Geoff Staneff

@gstaneff

Former thermoelectrics and fuel cell scientist, software and data product manager; current forestry startup guy trying to reduce the impact of future wildfires. PNW based, have visited high intensity burns this year from Northern BC to the Sierras. He/Him

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Geoff Staneff@gstaneff· Jun 10

In 1980 there was a NatGeo special on Energy that showed growth in fossil fuel consumption from 1960 to 1979. Looking at contemporary data we can see consumption is still rising. 19 -> 28 -> 77 Quads from fossil fuels from 1960 to '79 to 2023 (61.5 rejected). flowcharts.llnl.gov/sites/flowch...

Pages 18 and 19 from the 1980 National Geographic special on Energy, showing Sankey diagrams for total US Energy consumption in 1960 and 1979 (in Quads). Between 1960 and 1979 the US population grew from 181 million to 221 million and Energy Consumption grew from 19 to 28 Quads, nearly all of it from fossil fuels. While the mix of sources changes over time and some have had remarkable growth over the decades; the quantity of fossil fuel based energy consumption has steadily climbed, accounting for about 77 of 94 Quads in 2023. The volume of fossil fuels needs to go down in absolute terms to make progress on emissions. Growth in green generation doesn't eliminate or prevent ongoing emissions.

Geoff Staneff@gstaneff· May 15

As a "welcome to Caltech" session with Prof Johnson in 1998 he developed this diagram on the whiteboard as a t.i.c. way to describe what post-degree life was really like. Developed left to right; Lunch was the punchline for "yet another thing" keeping you, the bright young thing, from The Work.

A rectangular box representing how you, a future new faculty member at a research institution, will actually spend your time. This is a stacking area chart, so the vertical axis sums to 100% of your day and the x-axis runs from getting hired through Tenure and on to Emeritus status at the end of the line. Within the area of the chart are two diagonal lines crossing at the Tenure point. At the start of career, on your honeymoon year as a new professor, you spend 100% of your time doing research. As you settle into your role you pick up teaching assignments and spend more time writing grants to support your growing research team. As you approach Tenure you've stopped doing research entirely, filling your days with funding concerns: both teaching, which contributes to team funds, and grant writing - keeping everyone funded is 100% of your life. Post Tenure, when you've made it, the grant writing and teaching gets easier, and Lunch begins to take up more and more of your life. Ultimately, as Emeritus, you do what you want (100% Lunch).

It was delivered tongue in cheek and developed left to right so you didn't see lunch coming until the punch line. It was meant to disabuse new graduate students of the myths associated with faculty life. If you just want to do research (the work) faculty life isn't actually for you; faculty is the everyday frustration and toil behind the scenes of management, and they throw these new PhDs into the grinder with no training or expectation for the management side of running, funding, mentoring, and surviving as a new research team at a research university.

Dr. Johnson hits 50 years on faculty at Caltech this year, if I'm lucky I'll be able to catch him for lunch soon.

Geoff Staneff@gstaneff· Mar 13

🌲🔥 Going a little nuts looking at this treatment because it breaks a number of assumptions. Here I've marked the thing we measure against in blue and the thing we want to control in red. They are different things. Their relationships are not fixed across time, species, or growing conditions.

Landscape view of Sierra Mixed Conifer forest, post treatment in the foreground and untreated as a solid mass of vegetation in the background. Species here are: Ponderosa Pine, Sugar Pine, White Fir, Douglas Fir, Incense Cedar, and Black Oak. There is a blackened black oak in the near right, several burn scars on trees further back, and widely spaced trunks throughout the treatment area - intended to help fire get to ground and produce a survivable burn in the future for this forest. Marked in blue are horizonal lines at 4.5' above the ground on the uphill side of stems - the canonical Diameter at Breast Height. Much further up are red lines noting the distance between branches - a canopy closure measurement.

In practice we work towards basal area (diameters) but are attempting to hit a specific canopy spacing - during a project we measure the available and easy thing instead of directly measuring the thing we really care about - and it drives me a bit batty because we have the technology now to do something better.

