By ALEX BAUMHARDT/Oregon Capital Chronicle
Oregon’s coastal communities that rely on drinking water from forested rivers and creeks have lost substantial tree cover during the last 20 years, a recent NASA analysis found.
That can be not-so-good news for residents and the environment.
Forests not only improve the quality of surface waters, but also the quantity. They prevent erosion, and filter, direct and store rain and snow as they pass into streams, according to the researchers. And more than 80% of Oregonians, including most who live on the coasts, get some or all of their drinking water from surface water sources such as streams, rivers and creeks, according to the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality.
“We think of the coast range as having a lot of water, a lot of rain – and while that’s true in the winter – lately their streams are running pretty low during the summer months,” said Erik Fernandez, a program manager at the environmental nonprofit Oregon Wild who worked with NASA researchers on the analysis.
Young trees planted to replace logged mature trees also end up sucking up more water, further depleting surface water supply, Fernandez said. He also expressed concern that planting new tree stands requires spraying herbicides and pesticides, sometimes aerially, that can harm water sources.
Seth Barnes, forest policy director for the Oregon Forest Industries Council, said the more than 50-year-old Oregon Forest Practices Act, currently being updated, strongly protects water in Oregon’s logged forests.
“There’s really literally hundreds of protections that are put in place when anything is harvested in the state of Oregon,” Barnes said. “Things like stream buffers, harvest practices that are very specific and nuanced, reforestation requirements, steep slopes protections.”
Using data and satellite imagery from NASA collected between 1997 and 2023, four researchers from the agency’s Oregon Coast Range Ecological Conservation Team were able to look at logging impacts in forests within 80 Oregon Coast watersheds identified by Oregon Wild.
About one-third of the forested land in those 80 watersheds — nearly 600 square miles — had been logged during the last 20 years, according to the study.
“Over the last 20 years it would be entirely inaccurate to say logging in the Coast Range was done carefully. I don’t think you can look at an aerial photo and say it was done carefully,” Fernandez said.
The bulk of logging in watershed forests during this time was on land owned by industrial logging companies, followed by state and federal agencies, tribes and local municipalities. Those companies, including Weyerhaeuser, Stimson Lumber and Roseburg Forest Products, use a method called clearcutting, defined by the NASA researchers as the removal of all trees in an area exceeding 2 acres. Representatives from those companies did not respond to requests for comment from the Capital Chronicle by Monday evening.
Barnes said the companies and members of the Forest Industries Council have high compliance rates with the Forest Practices Act, including complying with regulations on water quality.
“We live in these watersheds and our families drink this water and recreate in these forests too,” and we want to be good stewards,” he said.
Casey Kulla, state forest policy coordinator for Oregon Wild, said he hopes the NASA analysis can aid efforts by some Oregon cities to buy and manage the forestland around their drinking watersheds.
The state recently passed legislation to create a Community Drinking Water Enhancement and Protection Fund with $5 million available for communities hoping to own or improve land around their source drinking water.
- Oregon Capital Chronicle is a nonprofit Salem-based news service that focuses its reporting on Oregon state government, politics and policy.
I am 70 years old and the timber industry in this state has been out of control and rapacious my whole life. Abundant scientific evidence shows that clear cutting is a horrible way to harvest timber, except for being economically advantageous, because it replaces healthy diverse forests with monocultural tree farms with low diversity of numerous species, particularly birds. And now we see how it hurts our water supplies. I think it’s about time for a ballot initiative to clamp down on this greedy environmentally destructive industry once and for all. It has shown itself totally incapable of responsible self-regulation. And it has co-opted those agencies and academic institutions that should be informing it of the proper way to do forestry.
Yachats News … thank you for this article.
I’ve been a private small track forester here on the Oregon Coast for 34 years and I wholeheartedly agree with what Lee reports.
I was a former member of the Oregon Small Forest Association, which used to be a useful organization for improving the care of forests, but left due to their bias toward poor, unsustainable forest practices, informed by OSU professors who are in the back pocket of commercial industrial interest that promote short-term practices that poison the environment and neighbors by providing biased practices under the guise of science. This is a crime against nature and people.
Yep.
From the study it really shows that the Private and State have been the largest offenders in the last 25 years. The recovery of these resources takes longer than the 25 years. This was very interesting study that I hope the state takes a more serious approach to watershed management.
Results identifying the percentage of different logging practices for each land ownership type.
Land Ownership % Clearcut % Thinned Total % Logged
Federal 3% 12% 15%
State 18% 24% 42%
Private 42% 0% 42%
Local 13% 18% 31%
Tribal 18% 27% 45%
“These results show that clearcutting is more common on private land than land owned by federal or state agencies, while commercial thinning is more prevalent on Oregon state land (Table 4). While a large percentage of locally owned and tribal land experienced logging activity, these classifications account for a very small proportion of the study area, respectively 2% and 0.2%, and so results for these ownership types should be taken with a degree of caution.”
Also, just for accuracy, the satellites are not NASA satellites. Landsat is a USGS managed and operated satellite series and even the data is from a USGS database (Earth Engine Data Catalog). So the images are not from NASA. NASA did conduct the analysis of the USGS data.