A coalition of conservation coalitions includingKlamath-Siskiyou Wildlands Center, Cascadia Wildlands, Oregon Wild, and the Soda Mountain Wilderness Council, filed a legal complaint challenging the Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) “Integrated Vegetation Management” (IVM) program. 

The IVM program would aggressively log forest stands located within Late Successional Reserves, which are forest areas the Bureau of Land Management set aside to protect habitat for wildlife that need mature and old-growth forests to survive, the coalition said.

According to the BLM, the Late Mungers Integrated Vegetation Management Project is designed to promote and develop safe wildfire response, fire-resilient land, and habitat for special-status species. Proposed treatments include prescribed fire, small diameter thinning, commercial thinning, and selection harvest on about 7,435 acres of BLM-administered lands.

Crag Law Center, which is part of the plaintiffs' action that includes Klamath-Siskiyou Wildlands Center, Cascadia Wildlands, Oregon Wild, and the Soda Mountain Wilderness Council, filed a legal complaint challenging the Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) “Integrated Vegetation Management” (IVM) program. The Integrated Vegetation Management program they say would aggressively log forest stands located within Late Successional Reserves, which are forest areas the Bureau of Land Management set aside to protect habitat for wildlife that need mature and old-growth forests to survive.

“Bureau of Land Management timber planners can dance around it all they want,” said George Sexton, KS Wild Conservation Director, “but it’s crystal clear that gap creation logging creates clearcuts that remove habitat and increase  fire hazard.”

The first commercial Integrated Vegetation Management timber sales is scheduled to be auctioned off in late May. This first sale, called Penn Butte, is located in the Williams Late Successional Reserve (near Williams, Oregon) and would remove over 400 acres of old-growth habitat through “open seral” logging and another 51 acres through “gap creation” clearcutting. But the agency never analyzed that timber sale in its review of the IVM program.