical wildfire risk. This is especially true in the West, where the expansion of the WUI is increasingly putting communities at risk.

The USFS’s move to further dismantle its place-based activities and research infrastructure is part of the broader anti-science, anti-nature, and commodification approach to natural lands and resources this administration is implementing. The stated goal of the restructuring is to improve efficiency and responsiveness. Those are reasonable objectives. But in complex systems like forests, efficiency is not just about proximity or speed. It depends on the ability to understand conditions, anticipate change, and make informed choices over time.

Instead, it seems the efficiency and responsiveness are aimed at boosting timber production. Forest management is not only an operational challenge. It is a knowledge challenge. It requires continuous observation, careful analysis, and the ability to learn from the landscape itself. Without that, decisions will be made with less understanding of what those forests need.