The National Fire Plan (NFP) is a long-term investment to help protect communities, natural resources, and lives of firefighters and the public. The Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service have a strategy for protecting people and the environment by restoring and sustaining land health, which includes evaluating the tradeoffs between programs that emphasize wildland urban interface and those that emphasize ecosystem restoration and maintenance. Agency line officers are responsible for the implementation of the NFP strategy and Survey and Manage (S&M) standards, and for managing the risks associated with species and human community protection.

Earlier this year a multi-faceted strategy was developed by the S&M organization to help integrate S&M requirements with the agencies’ need to implement the objectives and requirements of the NFP. The S&M organization has made progress in assistance to the NFP on several fronts: workshops for line officers in April, a May field visit to fuel reduction sites in California, and a recent request asking you for a description of your next three years’ fuel management projects around “communities at risk” so we can better focus on relevant S&M issues and needs.

In further conformance with the strategy, a tool has been developed for use by the field units. Attachment 1 to this memo contains amended Management Recommendations (MRs) for 24 vascular plants, lichens, bryophytes, and fungi species. Amended MRs for red tree voles and some amphibians and mollusks should be completed in the near future and will be transmitted under a separate memo. These amended MRs are designed to better facilitate fuels reduction activities around at-risk communities, as suggested by the 2001 S&M Record of Decision (ROD) on page 12 and by the Standards and Guidelines (S&Gs) on page 20 for high fire frequency areas. In addition to considering the use of prescribed fire within S&M known sites, other fuel reduction activities are addressed in these amendments. As noted in the attachment, these amendments are to be used only within areas with short fire return intervals near at-risk communities.

The at-risk communities to which these MR amendments apply were identified in the August 2001 Federal Register. The Federal Register provided the names of the communities at risk but did not provide boundaries associated with those communities. General maps to where these MRs apply are shown in Attachment 4 with more specific parameters provided in Attachment 1. Since the development of these maps the state of California has been updating their determinations of at-risk communities boundaries based on new census data and other information. The Federal Agencies in California should collaborate with the state to receive the updated community boundary information in conformance with the parameters defined in Attachment 1. [101KB PDF File]

Some of the attached MR amendments recommend “any treatment” to reduce fuels within the critical first 300 feet surrounding developments and structures associated with a community can occur with no mitigation for the S&M site needed. For these species, in these situations, pre-disturbance surveys are not required. For other treatments the line officer, with unit specialists’ recommendations, should determine whether a proposed fuel reducing activity should be considered “habitat-disturbing” and hence whether pre-disturbance surveys are required or not. Specifically, “…the line officer should consider the probability of the species being present on the project site, as well as the probability that the project would cause a significant negative effect on the species habitat or persistence of the species at the site”, page 22 of 2001 S&M ROD S&Gs. These MR amendments are a useful tool in helping to make this determination.

For those situations where the management of known sites in compliance with these MR amendments precludes the implementation of fuel reduction projects, the field unit should contact the S&M Program Manager for assistance.

We appreciate the field’s assistance in the development of these attached amended MRs. In addition to providing specific staffing to help develop these documents, last fall you identified which species were likely to occur in NFP treatment areas in numbers significant enough to be an issue. Recently you and your staff reviewed and provided key comments to the draft amendments. These comments were incorporated to make the amendments better products. Where field comments could not be addressed through MR edits, we addressed them in a Question and Answer document (Attachment 2). [33KB PDF File]

Please address questions to the appropriate S&M agency representative:

FS R5:  Paula Crumpton, pcrumpton@fs.fed.us, 530-242-2242;
BLM OR/WA/Northern CA:  Rob Huff, Rob Huff/ORSO/OR/BLM/DOI, 503-808-6479
FS R6:  Jeanne Rice, jrice@fs.fed.us , 503-808-2661
Interagency S&M Program Manager, Terry Brumley, tbrumley@fs.fed.us, 503-808-2968.

The taxa leads and experts are also good resources for you in applying these MRs and to help determine the need for surveys for certain activities.  A list of the leads and experts, including phone numbers and e-mail addresses, is included as Attachment 3.