Wildland Fire Rehabilitation and Restoration: Forest Service and 
BLM Could Benefit from Improved Information on Status of Needed  
Work (30-JUN-06, GAO-06-670).					 
                                                                 
Since 2001, Congress and federal agencies, including the Forest  
Service and Department of the Interior's Bureau of Land 	 
Management (BLM), have recognized the importance of		 
rehabilitating and restoring lands unlikely to recover on their  
own after wildland fires. However, while funding has increased	 
for fire prevention, suppression, and first-year emergency	 
stabilization, it has decreased for rehabilitation (work up to 3 
years after fires) and restoration (work beyond the first 3	 
years). GAO was asked (1) how the Forest Service and BLM plan	 
postfire rehabilitation and restoration projects, (2) how much	 
needed rehabilitation and restoration work they have completed	 
for recent wildland fires, and (3) what challenges the agencies  
face in addressing their needs. 				 
-------------------------Indexing Terms------------------------- 
REPORTNUM:   GAO-06-670 					        
    ACCNO:   A56202						        
  TITLE:     Wildland Fire Rehabilitation and Restoration: Forest     
Service and BLM Could Benefit from Improved Information on Status
of Needed Work							 
     DATE:   06/30/2006 
  SUBJECT:   Environmental monitoring				 
	     Land management					 
	     Wilderness areas					 
	     Wildfires						 
	     Wildlife conservation				 
	     Wildlife management				 
	     Environmental restoration				 
	     Wildland fires					 
	     Environmental rehabilitation			 

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GAO-06-670

     

     * Results in Brief
     * Background
     * Forest Service and BLM Differ in How They Plan Needed Rehabi
          * Forest Service Regions and Forests Have Discretion to Plan P
          * BLM Follows a Standard Process to Plan Rehabilitation Projec
     * Forest Service Lacks Data on Rehabilitation and Restoration
          * Forest Service Lacks Data to Know Whether High-
          * Priority Needs Are Being Addressed
          * BLM Officials Report Completing Most Rehabilitation Work, bu
     * Forest Service and BLM Officials Cite Different Challenges t
          * Forest Service Reports Funding and Other Issues Hinder Its R
          * BLM Cites Challenges to Ensuring Success of Completed Seedin
     * Conclusions
     * Recommendations for Executive Action
     * Agency Comments and Our Evaluation
     * Appendix I: Objectives, Scope, and Methodology
          * Planning Rehabilitation and Restoration Activities
               * Amount of Needed Rehabilitation and Restoration Work That Ha
                    * Survey Design
                    * Survey Administration and Data Verification
               * Challenges to Addressing Needs
     * Appendix II: Comments from the Department of the Interior
     * Appendix III: GAO Contact and Staff Acknowledgments
          * GAO Contact
          * Staff Acknowledgments
               * Order by Mail or Phone

Report to the Chairman, Subcommittee on Forests and Forest Health,
Committee on Resources, House of Representatives

United States Government Accountability Office

GAO

June 2006

WILDLAND FIRE REHABILITATION AND RESTORATION

Forest Service and BLM Could Benefit from Improved Information on Status
of Needed Work

Wildland Fire Rehabilitation and Restoration Wildland Fire Rehabilitation
and Restoration Wildland Fire Rehabilitation and Restoration Wildland Fire
Rehabilitation and Restoration Wildland Fire Rehabilitation and
Restoration Wildland Fire Rehabilitation and Restoration Wildland Fire
Rehabilitation and Restoration Wildland Fire Rehabilitation and
Restoration Wildland Fire Rehabilitation and Restoration Wildland Fire
Rehabilitation and Restoration Wildland Fire Rehabilitation and
Restoration Wildland Fire Rehabilitation and Restoration Wildland Fire
Rehabilitation and Restoration Wildland Fire Rehabilitation and
Restoration Wildland Fire Rehabilitation and Restoration Wildland Fire
Rehabilitation and Restoration Wildland Fire Rehabilitation and
Restoration Wildland Fire Rehabilitation and Restoration Wildland Fire
Rehabilitation and Restoration Wildland Fire Rehabilitation and
Restoration Wildland Fire Rehabilitation and Restoration Wildland Fire
Rehabilitation and Restoration Wildland Fire Rehabilitation and
Restoration Wildland Fire Rehabilitation and Restoration Wildland Fire
Rehabilitation and Restoration Wildland Fire Rehabilitation and
Restoration Wildland Fire Rehabilitation and Restoration Wildland Fire
Rehabilitation and Restoration Wildland Fire Rehabilitation and
Restoration Wildland Fire Rehabilitation and Restoration Wildland Fire
Rehabilitation and Restoration Wildland Fire Rehabilitation and
Restoration Wildland Fire Rehabilitation and Restoration Wildland Fire
Rehabilitation and Restoration Wildland Fire Rehabilitation and
Restoration Wildland Fire Rehabilitation and Restoration Wildland Fire
Rehabilitation and Restoration Wildland Fire Rehabilitation and
Restoration Wildland Fire Rehabilitation and Restoration Wildland Fire
Rehabilitation and Restoration Wildland Fire Rehabilitation and
Restoration Wildland Fire Rehabilitation and Restoration Wildland Fire
Rehabilitation and Restoration Wildland Fire Rehabilitation and
Restoration Wildland Fire Rehabilitation and Restoration

GAO-06-670

Contents

Letter 1

Results in Brief 4
Background 6
Forest Service and BLM Differ in How They Plan Needed Rehabilitation and
Restoration Work 10
Forest Service Lacks Data on Rehabilitation and Restoration Work; BLM
Lacks Data on Restoration Work 19
Forest Service and BLM Officials Cite Different Challenges to
Rehabilitating and Restoring Their Lands 24
Conclusions 34
Recommendations for Executive Action 35
Agency Comments and Our Evaluation 35
Appendix I Objectives, Scope, and Methodology 37
Appendix II Comments from the Department of the Interior 41
Appendix III GAO Contact and Staff Acknowledgments 43

Table

Table 1: Verification Results for Survey Responses about Project
Completion and Funding 40

Figures

Figure 1: Postfire Flood Damage at Sabino Canyon Recreation Site, Coronado
National Forest, Arizona 7
Figure 2: Completed Rehabilitation of Sabino Canyon Recreation Site,
Coronado National Forest, Arizona 8
Figure 3: A Helicopter Prepares to Aerially Seed a Burned Area after a
2005 BLM Fire 32

Abbreviations

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separately.

