Current Projects
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:
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, ...