July 23, 2007

There is a lot of exciting restoration policy work going on in Montana, so this update will focus on Wildlands CPR’s piece of the puzzle. Wildlands CPR recently helped start a collaborative group called Restore Montana, a network of leaders from Montana’s restoration economy that works for community renewal and natural resource restoration. Restore Montana’s “members” to date include conservation groups, restoration businesses, and labor interests. This ad hoc group continues to work closely with Montana Governor Schweitzer’s office to secure more state money for restoration work. Restore Montana hopes to be a public and policy voice for the businesses and workforce that make ecological restoration and community revitalization happen.

Another new but promising effort is the formation of a collaborative working group to focus on restoration efforts on Montana’s national forests. Marnie is the chair of the Vision and Principles Subcommittee. The goal of this subcommittee is to develop consensus recommendations for the overall Working Group, concerning both broad vision and specific priorities to help guide national forest restoration activities in Montana to achieve ecological, economic, and social health and sustainability. It is our hope that these principles can help lead to comprehensive national forest restoration projects that include road removal as a key component.

Sungnome Madrone from Humboldt County, California, Jim Burchfield, Associate
Dean of the University of Montana’s College of Forestry and Conservation, and Marnie spoke at the Bitterroot Economic Development District (BREDD) meeting at the end of last year. In attendance were approximately 30 county commissioners and economic development folks from several western Montana counties. We had a good response from a very diverse audience and we are already following up on this meeting: Jim Burchfield will be speaking to BREDD’s Redevelopment working group about Restore Montana.

Our Science Coordinator, Adam Switalski, continues to organize the Clearwater Citizen Monitoring Program. Last fall, Field Organizer Anna Holden took a group of students into the field to collect data on open and decommissioned roads. Then, after deep snow prevented further monitoring, Anna and Adam worked with a University of Montana ecology class to analyze the data. Their analysis found that bears used decommissioned roads significantly more than open roads (see cover story). This is quite exciting as it is the first study to document that bears are using decommissioned roads.

We are also preparing for next year’s monitoring. Mike Fiebig, our new Environmental Educator, has been talking to high school teachers in rural Idaho schools about teaching about restoration in their classrooms. Mike presented at the Watershed Education Training (WET) workshop in Kamiah High School (ID), attended by teachers from schools across the region. Mike discussed the restoration work occurring in their backyards on the Clearwater and showed them the methods Wildlands CPR is using to monitor road removal on the ground. Mike found several interested teachers and plans on taking classes into the field this spring to conduct citizen monitoring.

ESA/SER Organized Oral Session
Wildlands CPR and the UC Davis Road Ecology Center have put together an Organized Oral Session on road removal at the Ecological Society of America
/ Society for Ecological Restoration conference this August in San Jose, CA. The session will synthesize the current state of knowledge of road removal as a form of ecological restoration across landscape, watershed, and site-level spatial scales, and propose directions for future interdisciplinary research. For a list of speakers and more information click here.

Bull Trout, Flathead National Forest
Adam co-authored a research paper on road removal and bull trout on the Flathead National Forest (MT) with Lisa Eby and Magnus McCaffery from the University of Montana. The manuscript was officially accepted as a “Note” in the Transactions of the American Fisheries Society and is to be published this spring.

Information Requests
Adam responded to requests for information on off-road vehicles in New Mexico (from a concerned citizen), road avoidance zones (from Center for Biological Diversity), road removal (from BARK), bear research (from the University
of Kentucky), and road density conversions (from the Forest Service).