Old Growth

CRC and its partners work on a variety of mitigation and landscape restoration efforts in the Clearwater Valley, a landscape of over 270,000 acres.  However, much of our recent forestry funding is restricted to specific fuels mitigation projects that do not allow us to focus on old growth retention and recruitment. 

Building upon previous work, and with a 2020 grant from the Bock Foundation, CRC was able to further the protection of the most vulnerable trees and ecosystem on this landscape. More specifically, CRC partnered with the U.S.F.S. (Seeley Lake Ranger District) to ground truth previously collected remote sensing data to definitively identify stands of high-density old growth in selected timber units. In essence, CRC identified areas with old growth in need of future protection from catastrophic wildfire.  However, additional work is needed to complete this old growth inventory and to work with USFS to develop a restoration plan that will protect these vulnerable stands.  The paragraph below provides a more detailed summary of the findings from our 2020 work.

Click here to read more about CRC’s findings about old growth retention and recruitment from 2020.