Region Archives: United States

The Oregon Department of Forestry plans to plant around 2.3 million seedlings throughout more than 6,100 acres of harvested timber statewide. The agency announced that planting will soon occur across the Tillamook, Clatsop and Santiam forests. It is set to begin in the Sun Pass and Gilchrist forests later in May, with planting taking between six weeks to eight weeks — depending on factors like weather and soil conditions… The department revealed that planting seedlings has become more difficult since the Private Forest Accord was added to the Forest Practices Act in 2023. The new accord enforced further new requirements for maintaining forest roads and further monitoring for rule compliance, among other changes impacting private and non-federal forests throughout Oregon.

The 87th Annual Oregon Logging Conference (OLC) took place from Thursday to Saturday, February 20-22, at the Lane County Fairgrounds in Eugene. The theme for this year’s event, “Timber Builds Dreams,” reflected the growing impact of timber on Oregon’s economy and landscape as technology transforms the industry… On Friday, Feb. 21, more than 900 high school students from 33 schools participated in the 7th Annual Future Forestry Career Day. This invitation-only event offered students hands-on experiences in fields such as engineering, wildland firefighting, trucking, diesel mechanics, welding, and heavy equipment operation. Additionally, twelve high school teams competed in a forestry skills relay, showcasing their expertise in tasks such as choker setting and chainsaw use.

A familiar range of comments about logging, fishing, tourism and tribal issues are being expressed in response to a draft “biography” of the Tongass National Forest, with the 45-day comment period ending Monday as part of the agency’s years-long effort to update its management plan for the forest. A big unknown, however, is if that biography and other aspects of the management plan will be drastically reshaped by the Trump administration’s wholesale overhaul of the federal government, including large staffing cuts and an executive order mandating the repeal of federal regulations that inhibit maximum utilization of Alaska’s natural resources… An affirmation that a shift in priorities will occur under the Trump administration was offered by federal officials participating in a Feb. 11 panel discussion at the Southeast Conference’s Mid-Season Summit in Juneau.

Portland wants to plant 660,000 trees over the next 40 years and launch a citywide and city-managed street tree maintenance program that will take the financial burden off residents. A draft of the new Urban Forest Plan says the decline of the city’s tree canopy in recent years, an imbalance of tree cover across the city and the increased frequency of extreme weather events are driving the need to protect, restore and expand the city’s trees and vegetation. …Portland currently has 4.2 million trees covering 27,600 acres, or about a third of Portland’s land area. … The plan, developed by the city with public input and released for comment this week, is an update of a 2004 plan and would be funded by more than $100 million from Portland’s Clean Energy Fund as well funding from other sources. …The city also plans on taking over street tree maintenance and planting.

Following a rough few months of leadership and financial turmoil at the Oregon Department of Forestry — including the abrupt resignation of its director — Gov. Tina Kotek wants to change the law so she and future governors get to pick the agency’s leader, rather than the governor-appointed state Board of Forestry. Kotek is proposing Senate Bill 1051, sponsored by Sen. Kayse Jama, D-Portland, to allow the governor to choose the director of the state Department of Forestry, also known as the state forester. …The governor-appointed seven members of state Board of Forestry, which oversees rulemaking for the state’s Department of Forestry, has historically vetted and chosen the state forester. …Under Senate Bill 1051, the state forester would not need to have a professional forestry background, but one of their deputies would have to be a “practical forester,” who is “familiar with western conditions and experienced in organization for the prevention of forest fire.”

The 87th Annual Oregon Logging Conference (OLC) took place February 20-22, at the Lane County Fairgrounds in Eugene, Oregon. The theme, “Timber Builds Dreams,” reflected the growing impact of timber on Oregon’s economy and landscape as technology transforms the industry. Hundreds of vendors filled the venue, offering everything from equipment displays to hands-on demonstrations. The event was a mix of auctions, games with prizes, and special guests. One of the highlights was the keynote address by Chris Evans, of Portland-based TimberLab. TimberLab is known for its groundbreaking projects, including the Portland International Airport terminal roof, which used 3.4 million board feet of Oregon timber. Evans spoke about the future of large-scale construction using cross-laminated timber and custom glulam, highlighting the company’s leadership in innovation. …Overall, the 87th Annual Oregon Logging Conference proved to be a successful celebration of Oregon’s timber industry and its growing influence on both the economy.

Brian McCarthy

…The southwestern U.S. is usually synonymous with drought, but Ohio University Professor of Forest Ecology Brian McCarthy, says wet conditions this spring actually made matters worse for the January Los Angeles wildfires. McCarthy …uses a combination of experimental and observational studies to understand the population dynamics and community ecology of forests. “Southern California experienced a rather wet spring this year. This gave rise to the germination of a large number of herbaceous plants resulting in a thick luscious vegetation,” said McCarthy. “As part of the natural cycle of this region of the country, these plants then died at the end of the growing season and left an enormous amount of highly flammable fuel on the ground in the autumn.” …With fires becoming more frequent and volatile, McCarthy believes a key to mitigating damage from future wildfires is to prepare buildings and land and change the way we develop.

