Category Archives: stream temperatures

OSPC Comment on expanding water rules on small and medium salmon, steelhead, and bull trout Siskiyou Georegion streams

PDF of OSPC comments on Siskiyou Rules September 28, 2020

September 28, 2020

Greg Wagenblast, Hearings Officer
Private Forest Siskiyou SSBT Rulemaking
Oregon Department of Forestry
2600 State Street
Salem, OR 97310
Greg.WAGENBLAST@oregon.gov

Re: Public Comment on Proposed Amendment to OAR Chapter 629: Expanding water rules on small and medium salmon, steelhead, and bull trout Siskiyou Georegion streams

Dear Mr. Wagenblast:
I am the coordinator of the Oregon Stream Protection Coalition (OSPC), an ad hoc coalition of 26 non-profit organizations in Oregon and Washington united around the promotion of increased protection for freshwater aquatic ecosystems on nonfederal lands in Oregon. Thank you for the opportunity to provide public comment on the proposed rulemaking to apply the Salmon, Steelhead,
and Bull Trout (“SSBT”) stream buffer standards to the Siskiyou Georegion.

As a signatory of the Memorandum of Agreement implemented by SB 1602, I support the proposed rule change as part of a larger policy change package that includes future collaboration with private forest landowning entities to develop the framework for a statewide forest practices aquatic habitat conservation plan. Incorporation of the SBBT rule expansion to the Siskiyou into legislation helped expedite and streamline what could have been a lengthy and contentious rulemaking. This action effectively reverses a 2015 Board of Forestry decision to exclude small and medium streams that support salmon and steelhead in the Siskiyou region from stream protection requirements that became effective in July 2017 for the balance of western Oregon. OSPC has consistently advocated for inclusion of the Siskiyou in the SSBT rule since 2015. This rule change represents a modest improvement that brings stream buffer standards in the Siskiyou up to the same level as the rest of western Oregon.

I would like to take this opportunity to clarify that in adopting this rule the Board was not required to make a specific finding about the adequacy of either the existing or proposed rules to meet water
quality standards under the Clean Water Act or restoration targets under any of the six applicable Total Maximum Daily Load plans (TMDLs) for impaired water bodies in the Siskiyou region. Nor
did the Legislature or the Environmental Quality Commission make such findings.

Likewise, this rulemaking is not accompanied by analysis that indicates it renders the Oregon Forest Practices rules to be an adequate foundation for the federally approvable Endangered Species Act habitat conservation plan aspired to by the parties to the MOU implemented by SB1602. As noted in the comments dated September 18, 2020 already submitted into this proceeding by Rogue Riverkeeper and Wild Salmon Center, which we endorse, additional protection of the small and medium fish-bearing streams covered by this rule will be an important consideration in planned
future collaborative policy discussions.

Therefore, we are submitting for this record as separate electronic files:

1. Comments submitted by OSPC to ODF on the original SSBT rule change
These comments argued that none of the four buffer designs provided under the western Oregon SSBT rule (no cut, partial cut, North-South or equity relief) are adequate to meet the Protecting
Coldwater Criterion or the watershed-specific targets established by applicable temperature TMDLs. OSPC continues to find that available information supports the contention that larger buffers applied to more of the stream network are needed to achieve compliance with the Protecting ColdwaterStandard and applicable TMDL/Human Use Allowance requirements.

2. The final ODF report entitled “Siskiyou Streamside Protections Review: Summary of Literature Review” by Adam Coble, W. Terry Frueh, John Hawksworth and Ariel Cowan

This report, provided in its final form to the Board of Forestry as an informational item at its September 6, 2020 meeting, generally informs policy considerations regarding attainment of DEQ
water quality standards for temperature for small and medium fish-bearing streams in the Siskiyou geographic region.

This document includes a summary of available information relevant to the Siskiyou region about the adequacy of current forest practices water protection rules to meet stream temperature goals and relationships between riparian buffer width and basal area and prevention of stream temperature increases due to shade reduction.