BLM Bureau of Land Management

United States Government Accountability Office

Washington, DC 20548

June 30, 2006

The Honorable Greg Walden Chairman Subcommittee on Forests and Forest
Health Committee on Resources House of Representatives

Dear Mr. Chairman:

In the past 5 years, wildland fires have burned millions of acres of
federal land, breaking records in size, costing billions of dollars to
suppress, and drawing greater attention to the risks associated with
wildland fires. Many fires occur naturally, and some ecosystems are
adapted to fires, relying on them to maintain their health. However,
wildland fires can sometimes leave behind a burned landscape that
threatens human safety, property, and ecosystems. In areas of steep
terrain, postfire rainstorms can cause mudslides that bury homes, destroy
roads, and clog streams. Wildland fires also can create postfire
environments that are ideal for the growth of noxious or invasive weeds.
If these weeds replace native plant species, threatened or endangered
wildlife species can lose their habitat. When fires result in such adverse
effects, land managers may conduct emergency stabilization,
rehabilitation, and restoration activities to mitigate the effects and to
prevent further damage. The U.S. Department of Agriculture's Forest
Service and the Department of the Interior's land management agencies are
responsible for such activities on federal land.1 Combined, the Forest
Service and Interior manage about 630 million acres, or 94 percent, of the
nation's federal land, including forests, rangelands, and other lands.

In 2001, in response to one of the worst fire seasons in over 50 years,
the Departments of Agriculture and the Interior, in collaboration with
state governors, adopted a 10-year strategy to address federal, state,
local, and tribal management of wildland fires.2 One of the four goals
adopted in the strategy was to restore fire-adapted ecosystems through
rehabilitation and restoration efforts, combined with scientific research
and monitoring. In support of this goal, Congress began providing funds in
fiscal year 2001 to the Forest Service and Interior specifically for
postfire rehabilitation and restoration.

1The Department of the Interior's federal land management agencies include
the Bureau of Land Management, National Park Service, and Fish and
Wildlife Service.

2Years cited in this report refer to calendar years except where otherwise
specified.

In 2003, as a step toward coordinating their approaches to postfire
management, the Forest Service and Interior adopted the following common
definitions for emergency stabilization, rehabilitation, and restoration:

           o  Emergency stabilization activities are conducted within 1 year
           of a fire to address threats to life, property, or resources. Such
           activities may include seeding and mulching to prevent soil
           erosion.

           o  Rehabilitation activities, conducted within 3 years of a fire,
           address damage to minor facilities such as picnic facilities, or
           to lands unlikely to recover to a desired condition on their own.
           Such activities may include repairing roads or trails, planting
           trees, and restoring wildlife habitat.

           o  Restoration activities are a continuation of rehabilitation
           activities beyond the initial 3 years, or the repair or
           replacement of major facilities, such as a visitor center.

           Although the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management
           (BLM)-the agency that manages the most land within Interior-are
           both responsible for managing postfire work on federal lands, the
           task is different for the two agencies. The Forest Service
           conducts emergency stabilization, rehabilitation, and restoration
           activities under multiple programs such as its watershed
           improvement and reforestation programs, while BLM conducts
           emergency stabilization and rehabilitation activities under
           distinct postfire programs that do not address restoration needs.
           Forest Service land encompasses a wide variety of
           ecosystems-ecological communities such as old-growth forests,
           alpine meadows, and marsh wetlands-and watersheds that provide
           drinking water and timber, while most of BLM's land consists of
           rangeland (although BLM also manages about 55 million acres of
           forests and woodlands). These land characteristics influence the
           agencies' work. For example, the Forest Service's rehabilitation
           and restoration activities commonly include reforestation, road
           work, trail work, and weed control, but also can include
           activities ranging from surveying boundaries to securing
           archaeological sites. On the other hand, BLM's rehabilitation
           activities include primarily weed control, grass and shrub
           seeding, and fence repair or replacement.

           Since 2001, Congress and the agencies have taken actions that
           recognize the importance of rehabilitation and restoration
           activities, including directing funds toward these activities and
           developing strategy documents. However, while resources for fire
           prevention, suppression, and emergency stabilization have
           increased, fewer resources have been focused on the long-term
           rehabilitation and restoration of lands burned by fires. Between
           fiscal year 2001 and 2005, annual appropriations to the Forest
           Service and Interior for fire prevention, suppression, and
           emergency stabilization increased by about 26 percent (15 percent
           adjusted for inflation), but rehabilitation and restoration
           appropriations (directed in law or committee reports) declined
           steeply, from $246 million in fiscal year 2001 to $37 million in
           fiscal year 2005-a decrease of about 85 percent (86 percent
           adjusted for inflation).3 In this context, you asked us to
           determine (1) how the Forest Service and BLM identify and plan
           postfire rehabilitation and restoration activities; (2) how much
           needed rehabilitation and restoration work the agencies have
           completed for wildland fires that occurred between 2000 and 2004;
           and (3) what challenges the agencies face in addressing their
           postfire needs, and any actions they are taking in response.

           In conducting our work, we met with Forest Service and BLM
           officials; reviewed agency documents about postfire rehabilitation
           and restoration programs, projects, and funding procedures; and
           discussed challenges the agencies face in addressing needed
           rehabilitation and restoration work. We visited seven forests and
           three BLM units in western states, where rehabilitation and
           restoration efforts are concentrated, to interview agency
           officials and observe postfire conditions and rehabilitation and
           restoration projects. We also administered a Web-based survey to
           agency officials for 276 randomly sampled fires that occurred
           between 2000 and 2004 and burned over 500 acres each. For each of
           the fires in our sample, we surveyed agency officials in the field
           about any needed rehabilitation and restoration projects they
           identified, whether the projects were completed, factors
           preventing their completion, and any effects of not completing
           needed projects. However, when we collected source documents to
           validate responses for 10 percent of the completed surveys, we
           found that the data provided were not sufficiently reliable to
           report. A more detailed description of our scope and methodology
           is presented in appendix I. We performed our work from May 2005
           through May 2006 in accordance with generally accepted government
           auditing standards.

           In the aftermath of wildland fires, the Forest Service and BLM use
           similar procedures to identify rehabilitation and restoration
           needs, but differ in how they plan, prioritize, and fund needed
           work. To determine what rehabilitation or restoration projects, if
           any, are necessary after a wildland fire, both the Forest Service
           and BLM first assess the condition of the burned area and compare
           it with prefire and desired conditions. In many cases, the
           condition of the land is satisfactory-for example, because the
           fire did not burn severely-and no rehabilitation or restoration is
           needed. For fires that need rehabilitation or restoration, the
           Forest Service and BLM differ in how they plan, prioritize, and
           fund projects. The Forest Service has no national requirements for
           its rehabilitation and restoration activities; instead, it gives
           its regions and forests the discretion to develop procedures
           independently, so they can tailor them to their particular
           ecosystems and priorities. For example, some regions place a
           higher priority on infrastructure projects, such as repairing
           roads, trails, and recreation facilities, while others prioritize
           projects to help ecosystems recover, such as replanting burned
           areas. The Forest Service pays for its rehabilitation and
           restoration projects using funds from several different
           appropriations, including appropriations specifically designated
           for such activities under the wildland fire management account;
           appropriations from the national forest system account, which are
           available for recreation and vegetation management, for example;
           and appropriations from the capital improvement and maintenance
           account, which are available for road and facility construction or
           repair, among other things. According to Forest Service officials,
           relying on these other program funds allows regions and forests
           greater flexibility to determine their priorities across many
           program areas and to accommodate needs that arise after other
           unpredictable events, such as hurricanes. BLM, on the other hand,
           uses a standardized process to plan, prioritize, and fund its
           rehabilitation work. BLM field staff develop 3-year rehabilitation
           plans, its state and headquarters officials review and approve the
           plans, and headquarters officials allocate the available funding.
           Unlike the Forest Service, BLM pays for nearly all of its
           rehabilitation work with appropriations from a single source-its
           wildland fire management account-and requires the work to be
           complete within 3 years after a fire. BLM requires any subsequent
           restoration work to be addressed through other programs, such as
           range improvement and noxious weeds.

