2010 Annual Report

Reviewing economic headlines from 2010, one might have predicted that Wildlands CPR’s campaigns, staffing, and budget would have experienced a year of retrenchment. We’re happy to report, however, that we bucked the trend, solidifying and expanding our  signature campaigns, while also beginning research and development for new programs. For example, we significantly expanded our summer inventory and monitoring fieldwork, developing new partnerships with the Forest Service and grassroots groups. We continued to act as a watchdog on agency decisions, paying close attention to the multitude of motor vehicle use maps being issued by the Forest Service across the country. And we continued to lead the wildly successful Legacy Roads and Trails Campaign, while working to improve its results on the ground. Our efforts were almost universally successful, with a few hiccups here and there. This left us well positioned to both continue our successful programs and begin implementing new efforts in 2011.

Organizational Development
We had no changes to our permanent staff in 2010. However, we did add four summer field techs, in addition to numerous summer volunteers and a few shorttermers for intensive data collection at the end of the summer.

From a funding perspective, we expanded our fee-for-service work and reduced our dependence on philanthropic grants as a percentage of our overall budget. There was a change in the timing of our grant funding, however, in that several grants typically received in the fourth quarter of the year were pushed to the first quarter of 2011. The result is clear in the accompanying financial charts, where our expenditures top our income by nearly $80,000. That difference should be fully made up in early 2011 (since all of the funding would have been for 2011 work, anyway, this had no impact on our cash flow or overall financial health).

Campaigns
Wildlands CPR’s 2010 work revolved around two major campaigns: 1) The Legacy Roads and Trails Remediation Initiative; and 2) The Forest Service Travel Management Rule (which includes both off-road vehicle management, and identifying an ecologically and fiscally sustainable minimum road system). We’ve built a bridge between these two campaigns by successfully pressuring the Forest Service to identify their minimum road system (or “rightsize” it). While rightsizing was incorporated into the Travel Management Rule, it will also provide a blueprint for future Legacy Roads and Trails spending.

Legacy Roads and Trails
The year began well, after Congress approved a record $90 million for the Legacy Roads and Trails (LRT) program for Fiscal Year 2010 (FY10). When Congressional champions warned us that this might be a “high water mark” for the program, we responded by educating decision-makers about the important benefits LRT provides, including clean drinking water, green jobs, and improved fisheries and wildlife habitat. This year, the  budget-cutting chaos that took over Congress after the November election will make our work even more challenging. Our Restoration Campaign Director Sue Gunn continues to run this campaign for Wildlands CPR and our several related coalitions. In FY10, the Forest Service accomplished more than ever with LRT funds, including:

• 261 culverts fixed to provide aquatic organism passage
• 1509 miles of system and non-system road decommissioned (split about evenly)
• 887 miles of road improved
• 2618 miles of road maintained
• 76 bridges treated (e.g. maintained, replaced, upgraded, or installed) to reduce water quality impacts/restore fish passage.

These accomplishments are significant (trail data is not yet available), but we are  frustrated that the agency doesn’t report on ecological benefits in addition to mileage treated. (One of our main policy objectives for 2011 is to change this.)

Never content, we began three new projects related to LRT in 2010. First, we received funding from the National Forest Foundation to develop a wildlife and vegetation monitoring program for LRT projects in Montana/Northern Idaho (Forest Service Region One). We partnered with the University of Great Falls, Yaak Valley Forest Council and Friends of the Clearwater to set up wildlife monitoring sites on five different national forests. We hired a field technician and began collecting baseline data. We partnered with staff and graduate students from the University of Montana to set up a robust vegetation  monitoring protocol, and hired more field techs. We set up plots for a 5-10 year monitoring program to measure changes in wildlife use of reclaimed roads, and to look at the reasons for these changes (e.g. return of vegetation that provides food cost-treatment). Our baseline data was collected before roads were reclaimed, and in 2011 we will begin post-treatment data collection. Our Science Program Director, Adam  Switalski, developed and oversaw this program.

 

 We set up plots for a 5-10 year monitoring program
to measure changes in wildlife use of reclaimed roads,
and to look at the reasons for these changes.

Second, in the fall we created an ad-hoc coalition to support LRT in Montana, the Montana Legacy Roads, Trails and Jobs Coalition.” Its 27 organizations include six unions, one tribe, and a soil/agricultural coalition that understands how important national forest water is to agriculture. The coalition is broad-based and has already been successful. For example, we met with Senator Jon Tester (D-MT) in October to stress the link between LRT and the emerging restoration economy. Senator Tester is now taking a much more active role in supporting LRT in the halls of Congress!

The third new project was developing a series of maps demonstrating the relationship between municipal watersheds/water supply, roads, and water quality. We partnered with the Geos Institute in Oregon, and are now using the maps in our advocacy. It took us much of the year to collect the key data concept” maps for several cities in Oregon, showing a likely causal link between high road densities and “water-quality limited” streams (more research will clarify which watersheds are impaired because of roads as opposed to other problems). We are discussing revisions to the initial maps, and expect them to become an important tool in our efforts to better explain the connections between national forests, roads and clean water. These maps have the potential to become a powerful tool that will be important not just to secure continued funding for LRT, but also to influence future Forest Plan Revisions, efforts to identify a minimum road system, and more.