A primary finding is that: “[r]elevant literature (12 studies)
suggests implementation of current FPA rules will not ensure maintenance of Protecting Cold Water standard or the Human Use Allowance.” Siskiyou Review at iv. The review is notable for its
discussion of the policy implications of applicable TMDLs for forest practices and for its evaluation of how these analyses may inform our understanding of riparian buffer design as it relates to effective stream shading.

Sincerely,
Mary Scurlock, Coordinator
Oregon Stream Protection Coalition

Attachment 1: March 2017 OSPC Comments on SSBT Rule (24 pp)
Attachment 2: Attachments to March 2017 OSPC Comments on SSBT Rule (78 pp)
Attachment 3:  Siskiyou Streamside Protections Literature Review Summary from 9/9/20 Board Packet (30 pp) 

Click here to read related comments by Rogue Riverkeeper and Wild Salmon Center

Testimony to the Board of Forestry about Siskiyou Streamside Protections

BEFORE THE OREGON BOARD OF FORESTRY
Statement of Mary Scurlock, Oregon Stream Protection Coalition
Agenda Item 3: Siskiyou Streamside Protections Review
8 January 2019

Timely Degradation Finding Regarding Stream Tempreature as Priority. Our priority is for this Board to reach a final decision about the sufficiency of the current water protection rules with respect to stream temperature in the Siskiyou based on all available relevant information, including the expanded literature review. It would be ideal to decide the sufficiency of the rules to meet “desired future condition” at the same time, but not if alignment requires delay of a decision on stream temperature. We urge the Board to establish July 2020 as a firm date to decide whether resource degradation is occurring in the Siskiyou under current rules.

Climate Change Should Be Considered Without Delaying A Degradation Decision. We believe that available information on climate change is important contextual information that should be incorporated into the Siskiyou analysis, but that a 9 to 12 month project is not required to provide this information to the Board. We hope that you can find a way to scale back Option 1 to focus on the three identified information sources (the NorWest model, Spies et. al. 2018 and the Southwest Oregon Adaptation Partnership) in a way that fits within a hard July 2020 decision point. Your direction can clarify that consideration of this information in no way shifts the focus of your decision away from the discrete impacts of current forest practices on stream temperature.

Climate Change Option 2 creates a false tradeoff by for the Board. Option 2 outlines a policy analysis and development project that ODF (and other state agencies) may well find both necessary and valuable, but it does not belong in this Siskiyou Stream Rules review. We do not think that pursuing this or a similar policy development option should have any direct bearing on the conduct of the Siskiyou rules analysis, nor should it burden the Department’s limited effectiveness monitoring budget.

Project Charter (Attachment 2): This is a useful format to convey project scope. We have a few concerns:

• We suggest attaching a timeline, including past milestones.
• The outcome of the ODF-DEQ collaboration is described as a “process for aligning agencies’
sufficiency reviews.” Does this mean the result is simply a process for future alignment, or can we expect to accomplish actual alignment within the context of the Siskiyou rule review? When will the parties get beyond the current stage of “clarifying” their respective legal and policy authorities and mandates and finalizing statements of intent?
• We suggest that the description of monitoring options in the charter be amended to clarify how final decisions about how and whether to proceed will be made;
• The landowner-controlled regional committees are listed as “interested parties” that will be represented on the Siskiyou Advisory Committee but these committees do not actually represent a separate stakeholder group from forest landowners, who are already recognized. We suggest that it may be more appropriate to include county governments, local watershed councils or water providers as interested parties.

Committee Objectives (Attachment 3). We appreciate that the purposes of the committee have been clarified and that the Department recognizes the importance of prioritizing inclusion of Siskiyou region members and the use of in-region locations as budgets allow.

