The Wilderness Society has identified top priority Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF) and Forest Legacy land acquisition projects across the country. These projects are found in 14 states, including Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Maine, Montana, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Oregon, Tennessee, Vermont, Washington and Wyoming.
Read the complete list by clicking on the link below.
A decade after it was first adopted by the U.S. Forest Service, the Roadless Area Conservation Rule has proven to be remarkably successful in protecting the 58.5 million acres of national forest roadless areas from road building and logging. Only about 75 miles of road building has occurred in the roadless areas – far less than the Forest Service had predicted a decade ago -- and just a miniscule fraction of the unroaded forests has been logged, mostly in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest.
The purpose of the stewardship contracting authority is to allow public land managers to achieve land management goals while meeting local rural community needs. The authority’s use is on the rise, and many regard stewardship contracting as a win–win mechanism for federal land management and a means of ending the ‘‘timber wars’’ on public land.
Weeds cost Montana economically by reducing farm and ranch productivity, degrading water quality, depressing wildlife numbers, and threatening outdoor recreation. Fighting the war on weeds on the Rocky Mountain Front (RMF) is also costly, but how costly, and are we spending enough to effectively manage the problem? To answer these questions, The Wilderness Society conducted a phone survey of RMF land managers.
The challenges posed by unemployment and climate change create a powerful opportunity to revitalize our economy while restoring the backbone of our wellbeing: our natural heritage. Safeguarding our natural resources — our forests, rivers, prairies and other wildlands — in a warming world will protect and create jobs across the country today, while investing in our country's future.
An overlooked opportunity to sequester carbon on National Forests rests with its massive road system.
Preliminary analysis by TWS has indicated that returning unneeded Forest Service roads back to a natural state would be equivalent to revegetating an area larger than Rhode Island. We estimate that carbon storage from decommissioning and revegetating unneeded roads on our national forests is 39.5 — 48.5 million metric tons.
This series of maps illustrates National Landscape Conservation System locations, made up of the gems within our public lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management.
