Conservation Practices

A Collaborative Vision for Resilient Landscapes and Fire-Adapted Communities

The forests of western North America have innate ecological value, provide diverse wildlife habitats, underpin the global carbon and water cycles, and provide human communities with clean water, recreation, and other benefits. Landscape-scale forest restoration is needed to mitigate threats to these forests and surrounding communities from uncharacteristically destructive fires catalyzed by a century of fire exclusion, past destructive logging practices, and climate change.

The collaboratively-derived Rogue Basin Cohesive Forest Restoration Strategy  integrates resource assessments conducted by the Southern Oregon Forest Restoration Collaborative and partners to clarify the potential costs and benefits of landscape-scale forest restoration in the Rogue Basin.

This report integrates four foundational parts. The authors

1. Conducted wildfire risk assessment to quantify current wildfire risk and provide indicators for evaluating alternative management scenarios.

2. Identified a suite of five landscape-scale management objectives and the relative value of mechanical treatments to achieve those objectives.

3. Generated mechanical treatment themes and their potential extents and derived outputs for the entire landscape, should mechanical treatments be implemented.

4. Compared three contrasting management scenarios of increasing treatment footprint across the Rogue Basin and estimate their performance on key indicators.

5. Discussed how these assessments could be used to inform project development and evaluation.

LANDFIRE connection: the study incorporated LF2012 data, which were adapted for local use. While several data sources are listed int he study, LANDFIRE was the backbone of their vegetation and fuel data.

READ THE REPORT

NOTE: Appendix three (p. 61) covers the process of modifying LANDFIRE 2012 data for local use, including explaining a few of the corrections that were needed regarding tanoak, mastication, and new disturbance. Several data sources are listed.

Click here for detailed methodology for developing and refining fuel data from LANDFIRE and the local fuels calibration workshop, as well as running the FSIM large fire simulations. Analysis run and appendix written by Donald Helmbrecht of USFS Teams.