Travel Management Planning (includes Subparts B & A below)
Since 2005, Wildlands CPR has partnered with The Wilderness Society to colead a westwide campaign to ensure a positive outcome from the Forest Service’s designation of roads, trails and areas for motorized recreation (known as subpart B of the Travel Management Rule). Since that rule was issued, we’ve also been pushing the agency to implement subpart A by identifying and implementing an ecologically and fiscally sound minimum road system (as mentioned, this is also related to LRT). These two components made up the bulk of our Travel Management Planning Campaign, largely led by Legal Liaison/Staff Attorney Sarah Peters and Policy Specialist Adam Rissien.

Subpart B
We are starting to see our efforts on this portion of the travel management rule come to fruition across the west. As of December 2010, 68% of the national forests had issued subpart B decisions designating roads, trails and areas for off-road vehicle use. The results are impressive:

• 32.2 million acres of Forest Service land have been closed to crosscountry travel by off-road vehicles
• More than 31,000 miles of renegade, user-created routes have not been added to the formal transportation system
• More than 8,000 miles of system roads have been closed to motorized recreational use

These numbers are based on final decisions in travel management plans, but we didn’t succeed everywhere. The California National Forests, for example, mostly added routes to their system. And one of our top priority forests, the Beaverhead-Deerlodge in Montana, still hasn’t formally begun their off-road vehicle route designation process on a majority of its districts. Speaking of the Beaverhead-Deerlodge, we did bring a lawsuit against the forest for their approach to winter travel management, and we are awaiting a decision on that case as well as several others in Montana and beyond. We’re pleased to report that our campaign partners (Idaho Conservation League and The Wilderness Society) won an important lawsuit against the Salmon-Challis National Forest re-affirming the primacy of the off-road vehicle Executive Orders, and the need to “minimize impacts” to many different resources when designating off-road vehicle use (see cover story, this issue). Sarah also provided strategic assistance to partners on nearly a dozen other legal challenges that arose as a result of subpart B decisions, including several that we are participating in as co-plaintiffs.

Subpart A
Yes, we know A comes before B in the alphabet, but the Forest Service decided to start with Subpart B, so we did too (at least in this annual report). That said, we are extremely pleased to announce one of our most important victories from last year – on November 10, 2010 the agency released new guidance to the field directing all national forests to finally complete subpart A as well! We’ve been pushing for this for many years, and we see it as a once-in-a-generation opportunity to improve overall Forest Service management on the ground by rightsizing the transportation system (see RIPorter 15.4, cover story).

The agency set a deadline of September 2015 for completing this work – any roads not analyzed by then will lose their road maintenance funding. So there’s a real “stick” to pressure the national forests to follow through. Since the release of the guidance in November, we’ve helped coordinate meetings in four of the nine Forest Service regions on implementing the guidance, we co-developed a memo to our partners explaining Subpart A, and we have met regularly with the national/Washington DC Forest Service team leading the effort to express both our concerns and our optimism about the initial stages of the process.

As a community, we can only achieve this once-in-a-generation opportunity if grassroots groups, local policy makers and interested individuals across the country participate in this process from day one. The municipal watershed maps we’re developing, along with several other resources, will provide important tools to help people succeed in their efforts.

Science
2010 saw several scientific projects come to fruition, allowing Adam Switalski to submit two articles for publication in peer-reviewed journals. One was accepted and published in early 2011; the second  is under minor revision based on favorable reviews and will hopefully be accepted for publication upon final submission. Adam worked in collaboration with other ecologists on these and two other pending publications to advance the science of road reclamation.

We also expanded our fieldwork, undertaking a second year of “road reconnaissance” or “road inventory” work through a cost-share agreement with the Lolo National Forest. Adam’s top-notch crew surveyed hundreds of miles of roads, adapting and advancing the protocols being used and providing a  fairly comprehensive set of data to the Forest Service for future planning efforts. This road inventory work provides some of the critical data needed for the  agency to begin identifying their minimum road system
in accordance with subpart A of travel planning.

Our scientific work is now more effectively combining on-the-ground field efforts with policy needs, resulting in more focused use of time and resources, and, as mentioned above, much of Adam’s work feeds directly into our core campaigns (e.g. LRT monitoring). For example, Adam S. answered dozens of information requests from agency staff, grassroots activists, ecologists and others who needed scientific information related to the impacts of roads and offroad vehicles, as well as the ecological outcomes associated with road reclamation. He also oversaw the biennial update of our bibliographic database on the ecological effects of roads. The database now contains more than 20,000 citations on scientific articles related to road and off-road vehicle impacts and road reclamation.

Conclusion
Wildlands CPR continues to make great strides in our primary campaigns and related  efforts. We’re thankful for the continued support we’ve received from philanthropic foundations and individuals, making 2010 a bona-fide success. Though we have only a small fulltime staff, we are making huge impacts on the ground, as noted in the accomplishments above! Respected by grassroots activists and agencies alike, Wildlands CPR is building from success to success, providing effective solutions to often-intractable environmental problems on the ground. And we are using those successes to help us map out new strategies and program opportunities for 2011 and beyond.

**2010 Financial Report
(**Click on the pdf version in the side bar or below to view the pie chart of our 2010 income and expenses.)

Footnotes

* Volunteer and in-kind contributions are not represented here, but totalled 52 hours valued at $3,888.
* Wildlands CPR’s expenses exceeded our income by nearly 20%, but this is largely due to two things:

1) we received nearly $60,000 from foundations in the first quarter of 2011, instead of the fourth quarter of 2010

2) our fiscal year (the calendar year) never exactly matches up with our
grant income.

* Our finances and cash flow are healthy and we expect them to remain so in 2011.