Mattole Restoration Council

With funding from the State Water Resources Control Board Integrated Watershed Management Program, MRC has recently produced a series of new publications covering a range of topics from Sudden Oak Death to watershed-friendly economic possibilities. 

-White paper investigating the potential for establishment of a Long Term Ecological Research Station in the Mattole.

-Report on our current understanding of the Sudden Oak Death infestation in northern California, potential impacts in the Mattole, and how restoration can mitigate its effects.

-Report on climate change and scenarios of what it means for the Mattole watershed and our restoration effort.

-White paper on Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) technology and its potential applications in understanding Mattole forests.

Watershed recovery is inherently a slow process. While it may take mere years to diagnose the harms affecting a watershed, it takes decades to address those ills, and centuries for a complete recovery. The processes of sediment transport, forest growth, and soil accumulation are simply that deliberate.

Mindful of that time scale, 25 years after the Council began taking on projects in watershed restoration, the MRC has published a "quarterly report" -- a retrospective on what our first quarter-century of effort has accomplished. It's a 34-page booklet, issued at the end of 2011, entitled Harbingers of Recovery: A First Quarterly Report to Stakeholders. The images and excerpt below offer a flavor of what the booklet contains.

The Mattole Forest Futures Project is an approach to forest management that gives landowners streamlined approval for their logging plans, provided their harvest meets significant light-touch standards.

* January 2012 update *
The first three plans have been filed to harvest timber as part of the Mattole Forest Futures Project, under the Council's newly approved Program Timberland Environmental Impact Report (PTEIR):
Plan 1-11-100-HUM-PTHP: 67 acres of selective harvest on Wilder Ridge - approved by Calfire Dec. 27,
Plan 1-11-116-HUM-PTHP: 61 acres of selection, commercial thinning, and all-age harvest near Whitethorn, &
Plan 1-11-123-HUM-PTHP: 30 acres of selective harvest, also near Whitethorn.
These can all be downloaded from the Calfire harvest plan library.

The kinds of selective harvest contemplated as part of the Mattole Forest Futures Project will support the recovery of the Mattole watershed in four important ways: