forest health

The Keep Washington Evergreen initiative, proposed by public lands commissioner Hilary Franz in November, seeks to protect forests in the state over 20 years. In this final story, we look at the goal of reforestation.

Commissioner of Public Lands Hilary Franz introduced the Keep Washington Evergreen initiative at the end of November, which aims to protect and reestablish the state’s forests. In part two of this three part report, we look at the goal of protecting forests from conversion.

Commissioner of Public Lands Hilary Franz introduced the Keep Washington Evergreen initiative at the end of November, which aims to protect and reestablish the state’s forests. In part one, we look at restoring forest health.

In the decades since government restrictions reduced logging on federal lands, the timber industry has promoted the idea that private lands are less prone to wildfires, saying that forests thick with trees fuel bigger, more destructive blazes. But an analysis by OPB and ProPublica shows last month’s fires burned as intensely on private forests with large-scale logging operations as they did, on average, on federal lands that cut fewer trees.

New research suggests that a U.S. Forest Service proposal to allow the cutting of larger trees on public lands east of the Cascades in Oregon and Washington will have an outsized impact on forest carbon storage in the Pacific Northwest.

This latest rollback proposal, issued Tuesday, comes from the Forest Service Pacific Northwest Region. It would end a 25-year-old provision that prevents logging of trees that exceed 21 inches in diameter in six national forests across Eastern Oregon and Washington.

Oregon Forest Resources Institute, created in the early 1990s to educate residents about forestry, has acted as a public-relations agency and lobbying arm for the timber industry, in some cases skirting legal constraints that forbid it from doing so.

The land management plans, known as the “Eastside Screens,” came about in 1995 to protect old growth trees east of the Cascades. The rules were meant to be temporary. The Forest Service wants to amend a section of the policy called the “21-inch rule,” which prohibits harvesting trees that are greater than 21-inches in diameter.

Deforestation, climate change and the disturbances it can exacerbate – like wildfires, extreme droughts and insect outbreaks – are decimating old growth forests across the globe. That means forests worldwide are filling in with younger and shorter trees, according to a new study.

Researchers began their detective work, trying to figure out what happened to these treated areas during the first few extreme days of the Carlton Complex fire. They gathered geospatial maps and satellite images.