Oregon: USFS intends mushroom silvics for thinning of Deschutes NF

“The matsutake mushroom is culturally and economically an important
thing for people,” said Holly Jewkes, Crescent District ranger. During
the planning process for the tree-thinning project, forest staff went
to California to talk with people who come to Central Oregon to
harvest mushrooms, said Joe Bowles, district silviculturist, to see
where the important mushroom harvesting areas are located. The
project’s record of decision was released last week, and it is now in
an appeal period.

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The BLT Project — the BLT stands for Bunch of Little Trees — is
designed to try to help prevent catastrophic wildfires, insect
outbreaks or disease from killing large swaths of the national forest,
as well as to provide timber and other wood products, according to the
project’s record of decision. The logging part of the project would
produce about 12 million board feet of commercial timber, Bowles said
— not as much as the 19 million board feet proposed for Crescent’s
Five Buttes project, which is the subject of a federal lawsuit.

There’s not a whole lot of information available about what the
mushrooms need in terms of tree density or forest structure, he said,
so the project planners tried to take a conservative approach and not
log or conduct prescribed burns in some important areas. Mushroom hot
spots where the Forest Service will cut trees will come with a
requirement that all logging take place when there’s snow on the
ground, to lower the risk of damaging the fungus, Bowles said.

The plan also calls for the agency to help answer the question of what
makes good matsutake habitat — the Forest Service would monitor the
mushroom sites after the work is done to track any effects on the
crop. “We’ll look at if we went to a lower (tree) density here, and
left it higher here, how the mushrooms respond,” he said. The BLT
Project — the BLT stands for Bunch of Little Trees — is designed to
try to help prevent catastrophic wildfires, insect outbreaks or
disease from killing large swaths of the national forest, as well as
to provide timber and other wood products, according to the project’s
record of decision.

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