Forest Management
Unhealthy, overstocked forest needing treatment
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Forest Management Plan
The Commission owns approximately 3,500 acres, of which about 2,500 acres require some level of forest management activities. Very little forest improvement work had been implemented on Commission lands since the 1970s, causing forest health to deteriorate, timber growth rates to decline, and fuels loading to increase. Therefore, the Commission contracted with the U.S. Forest Service to update the 1986 management plan.
The Forest Management Plan was completed and adopted in October 1999. The primary goals of this plan are to:
- Maintain a healthy forest ecosystem that will minimize risk to water quality;
- Minimize fire risk due to fuel loadings;
- And increase timber productivity.
The plan updated vegetation inventories, recommended treatments, developed a ten-year action plan for implementing treatments, identified tasks needed to accomplish treatments, developed cost estimates for various treatments, and provided maps in GIS format with associated attributes in a database.
General recommendations were made for stand treatments needed over the next three decades with specific recommendations for the first decade.
Feller buncher thinning a forest unit
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The Board of Water Commisioners became very concerned after the large forest fires in 2002 and decided to accelerate the implementation of the Commission's Forest Management Plan over the next five years.
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