Montana Forest Management: Protecting Ecosystems and Communities

humans have always been actively engaged with their ecosystems and especially their forests

especially here in montana whether or not you live within the wildland urban interface in the middle

of the woods or in our communities force affect us all they affect our drinking water supplies they

affect our air quality they affect all of our recreational pursuits

and they affect all of our economies in one way or another i am sonia german i'm the state forester

for the state of montana i oversee private forestry assistance all of our partnerships with our state

federal local partners and tribal nations and i oversee

wildfire protection on state and private lands as state foresters we really see active forest management as being the

tool to achieve all of the valleys that we hold deer for recreation clean watersheds

protecting our communities and supporting wildlife habitat really proud of the work that our

service foresters do with private forest landowners so say that you have a landowner that is

really concerned about wildfire or really concerned about the insect and disease that they might be

seeing on their land a service forester will go and essentially consult with that private

forest landowner and come up with a plan to address some of those predominant issues that they're seeing on their

private forest land my name is marianne garner my name is don garner

and we're here at the the bearpaw we call it 10 miles from big fork montana we

purchased this property with the intent of having a big grizzly bear habitat we knew

nothing about managing a forest i took a class on for stewardship that was sponsored by the dnrc

they teach you how to inventory your property how to evaluate it and the thing that i came away with is

that we have a very sick forest and it needed a lot of help probably the biggest threat right now

for this property is wildfire when we got the property it had been logged in the past and

hadn't been logged with much care and there were a lot of places with extremely dense stands of

pretty unhealthy trees that are would be just ready with the smallest torch to go

we are seeing larger fires and we're also seeing more fires we end up working with a lot of private forested

landowners to do a lot of thinning help educate them about the natural occurrence of

fire help them understand that there is a likelihood that fire may

occur within or around their their forested ownership contractor comes in does extensive

thinning cuts down trees stacks the slash puts the logs on a truck and takes them to the mill

the way that helps with the fire risk is to reduce the opportunity for fires to go from the

ground up into the trees you know take the ladder fuel out and just increase the spacing from tree to tree

and the cost of that is shared between us and the montana dnrc the cost sharing programs were

invaluable for getting us to do things on scale where we could do more acres instead of

like 4 acres we could do 20 acres and backing those up over a number of years we've been able to cover most of

the property get thinning done on most of it there are over 800 million acres of forested land

throughout the united states and that's a lot of forested acres and that's a lot of ownerships

wildland fire insect disease smoke they don't recognize jurisdictional boundaries or ownership

boundaries and we have a saying that neither should our management in 2008 farm bill

congress required of the states to put together what are called forest action plans and they wanted us to do three

things assess the conditions of all forested lands work with a collaborative group to

identify priority areas to address some of the predominant issues that we're seeing

and come up with implementation strategies as to how we're going to get that work done

the need for our services is growing whether it's local government state government federal partners tribal

nations or private landowners the power of forest action plans is they offer that

opportunity for us to work across those jurisdictional boundaries in state foresters we're the glue that

brings everybody together