           Using available information, neither the agencies nor we could
           reliably determine how much needed rehabilitation and restoration
           work has been completed for Forest Service and BLM fires that
           occurred between 2000 and 2004. The Forest Service does not
           maintain comprehensive data on rehabilitation and restoration
           work, and thus could not determine how much rehabilitation and
           restoration work has been completed nationwide. In our visits to
           several national forests, agency officials reported completing all
           needed rehabilitation and restoration work for some fires, and
           little or no needed work for other fires, but without nationwide
           data, it is unclear how widespread either of these situations is.
           Also, while BLM maintains data on its rehabilitation work, the
           agency does not maintain data on its postfire restoration work,
           which is completed through other programs. BLM officials told us
           that, according to their data, most rehabilitation work needed
           through fiscal year 2005 has been completed. However, we could not
           independently validate all of BLM's rehabilitation data because
           these data are commingled with the agency's emergency
           stabilization data for fires before 2004. We administered a survey
           to officials from both agencies to obtain this information, but
           determined that the data provided in the survey was not reliable.
           Specifically, we requested source documents from a sample of
           respondents to validate the survey data, but a significant portion
           of the documents we received did not substantiate the survey
           responses. Without comprehensive data on needed and completed
           rehabilitation and restoration work, Forest Service and BLM
           officials make management decisions, including requesting and
           allocating funding, without knowing to what extent they are
           addressing the needs on their lands.

           Forest Service and BLM officials said they face different
           challenges in their efforts to address postfire rehabilitation and
           restoration needs, in part reflecting their different management
           approaches, ecosystems, and postfire activities. Forest Service
           field officials reported that a lack of dedicated funds,
           insufficient workforce, and other factors prevented many needed
           projects from being completed. In addition, officials told us the
           method the agency used to allocate annual rehabilitation and
           restoration funding to regions meant that available funds
           fluctuated dramatically from year to year, making it difficult to
           manage the program. Forest Service officials said they have tried
           to stabilize the erratic funding levels by changing how they
           allocate these funds to regions in fiscal year 2006, but have not
           asked for additional rehabilitation and restoration funding
           because of other competing program priorities and budget
           constraints. Forest Service field officials also noted that
           controversy about postfire activities, such as using chemical
           herbicides and harvesting burned timber, presented challenges.
           Disagreements about whether such actions would result in
           beneficial or harmful effects compared with doing nothing
           sometimes delayed projects, they said. Several Forest Service
           officials expressed concern that in some cases there is
           insufficient scientific evidence to support one action over
           another, and further noted that little research has been done to
           address this shortage. Consequently, officials rely on a limited
           number of studies when making decisions in these cases, which may
           at times exacerbate the existing controversy. For BLM,
           headquarters and field officials told us that while they believe
           they have completed most of their projects, they face challenges
           in achieving long-term success with some of their completed
           projects. According to agency officials, many of BLM's seeding and
           planting projects fail or are only partially successful because
           there is not enough rain for seeds to grow, or because officials,
           relying on limited information, use planting techniques that
           prevent seeds from germinating. To address this issue, BLM
           officials said they are now monitoring rehabilitation projects
           more consistently to learn why projects are effective or not, and
           have begun developing standard monitoring protocols and a
           Web-based information-sharing network that will allow staff to
           share lessons learned.

           To ensure that agency and congressional decision makers know if
           high-priority needs are being met, and to help them make informed
           funding and other decisions, we are recommending that (1) the
           Secretary of Agriculture direct the Forest Service to track and
           report to Congress the extent to which it is addressing its
           high-priority rehabilitation and restoration work, and (2) the
           Secretary of the Interior direct BLM to establish a procedure to
           address any postfire restoration work needed after 3 years, and to
           track and report to Congress the status of such work. We also are
           recommending that the Secretary of Agriculture direct the Forest
           Service to conduct additional research on the effects of postfire
           projects to provide agency officials with more scientific evidence
           to better support their decisions, especially about controversial
           actions. In commenting on a draft of this report, the Forest
           Service and Interior generally agreed with our findings and
           recommendations.

           Although wildland fires are inevitable natural disturbances that
           have helped shape ecosystems over time, they can be unpredictable
           and destructive as well. Fires can kill trees and other
           vegetation, alter wildlife habitat and soils, and destroy roads,
           buildings, campgrounds and other infrastructure. Fires can also
           leave lands denuded of vegetation and vulnerable to severe erosion
           and mudslides, which can contaminate municipal water supplies and
           compromise water quality in streams and lakes. In addition, the
           open landscapes left by fires can create opportunities for
           invasive plants to become established or expand, crowding out
           native plants and the animals that depend on them. When wildland
           fires have adverse effects on natural resources, and federal land
           managers believe the lands are unlikely to recover to a desired
           condition on their own, they may conduct rehabilitation or
           restoration work to aid or accelerate recovery. Similarly, when
           wildland fires damage developed features such as roads, trails,
           buildings, fences, or campgrounds, land managers may identify
           needed work to repair or replace them, as shown in figures 1 and
           2. Rehabilitation and restoration projects include, for example,
           repairing or maintaining roads and trails, controlling noxious and
           invasive weeds, replanting forests or grasslands, repairing or
           replacing fences, restoring fish or wildlife habitat, rebuilding
           burned facilities, replacing boundary markers, and stabilizing
           archaeological sites.

           Figure 1: Postfire Flood Damage at Sabino Canyon Recreation Site,
           Coronado National Forest, Arizona

           Figure 2: Completed Rehabilitation of Sabino Canyon Recreation
           Site, Coronado National Forest, Arizona

           In some cases, land managers may determine that no rehabilitation
           or restoration projects are needed because a fire did not have
           adverse effects on any resources or infrastructure, or because the
           burned lands are likely to recover on their own. Under historical
           conditions, many forest and rangeland ecosystems have adapted to
           wildland fire, and the vegetation, insects, fish, and wildlife in
           such systems benefit from the kind of fires that occur there,
           surviving and regenerating after fires occur. Fires can benefit
           resources by recycling soil nutrients, renewing vegetation growth,
           adding material to streams that improves spawning habitat for
           fish, and sustaining ecological functions. For example, when
           ponderosa pine forests are adapted to wildland fires, frequent
           less-intense fires remove brush and small trees, which allows the
           large trees to survive and grow.

