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Mendocino Redwood Company has developed three unique and related planning efforts to address critical areas of forest planning. The Landscape Planning process has its basis in data from sampling efforts throughout the forest. The data are used to estimate the current condition of the forest. It is also used for computer simulations of forest growth and yield to develop a harvesting scenario that is compatible with company objectives, watershed protection, and habitat conservation. The Watershed Analysis and Road Survey process provide baseline information about the condition of watersheds and identify mitigation strategies to promote restoration activities and reduce management impacts. The long-term sustainable forest management planning process identifies strategies to ensure wildlife habitat is managed in such a manner as to maintain and improve the natural biodiversity of the redwood forest ecosystem, conserving unique natural communities, and meeting water quality goals.
All three of these processes have monitoring components associated with them. Monitoring assures that management activities are in compliance with stated management guidelines derived from the planning process and that the desired outcomes from management processes are achieved.
The combination and integration of the contents of these three planning efforts approximately add up to the contents required in a California Forest Practice Rule Sustained Yield Plan (SYP). CFPR Section 1091.1 (b) states that the intent of an SYP is "...to supplement the THP process by providing a means for addressing long-term issues of sustained timber production, and cumulative effects analysis which includes the issues of fish and wildlife and watershed impacts on a large scale landscape."
Specifically, the tables on the next three planning efforts cover the SYP content requirements as follows:
Landscape Planning
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- Sustainability of Harvest Level and Rationale
- Projected Inventories over Time and Methodology
- Growth and Yield over Time and Methodology
- Timber Management Objectives
- Rationale for Management Unit Selection
- Description and summary of Forest Types/Structure (for habitat determinations)
- Estimate of stand structure type acreage and percentage of composition of the watershed by decade
- Estimate of acres of forest types to be harvested by silvicultural method, and the location of submitter's approved and submitted THPs and presently projected future timber operations
- Accounting of how watershed analysis, HCP, and other management policies constrain timber harvest
- Discussion of silvicultural prescriptions applied to each stand type
- Demonstration of ability to meet minimal stocking and basal-area requirements for selected silvicultural methods
- Description and summary of sensitive areas, such as high conservation value forests and areas with unique vegetation.
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Watershed Analysis/Road Survey
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- Descriptions of watercourses/watersheds including maps, unstable areas, unstable soils, sediment discharge
- Hillslope and instream assessments
- Maps of existing roads and approximate location and miles of proposed new, reconstructed, and abandoned roads
- Descriptions of areas known to be sensitive to ground disturbance and present sources of erosion
- Practices, mitigations, and restrictions
- List of problem locations
- Identification and maps of sensitive watersheds
- Description of measures taken to protect resources in sensitive watersheds
- Scheduled activities to reduce problems over time
- Monitoring plan
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Long-term sustainable forest management plan
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- Protections for fish
- Protections for wildlife
- Rationale for appropriate assessment area by species/ecosystem
- List of threatened, endangered, sensitive, rare species of plants and animals that could be impacted
- Potential direct and cumulative significant adverse impacts to ecological resources.
- Retention and recruitment standards for habitat elements (e.g. snags, downed logs)
- Practices, mitigations, and restrictions
- Potential significant adverse impacts, including cumulative effects of the planned operations and other projects on water quality, fisheries, and aquatic wildlife
- Discussion of feasible measures to mitigate or avoid significant adverse impacts
- Impacts of economic activities, recreation, range, forage
- Monitoring and adaptive management
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