Oregon Board of Forestry Grants Petition to Protect Coho Salmon from Private and State Logging

News from Cascadia Wildlands
July 26, 2019

SALEM, Ore.— Late Wednesday afternoon after hours of deliberation, the Oregon Board of Forestry voted 5-2 to accept a petition for rulemaking on coho salmon. The petition was brought by 22 different conservation and fishing groups under a rarely used portion of the Forest Practices Act which requires the Board to consider forest protections on private and state land when species are listed under state or federal endangered species acts. The Board is required to identify “resource sites” for listed species and subsequently develop rules to protect these species if threatened by state and private logging practices.

While coho salmon have been threatened with extinction for years, the Board of Forestry has until now never initiated a state-mandated review of its rules to protect the fish. “The Oregon Forest Practices Act requires the Board of Forestry to address conflicts between logging and habitat for species at risk of extinction,” said Nick Cady, Legal Director with Cascadia Wildlands.  “The major ongoing conflict between logging practices and coho salmon habitat is finally getting the hard look it deserves.”

The Board has only undertaken such efforts for a handful of bird species and had never done such work for coho salmon, which are listed as threatened by the National Marine Fisheries Service.  The petition specifically asked the Board to (1) collect and analyze the best available information on coho salmon; (2) conduct a resource site inventory; and (3) adopt rules to protect resource sites and to develop a process to identify new sites in the future.

“This resource site process allows the state of Oregon to take a wholistic look at the numerous different ways logging impacts salmon and its breeding habitat. Practices that perpetuate poor habitat conditions like intensive logging too close to streams and on landslide-prone areas, sediment from forest roads, and large areas dominated by clear-cuts and said Robyn Janssen with Rogue Riverkeeper. “Oregon’s rules for state and private timberlands are the weakest in the Pacific Northwest, and it is encouraging to see the Board take its first steps towards addressing these deficiencies.”

Oregon has relied heavily on voluntary measures by timber companies to protect coho.  Between 1995 and 2017, taxpayers invested $65 million dollars of public funds on instream habitat restoration efforts.  However, Oregon’s weak forest practices rules still allow logging to degrade aquatic habitat critical to the recovery of coho salmon.

“It is an obvious case of one step forward, two steps back. We need to address the root causes of fish decline. The public’s investments in habitat restoration activities cannot keep up with the pace or scale of the ongoing degradation from poor forest practices,” said Nick Cady. “The Board has a perfect opportunity now to address these inefficiencies and meaningfully address salmon recovery where it matters most.”

Who’s Following The Forest Practices Act? Oregon Can’t Say For Sure: OPB News Story

June 13, 2019
by Tony Schick
OPB

Click here for full story

On Feb. 26, 2019, Oregon State Forester Peter Daugherty sat in front of lawmakers during a budget hearing and reported his agency’s sterling compliance rate with the laws that govern private logging.

“The audit showed an overall rule level compliance rate of 98%,” Daugherty told them.

Others aren’t so sure about that.

“We don’t know if it’s 98, 99 or 50,” said Brenda McComb, a retired Oregon State University professor who serves on the board overseeing Daugherty’s agency, the Department of Forestry.

McComb, fellow forestry board member Cindy Deacon Williams and two consultants separately hired by environmental advocates are arguing the department’s work is riddled with biases and analytical flaws. One reviewer deemed them “sufficiently severe to preclude any defendable assessment of compliance rates.”

In response, the Department of Forestry says it is confident in its numbers but has nonetheless commissioned another statistical review by Oregon State University. It expects that to be completed this month.

All this means the state has spent five years and close to a million dollars to find out how many people and companies follow state logging rules — and came away with an answer that’s now being called essentially worthless.

“It’s just ridiculous,” Williams said. She first expressed her concerns about the numbers before ODF cited them in legislative testimony. She now says she’d like to see the monitoring redone and the record corrected.

“You can’t legislate or guide policy in a vacuum of ignorance,” she said. “We simply don’t have the information that we need in order to know whether our policies are responsible and are achieving our aims.”