           Recognizing the need to restore historic vegetation conditions to
           help reduce the risks of wildland fires, as well as the need to
           address adverse effects that can result from fires, in 2001 and
           2002, federal agencies, states, and others developed a 10-year
           strategy and implementation plan. The strategy established four
           broad goals for wildland fire management: (1) improving fire
           prevention and suppression for those areas that need it; (2)
           reducing hazardous fuels, by mechanically thinning forests and
           using controlled burns; (3) restoring fire-adapted ecosystems and
           rehabilitating burned areas; and (4) promoting community
           assistance to help conduct fire management activities. The
           implementation plan established measures for showing progress
           toward each of the goals.

           Around the same time, in fiscal year 2001, Congress began
           providing funds to the Forest Service and Interior specifically
           for postfire rehabilitation and restoration. The funding was
           greatest in 2001, and decreased after that, particularly for the
           Forest Service. To administer these funds and address its
           rehabilitation and restoration needs, the Forest Service relies on
           existing staff and programs, such as watershed improvement and
           recreation programs. On the other hand, BLM has a specific
           rehabilitation program and some dedicated staff to administer its
           funds. BLM's program initially included both emergency
           stabilization and postfire rehabilitation work, but since 2004 has
           been separated into two programs. BLM's rehabilitation program
           covers work up to 3 years after a fire and does not provide for
           subsequent postfire restoration work. The Forest Service manages
           its rehabilitation and restoration work through nine regional
           offices, and offices overseeing 155 national forests and 20
           national grasslands across the nation. Each forest and grassland
           is divided into several ranger districts. BLM manages its
           rehabilitation program through state offices in 12 western states,
           including Alaska, that oversee field and district offices.

           Both the Forest Service and BLM manage their lands for multiple
           uses, including timber production, wildlife, recreation, and
           wilderness purposes. Under the National Forest Management Act, the
           primary law governing the land management planning activities of
           national forests in the Forest Service, all national forests must
           have land and resource management plans for the lands they manage.
           Generally, these plans describe desired future conditions for
           lands and resources in various geographic areas within the forest,
           and identify strategies to maintain or achieve those conditions.
           Similarly, BLM field offices develop resource management plans
           under the Federal Land Policy and Management Act for the lands
           they manage. Like the national forests' plans, BLM plans identify
           specific desired outcomes and allowable uses and actions to
           achieve those outcomes. Generally, neither agency's plans identify
           strategies or actions specifically related to postfire recovery.

           When agency officials identify needed projects-including postfire
           rehabilitation and restoration projects-they must ensure that the
           projects are consistent with these land management plans. In
           addition, if a project could have environmental impacts, the
           agencies are required to conduct an analysis of the potential
           impacts. Under the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969,
           agencies generally evaluate the likely effects of projects they
           propose using a relatively brief environmental assessment or, if
           the action would be likely to significantly affect the
           environment, a more detailed environmental impact statement. One
           purpose of this analysis is to ensure that agencies have detailed
           information available to inform their decision making. The
           agencies give the public an opportunity to comment on draft
           environmental assessments and impact statements. Also, the Forest
           Service and BLM have established procedures for administrative
           appeal of their decisions. As a general rule, once the
           administrative appeals process is complete, the public can
           litigate the relevant project decision in federal court.

           The Forest Service and BLM use similar procedures to determine
           whether any rehabilitation or restoration work is needed after a
           wildland fire, but they differ in how they plan, prioritize, and
           fund needed work. These differences reflect the distinct
           approaches the Forest Service and BLM have adopted for managing
           postfire rehabilitation and restoration. The Forest Service has no
           national guidance for postfire rehabilitation and restoration, in
           part because it does not have a discrete program for such
           activities. Instead, the agency addresses its rehabilitation and
           restoration needs through existing programs, including its
           watershed, forest management, recreation, rangeland management,
           wilderness, and construction programs, among others. Forest
           Service regions and forests have discretion to determine how to
           plan, prioritize, and fund needed rehabilitation and restoration
           work in the context of these programs. To fund such work, the
           agency draws from several different appropriations.4 On the other
           hand, BLM has a distinct program for postfire rehabilitation, and
           has issued national guidance for the program. Following this
           guidance, agency officials use a standard process to plan,
           prioritize, and fund rehabilitation work, nearly all of which is
           paid for with funds specifically designated for rehabilitation
           under the wildland fire management appropriation. BLM's
           rehabilitation program covers postfire work up to 3 years after a
           fire, and any subsequent restoration work must be addressed by
           other ongoing BLM programs, such as the wildlife and noxious weeds
           programs.

           The Forest Service has no national guidance on how to identify,
           prioritize, and fund postfire rehabilitation and restoration work.
           According to a headquarters official, the agency has not developed
           guidance in part because appropriations specifically designated
           for these activities-about $12.8 million for fiscal year 2005 and
           $6.2 million for fiscal year 2006-did not warrant development of a
           manual. Instead, the agency provides its regions and forests with
           wide latitude to use varied procedures that accommodate their
           diverse ecosystems, priorities, and unique circumstances.

           The Forest Service allocates the appropriations designated for
           rehabilitation and restoration to its regions annually based on
           each region's proportion of Forest Service acreage severely burned
           over the previous 5 years. The regions, in turn, allocate these
           funds to forests, usually applying a prioritization system to
           select among project proposals and funding requests submitted by
           forests. In addition, Forest Service regions and forests use
           appropriations available for activities such as reforestation and
           construction to help pay for related rehabilitation and
           restoration work. According to agency officials, relying on these
           other funds gives regions and forests the flexibility to determine
           their priorities while considering needs on burned lands as well
           as in other areas, and to accommodate needs that arise after
           unpredictable events in addition to fires, such as hurricanes. The
           Forest Service does not keep track of how much rehabilitation and
           restoration work is funded through these programs.

           According to agency officials, the first step in planning postfire
           rehabilitation and restoration projects is for forest and
           district-level staff to determine whether any such work is needed,
           by comparing postfire conditions with prefire and desired
           conditions. Typically, immediately after a wildland fire is
           contained, field officials assemble an interdisciplinary team made
           up of specialists such as foresters, wildlife biologists,
           hydrologists, botanists, and soil scientists, among others, to
           conduct an on-the-ground evaluation of the burned area. Officials
           use this evaluation along with satellite photographs of the burned
           area, for example, to assess a fire's effects on the land and
           resources. Finally, agency officials compare these postfire
           conditions with historical photos and data on prefire conditions,
           and with descriptions of desired conditions detailed in forest
           plans and other guidance documents.

