Drilling limited across a million acres in Wyoming Federal officials say natural gas companies will face limits on drilling across a million acres in Wyoming's Powder River Basin for the next several years in order to protect declining sage grouse populations. The new rules limit development to one wellpad per square mile unless companies can prove more wells won't hurt grouse, a popular game bird. Previously, the federal Bureau of Land Management had allowed eight to 16 wellpads per square mile. Scientists have said that higher density was driving sage grouse toward extermination. The rules will be in place for about four years while the BLM revises its management plan for the Powder River Basin, a region straddling the Montana-Wyoming border with rich reserves of natural gas....
Judge Dismisses Inyo County Suit to Open Roads in Death Valley A federal judge today largely threw out a suit by Inyo County to open highways through remote roadless areas of Death Valley National Park. Inyo County had hoped to take control of three routes -- little-used paths and canyon bottoms -- using a repealed Civil War-era law known as RS2477. The judge ruled that Inyo County waited too long to assert its claims to three roads within the National Park because they were included in a 1979 wilderness study by the Bureau of Land Management. The court agreed with conservation groups and the National Park Service that the county failed to file suit within the 12-year statute of limitations. The court thus dismissed the county's claims to all of one route and to the vast majority of two others....
Prairie dog plan finds little favor The U.S. Forest Service this week released its plan to control black-tailed prairie dogs - including the use of poison - within the Buffalo Gap and Fort Pierre National Grasslands in South Dakota and the Oglala National Grassland in Nebraska. But the announcement of a final environmental impact statement drew the ire of people on both sides of the issue: Wildlife conservation groups claim it will have a ripple effect on other species, while some ranchers were angered that the Forest Service didn't go far enough. The goal would keep prairie dog colonies to 3 percent or less on affected federal lands. The plan applies to 800,000 acres of grassland but does not include sites where the black-footed ferret has been reintroduced - including a wide swath of the Conata Basin south of Wall where the Forest Service said more prairie dogs are needed. The rare and endangered ferrets feed almost exclusively on prairies dogs....
1988 fires in Yellowstone paved way to forecasts As large swaths of Yellowstone National Park burned during the destructive fires of 1988, a small group of fire analysts descended on the park for a firsthand look at how massive fires burn. From those observations, U.S. Forest Service researcher Richard Rothermel crafted a technique to track some of the largest and most dangerous types of wildland blazes known as crown fires. Twenty years later, Rothermel's fire behavior formulas are still in use today and stand as a pillar of wildland fire science, said Lloyd Queen, a University of Montana professor who directs the National Center for Landscape Fire Analysis in Missoula. Unlike surface fires, which move through a forest at ground level, occasionally torching entire trees as they pass, crown fires roll through the dense upper reaches of the forest canopy. Leaping from treetop to treetop, their flames can top 100 feet in length....