Is The Law Working?

The effectiveness of Oregon’s Forest Practices Act is at the center of contentious debates about private logging.

Thousands of timber harvests take place in Oregon every year, on vast corporate forests and small family-owned woodlots.

The 288 rules of the Forest Practices Act govern them all. They dictate how many trees must be left standing alongside streams to keep them shady and cool for salmon. They govern forest road construction to lower the chances of a landslide. They direct foresters on when trees must be replanted, and more.

Oregon’s comprehensive law was the first of its kind when it was passed in 1971, but environmental advocates say it has since become the weakest state forestry law on the West Coast.

It remains the law that state officials use in defending against claims from the federal government that Oregon hasn’t adequately protected coastal streams. It’s what industry lobbyists extol and environmental lobbyists rail against.

Central to understanding the effectiveness of this law is the question of how well it’s being followed. So, back in 2011, the Oregon Legislature directed ODF to conduct an annual study of Forest Practices Act compliance, using an independent contractor to collect data from a sampling of forest owners.

The agency began by reviewing how well forestland owners and the timber industry were complying with rules on harvesting trees, building and maintaining forest roads and protecting water quality.

In Line With Other States

Its work found an overall compliance rate of 98% in 2017, the most recent year completed. The state also calculates compliance rates for specific rules, ownership classes and regions. Forest industry representatives say they are confident in the accuracy of those numbers, as do several members of the state’s forestry board.

Joe Justice, a board member who works for Hancock Forest Management in Eastern Oregon, said ODF foresters use the audits to identify areas where they need to work with landowners before, during and after tree harvests.

“Compliance Audits are just one way the Department monitors Forest Practices,” Justice said in an email. “A great deal of valuable information is gained from these audits including information and trends that help ODF focus training and education.”

Marganne Allen, ODF Forest Health & Monitoring Manager, said Oregon’s reported compliance rates are credible. She pointed out that they also fall in line with those reported by other states, which have found that landowners and timber operators are abiding by forestry laws at compliance rates that range from 61% to 99%, according to the Society of American Foresters.

“This has been a very repeatable outcome over time,” Allen said. She said the latest findings also are consistent with previous ODF studies dating back to 2002.

Department of Forestry officials say they are working to improve the way they check on logging-related activities. The department plans to involve statisticians from OSU in reviewing future audits, the next of which will focus on how landowners plant trees after harvesting. The department also opened up its external review team, Allen said, but the environmental groups criticizing its latest audit declined to participate.

A Flawed, Selective Method

A major concern they raised is who the department included and who is left out. The state made 345 inquiries with potential audit participants but ultimately studied only about one-third of them.

Participation was voluntary. Some landowners refused to give state foresters access to their woodlots — something the law permits them to do.

Don Stevens, a retired OSU statistician who reviewed the work at the request of the Wild Salmon Center, is the reviewer who said the audit’s flaws undermine the credibility of the state’s reported forestry-rule compliance rates. He said ODF’s sampling provides “enormous potential for non-response bias.” In other words, there’s no way to know if that method left out thousands of acres of forest land rife with violations. And should that be the case, the Department of Forestry’s overall picture of how well Oregon’s Forest Practices Act has been followed could be wildly inaccurate.

Stevens and others say the problems go beyond the collection of bad data. They say the department’s analysis of that data is also flawed.

Chris Mendoza, an environmental consultant who has worked on compliance monitoring for the Washington Department of Natural Resources, reviewed ODF’s work for the Oregon Stream Protection Coalition. He equated ODF’s methods to finding out that 200 out of 1,000 motorists pulled over by police were exceeding the speed limit — and assuming those 200 were the only speeders out of all 100,000 cars on the highway that day.

“If ODF intended to choose a method that selectively depicts the highest possible compliance rates for forest practices rules … then ODF’s reporting ‘methods’ hits that mark,” Mendoza wrote in his assessment.