           Agency officials told us that, in many cases, no rehabilitation or
           restoration work is needed. According to the officials, there are
           various reasons that natural recovery may be sufficient, and
           active rehabilitation and restoration efforts may not be needed.
           For example, some fires burn in areas adapted to wildland fires
           and leave natural resources no worse off than before the fire, or
           benefit resources, for example, by stimulating vegetation growth
           or increasing denning and foraging habitat. When fires also do no
           damage to infrastructure such as fences or campground facilities,
           there is usually no need for any active rehabilitation or
           restoration, according to agency officials. In other cases, agency
           officials said rehabilitation or restoration may not be needed if
           the burn is not severe; the burned area is inaccessible due to
           topography, legal access, or other issues; or the fire burned in a
           management area where such work is precluded, such as a wilderness
           or roadless area.5

           Often, forest officials determine that postfire rehabilitation or
           restoration is needed to repair damage to resources or
           infrastructure, or to prevent further damage from occurring after
           postfire rainstorms. The officials must then determine what
           projects are needed. Many Forest Service regions have no specific
           guidance for this step, and officials rely on the guidance
           available in program handbooks and legislation. For example, the
           trails management handbook includes guidance for planning
           projects, such as how to assess trail conditions against height,
           width, and other trail construction standards, depending on
           whether the trail is designated primarily for use by hikers or by
           pack animals as well. In addition, some laws include requirements
           or provisions that guide agency officials' actions when planning
           projects. For example, for projects significantly affecting the
           environment, the National Environmental Policy Act requires agency
           officials to evaluate the environmental impacts of the proposed
           project and alternatives to the project in an environmental impact
           statement. Implementing regulations for the act require the agency
           to provide opportunities for the public to comment on the draft
           statement. In accordance with other laws, agency officials assess
           whether any cultural resources, such as archaeological sites, will
           be affected by their proposed actions, and whether any threatened
           or endangered species-or their habitat-will be affected.

           Once forest officials determine that rehabilitation or restoration
           work is needed, they have various approaches to documenting a need
           for the work, depending in part on legislative requirements, as
           well as the severity, complexity, and extent of the fire's
           effects; available funding; anticipated level of controversy; and
           established regional or forest procedures. In some cases, forests
           prepare rehabilitation and restoration planning documents that
           describe and analyze all needed projects for a given fire, and
           cover time periods up to 9 years or longer. According to agency
           officials, such plans are useful when a wildland fire has
           widespread, severe, or complicated effects over a large territory
           and officials anticipate needing extensive analysis and planning
           efforts to determine project needs, costs, and time frames. Agency
           officials told us they also use comprehensive formal plans when
           they expect their actions to be controversial, so that the
           rationale for their decision is clearly documented. On the other
           hand, sometimes agency officials do not prepare such planning
           documents because they do not have enough funding or they believe
           the funds are better spent elsewhere. They may instead prepare
           separate shorter plans in each of the program areas affected, or
           create a simple spreadsheet listing needed projects and estimated
           costs, for example. In other cases, officials do not prepare any
           planning documents even if they believe rehabilitation or
           restoration work is needed, because they do not expect to receive
           funding to cover the costs of the work.

           The Pacific Northwest region, unlike other Forest Service regions,
           issued standardized guidance for its postfire rehabilitation and
           restoration activities in December 2005, to be used by forests in
           the region beginning in 2006. The guidance established a uniform
           process to be followed by all forests in the region when assessing
           rehabilitation and restoration needs after wildland fires or other
           disturbances. It is intended to be instructional as well as to
           ensure consistency among forests' project proposals, so that
           regional officials can compare them equitably when deciding how to
           allocate funds.

           Generally all of the regions follow similar processes to
           prioritize and fund projects, although the specifics vary widely.6
           Typically, forests submit project proposals and requests for
           postfire rehabilitation and restoration funding to regional
           officials annually.7 In most regions, officials prioritize the
           proposed projects, often according to a predetermined set of
           criteria, and fund the highest-priority projects. Many regions
           include projects that will protect human safety among the top
           priorities, but beyond this similarity, priorities differ from
           region to region. For instance, the Southwestern region places a
           higher priority on repairing and replacing infrastructure needed
           for forest management, because such infrastructure will not
           recover naturally. Reforestation in the Southwestern region is
           lower priority, according to agency officials, because over time,
           the trees will grow back naturally. Also, agency officials at one
           forest in the region told us that efforts to plant seedlings in
           the forest's dry climate tend to have high failure rates
           especially during periods of drought. On the other hand, the
           Northern region emphasizes restoration of natural resources,
           including reforestation. Northern region officials said that in
           their region, without active reforestation efforts, less desirable
           species of trees would become dominant in some locations,
           perpetuating an undesirable cycle of fires. In some regions,
           officials consider the forests' priorities as well. For example,
           many forests consider boundary-marking projects among their lowest
           priorities, but for forests where logging operations are conducted
           adjacent to or on Forest Service land, such projects are important
           to protect against trespass. While most regions follow similar
           processes from year to year, some regional officials told us that
           in years when their funding allocations were relatively low-enough
           to fund only one or two projects, for example-they did not use a
           formal procedure to solicit and fund project proposals because the
           amount of funding did not warrant such an effort.

           In addition to rehabilitation and restoration funds, some regions
           allocate portions of other funds to help forests pay for projects
           that are not funded with rehabilitation and restoration funds. For
           example, the Southwestern region uses 50 percent of its share of
           the reforestation trust fund to pay for needs after wildland fires
           in the region, and directs moneys from the roads and trails fund
           to eligible rehabilitation and restoration projects.8 Some agency
           officials said that these funds, distributed at the discretion of
           regional officials, can be particularly important for forests with
           smaller budgets that provide little flexibility to accommodate
           unpredictable expenses.

           When funding is not available from the region, forests use funds
           for programs such as watershed management, wildlife, and road
           construction to pay for related rehabilitation and restoration
           projects. The budget process for these funds begins up to 2 years
           in advance of when the funds are actually needed, so agency
           officials must plan ahead, and any rehabilitation and restoration
           projects funded through this process must compete with normal
           program needs for funding. Once the budget process is complete,
           there are ways to fund rehabilitation and restoration projects
           even if they were not in the original budget request. Sometimes
           funded projects are less costly than anticipated, and the
           resulting savings can be directed toward needed rehabilitation or
           restoration projects that were not in the budget. Alternatively,
           forest officials may determine that some unexpected postfire
           rehabilitation or restoration needs are higher priority than
           certain projects already in the budget, and direct the budgeted
           projects' funds to the rehabilitation or restoration work,
           deferring the work originally planned.

           Some Forest Service officials said they rely on sources of funding
           other than appropriations specifically designated for
           rehabilitation and restoration to pay for a significant portion of
           needed work. For example, in 2003, the first year after the
           Biscuit fire in Oregon, Forest Service officials told us they
           spent a total of about $7 million on rehabilitation and
           restoration work; about $2 million, or 29 percent, of the total
           was rehabilitation and restoration funding, while the remaining 71
           percent of funds came from other sources. To complete needed work,
           Forest Service officials said that in addition to appropriations
           specifically designated for rehabilitation and restoration, they
           use appropriations designated for activities such as watershed
           improvement, road maintenance and repair, and recreation
           management, as well as receipts from salvage timber sales and
           funding from other sources such as states and private parties.