Geoff Staneff@gstaneff· Feb 26

The gold piping and collar? Reminds me a bit of the French 7s away jerseys from 2016. I like the Italian collar and the older French sublimated detail, which looked like feathers up the back for France and like someone spilled their drink for the Italians. Why yes, I'm a back, why do you ask?

Geoff Staneff@gstaneff· Feb 25

This image of the post-treatment landscape illustrates the target stocking level for this overcrowded forest. Reducing the density of stems allows the survivors more light, water, and opportunity to grow larger. The machine's selection is far less likely to get away from us than a hot-season fire.

In this image we have what is hoped to be a fire resilient stand; a plantation on USFS land in Sierra mixed conifer cut to 60 sq ft per acre. White Fir, Douglas Fir, Ponderosa Pine, Incense Cedar, and Sugar Pine make up the conifers, with Black Oak on this site representing the hardwoods. Across the road in the background you can see the untreated forest – closed in and prone to crown-runs when fire comes. When the crown is burned the fire spreads fast and trees die en masse. The spacing post treatment gives the fire a chance to get back on the ground, where the blackened bark on living trees stand as evidence of survivability of the forest when subjected to ground fire.

This was photographed in a gap between storm systems, a break in the rain before the snows started earlier this month. The scene is very wet, the ground is rich brown and green, the stems of trees brown and fire-blackened, the crowns dark green, and the sky cloudy, dark, with breaks of pale blue poking through.

Geoff Staneff@gstaneff· Feb 25

The machine in this image is a feller buncher, a tool that can be used for logging and to thin a forest to enhance fire resilience and promote stand health. As with most things, it comes down to how you use it; my startup creates a tool that helps folks cut some, not all, of the trees.

A Tigercat feller buncher on a hillside of sierra mixed conifer plantation on USFS lands. This 90,000 machine can cut trees and carry them around singly or in bunches (feller: means it cuts trees, buncher: means it groups the cut trees). In the background you can make out power lines, clearing lines of wind-throw risk reduces fire starts in extreme conditions, and reducing the stocking level of a stand also allows the surviving trees more light, water, and less competition which makes them more resilient against pests and disease. The ground is a little muddy, the machine with metal tracks a little dirty, the trees in the background thick and closely packed, but more sparsely spaced around the machine - this affords an opportunity to get fire on the ground and out of the crown when it comes.

There is a a slope to this hillside, lots of conifer trees and mixed clouds in the sky behind the tops of the trees. This feller buncher is yellow nd black, the cutting head near the camera is about 10' tall and this machine has seen about 4,000 hours of service.

Geoff Staneff@gstaneff· Feb 23

This is Base Power, with 1/4 the fundraise? No accident they all start in Texas, easy to monetize the dysfunctional grid (e.g. the trapped ratepayers). How does the business work when the local grid operator isn't a clownshow? Does this lower electrical system costs or redistribute wealth?

The classic 3 dragons meme. The yellowish dragons have different facial expressions, you can only see their necks and heads here - disclosure this might be a hydra instead of three different dragons. The far left one is looking dead on at the camera, mouth slightly open showing sharp teeth and overall conveys menace. This dragon is labeled CAISO, for the California Independent System Operator. The middle dragon is similarly vicious, but has been a little distracted by the third dragon with an eyebrow raised in that direction. This dragon is labeled MISO, the Midcontinent Independent System Operator. The third Dragon. The third dragon has a derpy expression with a different art style, its tongue is sticking out like a tired puppy, the eyes are great boons with shiny pupil accents. It is non-threatening and looks... incompetent. The third dragon is labeled ERCOT, for the Electric Reliability Council of Texas.

Geoff Staneff@gstaneff· Feb 17

They've updated in the last 4 hours or so. Still not quite right, but not so obviously crap.