The ODF’s Allen said her agency wanted to account for the fact that not all timber harvests are the same, and some landowners may be encountering the law more often than others.

Larger Questions About The Agency

“You can have one harvest unit that has only, say, 100 feet of road. Another may have 500 feet of road. So it’s important to get across some metric of not all harvest units are equal, and that they’ll have a different number of times that a given rule is applied.”

She said no issues had been raised with this method in the past, but that she expected OSU’s expertise to inform how they approach it in the future.

For some board members and advocates, the audit raised larger questions about how the agency works.

Bob Van Dyk of the Wild Salmon Center noted that, save for members from the Department of Environmental Quality, the audit’s external review committee was made up entirely of people from forest companies and industry trade groups.

A contractor sorts logs on Oregon Board of Forestry land in southern Oregon. 
A contractor sorts logs on Oregon Board of Forestry land in southern Oregon. Oregon Department of Forestry

“This audit shows that the agency that’s charged with protecting our forest waters is too close to the timber industry that they regulate,” Van Dyk said. “And that we can’t be confident in the quality of the laws, nor in their implementation.”

Williams, who was a fisheries biologist for 30 years before serving on the Board of Forestry, said the audit appears to be part of a pattern that causes her to be skeptical of scientific information coming out of the forestry department.

At a Board of Forestry meeting in early June, Williams voiced concerns that a board-ordered review of the science on the effects of forest practices on stream temperatures in Oregon’s Siskiyou forests omitted studies that were both relevant and indicated a need for changes in management to reach water quality objectives.

She said the agency’s work has the appearance of a bias toward upholding the status quo.

“It certainly feels that way,” Williams said in a phone interview. “I don’t know if it is an intentional bias or not, you know, I don’t know what’s causing it, but the result is that we are being given sort of a rose-colored glasses picture of the world.”

Fishing, conservation groups want logging rules to protect Coho

Tillamook Headlight Herald
May 1, 2019

While Coho salmon have been threatened with extinction for years, the Board of Forestry has never initiated a state-mandated review of its rules to protect the fish.

Twenty conservation and fishing organizations have delivered a rulemaking petition to the Oregon Board of Forestry requesting new rules to prevent logging-related harm to “resource sites” for Coho salmon listed under the state and federal Endangered Species Act.

Coho salmon, which are split into three evolutionarily significant units in Oregon, were first listed in Southern Oregon in 1997, and soon thereafter along the rest of the Oregon Coast in 1998. The Lower Columbia Coho population was listed almost over a decade ago, in 2005.

“The Oregon Forest Practices Act clearly requires the Board of Forestry to address conflicts between logging and habitat for species at risk of extinction,” said Nick Cady, legal counsel with Cascadia Wild. “There are major ongoing conflicts between logging practices and Coho salmon habitat that need to be resolved.”

Oregon has relied heavily on voluntary measures by timber companies to protect Coho. Between 1995 and 2017, taxpayers invested $65 million dollars of public funds on in-stream habitat restoration efforts. However, Oregon’s weak forest practices rules still allow logging to degrade aquatic habitat critical to the recovery of Coho salmon.

Conrad Gowell, Fellowship Director with the Native Fish Society said, “We need to address the root causes of fish decline. The public’s investments in habitat restoration activities cannot keep up with the pace or scale of the ongoing degradation from poor forest practices.”

Oregon’s rules for state and private timberlands are the weakest in the Pacific Northwest. “Oregon has dragged its feet in addressing problems that have long been identified by state and federal expert agencies,” said Mary Scurlock with the Oregon Stream Protection Coalition.

“Intensive logging too close to streams and on landslide-prone areas, sediment from forest roads, and large areas dominated by clear-cuts and young plantations are perpetuating poor freshwater habitat conditions,” Scurlock said.

