A Hinkle in time — 10 year logging impact study enters final phase

HINKLE CREEK — The state's timber capital and a local dynasty are leading the way in breathing new life into forest policy based on watershed-sized research.

Roseburg Forest Products provided 5,000 acres of its 13,000-acre Hinkle Creek forest for a 10-year study designed to assess how current logging practices affect fish, streams and water quality. The study began in 2001.

Scientists, policymakers and timber managers hope the study will reap dividends and help update policy for more effective land management.

A paired watershed study looks at two watersheds. Impacts of timber activity on one watershed are compared with what happens without logging on the other.

“If you're going to study cumulative impacts, you have to study at the size of a watershed,” Arne Skaugset, an Oregon State University forest hydrologist and science lead on the Hinkle Creek study, said at a tour of the study site on July 30.

Hinkle Creek is what's known as a “nested” watershed study. Like the Russian nesting dolls, the main watershed is made up of two, almost evenly divided, smaller watersheds: the North and South forks.

At Hinkle Creek, the South Fork has been logged at three different intervals during the study, but the North Fork has remained untouched to offer control data.

“It's easy to pick out the North Fork — it's green,” Skaugset said, by way of orienting tour participants.

The study at Hinkle Creek is moving into the final phase of research as the last harvests finished up on the South Fork this spring.

For the next three years, data will be collected from the multitude of stations and monitors on both the South Fork and the North Fork.

“The day you collect the last bit of data is sometimes the day a lot of the work begins,” Skaugset said.

Hinkle Creek is one of three similar studies going on in Oregon.

The other two, the Alsea and Trask River studies, began in 2006, five years after Hinkle Creek. They are focused on coastal range forests. Hinkle Creek is the only one located in the Cascades.

Roseburg Forest Products offered the Hinkle Creek site — the second largest watershed in the study and the only one completely privately owned — and was the only site scientists didn't struggle with the landowners about, Skaugset said.

“Hinkle Creek was thrown out there as a ‘proof of study' project. Roseburg and Hinkle Creek were the first ones to break the mold,” he said.

A Hinkled-history

Hinkle Creek is located east of Sutherlin. The rainfall-driven watershed drains into the Calapooya Creek, which flows past Oakland before reaching the Umpqua River.

The Hinkle Forest area represents a small part of the 450,000 acres RFP owns.

“But we want to assure you we get spiritual about our forest lands,” Allyn Ford, RFP president and chief executive officer, told about 60 people on the tour. “So is it an arm's-length relationship? No it's not. From a family standpoint, this is home base for us.”

Ford — now in his 60s — remembers playing in Hinkle Creek as a tot when his father's log crews spent the week working on the hills and then were trucked back to families for the weekend.

The Hinkle Creek study area was originally logged in the 1950s.

Around that same time, a study on the impact of that era's logging practices was happening on the Alsea River — the same site in the current study.

Results of the older study, which found stream conditions had reached unhealthy levels for fish, paved the way for the Oregon Forest Practices Act of 1971.

Today, Phil Adams, land manager for RFP, said the area is currently managed for long-term stewardship. So mature areas are harvested, then reforested for future harvests.

“We are managing the land for the long term and view the existing FPA as our roadmap to meet current regulatory standards. We often choose to add to the standard with our own internal ‘best management practices,' ” Adams said.

Oregon was the first state in the U.S. and is one of only 13 states that have such an act, said David Kvamme, communications director for the Portland-based Oregon Forest Resources Institute.

Since the OFPA came into effect, the act has evolved and changed, but research hasn't kept pace with what's happening in the field nowadays.

“We don't have any data to see how current practices affect watersheds,” Kvamme said.

The Hinkle, Alsea and Trask studies hope to fill in those gaps.

Science to policy

Though many of the results will have to wait until 2011, some of what's coming out now is somewhat counterintuitive, scientists say.

Doug Bateman, Oregon State University fish biologist working on the Hinkle Creek study, said according to earlier data collected on the impacts of harvests near non-fish bearing areas upstream, they didn't see any difference between fish growth and survival rates downstream in either the North or South forks of the watershed.

However, there was a 3 percent increase in fish movement, but Bateman said they still don't understand the biological significance of that finding.

Now that the final harvests — clearcuts along fish-bearing streams on the South Fork — have concluded, Bateman said the North and South fork data may show some splits in impacts.

“We're thinking in this next (harvest data) entry, because it was so extreme, that things aren't going to have to move very far before it impacts the fish,” he said. “But to date, it just seems like the fish haven't responded in any big way to those headwater logging treatments.”

Skaugset expects the Hinkle Creek study to cost about $8 million by its conclusion.

The lead researcher called the July tour a “high-water mark” because of the many policymakers, including the Oregon Board of Forestry members, in attendance.

“The idea of doing science to inform policy is always in the (background),” he said.

Many politicians were back for a second time and were surprised to see the regrowth after earlier logging operations.

“It was very interesting to me to see how much it had grown up,” said Douglas County Commissioner Susan Morgan. “I hope it really informs the discussion ... so that people can continue to make a living off the land and we can protect the genuine environmental needs.”

State Senator Floyd Prozanski was also in attendance for a second tour and looks forward to what the study might yield.

“It's very exciting to see what private and public cooperative management is creating and what kind of science is coming from it,” he said. “By having this (study) — long term and large scale — we'll have the opportunity to see if there's a better way to reach those objectives that we have and that's sustainability.”

John Blackwell, current chairman of the Board of Forestry, was on his first trip to the Hinkle Creek site.

“Nothing beats being on the ground and then having that translate into decision-making later,” he said.

• You can reach reporter DD Bixby at 957-4211 or by e-mail at dbixby@nrtoday.com.