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:
From the Institute for Conservation Leadership: Collaboration is Like Regenerative Agriculture
We’ve heard the voices of frustration and challenges about how long it takes to create a productive network, alliance, or partnership. And the questions come – How long will this take? Why can’t we move faster? Is this worth it? Will this actually work?
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 ...
How to prevent an anti-government revolution
Thanks in large part to a land-management strategy that local ranchers, conservationists and federal employees developed 15 years before the Bundys arrived, the community was largely inoculated against their simplistic solutions and fiery but empty rhetoric. Through years of homegrown collaboration led in part by the nonprofit High Desert Partnership, the community was already tackling many of the issues that inspired the Bundys to take up arms: fences, water access, poverty. To many locals, these were not ideological struggles, but tangible problems they were solving together.
21st century planning techniques for creating fire-resilient forests in the American west
Novel approaches to framing wildfire protection (e.g., potential operational delineations, or PODs) and advancements in modeling tools have been critical to improving our understanding of fire and its potential impacts. The successful use of those tools requires data that are accurate at fine resolution, spatially explicit, and current. However, such data often do not exist or are extremely time intensive and costly to develop. Moreover, much of the information generated from various existing fire models can be difficult to translate to other metrics related to managing ...
Be the Beaver
In Oregon, our crew forged this connection through a relatively new type of restoration tool: beaver dam analogues (BDAs). Water that backs up behind BDAs recharges the floodplain and increases the wetted width of the stream flow. Essentially, a BDA creates a porous wall of sticks, logs, and leaves that slows the flow of water in one part of the stream and retains much of this flow behind the “dam,” allowing some of this backed-up water to seep into the floodplain. This beaver-like engineering helps promote channel aggradation, or in other words, prevents channels from incising into themselves and away from the natural floodplain.
They Overcame Mutual Loathing, and Saved a Town
JOHN DAY, Ore. — One of the most venomous battles in our polarized nation is the one that has unfolded between loggers and environmentalists in timber towns like this one in the snow-capped Blue Mountains of Eastern Oregon.
Yet, astonishingly, peace has broken out here. Loggers and tree-huggers who once loathed and feared each other have learned to hold their noses and cooperate — and this may have saved the town. It may also offer lessons for a divided country.
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Forest Resiliency in Lake and Klamath Counties
Today our forests in Lake and Klamath Counties are in jeopardy. Insect infestations, overstocked Western juniper, and an altered fire regime have all led to heavy fuel loads. A single lightning strike today has a greater probability of creating a catastrophic wildfire that will burn hotter and more intensely than historical natural fire. Our forests need YOUR HELP to be restored to their once-resilient state and reverse these trends.
Private landowners, along with state and federal entities, must work together across jurisdictional boundaries to effect change on a ...
Finding common ground on active forest management
Environmentalists, working alongside timber industry professionals, helped end the ban on logging trees over 21 inches.
Instead of fighting in the courtroom, with environmental lawsuits halting timber projects, the former adversaries joined together in forest collaboratives to find areas of agreement using science, and the most recent result is the end of an era of prohibition on logging trees larger than 21 inches in diameter — a result the collaboratives believe is mutually beneficial for the environment and the timber industry, and based on the best available ...
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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