The new Git Flow code integration map, they've shifted the 2010 version so time runs along the X axis now (good) but lost the re-integration of the hotfix example back into the development branch (bad). A lot of the paths look random, like they didn't have specific code integration flows in mind to describe the kinds of code update a team might push with Git Flow. But the lines, circles, and colors are more clear! For instance, why do a point release through the release process and immediately do a full numbered release immediately after? It is possible but much of the original graphic's detail and nuance about how bringing different code evolutions across time together into the release process has been lost. Basically, the integrations only go as fully coherent units in the new diagram while the old captured forking works in progress to release one version now and rework (and integrate with other features) a more full version of that same feature later.

Geoff Staneff@gstaneff· Feb 7

The same spot has been imaged from space again, but finally the piles have been burned in this project area.

A view of the Coconino from space, showing the outlines of burn piles after they had been burned. In the top left is a stand of dark green trees closely packed, with a clumps and groups smattering of dark green trees, dark shadows, and tan ground filling 3/4 of the scene. The roads are reddish, this was likely an image taken over the winter. There appears to be a herd of animals stretched along a portion of the road between the big groups of burn piles.

Geoff Staneff@gstaneff· Feb 7

A spot I've been to several times finally got through some pile burning backlog in the last 6 months and it is already visible on Google Maps. Here was a view representative up through at least the first half of 2025. Lots of wood-rat habitat around here.

A view of the Coconino from space, west of Flagstaff Arizona. The ground is light brown, the dark green pine trees are casting dark shadows across the ground. In most of the scene the trees are in clumps with openings between them, the top left is thickly grown. Mixed throughout are *huge* piles of logging slash and decaying biomass left over from the thinning project.

Geoff Staneff@gstaneff· Feb 2

Careful, even strategic reserves can prove to be less secure than expected.

An image of thousands of white 55 gal drums stacked in a warehouse 5 layers deep and extending to infinity. Purported to be from the inside of the Canadian Strategic Maple Syrup Reserve, and the site of the 2011-2012 vol de sirop d'érable du siècle (Maple Syrup Heist of the Century).

The white barrels are unlabeled and nominally filled with 600lbs of maple syrup each, unless someone has stolen the syrup leaving water filled or empty barrels.

Geoff Staneff@gstaneff· Feb 2

This one is also a good background on US land use. I grabbed this from Bloomberg nearly 8 years ago. It doesn't break out power generation except for Ethanol and probably the less we talk about this particular map projection the better (what is going on in the SW!?). Based on USDA data.

Map from Bloomberg showing the breakout of land use across the US, as something like a TreeMap or Voroni diagram. The map projection is strange, as if half the country is laid out flat on the table and the mountain west just curled off the edge of the table, making it look much smaller - placing an emphasis on the Texas-Florida portion of the country. The largest region by far is land use given over to Cows, with livestock feed, wheat exports, feed exports, enthanol, sheep/goats/other, horses, and the foot we eat taking up close to 2/3 of the map. 1/3 is split across various forests (private, corporate, federal). With housing filling the NE. Everyone always ask why so much land is put aside for wildfires every year. That's a trick in two ways: first it was meant to represent the proportion of the overlapping private, corporate, or federal lands that burned and second US Wildfire behavior changed dramatically at about the time these data were compiled and it underrepresents a world with the fire season regularly bringing us million acre fires in the US.

The colors are diverse, meant to help demark content rather than convey an image. Maple Syrup takes up about as much land as Golf, Tobacco, Flowers, etc. Christmas Trees are the smallest unit on the map (about 250k acres? Maybe, makes a lot of assumptions about how consistent the representation of the map is that are perhaps unreasonable given what is going on with the projection).

This was all based on USDA data.

Geoff Staneff@gstaneff· Feb 1

David MacKay's Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air from 2009 had graphics such as these to illustrate the footprint of equivalent power production. Joining it onto literal land use seems a small additional step best left to the student.

A map of the continental US from Sustainable Energy Without The Hot Air by David JC MacKay, 2009. Along the right side is a color key for four different methods of producing 42kW/d of electrical power: Olive for Wind, Purple for Nuclear, Green for Biomass, and Yellow for Solar. Across the US are scattered colored blocks representing each of those modes and the amount of the continent they'd take up. The Nuclear footprint is represented by 48 dots near major power demand centers. The Solar is simply a large block in NW Arizona. The Wind contribution runs North to South from Montana into Texas. And finally the biomass contribution covers the great plains through to the Atlantic coast. It makes the relative land-use cost of different modes starkly clear. This is based on potentials and technologies from 17 years ago and over this time Wind and Solar have been progressing down steep learning curves and can likely do even more with their already relatively more modest land use demands.

