The public comment period for draft amendments to the Northwest Forest Plan is set to close later this month. KS Wild staff and partners have been reviewing large volumes of the Draft Environmental Impact Statement to better understand how new components of the amendment would impact forests in northern California and southwest Oregon. You can read past KS Wild blogs about the Northwest Forest Plan and its importance to old-growth and wildlife conservation, and in brief, the plan covers roughly 20 million acres of National Forest lands from north of San Francisco, CA up the West Coast to the Olympic Peninsula and North Cascades. In our bioregion, the Rogue River-Siskiyou, Six Rivers, Klamath, and Shasta-Trinity National Forests would be among the forests impacted by changes.

With a deadline of March 17th, the public is encouraged to weigh in themselves at the USFS comment portal. For KS Wild, our main talking points are focused on five key areas: 

1) Supporting the inclusion of Tribes and Indigenous voices that were left out of the NW Forest Plan negotiations 30 years ago. 

2) Supporting new standards that protect old forests in timber matrix zones - which are defined as areas for logging emphasis. 

3) Supporting language that allows for more widespread cultural and prescribed burns, and encourages the agency to utilize planning tools like PODs to help with natural wildfire ignitions.

4) Maintaining Adaptive Management Areas as outlined in the original plan, and using AMA framework to engage communities and other members of the public in project planning. 

5) Advocating for changes to the amendment that change protections for mature and old-growth in special reserves. The new amendment increased the age of trees that can be harvest from 80 to 150 years old, potentially impacting critical habitat for Northern spotted owls and other old-growth dependent species.