Interior has added two logging categorical exclusions to its environmental procedures, 622 comment letters arrived on them, and neither text changed by a word

Twelve projects were dropped as outliers, and the cap came out of what was left.

The Interior Department filed two notices on Friday morning adding categorical exclusions to the environmental procedures the Bureau of Land Management works under. Both publish on Monday and both take effect the day they publish. One covers salvage of dead and dying trees. The other covers thinning.

Neither notice was reported anywhere, which is normal for a public inspection filing and is the reason to read the list.

What a categorical exclusion does

It decides which document gets written, and nothing else.

Under the National Environmental Policy Act an agency must prepare an environmental impact statement where significant effects are reasonably foreseeable, and may prepare an environmental assessment where they are not. A categorical exclusion is a finding that a whole class of action does not normally have significant effects, so neither document is required. Before using one, the bureau still has to check for extraordinary circumstances under 43 CFR 46.205 and 46.215, and where it finds them it writes the assessment after all.

Both notices say, in almost the same words, that the exclusion pertains only to compliance with the Act and not to the character or advisability of forest management.

The two caps

The salvage exclusion is not a single number. Where a fire, insect outbreak, disease or drought has hit 3,000 acres of bureau land or less, the cap is 1,000 acres. Where the disturbance exceeds 3,000 acres, the cap is the lesser of 5,000 acres or one third of the disturbance area. It permits one mile of permanent road and temporary roads at up to 2.25 miles per 1,000 acres of harvest.

A dying tree is defined. It is a standing tree severely damaged by disturbance which, in the judgment of a forestry professional, is likely to die within two years.

The density management exclusion is a flat 5,000 acres of treatment area, with five miles of permanent road and temporary roads at up to 2.5 miles per 1,000 acres. It expressly does not cover clearcutting, even-aged regeneration harvest, variable retention harvest, or converting forest to anything that is not forest. Group selection openings are capped at two acres each and 10 percent of the treated area.

Where 5,000 came from

The Department set it out when a commenter asked.

Of the environmental assessments reviewed for the thinning exclusion, twelve projects exceeded an upper interquartile range fence of 5,385 acres and were analysed separately. The 99th percentile of the remaining 72 is 5,158 acres. The Department rounded that down to 5,000 for what it calls administrative clarity and added conservatism, and says the method of taking a post-outlier 99th percentile follows Environmental Protection Agency practice.

The same answer records that 14 of the projects reviewed were larger than 5,000 acres anyway, six of them between 10,000 and 31,191.

The comment periods

Both exclusions were proposed on 6 April, in the same issue, each for 30 days.

The salvage proposal drew 284 comment letters and the Department answered 25 substantive issues. The thinning proposal drew 338 and the Department answered 13. State governments, interest groups, non-profit organisations and private citizens wrote in on both, in support and in opposition.

The salvage notice says the Department has not made any changes to the proposed text. The thinning notice says it has not made any edits to the text as proposed.