Ashland OR Forestry Goal: Low-Intensity Fires, Understory Clearing To Protect Watershed
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Motivated largely by a desire to protect its drinking water, Ashland has used selective logging and controlled burns to reduce fire risk. The goal is to return its forested watershed to a more natural state, one that can handle low-intensity fires on a regular basis without killing big trees and polluting the water supply.
The city draws its potable water from Ashland Creek, and for years had no other supply to tap in a pinch. The watershed is highly erosive, meaning a serious fire could harm water quality and clog Reeder Reservoir, the storage point for the city’s water system. “Other cities have multiple watersheds,” said Chris Chambers, forest division chief for the city of Ashland. “If one burns it’s a big deal, but they have other sources. We’re not in that scenario. We really have all of our eggs in one basket.”
Ashland launched its Forest Resiliency Stewardship Project in 2010 in partnership with the U.S. Forest Service, The Nature Conservancy and the Lomakatsi Restoration Project, a nonprofit based in Ashland that specializes in habitat projects. By the end of 2019, it’s expected that 10,800 acres will have had both thinning and burning treatments, according to Chambers.
It’s a remarkable achievement for any city, but particularly so for Ashland, where protesters demonstrated in the 1990s against logging plans in the surrounding Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest, partly out of concern for endangered spotted owls.
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https://www.newsdeeply.com/water/articles/2018/02/20/as-fire-risk-explodes-across-the-west-an-oregon-city-finds-a-solution