“The Board has been taking a very slow and piecemeal approach to updating its policies,” Robyn Janssen said, “The last rule change took 15 years but still didn’t address some of the biggest problems for salmon and water quality – and left the Rogue Basin and its salmon out of the picture entirely. We can’t afford to wait another 20 years for Oregon to bring its logging rules up to snuff.”

Board of Forestry, Uphold your Mission: Op-Ed in Mail Tribune

by Lydia Doleman
Sunday, May 26th 2019

Mail Tribune

I am a mother, a carpenter, a business owner, and the co-founder of a non-profit called Speak for the Trees. I live in the Little Applegate Valley and have for nearly 10 years. During that time, I’ve seen our local forests and hillsides decimated by private forestry practices and lack of reasonable, science-based rules from the Oregon Board of Forestry.

The stated mission of the Oregon Department of Forestry is “To serve the people of Oregon by protecting, managing and promoting stewardship of Oregon’s forests to enhance environmental, economic and community sustainability.” My experience of interacting with the Oregon Department of Forestry has been that it caters heavily to private timber companies and has little regard for communities, businesses and species that depend on healthy forests and waterways.

Currently, rules for clearcut logging on private lands in the Southern Oregon “Siskiyou Region” require 50- and 70-foot riparian “management” areas for small and medium streams. However, all too often the “management” of these riparian areas results in harvesting down to a 20-foot required no-cut buffer minimum. If a stream is non-fish bearing, trees can be cut all the way to the stream’s edge.

You don’t have to be a scientist to know that this is not good for waterways. Lack of trees and streamside vegetation causes warmer temperatures, increased sediment, and additional impacts to cold water streams vital to our fisheries and communities.

Even my 6-year-old could point out that removing the trees (i.e. the shade) from a stream will make it warmer, having a detrimental impact on stream health and salmon habitat. So why even consider excluding any Oregon bioregion from expanded stream buffers when doing so is also in direct violation of the Clean Water Act? Especially in a region that supports threatened coho salmon and other sensitive fish species.

For the rest of Western Oregon, stream buffer rules are at least better than what we have here in the Siskiyou Region. When the Board of Forestry voted to increase stream buffers for Western Oregon forests, increasing buffer zones by 10 feet, they left the entire Siskiyou Region out of these increased protections, claiming there is no data to support the need. Again, I’m not a scientist, but I know that trees create shade and shade creates cooler temperatures on land or water.

From a profit perspective, an extra 10 feet of buffer at the stream would have a minimal economic impact on the vast majority of private-land logging operations and would provide a net positive impact on our environment and our communities. Healthy streams are the life-blood of our rural communities. Water is the bank account we all draw from; it’s how we grow our food, our medicine and our businesses. We are looking at hotter, drier times ahead and our streams deserve and will require more protection as we stare down the barrel at systemic climate changes.

As a carpenter I love working wood and I love our forests. Stream health, forest health and economic health do not have to be at odds. One of the biggest issues is that our forest products are greatly undervalued. With the trade war with China and a slowing construction sector, the price per million board feet is dropping, mills are slowing production and exports are a fraction of what they once were. The time is ripe to encourage holding onto more of our precious resources and managing our forests in a sustainable, innovative and conscious way.

The Oregon Board of Forestry has a responsibility and an obligation to uphold its mission in its decisions. Excluding the Siskiyou bioregion from increased stream buffers seems counter to that mission. I believe we can do better for our watersheds, our communities and our future. You can speak up by asking the Board of Forestry to include the Siskiyou Region in increased stream buffers rules like the rest of Western Oregon.

What legacy do you want to leave?

Lydia Doleman lives in the Little Applegate with her daughter, owns Flying Hammer Productions and is the co-founder of the nonprofit Speak for the Trees.