Geoff Staneff@gstaneff· Jan 16

New year, same Forest and Friends monthly meet up on the eastside (Bellevue WA)! If you are in the neighborhood next Thursday come on by and join us as we kick off 2026 together. 🌲🔥 luma.com/hrt8kynx

A recently thinned Sierra Mixed Conifer stand in the Plumas NF. The ground is damp-brown with scattered litter (and mounds of dirt meant to block skid trails and minimize recreational use reinforcement of temporary roads and trails). The trees are tall and well spaced to reduce the chance future fire carries from tree-top to tree-top, they have dark straight trunks and deep green needles in the top quarter of the stem. The sky is a bright blue with a large white cloud behind the trees on the left. The dappled sun filtering through the canopy casts shadows across the scene. This stand was thinned from about 150 to 60 square feet per acre, to support a return to vigorous growth for the larger trees that remain on the stand. The species here are Sugar Pine, Ponderosa Pine, White Fir, Incense Cedar, Douglas Fir, and Black Oak, and this stand was planted to create this SMC species distribution.

Geoff Staneff@gstaneff· Sep 6

Just as everyone was getting ready for bed an unexpectedly non-zero amount of croaking emanated from downstairs. We do have a clearly posted notice: "No Wild Animals In The House" on the garage door. It appears to be not as efficacious as hoped.

A small (noisy) frog sitting on a hardwood floor; a clearly marked no-frog zone. This is the least blurry image as there was much running around, screaming, and general encouragement for this frog to no longer be within the house. Why is it in the house? Why is it climbing up the walls? Where did it come from?

The clear finished white oak flooring next to the white wall and trim contrasts clearly with the small dark brown and green frog in a strange land. This frog was relocated into the yard, non-violently, where it may find more success in attracting the kind of attention its enthusiastic croaking serenade deserved.

Geoff Staneff@gstaneff· Sep 6

Fire Scar Friday? 10 days ago at Blodgett, this is the backside of one you pass on the way in every time without thinking about it. But unless you walk around behind it you won't realize the character in this burn scar.

A fire blackened trunk of an incense cedar at Blodgett Research Forest near Georgetown CA. The brown trunk is blackened at the base, with a void burned out from the fire. The ground is covered with needles, light brown, starkly contrasting with the still blackened trunk. The tree is very tall and the image somewhat distorted to show some of the lower branches far up the trunk. This very large tree will survive this fire scar, and has already as this isn't its first fire. The sky between the trees is cloudy with patches of blue peeking through the white and grey clouds. There is a grey gravel road behind this tree and many other trees in the background of the image. The other trees represent a variety of species including tan oak, ponderosa pine, Douglas fir, and sugar pine, white fir, among others. Large cones (dark brown) and a bed of needles (light brown) dominate the litter, though some sticks and shrub regrowth is here as well. Many of the trees in the background also show fire blackened trunks - Blodgett hosts prescribed fire outreach to the community and actively burns this research forest in order to reduce its susceptibility to severe wildfire.

Geoff Staneff@gstaneff· Sep 5

The view looking west from a rest stop between Ellensburg and Vantage Washington on Tuesday evening. Dry lightning fire starts were pushing a lot of smoke into the air causing some red-sky conditions for much of Eastern Washington. It has occasionally been flowing over into Western Washington too.

Picture of the sun through wildfire smoke, through sagebrush just outside Vantage, WA. The foreground sagebrush is mostly in silhouette with dark brown stems and green leaves. In the midground, obscured by the foreground, are rolling hills of dark green and brown grasses, with a high voltage transmission tower on the left side. The background mountains are red-blue with reflected light from the sun through wildfire smoke. The sky is glowing red-orange around the smoke plume, with the top half of the sun shining through in red ominously.

