KS Wild Releases Restoring the Rogue Report Details Restoration Priorities in the Rogue River Basin

Ashland – The Klamath-Siskiyou Wildlands Center (KS Wild) released a data-rich report today titled “Restoring the Rogue,” which details restoration activities in the 3.3 million acre Rogue River Basin.

The Rogue River Basin boasts some of the most important salmon and old growth forest habitat remaining on the west coast, but even its lands and waters have been degraded by past extraction and construction activities. The Rogue has been the subject of restoration management over the past several decades, but, again, progress has been slow. KS Wild’s report prioritizes where restoration is most needed to restore streams, reduce fire hazards in forests adjacent to communities, thin neglected tree plantations, fix water quality problems and remove or storm-proof old logging roads.

“This is a detailed, site-specific report about where we can get the biggest bang for our buck restoring forests and watersheds in the Rogue Basin,” said Joseph Vaile, Campaign Director at KS Wild and primary author of the report. “We want this to be a starting point for widespread restoration in the Rogue Basin, which can produce jobs, clean water and healthy forests.”

KS Wild works with the Southern Oregon Small Diameter Collaborative and other groups to advance restoration of forests in southern Oregon, including removing smaller trees from overly dense forests. The report calls for a focus on the most altered forests, such as those that have the most ingrowth of trees from either past logging or the effects of fire suppression.

Restoring the Rogue also takes a hard look at aquatic restoration needs. It prioritizes small subwatersheds (173 subwatersheds are in the Rogue River Basin) based on their relative importance for salmon, the impacts of the road system from stream crossings and erosive soils.

“As we see federal land managers working more on restoration projects, we saw a need for all the data related to federal lands restoration needs to be collated in one place. The Rogue Basin was the perfect place to begin the dialog and start to prioritize where the needs are the greatest,” said Vaile.  

Key Findings and Recommendations of Restoring the Rogue:

•    Remove or stormproof 1,293 miles of road (out of 7,605 analyzed).
- over please -
•    Prioritize thinning of 166,000 acres of young managed stands between 40-80 years of age.

•    Prioritize thinning of 124,089 acres of high fire hazard forests in the Josephine and Jackson County Wildland Urban Interface.

•    Focus noxious weed removal on 6,950 acres of State listed invasive species sites.

•    Prioritize projects that help attain water quality on the 1,314 stream miles that violate state water quality standards.

•    Protect and expand roadless areas, including 728,341 acres of citizen inventoried roadless lands.

•    Protect Mature and Old-Growth Forest, especially the 719,235 acres of forest older than 150 years of age.

Other interesting facts:

•    62% of the Rogue Basin is held by the federal government.

•    There are 596 documented fish passage barriers in the Rogue Basin, only 70 occur on federal land.

•    There are 6,174 miles of road on National Forest and 3,813 on BLM land in the basin. If stretched across the country, roads on federal land would extend from Medford to New York City, and back again, nearly twice.

•    There are 1,430,451 acres of grazing allotments on federal land, 314,749 are high potential conflict according to this analysis (based on rare plants, salmon habitat and other potential conflicts).

To download the report visit http://kswild.org/programs/restoration-and-collaboration/restoring-the-rogue-a-plan-to-prioritize-restoration-on-federal-lands-in-the-rogue-river-basin Hard copies also available upon request.