Presentation by Mary Scurlock, Tuesday, May 14th, from 6:00-8:00 p.m.: Private Forests, Public Waters: How and Why Oregon is Failing Its Forest Streams

Presentation of Private Lands, Public Waters

On Tuesday, May 14th, 2019, from 6:00 p.m. to about 8:00 p.m., Mary Scurlock, coordinator of the Oregon Stream Protection Coalition, will be giving a presentation entitled “Private Forests, Public Waters: How and Why Oregon is Failing Its Forest Streams.” This presentation will take place at the North Coast Recreation District building:  36155 9th St. in Nehalem, Oregon.   It is free and open to the public of all ages.

This presentation is part of the North Coast Communities for Watershed Protection (NCCWP) “Speaking Truth to Power” series.

Mary Scurlock will discuss the science, policy, and political reasons why current state and private forest policies are failing to protect the public’s interest in clean water and healthy wildlife.

Scurlock’s presentation will review the harmful effects in Oregon on water quality and aquatic habitat caused by clearcut logging and its associated road building, compare Oregon’s water protection requirements with those in other states, and describe barriers to, and opportunities for, change through citizen action.

Press Release: Twenty Oregon Fishing and Conservation Groups Petition for New Logging Rules to Protect Coho Salmon

Media Contacts:

Nick Cady, Cascadia Wildlands, nick@cascwild.org, (314) 482-3746

Conrad Gowell, Native Fish Society, Conrad@nativefishsociety.org, (971) 237-6544

Mary Scurlock, Oregon Stream Protection Coalition, Mary.Scurlock@comcast.net,  (503) 320-0712

 

FOR RELEASE

April 24, 2019

Twenty Oregon Fishing and Conservation Groups Petition for New Logging Rules to Protect Coho Salmon

SALEM, OR – Today, twenty conservation and fishing organizations delivered a rulemaking petition to the Oregon Board of Forestry requesting new rules to prevent logging-related harm to “resource sites” for coho salmon listed under the federal Endangered Species Act and the Oregon Endangered Species Act.  Coho salmon, which are split into three evolutionarily significant units in Oregon, were first listed in Southern Oregon in 1997, and soon thereafter along the rest of the Oregon Coast in 1998. The Lower Columbia coho population was listed almost over a decade ago, in 2005.

While coho salmon have been threatened with extinction for years, the Board of Forestry has never initiated a state-mandated review of its rules to protect the fish. “The Oregon Forest Practices Act clearly requires the Board of Forestry to address conflicts between logging and habitat for species at risk of extinction,” said Nick Cady, legal counsel with Cascadia Wild.  “There are major ongoing conflicts between logging practices and coho salmon habitat that need to be resolved.”

Oregon has relied heavily on voluntary measures by timber companies to protect coho.  Between 1995 and 2017, taxpayers invested $65 million dollars of public funds on instream habitat restoration efforts.  However, Oregon’s weak forest practices rules still allow logging to degrade aquatic habitat critical to the recovery of coho salmon.  Conrad Gowell, Fellowship Director with the Native Fish Society notes “We need to address the root causes of fish decline. The public’s investments in habitat restoration activities cannot keep up with the pace or scale of the ongoing degradation from poor forest practices.”

Oregon’s rules for state and private timberlands are the weakest in the Pacific Northwest.  “Oregon has dragged its feet in addressing problems that have long been identified by state and federal expert agencies,” observed Mary Scurlock with the Oregon Stream Protection Coalition. “Intensive logging too close to streams and on landslide-prone areas, sediment from forest roads, and large areas dominated by clear-cuts and young plantations are perpetuating poor freshwater habitat conditions.”

“The Board has been taking a very slow and piecemeal approach to updating its policies,” said Robyn Janssen, “The last rule change took 15 years but still didn’t address some of the biggest problems for salmon and water quality – and left the Rogue Basin and its salmon out of the picture entirely.  We can’t afford to wait another 20 years for Oregon to bring its logging rules up to snuff.”