Geoff Staneff@gstaneff· Sep 5

Windy.com is also useful if you want to see projections and forecasts. Yesterday (in Spokane) we were talking about the angry-purple quality all over BC (even as we were smoked in there). The dry-lightning that came up the coast this week starting wildfires... everywhere is mostly to blame.

Air quality map for the Pacific Northwest, Washington and BC. Most everything is colored yellow-orange for bad air quality. There a few areas of green marking good air quality in Northern BC and closer to Alaska, there are big regions of red to angry purple indicating you should hold your breath over vast portions of BC and some parts of Washington. Most due to local wildfire starts from dry-lightning storms this week (recent fires are putting up a lot more smoke than the older fires). As the winds flow down slope towards the Puget Sound the smoke building up behind the mountains on the east side is pulled through into west side population centers. Represent bas health outcomes for everyone involved.

Geoff Staneff@gstaneff· Aug 28

The colors were just something else out here. The blue and white of the sky contrasting with the green and orange of the needles, with the brown and black of the trunks and ground. It looked like a brush demo with a color transition from the ground to the sky.

More of the giant sequoia stand at Blodgett. The blue and white of the sky contrasting with the green and orange of the needles, with the brown and black of the trunks and ground - with many many trees arranged in a regular array across 10 acres of study.

Geoff Staneff@gstaneff· Aug 28

An old charred stump in the sequoia plot at Blodgett. Despite the bright sunlight, under the tight canopy it was very shady with small bits of sunlight poking through periodically. This view is mostly trunks, the the canopy untouched above.

Old stump, blackened in a recent underburn in a study plot of giant sequoia. The trunks are brown and black, the low branches are white and not completely trimmed, the canopy is above the frame for the most part, green in the background. Filtered sunlight comes through the stand. Every tree has a tag with number and unit information, these trees have been measured and tracked since their plantings 45 years ago.

Geoff Staneff@gstaneff· Aug 27

More from Blodgett's Segi stand (yesterday). The torch line can be seen in the bed of wood chips that didn't carry the fire during the burn. There is a patch of some groundcover coming in, sitting in a spot of sun breaking through.

Another image from a stand of 45 year old giant sequoia, post prescription burn. The trees have dark brown-black trunks, green needles with orange-brown scorch from the heat of the fire, and the ground has black trails from where the fire burned (and didn't) through the stand. Centered is a patch of green groundcover that has sprouted up in a patch of sunlight, at the base of several burned stumps.

Geoff Staneff@gstaneff· Aug 27

Spent the day here, getting dusty and covered in soot doing a post-fire survey of a former research stand being introduced to fire. Blodgett is in full "burn the forest to save the forest" mode now, they are getting a lot of work done this year (not now in high fire season, natch).

A stand of 45 year old giant sequoia planted in a geometric array. This stand had Rx Fire introduced this year, but it was really too wet for the fire to carry well. You can see the black tracks from the fire in the ground litter, missing patches of ripe fuels, but generally burning hotter around the bases of these trees. Sequoia drop a lot of litter in part to encourage fire intensity because that fire kills rivals and not the sequoia. The green tops reach into the cloudy sky, lower down the needles are all scorched amber-brown, the trunks show blackening, but many low branches remain (in white).

Geoff Staneff@gstaneff· Jul 30

I think we might not be looking in the right places. Or giving it enough time.

The Bike Tree of Vashon Island. Apparently abandoned in 1954, it sits inside the trunk about 7' up today. A rusted bicycle has been consumed by a growing tree, leaving the front tire and handlebars free on one side and part of the rear wheel, fender, and hub at the back. The scene is forested, with a full green understory of dense brush and many smaller alders in the background, some covered with climbing green ivy. The chain needs oil.

