Laying the Groundwork for Habitat and Ecocultural Restoration on the Modoc National Forest with the Kosealekte Band

Published August 5, 2022

After years of visioning and strategizing, Lomakatsi Restoration Project is excited to be putting boots on the ground as part of the Taktokeewa Pine Springs Habitat Restoration Project in partnership with the Kosealekte Band and U.S. Forest Service-Modoc National Forest. This collaborative effort is located in the northeastern corner of California, 10 miles southeast of Alturas, within the aboriginal homelands of the Kosealekte Band of the Ajumawi-Atsuge Nation (federally-recognized as the Pit River Tribe). This collaboration between the Kosealekte Band, the Modoc National Forest, and Lomakatsi aims to restore an initial 3,000 acres of important habitat by 2026.

Presently, we’re providing capacity to our Forest Service partners by conducting the required pre-implementation environmental assessments and drafting specialist reports, while working closely with Forest Service’s team of specialists. Through this work, six Lomakatsi tribal staff from the Kosealekte Band are serving as our technical forestry team, working with our foresters and ecologists in an effort to collect quality data, while building capacity through a peer-to-peer learning and training program.

Earlier this summer, Lomakatsi’s Ecological Monitoring Associate Jordan Anderson and Tribal Projects Manager George Swartzlender—a member of the Kosealekte Band—led tribal crew members in completing Northern Goshawk surveys in planned treatment areas. This week, and throughout the remainder of the summer, the team will be conducting “common stand exams” to assess current ecological conditions in the project area and inform the restoration prescriptions that will be developed for future ecological forestry and restoration work.

Over the past two months, Tribal Partnerships Director Belinda Brown and the Lomakatsi team have been working closely with elected leaders of the Kosealekte Band and archeologists from the Forest Service Heritage Program to launch cultural surveys in the project area. Lomakatsi will be contracting with an archeologist to complete this assessment work over the next year, with Kosealekte Band members leading the survey work and serving in an advisory capacity. Restoration treatments, including ecological thinning and prescribed burning, are scheduled to begin in 2025, with the goal of enhancing wildlife habitat, promoting ecocultural plant species used by local tribes for cultural and subsistence purposes, and reducing the risk of severe wildfire to adjacent communities.

Contact

645 Washington Street
Ashland, Oregon 97520

(541) 488-0208
info@lomakatsi.org

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Mission

Restore ecosystems and the sustainability of communities, cultures, and economies.

We acknowledge that Lomakatsi operates programs across the ancestral lands of aboriginal peoples who lived and live in the watersheds of the Willamette River, Rogue River, Klamath River, Umpqua River, and Pit River, in what is now called Oregon and California. From sagebrush hillsides and mixed conifer forests, to oak woodlands and riverine systems, we offer our respect, recognition, and gratitude to the original past, present, and future inhabitants of these landscapes, to whom we dedicate this work.