New Resources, Summer 2010

USDA releases 5-year plan

On June 11, 2010, the US Department of Agriculture released its 2010-2015 strategic plan, including its overarching plans for the Forest Service. Forest Service management was addressed in the second of the plan’s four goals:

Ensure our national forest and private working lands are conserved, restored, and made more resilient to climate change, while enhancing our water resources.

This goal is consistent with previous speeches and addresses Secretary Vilsack has made emphasizing the importance of water resources, and their connection with the national forests. In addition, the strategic plan specifically mentions the importance of decommissioning roads (albeit in a laundry list of things that the agency will be addressing).

USDA will use restoration of watershed and forest health as a core management objective of the National Forests and Grasslands. The plan includes performance measures and  specific “strategies and means” to achieve those performance measures. It seems Wildlands CPR’s message has been getting through, and one of the strategies specifically acknowledges the impacts of roads on watershed health: Protect water resources on National Forest System lands by planning for watershed health and working to restore degraded watersheds, reduce erosion, reclaim and restore abandoned mine lands, reduce the threat of watershed damage from catastrophic wildfires, and reduce the impact of the road system on watershed health. Click here to see the plan.

University of Oregon releases new report on restoration jobs

The Ecosystem Workforce Program at the University of Oregon recently released three new reports about jobs related to forest AND watershed restoration. Their in-depth study affirms many of the job numbers that we have used to date regarding job creation through watershed restoration. For example, previous studies have found that road reclamation provides about 14.5 direct jobs per million spent. The U of O study found that overall forest and watershed restoration contracting results in 15.7 to 23.8 jobs per million depending on the specific project. The data is specific to the state of OR, but is consistent with the type of information released in a report on Montana’s restoration economy by the state of MT in the fall of 2009. According to the U of O report, restoring fish passage by fixing culverts, for example, creates 15.2 jobs per million, with an additional output multiplier of 1.8 – 2.3 (meaning that the money invested recirculates through the economy an additional 1.8-2.3 times).

These new reports will be a great addition to the discussion about how watershed restoration can provide green jobs in rural economies. For more information on the general topics of the restoration economy and how this can help create jobs and restore the natural environment, please see Wildlands CPR’s Political Economy of Watershed Restoration series. Published last fall, these reports provide an overview of some of the same topics covered in-depth in the reports released this week by the University of Oregon.

2008-09 Forest Service Road Accomplishment Reports Available

For the past several years, Wildlands CPR has been posting the Forest Service’s annual Road Accomplishment Reports (RAR). The RARs show how many miles of roads are maintained, improved, or decommissioned in any given year and on any given forest. The RARs also show which funds were used to pay for the work. We recently received the 2008 and 2009 RARs from the Forest Service and have just uploaded them to our website, on the same page where we have posted previous RARs. That page also lists instructions for how to read and use these reports. In 2007, the agency switched from sending us individual forest reports to sending us one large file in a “pivot table” which allows you to hide and show different data at different times. Thus we highly recommend you review the instructions before downloading the data. The data in the RARs can be used to tease out how the entire agency, individual forests, or regions are managing their road system. In March, Greg Peters posted a blog about some of the changes in the road system that have occurred over the years as detailed in the Road Accomplishment Reports. His post includes a graph that illustrates changes in the percentage of roads that have been maintained over the past 8 years and overall road mileage.