Geoff Staneff@gstaneff· Jul 24

Hey folks, tomorrow July 24th we're doing our monthly forestry and startups meet-up. I hope to see some new faces out for pizza and BEvERages to talk forests, climate, and as we get into the hot part of the year, wildfire. Details here: lu.ma/dn82mhs0 Photo of checking real-time LiDAR measurements

Ponderosa Pine forest, dusty brown ground covered with needles, a few downed trees looking worn and gray, straight black and redish trunks with plate like bark, and green canopy fading off into the distance. There is a man wrapping a steel tape measure around one of the trees, measuring the diameter. Several of the trees have orange paint indicating those trees are to be retained in any subsequent forest treatment on this site.

Geoff Staneff@gstaneff· Jul 18

Ponderosa Pine at 8,000' in Arizona might be fire resilient at a basal area of 40-60 sq ft per acre. This stand is at 150-180 with very few trees marked for removal. Setting aside the treatment target for a minute, why mark the LTM instead of ITM? An affection for tracer paint? A love of Orange?

A Ponderosa Pine Forest near Flagstaff Arizona. The sky is blue, the ground is dusty brown, the trees are densely packed, and most of them have orange paint diagonally across the trunk. There are about 3x as many trees as are healthy in this landscape, but from this mark maybe 1 in 10 will be removed. It is hard to understand why this was Leave Tree Mark instead of Individual Tree Mark, perhaps other people enjoy orange paint on all the trees in their forests?

Geoff Staneff@gstaneff· Jul 13

This week I'm back in the Flagstaff area showing folks at the Coconino and Kaibob how an on-machine LiDAR and Camera system can help projects achieve their objectives and reduce mistakes and incidents from operators taking too few or too many trees from the landscape.

Post project landscape near Flagstaff Arizona; light brown ground, dark brown to black trunks, green needles, and clear blue skies. Unless you really look you won't notice that there is something strange with the spacing and diameters in this stand. Instead of random clumps and openings, the operator created something akin to city blocks, and instead of leaving a mix of diameters the operator selected heavy from the 8-14" DBH class. The combination, while holding less fuel and reduced likelihood of continuous crown fire, leaves a raptor's playground and a bit of a dead area for prey animals.

Geoff Staneff@gstaneff· Jul 13

Last month, I was getting stuck on a ridgeline in the Sierras. It turns out the mechanical treatment limit of around 30% is a soft limit; here I was sliding backwards downslope at only 25% due to the loose post-treatment surface litter. Took an hour with a come-along to pull it out.

A hillside, 25% slope, with dry loose pine litter scattered across the surface and a few trees and a UTV well and truly stuck on that slope. Between the trees you can see deep blue sky, the trees have green needles and dark trunks, the littered ground is all light browns - brittle dry material dropped to the ground 6 months earlier. The UTV is a 4wd diesel 2-seater by Polaris, in greys and orange. There is a camera and lidar system on the roof.

Geoff Staneff@gstaneff· Jun 22

Some post treatment forest, is it enough? Is it too much? Should we do more? The classic response in Forestry is "it depends," and so it does. The ridgelines offer an opportunity to hold a fire and contain it within a watershed, but sometimes conditions line up for extreme fire despite efforts.

Some Sierra Mixed Conifer along Dog Valley Road. The scene has a mostly open forest with green brush on the ground, tall dark brown trunks, and green needles with brilliant blue sky peaking through the canopy. This area is probably as 120sq.ft./acre, treatment goals along the project were mostly at 80sq.ft./acre, but some areas were left at much higher densities. The untreated landscape is often in the 350-400sq.ft./acre densities.

Geoff Staneff@gstaneff· Jun 22

Stopped by South of Lake Tahoe to take a look at the last reaches of the Caldor burn scar. We were out to support some fuels reduction work and it helps to see what happens when the fires get out of hand.

A hillside covered with black sticks south of Lake Tahoe. A few trees near the bottom of the picture have some green needles, one on the right is browning, likely dead from the fire damage, but most of the trees in the scene are quite dead from the high intensity fire that burned up this hillside. The sky is bright blue, across the top of the ridgeline.

Geoff Staneff@gstaneff· Jun 22

Hey, spent the week off-grid in the Plumas. Saw some trees, tested some systems, introduced some of the team to where we work and why. A great week to spend in the woods, but tired now.