Draft SNFPA Management Review and Recommendations

Recreation Impacts

New Information and Understanding Gained from Review

How the ROD Applies to Recreation

The Team found that the standards and guidelines pertaining to recreation activities are scattered throughout the ROD and inconsistently worded. In several places, the direction for recreation is embedded in a larger paragraph or section pertaining to species protection. In other places, it appears as a single sentence at the end of a full discussion of vegetative treatment guidelines. Still other times, it appears woven throughout several pages of direction, as in the aquatic management strategy. It is our observation that the complexity of this broad direction has caused confusion on the part of permit administrators and other field-level readers who have limited time to sort through management direction primarily written for fuels projects to tease out the relevant standards and guidelines and interpret them for even the simplest of recreation projects.

References are made to evaluate recreation uses, projects and activities during landscape analysis, during project-level analysis, during site-specific Riparian Conservation Objectives (RCO) analysis, during environmental analysis and when a permit is reissued or reviewed. The terms “existing use”, “existing activity“, “continuing recreation use”, “new project”, “new decision”, “proposed project”, “proposed activities”, and “resource activities” are used throughout the ROD---sometimes interchangeably—to describe recreation. This is problematic because there are important nuances associated with each phrase.

Even after working on this subject for several months, the Team still had difficulty finding and explaining how a particular standard and guideline was supposed to apply to a project in the field. Given this level of confusion, our first step was to consolidate all relevant direction about recreation in the ROD so we could begin to evaluate the actual effects of implementation. The consolidated version is provided for reference in Appendix Z. Note that the standards and guidelines related to grazing, the willow flycatcher, and Yosemite toad are likely to effect recreational stock use (see “Impacts to Grazing”, pg. 54).

Mapping errors contribute to the confusion. For example, developed recreation sites have been mapped as old forest emphasis areas. In most cases, it is not appropriate to manage developed recreation sites for old forest structure and function. We recommend that the maps be redrawn to explicitly exclude developed recreation sites from old forest emphasis areas. A number of other steps can be taken to reduce confusion and increase program efficiency at the field level. These are described in more detail in the following sections.

USDA Forest Service · Pacific Southwest Region