           BLM has a standard process to identify, plan and fund any needed
           postfire rehabilitation projects, guided by Department of the
           Interior policy and a draft BLM handbook. The handbook prescribes
           specific procedures, time frames, and rules for identifying,
           planning, and funding rehabilitation work. BLM's postfire recovery
           program, unlike the Forest Service's program, is limited to
           rehabilitation and does not include restoration. BLM pays for
           nearly all of its postfire rehabilitation work with rehabilitation
           funds within its wildland fire management appropriation, and
           funding for such work is available for only 3 years after a fire.
           According to Interior policy, any restoration needs remaining
           after this time are to be incorporated into ongoing programs of
           work in resource programs such as the wildlife, noxious weeds, and
           rangeland management programs.

           The first step in planning postfire rehabilitation work is for
           agency officials in the field to assess whether any rehabilitation
           work is needed. BLM headquarters officials encourage field
           officials to do this immediately after a fire, at the same time
           they are assessing the need for emergency stabilization projects.
           As with the Forest Service, BLM field officials typically assemble
           an interdisciplinary team of specialists to conduct an
           on-the-ground evaluation of the burned area and compare the
           condition of the burned land to prefire and desired conditions.
           Generally, agency officials told us they rely on historical
           knowledge to determine prefire conditions, and on resource
           management plans and other planning documents, as well as
           professional judgment, to determine desired conditions.

           In addition to its resource management plans, many BLM field
           offices have preapproved plans that outline the postfire work they
           would do if a wildland fire occurred on their lands. These plans,
           called Normal Fire Rehabilitation Plans, are prepared for a
           specified management area in advance of any fires, and describe
           typical projects that would be implemented under normal conditions
           after a fire. The plans detail the criteria for selecting each
           type of project and for determining when such projects are not
           needed, and provide guidance for developing a site-specific
           rehabilitation plan following a wildland fire. The handbook
           recommends that field offices develop Normal Fire Rehabilitation
           Plans to facilitate more efficient and timely approval of
           emergency stabilization and rehabilitation plans.

           In many cases, agency officials said they decide that no active
           rehabilitation activities are needed. For example, BLM officials
           told us that almost 10 million acres of land burned in Alaska
           between 2000 and 2004, but that little or no rehabilitation was
           needed because, for example, the lands were adapted to wildland
           fire. In other cases, agency officials said no rehabilitation was
           needed because the fire had no negative impacts and the site could
           recover naturally. When lands are adapted to wildland fire or a
           fire has no negative impacts, there may be enough plants remaining
           that the site can recover naturally as long as it is protected
           from further disturbances, according to the officials.

           In cases where rehabilitation work is needed, the BLM handbook
           requires agency officials to identify and estimate costs for all
           rehabilitation projects needed during the 3 years following the
           fire, and document these elements in a plan. The plan is required,
           among other things, to describe each project, how it is compatible
           with approved land-use plans, and how it is related to damage or
           changes caused by the wildland fire. In addition, the plans must
           include a provision for monitoring the projects to determine
           whether they meet their objectives.9 Besides requirements about
           the plan, the handbook provides guidance about which activities
           meet the definition of postfire rehabilitation and qualify for
           rehabilitation funds. This guidance is particularly important,
           according to agency officials, because BLM only recently separated
           its emergency stabilization program and funding from its
           rehabilitation program. In addition, field staff work with BLM
           state rehabilitation coordinators to clarify any questions they
           have while preparing rehabilitation plans. The plans must be
           completed before the end of the fiscal year during which the fire
           occurred, which, in some locations, means that agency officials
           typically have 1 to 3 months to complete their plans. Also, like
           the Forest Service, BLM must ensure that it meets the requirements
           of relevant laws, such as the National Environmental Policy Act
           and the Endangered Species Act, among others.

           Once rehabilitation plans are complete, field officials submit
           them to agency officials in state offices and headquarters for
           approval. These officials review the plans to ensure that all
           proposed projects meet eligibility requirements for rehabilitation
           funding, and to assess the cost-effectiveness of the proposed
           projects. For projects that do not meet the eligibility
           requirements or are judged to be too costly, state and
           headquarters officials return the plan to field officials for
           revisions and resubmission. In addition, reviewing officials may
           return a plan if projects seem inappropriate or imprudent for
           other reasons-for example if officials believe a proposed seeding
           technique will be ineffective for the context in which it is
           proposed.

           Approval of rehabilitation plans is only the first step; the
           proposed projects must still be selected for funding. Funding for
           rehabilitation projects is allocated 1 year at a time, in a
           departmentwide process in which BLM's projects must compete with
           projects from the other Interior agencies. At the start of each
           fiscal year, a team representing all of Interior's land management
           agencies meets to allocate the department's rehabilitation
           funding. So far, Interior has been able to fund all needed
           projects that meet eligibility requirements, according to BLM
           officials. As a result, agency officials told us they pay for
           nearly all rehabilitation projects with rehabilitation funds. In
           the future, if there are more funding requests than available
           funding, the interagency team plans to assess the projects against
           a set of prioritization criteria and fund only the
           highest-priority categories of projects. The criteria, not yet
           finalized by the interagency team, may include factors such as
           whether the proposed project incorporates partners and addresses
           resource objectives.

           Once projects are funded for a given year, BLM officials in the
           field begin implementing them. At the end of each of the first 2
           years covered by the plan, officials must complete an
           accomplishment report recording the projects completed during the
           year and their costs, as well as a monitoring summary for the
           completed projects reporting whether they were successful and
           whether additional projects are needed. For any remaining work,
           officials must submit a funding request. After the final year, BLM
           requires officials to submit a closeout report to headquarters
           detailing the projects completed, their cost, whether they were
           successful, and any lessons learned.

           With available information, neither the agencies nor we could
           reliably determine how much needed rehabilitation and restoration
           work has been completed for Forest Service and BLM fires that
           occurred between 2000 and 2004. The Forest Service does not know
           how much rehabilitation and restoration work has been completed
           because it does not maintain comprehensive data on such work. The
           agency only tracks rehabilitation and restoration work
           accomplished using appropriations specifically designated for such
           activities under the wildland fire management account, and does
           not collect data on such work paid for with other funds. BLM
           officials reported completing most needed rehabilitation work for
           fires between 2000 and 2004, but said they do not know how much
           restoration work is needed or completed because they do not track
           data on postfire restoration. We could not independently verify
           all of BLM's rehabilitation data because these data are commingled
           with the agency's emergency stabilization data for fires before
           2004. Because the Forest Service had no national data and we could
           not verify BLM's data, we administered a survey to officials from
           both agencies to obtain information about how much rehabilitation
           and restoration work has been completed. However, we determined
           that the information provided in the survey was not sufficiently
           reliable to report because when we assessed a sample of responses,
           we found that in a significant number of cases, supporting
           documents were either unavailable or they did not substantiate the
           answers provided in the survey.

