The Inyo National Forest is proposing to undertake the Eastern Sierra Fire Restoration and Maintenance project. The project area encompasses the eastern Sierra Nevada mountain range from Lundy Canyon in the north to the Kern Plateau and Kennedy Meadows in the south. The eastern extent of the project encompasses the Mono Craters Glass
Proposed project activities would entail broadcast burning through aerial and ground ignition along with incidental fireline construction to supplement the use of existing roads trails and natural barriers as fire lines. Hand thinning and limbing to raise canopy base height will occur where stand density is likely to result in undesirable prescribed fire effects and this treatment is determined to be cost effective. Mowing also would be used in select areas to reduce connectivity between understory and overstory vegetation to achieve desirable fire effects.
Treatment areas would target ecosystems that support an understory with sufficient fuel to support fire spread and that have a natural fire regime of frequent to moderately frequent low to mixed severity fire in coniferous forests and mixed to high severity fire aspen forests. Target vegetation types include Jeffrey pine mixed conifer red fir lodgepole pine and aspen. No treatment is proposed where pinyon whitebark pine limber pine foxtail pine western white pine or bristlecone pine are dominant (>50% of the stand). The project will be designed to maintain and foster the persistence of old forests. In dense forests and/or in places with significant accumulations of surface and ladder fuels the need to first analyze and implement mechanical pre-treatments through a separate environmental decision making process would be identified instead.
The proposal would authorize a program of prescribed burning in appropriate locations across the Forest. Units would be identified and prioritized based on existing conditions location and capacity to develop an implementation schedule and appropriate resource surveys would be completed prior to implementation. The objective is to reintroduce fire at a scale at which it would have burned before fire suppression but the total area burned each year would be determined by funding capacity weather and air quality conditions. Currently the Forest implements broadcast burning in previously approved project areas on the scale of 1000 to 2000 acres per year.
Actions proposed in the Eastern Sierra Fire Restoration and Maintenance project are in accordance with 36 CFR 220.6(e)(6). Projects planned under this Categorical Exclusion (CE) are limited to timber stand and/or wildlife habitat improvement activities that do not include the use of herbicides or do not require more than 1 mile of low standard road construction. (ii) Thinning or brush control to improve growth or to reduce fire hazard including the opening of an existing road to a dense timber stand. The Inyo National Forest plans to design and implement prescribed and managed wildfire for multiple objectives including resource benefit at a large scale.
Your comments specific to this project and/or to individual sites and resources are valuable in helping the Forest identify issues and concerns and refine the analysis to focus on places or issues that are important to you. As such we request that you review the proposed action and share either your suggestions or endorsement of the actions by January 6 2020.
If you are interested in visiting with Forest staff in the field to discuss the project or for additional information regarding this project please contact the Inyo National Forest by January 6 2020.
You may contact Erin Noesser at erin.noesser@usda.gov or (760)873-2449 or Carly Gibson at carly.gibson@usda.gov if you have questions.
Carly Gibson
