Groundtruthing Forest Service Road Decommissioning

The National Forest Service uses the term "road decommissioning" to describe a variety of road closure treatments, from gates or earthen berms to complete road recontouring and restoration. In the summer of 2003, Wildlands CPR conducted a study of the national forests across the United States to help evaluate the effectiveness of road decommissioning, "National Forest Service Road Decommissioning: An attempt to read through the numbers." Ryan Schaffer, an intern with Wildlands CPR, compiled information from the nine Forest Service regions to determine the cost per mile the Forest Service spent on road decommissioning. The report details the road-decommissioning cost per mile on a forest by forest basis whenever possible.

This project is a follow up to the previous study. During Ryan's research he found that often the cost-per-mile of road decommissioning didn't seem to match the technique the Forest Service stated they had utilized For example, the Forest Service states they had removed stream crossings and culverts (often a fairly expensive technique) but their cost per mile is only $500. Another example is the forest might be decommissioning many miles of road at a low cost-permile, which could indicate they aren't doing an effective job in terms of ecological restoration. The goal of this project is to create a volunteer monitoring system that can be used across the country by grassroots organizations and interested citizens to groundtruth road decommissioning efforts. The goals of this project are to 1) determine what the Forest Service means by road decommissioning, 2) determine if road decommissioning goals are being met, and 3) develop a volunteer plan for this project for Wildland CPR.

There are several components that will be a result of this project. The first is an organizing plan that details the steps that grassroots groups and volunteers would take to organize a road decommissioning groundtruthing program. The second piece is a field-monitoring checklist to evaluate road decommissioning. This would be standardized so groups and citizens around the country could use the same methodology, which could eventually be compiled and utilized nationally to promote more ecologically sound road decommissioning on Forest Service lands. The final component would be actual road monitoring results gathered from volunteers and other interested groups.

 

To download the full report, click the link to the left.