Opinion: Reform the Oregon Forest Practices Act

Published in Mail Tribune

By Jason Clark
December 09, 2018

Another year of extensive wildfires, debilitating smoke, and several tragedies across the West have made it clear that Oregonians cannot afford forestry practices that continue to make this problem worse. The consequences of our forest management history and our changing climate have been illuminated by a hazy vermilion sun. The complex, fire-resilient forests of yesteryear have been replaced with younger, denser stands more likely to experience stand-replacing fires. Meanwhile, climate change is causing fuels to dry out earlier and stay dry longer, creating the conditions for more fires and greater fire severity.

Many commendable thinning and fuels reduction projects have been carried out on unnaturally dense Forest Service and BLM lands in recent decades. These efforts need to be improved and expanded into a widespread restoration forestry effort to put our fire-suppressed public forests on a path toward increased fire resiliency.

But there is another half of the equation that can’t be ignored — private, industrial forestlands. A recent study of the 2013 Douglas fire by leading scientists at Oregon State and Humboldt State Universities confirmed the forests most likely to burn at high severity are the dense, young stands on private timberlands that are planted after conventional clearcut logging practices sanctioned under the Oregon Forest Practices Act, not the typically older stands on public lands.

Therefore, it is critically insufficient to only improve forest management on public lands.Locally, the Rogue Basin Cohesive Forest Restoration Strategy, created by a multi-party team of federal, state and nonprofit contributors, provides a well-considered, science-based framework for how to approach restoration forestry and increase fire resiliency in our region. The “All Lands” approach described therein proposes to treat 900,000 acres of federal land plus 200,000 acres of non-federal lands of mixed ownership, in and around communities and infrastructure. A small proportion of the 200,000 non-federal acres is industrial timberlands, however, tens of thousands of acres of industrial timberland are directly adjacent to the proposed treatment areas on federal lands. Without meaningfully addressing these fire-prone, private timberlands, our success in achieving a more fire-resilient landscape will be limited.

To responsibly address the role that private forests play in contributing to wildfire risk, we must transform the Oregon Forest Practices Act, the decades-old state statute in dire need of modernization. Increased fire risk is just one of the negative side effects of industrial logging practices that Oregonians are left to bear. Soil loss, diminished water quality, degradation of fisheries, and habitat loss for rare species are some of the others. The state should convene a team of scientists and progressive forestry practitioners to hammer out rational, proactive, and easily verifiable operational standards for the future of forestry in Oregon. This team should set new standards dramatically reducing the allowable size of harvest units, requiring longer rotation times, and maintaining legacy retentions of older trees, requiring that a proportion of the more fire-resilient trees be left standing. To put Oregon’s private forests on a path toward greater fire resiliency, we must diversify the landscape level expanses of tightly packed, even-aged tree farms that cover so much of our state. We should also require timber companies to address the enormous amounts of slash left behind following timber harvests that are tinderboxes of explosive fuels. And we should ban the aerial spraying of herbicides which adds additional fuels and pollutes our streams.

In the long run, timber companies will benefit from management practices that lead to more fire-resilient forests. As improved practices are implemented and fire resiliency increases over time, timber assets will become less vulnerable to going up in flames. Further, there are numerous benefits to other ecosystem services that will follow from fire-resilient forestry practices including improved habitat, water quality and more secure carbon storage.

It is imperative that Oregon implement forestry practices that improve fire resiliency. We can supply the local mills and support the invigoration of our economy while improving our forests’ structure in a way that helps to protect it and our communities from future wildfires. Imagine a future where Oregon’s private forests are structurally diverse forests that include larger, fire-resilient trees and where large clearcuts and expansive, even-aged tree farms are a memory. We must move our state’s private timberlands in this direction, because not doing so allows the wildfire problem to get worse. To get there, we must reform Oregon’s outdated rules and account for the role private timberlands play in wildfire risk. Oregonians need strong leadership in Salem to address this issue in 2019 and beyond. Who is ready?

Jason Clark is a botanist who lives in Talent and works in forests across the Northwest.