Accomplishments

January 13, 2023

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?more

November 14, 2022

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 ...more

October 31, 2022

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.more

September 8, 2022

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 ...more

August 16, 2022

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. more

April 18, 2021

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. ...more

April 18, 2021

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 ...more

April 18, 2021

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 ...more