Sierra Nevada Forest Plan Amendment

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An interdisciplinary team has been assembled to prepare a narrowly focused SEIS that responds to the Judge's direction and is working to meet the Court ordered May 1, 2010 deadline for completion of this new SEIS.

A Draft Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement is now available. The Notice of Availability was released on February 19, 2010, and public comment regarding the information contained in the Draft SEIS will be solicited until May 5, 2010.

If you are interested in subscribing to the mailing list and be notified of the progress of the SEIS, please complete the registration form to subscribe.

Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement in Response to District Court Order

February 10, 2010, update: A Notice of Availability was published in the Federal Register today, with a public comment period ending April 5, 2010. Note: this deadline has since been extended to May 5, 2010.

On December 10, 2009, the Forest Service issued a Notice of Intent to Prepare a Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement (SEIS) to the 2004 Sierra Nevada Forest Plan Amendment (Framework) Final SEIS. The Draft SEIS is now available for viewing or download.

The new SEIS is being prepared in response to an order issued on November 4, 2009 by Judge Morrison C. England of the Eastern District Court regarding the two lawsuits against the 2004 Sierra Nevada Forest Plan Amendment decision by Sierra Forest Legacy and the People of the State of California.

Judge England ordered the Forest Service to ... "prepare another supplemental EIS on the Framework, one that meets the range of alternatives and analytical consistency identified by the Ninth Circuit in its decision on the preliminary injunction portions of this case."

The Ninth Circuit found that the 2004 Framework's SEIS failed to properly consider Alternatives F2 through F8 as required by the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) by:

1. not updating the modeling for those alternatives to make them comparable to alternatives S1 and S2, and;
2. not considering the "new" objectives of reducing stand density for forest health, restoring and maintaining ecosystem structure and composition, and restoring ecosystems after severe wildfire and other large catastrophic disturbance events when evaluating those alternatives.