           Forest Service officials acknowledged that they could not tell us
           what portion of the agency's nationwide rehabilitation and
           restoration needs have been addressed because they do not track
           such information on a national level. Field staff are only
           required to report accomplishment information for rehabilitation
           and restoration projects funded specifically with rehabilitation
           and restoration moneys, even though much of this work is funded
           through other agency programs. They are not required to report
           information about how much rehabilitation and restoration work is
           needed, although staff in some regions do so; they also are not
           required to report information about rehabilitation and
           restoration work completed using other funds. Consequently, there
           is no centralized source of information about all rehabilitation
           and restoration needs and accomplishments nationwide. According to
           a headquarters official, the Forest Service does not require
           forest officials to collect data on rehabilitation and restoration
           work because the agency does not manage such work under a single
           program; instead, the work cuts across multiple programs.
           Furthermore, the official said the Forest Service does not
           maintain data on needed work because agency officials do not
           expect there to be sufficient funding to pay for all of it.

           Because the Forest Service does not have comprehensive data on
           rehabilitation and restoration needs and accomplishments
           nationwide, we administered a survey to agency officials in the
           field to collect this information, but determined that the
           information provided in the survey was not sufficiently reliable
           to report. The survey asked for qualitative information about
           rehabilitation and restoration needs and accomplishments for a
           random sample of fires that occurred between 2000 and 2004 and
           burned over 500 acres. After administering the survey, we
           requested supporting documents to validate a sample of responses.
           However, we found that a significant portion of the responses were
           not adequately supported. For example, in some cases, respondents
           mistakenly reported information about emergency stabilization
           projects rather than rehabilitation and restoration projects. In
           other cases, no documentation was provided to support survey
           responses, or the information in the documents contradicted the
           survey responses. Consequently, we determined that the data
           provided in the survey could not be reliably reported.

           An interregional group of Forest Service officials reached a
           similar conclusion about the agency's rehabilitation and
           restoration data when it attempted to collect and report related
           information.10 The group-tasked with developing an agencywide
           strategy for postfire recovery in 2004-found that they could not
           identify the agency's total rehabilitation and restoration needs
           and accomplishments because the agency did not maintain
           consistent, reliable data about such needs. The group noted that
           the Forest Service has a fire management database with the
           capacity to track rehabilitation and restoration needs and
           accomplishments, and that headquarters officials originally used
           the system to determine priorities and funding allocations.11
           However, they said that field staff rarely enter data into the
           system because headquarters officials no longer use it this way,
           now that they delegated the task of prioritizing and funding
           projects to the regions. Some regions have developed their own
           systems to track regionwide data, but because the systems are not
           consistent, the data cannot accurately be combined or compared
           across regions. The interregional group recommended that if
           agencywide consistency is needed for data on rehabilitation and
           restoration, the Forest Service should consider identifying the
           minimum data necessary and modifying existing or emerging systems
           to incorporate such information.

           In our visits to seven national forests and telephone interviews
           with officials from all of the Forest Service regions, agency
           officials reported that varied amounts of rehabilitation and
           restoration work have been completed. For some fires, agency
           officials said they had completed all or almost all needed
           rehabilitation and restoration work, while for others, they told
           us that a significant amount of work remains to be done. For
           example, agency officials reported that almost all of the needed
           rehabilitation and restoration work is complete for the Diamond
           Point fire, which burned nearly 150,000 acres in the Payette
           National Forest in Idaho during the summer of 2000. According to
           one official, the only work that has not been completed for that
           fire is work that will not be needed until 15 or 20 years after
           the fire, such as clearing hiking trails when dead trees fall in
           the future. Similarly, agency officials reported completing all or
           almost all needed rehabilitation and restoration work for the
           3,000-acre Thorn fire in the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest in
           2000, and the 18,000-acre Fridley fire in the Gallatin National
           Forest in 2001, among others. In contrast, agency officials
           reported that a significant portion of needed rehabilitation and
           restoration work remains for the Bitterroot fires of 2000, which
           burned about 300,000 acres, as well as for the Bullock and Aspen
           fires of 2002 and 2003, which burned a total of about 115,000
           acres in the Coronado National Forest. For the 2002 Red Waffle
           fire, which burned about 5,000 acres in the Custer National
           Forest, agency officials told us that almost none of the needed
           work had been completed. These examples suggest that, for at least
           some fires, a significant portion of needed rehabilitation and
           restoration work has not been completed. However, without
           comprehensive data, neither we nor agency decision makers know how
           common this situation is across the nation.

           Furthermore, while we found that a substantial portion of needed
           work remains undone for some fires, it is unclear whether more
           should be done at this point because the Forest Service has no
           clear time frames for completing such work. Some Forest Service
           officials told us that, although they had not yet completed all of
           the rehabilitation and restoration work they believed was needed,
           they were not concerned because they planned to complete the work
           over the course of 5 or 10 years after the fire. Few of the agency
           officials we interviewed reported adverse effects that had already
           resulted from not completing projects. However, some officials
           expressed concern about future effects, such as compromised water
           quality and loss of forest habitat, that could result if needs
           were left unmet over the long term.

           Given constrained budgets and competing priorities, a headquarters
           official explained that the Forest Service does not expect forests
           to complete every needed rehabilitation and restoration project;
           instead, forests are expected to complete the high-priority
           projects. However, agency officials do not know whether they have
           addressed the highest priority projects nationwide, because they
           do not track this information, either. In our interviews with
           officials in the field, we found that regions have addressed their
           priorities to varying degrees from year to year and region to
           region. For example, in 2004, the Intermountain region was able to
           fund the top 14 of its 20 priority categories, while the
           Southwestern region was only able to fund the top 2 of its 9
           priority categories using rehabilitation and restoration funds.12
           As a result, the Southwestern region identified about $5.2 million
           in unfunded needs that year, including about $2.3 million in
           high-priority needs, according to an agency official. However, in
           fiscal year 2005, because the Southwestern region received about
           $7 million in rehabilitation and restoration funds-an increase of
           more than $6 million over the previous year-the region was able to
           address its backlog, agency officials told us. For fiscal year
           2006, the region was allocated under $1 million and expects once
           again to only address projects in its top 1 or 2 priority
           categories, leaving what agency officials estimate to be millions
           of dollars in needs unfunded. While some regional officials
           tracked such information, others did not, and none of the regions
           routinely reported such information to headquarters. Consequently,
           Forest Service officials make management and funding decisions
           without knowing, on a national scale, whether the agency is
           keeping pace with its high-priority rehabilitation and restoration
           needs.

           BLM officials told us that, according to agency data, most
           rehabilitation work needed for fires that occurred between 2000
           and 2004 has been completed. The agency requires field staff to
           report all rehabilitation needs to headquarters in rehabilitation
           plans and budget requests. BLM officials in each state office
           assemble and review the data on budget requests and allocations
           for all of the district and field offices within the state. Once
           rehabilitation work is funded, agency officials said there are
           only a few factors-such as unusual weather or other unanticipated
           events-that prevent the work from being completed. Consequently,
           agency officials infer that nearly all needed work that has been
           funded through fiscal year 2005 has been completed. In addition,
           BLM tracks nationwide data on the total number of acres that have
           been rehabilitated, and reviews the data for any anomalies,
           correcting errors when found. The agency reports this information
           to Congress each year in its budget request as well as in its
           annual report on public lands.13 Further, one agency official
           reported that BLM is currently revising its performance measures,
           and is planning to report the percentage and number of acres
           identified in rehabilitation plans as needing rehabilitation
           treatments that actually received the treatments. The agency has
           begun to informally collect these data in fiscal year 2006 to
           prepare for reporting the information in the future.

