More detailed environmental studies examining how logging impacts wildlife habitat, particularly for birds, in the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest should be completed by late January, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Forest Service said Thursday.
The studies are in response to a federal judge's decision to block the planned sale of timber rights on about 22,000 acres of the forest. U.S. District Judge Lynn Adelman of Milwaukee made the ruling in a lawsuit filed by the Habitat Education Center, aMadison-based environmental group, two years ago.
Earlier this year, Adelman ruled the Forest Service must consider the cumulative effects the six national forest timber sales would have on the environment instead of assessing the sales individually. The Habitat Education Center sued the Forest Service to block three of those timber sales.
The Habitat Education Center contends those timber sales would damage the habitat of the red-shouldered hawk, the goshawk and the American marten, all of which reside in areas of the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest.
The lawsuit alleged the timber sales, part of vegetation management projects on some 100,000 acres of forest, violated the National Environmental Policy Act, the National Forest Management Act and the Endangered Species Act.
The new studies are designed to correct deficiencies Adelman identified in the original environmental documents relating to the timber sales, said Debra Kidd, a Forest Service spokeswoman in Rhinelander.
"The analysis of the effects will be more detailed and our writing about it will be more explanatory," she said.
Instead of appealing Adelman's ruling, the Forest Service hopes the new studies address the judge's concerns and Adelman would lift the injunction blocking the timber sales, she said.
Howard Learner, executive director for the Environmental Law & Policy Center, which presented the case for the plaintiffs, said Adelman's decision could set a precedent in that the Forest Service must now consider the impact of past, present and future timber harvests on wildlife habitat.
"It's a simple but remarkable change in terms of how the (Forest Service) will manage forests in northern Wisconsin," Learner said in speech this week at the Sigurd Olson Environmental Institute at Northland College in Ashland.
The timber sales at issue in the lawsuit involve about 5,600 acres that straddle Sawyer and Ashland counties near Clam Lake, about 8,800 acres near Lakewood in Oconto County and 7,740 acres in Forest County, about 20 miles east of Eagle River.
Don Waller, a botanist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said his research shows species diversity in the Chequamegon-Nicolet Forest is declining, and logging is partly to blame.
"The common species are becoming commoner, and the rare species are becoming rarer," he said in his speech at the college.Associated Press via Duluth News Tribune
