Belinda Brown grew up hearing stories about the oak savannas that stretched across the landscape.
Brown, a member of the Pit River Tribe, whose members live just over the border in California, said oak trees once filled many of the region’s valleys.
“The lower bands completely depended on that oak habitat for their food source, so acorns and salmon,” said Brown. “Staple food when Safeway didn't exist.”
Brown works for the Lomakatsi Restoration Project, where she coordinates involvement with tribal governments during habitat restoration.
An estimated 10% of the Pacific Northwest’s historical oak habitat remains. Environmental groups are working to restore what is left, hoping to reduce wildfire risk while bringing back habitat for wildlife.
The wide-open oak savannas have largely disappeared since European settlement. Dense stands of fir trees have crowded out many oaks, leaving them hidden beneath the canopy, nearly invisible.
“Our elders would tell us this is a land that's not cared for. There's debris all around,” she said. “It's not clean. It's not well kept like a house, and for us aboriginal people, that is our house.”
Restoration in action
East of Medford, crews worked on a dense thicket of fir trees, leaving a cemetery of stumps and piles of branches waiting to be burned. In a cleared patch, a cluster of stumps circled a withering oak tree.
“So if you can imagine all of these stumps grown up,” restoration ecologist Rob Strahan said. “You couldn't even see this oak.”
Strahan is part of the Klamath Siskiyou Oak Network, a collaboration working to conserve oak habitat in Southern Oregon and Northern California. Since forming in 2011, the network has restored about 6,000 acres.
Jaime Stephens with the Klamath Bird Observatory said oak habitat tends to overlap with where people like to live, which is why it’s degraded so much. The practice of quickly putting out any and all wildfires has also changed the landscape.
“The oaks are adapted to fire,” she said. “The conifers outcompete them in the absence of fire.”
In 2020, the partners identified the areas where oak habitat restoration would have the most impact. The current project aims to bring back another 4,000 acres of historic oak habitat.
Amelia Liberatore with the Southern Oregon Forest Restoration Collaborative said they’re working against the clock.
“It takes 200 years to grow a 200-year-old tree,” she said. “So we can do this work now and save those 200-year-old trees and have those benefits right away.”
The project spans both federal and private lands, helping to create a more effective restoration in the long term.
“Wildlife doesn't really care who owns it, and wildfire doesn't care who owns it,” said Liberatore. “When we work together, we're able to make progress together, even though it is time consuming.”
Working across ownership boundaries creates larger blocks of oak habitat, helping to amplify wildfire prevention and other benefits.
“Wildlife doesn't really care who owns it, and wildfire doesn't care who owns it.”
The network created different restoration plans for each site. Some areas are being restored to open savannas, while other areas might look more like an oak forest. Consultation with tribes helped determine what areas historically looked like to ensure the best restoration possible.
The Klamath Siskiyou Oak Network is just one of nine oak partnerships in the Pacific Northwest and was the first to form.
Kelly Missett, with the Pacific Birds Habitat Joint Venture, said the lessons learned through the network are now guiding the other projects.
“It's a proven model of successful partnership and collaborative restoration that's being replicated across the entire region,” she said.
Hearing the changes
The collaborative has cut many of the fir trees down, opening up the habitat again. But because this is federal land, Strahan said, the larger trees remain, reserved for government timber sales.
Brown said they should be cutting down more fir trees.
“What some folks would call heavy-handed treatments is actually getting the forest or the oak savannas or oak woodlands back to more of a historical reference system,” she said. “What we're seeing right now isn't healthy.”
Still, the work has produced results. For Stephens, one of the clearest signs of success is what she hears.
“What some folks would call heavy-handed treatments is actually getting the forest or the oak savannas or oak woodlands back to more of a historical reference system.”
“We're hearing birds like lazuli bunting, ash-throated flycatcher,” she said. “Those are species that weren't here before the restoration.”
Stephens said different kinds of birds lived here before the restoration. As open oak habitat returns, so do the birds that depend on it. She expects migratory birds to benefit as well.
“Oak habitats do have a disproportionate amount of migrants, just like riparian do,” said Stephens. “Riparian and oak habitats host a lot of insects. They host a lot of food sources, and so when the birds are stopping along migration, they select those habitat types.”
Stephens said the network only has money to do the initial restoration work. Keeping fir trees from reclaiming the landscape will fall to the federal government and private landowners after the project wraps up over the next few years.
Restoring the landscape is the most expensive part. Maintaining it should cost far less. Once the initial work is complete, the plan is to use prescribed burns to keep fir trees at bay.
“Bringing back that cultural fire, anthropogenic fire, as a land management tool is the endgame that we want to get to,” said Brown.
Organizers hope that oak trees will again join Douglas firs as a major part of the Pacific Northwest landscape.
