The federal Bureau of Land Management plans to auction off almost 500 acres of forestland on Thursday to log dead or dying trees. But, one conservationist says many of the trees are actually healthy.
The Boaz and Forest Creek timber sales in the Applegate Valley are meant to harvest Douglas fir trees impacted by recent outbreaks of invasive beetles and drought.
The federal Bureau of Land Management plans to auction off almost 500 acres of forestland on Thursday to log dead or dying trees in the Applegate Valley, shown here from the Sterling Mine Ditch Trail, on January 17, 2021.
Courtesy of Bureau of Land Management / JPR
The Medford BLM said trees were marked for removal based on criteria developed with Oregon State University scientists to identify which trees are dead or dying.
But Luke Ruediger, executive director of the Applegate Siskiyou Alliance, said a number of the areas proposed for logging don’t meet the BLM’s criteria for dead and dying trees.
“The BLM is clearly manipulating the public’s concern around beetles to implement clearcut logging in previously controversial stands that have been opposed by the public,” Ruediger said.
Ruediger said some of these same areas were part of the Nedsbar timber sale in 2016, which was shelved by the BLM after it received no bids. He said the aggressive logging by the BLM in these areas will exacerbate the effects of climate change and increase wildfire risk by creating open fields of dry, flammable brush that will grow in place of the trees.
Meanwhile, Medford BLM spokesperson Kyle Sullivan said it’s more efficient to cut down all the trees in an area that will die over the next several years, rather than just the ones that are already dead.
“We have approximately 200,000 acres on the Medford district that have elevated levels of mortality, and so we don’t have the luxury of going back to the same stand multiple times to treat it over the course of several years,” Sullivan said.
Increasing drought frequency in the region is weakening Douglas fir trees, making them more susceptible to infestations from invasive beetles. Local tree scientists have been refining the risk assessment model to determine which trees are likely to die within the next few years.
“These are all working documents because the problem is so new and came up so fast that we just sort of make them up and tweak them as we go,” said Laura Lowrey, a forest entomologist for the U.S. Forest Service who’s been developing the risk assessment model for dead and dying Douglas fir trees. “So the best we always give out to the [forest] managers, the best version we have.”
Lowrey said that this model is looking at long-term trends and risks to trees. While there may be one or two good years where Douglas fir trees are able to recover slightly, they’re still at a high risk of dying if another couple of hot, dry years come along.
Ruediger said he’s also concerned about the lack of public information on these timber sales. As of Monday, an authorization for the 233-acre Forest Creek project was still not available on the BLM’s website. The auction notice for the 250-acre Boaz timber sale was posted a little over a week before the sale was authorized by the BLM.
Known as a “categorical exclusion,” these types of timber sales are done without any chance for public input. Sullivan from the Medford BLM said they can approve salvage projects quickly if they’re under 250 acres.
“We use categorical exclusions when it’s urgent to take action before doing the work is no longer viable in those small areas,” Sullivan said.
But, Ruediger said that approving projects this way shows a lack of transparency from the BLM, especially because they’re done so quickly that the public has such a short window to review the project and attempt to file an appeal.
“I am fearful, personally, that the BLM is going to use this as the model moving forward, where they will claim stands that are living have been killed by this beetle mortality outbreak,” he said. “They won’t do the analysis, because I think if they did do an environmental assessment, they would not be able to propose the intensity of logging that they’re proposing, and they would not be able to do it in a way that circumvents the entire public process.”
Ruediger said his organization still plans to file an appeal with the Interior Board of Land Appeals to try and stop this project, and he’s looking at the legality behind how quickly the BLM listed these projects for sale.
Sullivan said there have been unexpected delays with the categorical exclusion for the Forest Creek project, and the sale may have to be delayed. But the Boaz timber sale is still scheduled for Thursday morning.