SEATTLE — The termination letters that ended the careers of thousands of U.S. Forest Service employees mean fewer people and less resources will be available to help prevent and fight wildfires, raising the specter of even more destructive blazes across the American West, fired workers and officials said. The Forest Service firings …are part of a wave of federal worker layoffs, as President Donald Trump’s cost-cutting measures reverberate nationwide. Workers who maintained trails, removed combustible debris from forests, supported firefighters and secured funds for wildfire mitigation say staffing cuts threaten public safety, especially in the West, where drier and hotter conditions linked to climate change have increased the intensity of wildfires. …U.S. Rep. Kim Schrier, a Washington state Democrat, said on the social platform X that the Forest Service layoffs are already hurting the state, “and it is only going to get worse. Fire season is coming.”

Fewer wildfires occur in North American forests today than in past centuries, but this decline has increased the risk of more intense wildfires, according to a study published in Nature Communications. While it may seem unexpected, frequent low-intensity surface fires help maintain forest health by naturally reducing fuel buildup over large areas. Researchers from the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder and the U.S. Forest Service’s Rocky Mountain Research Station compared wildfire frequency across two periods: 1600 to 1880 and 1984 to 2022. Using data from 1,850 tree-ring records in historically burned areas, they assessed past fire activity and compared it with modern fire perimeter maps from Canada and the United States. The findings show modern-day fires are much less frequent than they were in past centuries, despite recent record-breaking fire years, such as 2020. 

PORTLAND, Ore. — An environmental nonprofit is sounding the alarm over the federal funding cuts and hiring freeze instituted by President Donald Trump’s administration, which it said could threaten the population of Oregon’s endangered spotted owl. The widespread layoffs and cuts instituted by the Trump administration have set off a series of protests across the country and around Portland, some of which have focused specifically on the thousands of U.S. National Parks and Forest Service workers who have been fired. The Northwest Forest Plan and the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) require the endangered owl population to be monitored, but the Center for Biological Diversity said in a news release that the federal freeze means the monitoring “either won’t occur or will be greatly reduced.”

The Alliance for the Wild Rockies, Native Ecosystems Council and Council on Wildlife and Fish filed a lawsuit in federal court in Montana against a road-building and commercial logging project on public lands in the Big Belt Mountains of Montana. The challenged Wood Duck project is located in a wildlife corridor that is critical for recovery of grizzly bears, and is highly desirable elk habitat.  Logging and road building harm elk and grizzly bears and will likely displace both species from the public lands in the area. The lawsuit raises challenges against the project, and also against the Forest Service’s failure to implement strong protections for public land elk habitat, grizzly bear travel corridors, and old growth forest across the Helena – Lewis and Clark National Forest.

Back in 2021, the SDS Lumber and Timber Company’s sale of its extensive mill properties and nearly 100,000 acres of Pacific Northwest forest reserves to sent a shockwave through the Columbia River Gorge as well as the global timber industry. Now, through a complex partnership agreement, nearly all of the forests formerly owned by SDS in southwestern Washington are remaining open to logging, while being protected against future commercial or residential development.  The Columbia Land Trust has announced a $36 million award from the U.S. Forest Service that will go toward establishing a new conservation easement on a 29,000-acre piece of former SDS Lumber land… Keeping timberlands as “working forests,” rather than carving up the land into commercial or residential parcels, is considered a major conservation win, according to Columbia Land Trust Executive Director Meg Rutledge.

Can Washington state hold off harvesting older forests in the face of a projected $12 billion budget deficit without impacting local governments and school districts that get money from those timber sales? That’s the big question facing Dave Upthegrove, Washington’s new Public Lands commissioner. As one of his first acts on the job, Upthegrove did what he promised to do on the campaign trail — pause the harvest of timber from 70,000 to 80,000 acres of older forests that don’t yet qualify as “old-growth” but still are old enough to provide valuable habitat. Upthegrove said the pause on logging older forests would be offset by increasing harvests in younger forests. He also said the fact that timber values have gone up should dampen the blow.

The U.S. Forest Service is at a crossroads in 2025. As the Trump administration takes hold and federal employees are dealing with threats of termination from Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, the agency is set to wrap up a 120-day comment period on March 17 to amend the 1994 Northwest Forest Plan. Meant to guide forest stewardship across more than 20 million acres in the Pacific Northwest, the original Northwest Forest Plan left tribes and Indigenous communities out of the negotiating room. Climate change was barely mentioned in 1994, and here we are 30 years later addressing issues that are important to many communities across Northern California, western Oregon, and western Washington… It remains to be seen what the Trump administration will do with the Northwest Forest Plan amendment effort, and there is potential that it could go the way of the National Old Growth Amendment and be abandoned.