Goals for Our Restoration Work

Build on Past Successes

Work we do that affects the ecosystem will be driven by and consistent with restoration needs:

• Building on past successes, we are focusing our work on restoration actions so that all forests and wildlands are better able to adjust and thrive in the face of climate change and large scale disturbances such as fire, drought and insect and disease attacks.
• We will also continue our work of maintaining and protecting healthy ecosystems.
• Plans, projects and activities conducted in the Region that affect the ecosystem will be consistent with and driven by specific restoration and ecosystem maintenance needs.
• Our restoration efforts are not something new; we are highlighting and placing more emphasis on these efforts.

Accelerate Restoration

Our goal is to pick up the pace and scale of restoration work:

• Our current pace of restoration work needs to be accelerated to mitigate ecological threats and disturbances such as wildfires, insects, diseases, and climate change impacts.
• Our goal is to increase our restoration work in all areas; meadows restoration, controlling invasive species, road maintenance and decommissioning, thinning dense forests, returning fire to its natural role in the ecosystem where possible, improving fish and wildlife habitat, restoring species to their historic habitat, cleaning up abandoned mines, etc.
• One objective is to increase the removal of fuels that can feed a wildfire to 500,000 acres per year-this includes the use of mechanical equipment, prescribed fire, and wildfires managed to benefit the ecosystem.

All Lands Approach

We are exploring new ways to accomplish restoration work including large scale conservation actions across boundaries:

• We recognize that current budgets do not provide enough funds to achieve the desired increased pace and scale of restoration work.
• We will build upon existing partnerships and seek new partnerships to support ecological restoration priorities within the Region.
• We will work with partners to accomplish work across ownership boundaries for large scale restoration projects that utilize an "all lands" approach.
• We are exploring ways to increase our investment in restoration work by increasing the benefits citizens will receive from national forests such as improved delivery of clean water, recreation, biodiversity, wood, etc.