SENECA – The Blue Mountains Forest Partners (BMFP) and the Forest Service recently took “a big step,” according to collaborative member Susan Jane Brown.

The recent collaboration on the Soda Bear Project resulted in the partners embracing a different way at looking at forest restoration, she said.

The BMFP’s Soda Bear Project committee and the Partners’ general membership voted July 28 to support a framework for the project that entails the following:

Trees of all species that exhibit old growth characteristics, and those that are 150 years of age or older, will be spared from harvest. This takes the place of a rule in which trees of 21 inches or larger are left.

Trees greater than 21 inches in diameter could be removed if they are less than 150 years old.

To keep late and old structures in forest stands, treatments will be done that mimic what happens when natural fire disturbs stands at different times.

Plants and smaller trees that compete with the older trees, in an area two times the drip-line of the tree’s crown, will be removed. This is done to help retain older trees, and help their survival.

Treatments done in the woods will be designed to reduce potential for large, severe wildfires and insect outbreaks. The actions will be done to promote heterogeneity in small patches among the large landscape, with the aim of increasing resiliency of the forest, and the ability of the landscape to recover when severe disturbances occur.

The Forest Service and the partners will work together in monitoring the project as it is done.

The chosen alternative will result in removal of 431 acres of biomass, 9,260 acres of timber from commercial thinning, and 186 acres of timber removed while retaining old trees in what is known as shelterwood harvest. The project also calls for burning of fuels on over 14,000 of the area’s 20,774 acres.

The way it will accomplish those things is based on cutting-edge research on how to restore Ponderosa pine forests, said Brown, a member of BMFP’s operations committee and attorney for the Western Environmental Law Center.

Soda Bear was proposed to reduce fire danger in the urban-wildland interface surrounding the town of Seneca.

Getting to the mutually agreed-upon alternative was “a big step for the collaborative,” noted Brown.

“The collaborative has been talking all along about the types of forest management prescriptions that the group could collectively accept,” she said. “Soda Bear utilizes a restoration prescription based on the work of Dr. Jerry Franklin and Dr. Norm Johnson – which is cutting-edge research on how to restore Ponderosa pine forests on the eastside. The collaborative agreed that the Franklin/Johnson prescriptions – which were made from field trips to the Soda Bear area – made sense ecologically and economically, and that agreement has been historically lacking on the Malheur,” said Brown.

“In addition, we are moving away from arbitrary diameter limits, to prescriptions that take a broader landscape approach to restoration. We are still protecting old growth trees and forests, but we are using the tree identification methodology prescribed by Dr. Robert Van Pelt to determine what is in fact old growth,'” she said. “This, too, is the best available scientific information about what qualifies as an old growth tree to be protected.”

“The project is a big step forward because the collaborative group has collectively agreed to embrace Franklin/Johnson/Van Pelt as the standard for how to restore our forests. I don’t know as though the Forest Service would have gotten to this place without our interaction with Drs. Franklin and Johnson,” Brown said. “But as a result of that work, the agency – as well as the collaborative – have a better understanding of the appropriate steps we need to take to achieve forest resiliency and restoration.”

Following the July 28 vote supporting Alternative 3 of the Soda Bear Environmental Analysis, the project went into a 30-day objection period.

If the Forest Service receives objections, a meeting would be set up to try to resolve the objections, said Ryan Falk, environmental coordinator for the project.

After any objections are answered, Malheur National Forest Supervisor Teresa Raaf could issue a decision on the project, he noted.

If there are no objections, the decision could come in early September. Otherwise a decision would be expected in late September or early October.