Projects
The Blue Mountains Forest Partners works with the United States Forest Service and other partners to develop science-based restoration projects that seek to create forest health and community resiliency.
Collaborative Restoration on the Malheur National Forest
We’re working collaboratively to restore the southern Blue Mountains in Eastern Oregon. This area has suffered from 100 years of fire suppression, logging, and unregulated grazing, causing a landscape of dense forests and heavy fuel loading. Our restoration work aims to remove young trees and promote the survival of old trees, while re-introducing low intensity surface fire to reduce fuels and protect communities. Explore the benefits of our work on the Malheur National Forest in this interactive story map created by our partners at the Oregon State University:
Of Woodpeckers and Harvests: Finding Compatibility Between Habitat and Salvage Logging
Vicki Saab, a research wildlife biologist with the Rocky Mountain Station, has spent over two decades studying the habitat niches of disturbance-associated woodpecker species in post-wildfire landscapes. These data form the basis of FIRE-BIRD, a new habitat mapping tool that managers can use to locate probable woodpecker habitat within the area. To demonstrate how FIRE-BIRD can be used to inform management decisions, Saab collaborated with the Malheur National Forest and the Blue Mountains Forest Partners on an experimental salvage logging study called the Canyon Creek ...
Working on timber peace: the Blue Mountains Forest Partners
Hear about our collaborative from Oregon Public Broadcasting's Oregon Field Guide! After the “Timber Wars” left both sides with deep animosity, loggers and environmentalists have done the unthinkable in Eastern Oregon: they've worked together to find common ground—and even become friends. This is the story of the Blue Mountains Forest Partners, one of the most successful forest collaboratives in the Pacific Northwest.
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Prescribed Fire & Smoke Management
For a millennium, surface fires burned thousands of acres of ponderosa pine and dry mixed conifer forests in the southern Blue Mountains every year. Today, the nature of fire has changed. In 2015, 110,000 acres burned, much of it a high severity fire that killed thousands of acres of old growth pine and destroyed more than 40 homes. The behavior of fires like the Canyon Creek Complex is driven by dense forests and the build-up of surface fuels over more than 100 years since fire was excluded from the landscape.
Thinning forests captures the economic value of timber, ...