           While BLM collects data on nationwide rehabilitation needs and
           accomplishments, we could not independently verify the data
           because, for fires before 2004, the agency's rehabilitation and
           emergency stabilization data are commingled. In an effort to
           collect this information, we administered a survey to agency
           officials in the field. The survey we administered to BLM
           officials asked for qualitative information about rehabilitation
           needs and accomplishments for a random sample of BLM fires that
           occurred between 2000 and 2004 and burned over 500 acres. However,
           like the Forest Service survey, when we compared a sample of
           responses to supporting documents, we found that a significant
           portion of responses were not adequately supported. Specifically,
           we found that respondents sometimes reported information about
           emergency stabilization work rather than rehabilitation work.
           While we recognize that this could be a result of the relatively
           recent separation between the two programs in 2004, we determined
           that the data provided in the survey were not reliable.

           In our visits to three BLM field locations and interviews with BLM
           officials from four state offices, agency officials consistently
           reported completing all or almost all rehabilitation work that was
           needed for fires that occurred between 2000 and 2004. For example,
           in Idaho, BLM officials told us that all of the agency's
           rehabilitation work identified as needed in the state during this
           time period has been funded, and that nearly all of the funded
           work has been completed. Several officials told us that the only
           incomplete work is that needed beyond the first 3 years after a
           fire, which is defined as restoration work. Agency officials in
           Oregon, Utah, and Nevada also reported completing nearly all
           needed rehabilitation work, with few exceptions-such as work that
           was hindered by uncontrollable events like weather, or work needed
           beyond 3 years after a fire.

           Although BLM keeps close track of its postfire rehabilitation
           needs and accomplishments nationwide, and reports completing most
           of this work, the agency's rehabilitation program does not fund or
           track any restoration work-that is, work needed more than 3 years
           after a fire. Instead, Interior policy calls for any restoration
           needs to be addressed by other agency programs, such as the
           wildlife, noxious weed, or rangeland management programs. However,
           BLM officials we talked with did not know whether these other
           programs were addressing postfire restoration needs. Several BLM
           officials indicated that continued monitoring beyond the 3-year
           period is important in some cases to determine the effectiveness
           of projects that have been completed. One BLM analysis of postfire
           projects from 1999 to 2003 concluded that time and funding limits
           on monitoring prevented field officials from determining the
           success or failure of some projects. In some cases for which
           projects were known to be only partially successful, agency
           officials said that if they could identify and address the issue
           right away-for example, by seeding native plants so that invasive
           species could not expand-they could avoid losing their original
           investment.

           Forest Service and BLM officials reported different challenges to
           their efforts to rehabilitate or restore their lands after fires.
           Forest Service officials cited a lack of funding, transfers of
           funding for fire suppression, and erratic funding levels from year
           to year as hindering their rehabilitation and restoration efforts.
           In addition, some Forest Service officials told us that
           controversy around certain types of postfire activities, market
           forces, and insufficient workforce made it difficult to address
           needed rehabilitation and restoration work. For BLM, headquarters
           and field officials told us that while they have completed most of
           their projects, they face challenges in achieving long-term
           success with some projects. Many of BLM's seeding and planting
           projects fail or are only partially successful when new plants do
           not become established because of drought, soil conditions, or
           planting techniques, for example. To address this issue, BLM
           officials said they are now monitoring rehabilitation treatments
           more comprehensively to learn why treatments are effective or not,
           and have begun developing standard monitoring protocols, a
           database to track project information and success rates, and a
           Web-based information-sharing network that will allow staff to
           share lessons learned.

           According to Forest Service officials, various factors related to
           funding hindered their postfire rehabilitation and restoration
           efforts. Specifically, agency officials reported that a lack of
           dedicated funds, the transfer of funds to pay for fire
           suppression, and the low priority of one project compared with
           others competing for the same funds prevented completion of some
           projects. Regarding the lack of dedicated funds, several officials
           we interviewed cited the downward trend in funding for postfire
           rehabilitation and restoration, and commented that funding for
           other programs had not increased to compensate. According to a
           regional official, in 2004, forests in the Northern region
           identified about $46 million in rehabilitation and restoration
           needs attributable to the previous year's fires, but the region
           had only about $3 million in rehabilitation and restoration funds
           to allocate to the forests. Officials in several regions told us
           that, although their projects had been approved for rehabilitation
           and restoration funding, much of the funding was transferred to
           pay for fire suppression.14 For example, after 307,000 acres
           burned in the Bitterroot National Forest in Montana, forest
           officials identified and received funding for about $30 million in
           rehabilitation and restoration work in 2002. However, according to
           these officials, later that year most of the funding-about $26
           million-was transferred to pay for fire suppression elsewhere.
           Consequently, the forest did not have enough funding to pay for
           all of the work, and as of March 2006, much of it still had not
           been done. According to agency officials, the situation was made
           worse because they had made assurances to the public, which
           expected the Forest Service to complete the work they planned.

           In other cases, agency officials told us they were not able to
           complete some rehabilitation and restoration projects because they
           were lower priority than other needed work on the forest. For
           example, after a wildland fire at the Custer National Forest in
           Montana, officials told us that they needed to thin the forest to
           reduce the risk of a future fire causing severe damage. However,
           this fuels reduction project, located far from any communities,
           was not selected for funding at the regional level, and it was not
           funded by the forest because the forest's budget could only
           accommodate the highest-priority fuels reduction projects-where
           communities would be threatened if a wildland fire started.

           In addition, during our field visits, officials told us that
           erratic funding levels hindered their ability to address postfire
           rehabilitation and restoration needs. Specifically, agency
           officials said that the amount of rehabilitation and restoration
           funding headquarters allocated to the regions has fluctuated
           dramatically from year to year, making it difficult to plan
           budgets. For example, the Southwestern region received about
           $600,000 in fiscal year 2004, about $6.8 million in 2005, and
           about $900,000 in 2006. Based on 2004 funding levels, forests in
           the region did not expect to receive substantial funding in 2005.
           When about $6.8 million became available, however, some
           Southwestern forests could not spend all of the money before the
           end of the year because they had not hired additional seasonal
           staff, prepared contracting or planning documents, or otherwise
           established the necessary infrastructure to spend the funds and
           implement needed work.

           Agency officials reported that factors unrelated to funding also
           hindered their ability to address needed postfire rehabilitation
           and restoration work. Even if there were unlimited funding, some
           officials told us they would be limited by the size of their staff
           or other operational constraints, such as the length of their
           field season. For example, in 2005, the Apache-Sitgreaves National
           Forest received about $2.4 million for needed rehabilitation and
           restoration after the Rodeo-Chediski fire. However, because of
           their limited staff and the time required to complete the
           contracting process, which they only initiated in February when
           they learned that they would receive the funding, forest officials
           said they were not able to spend all of the funds. Exacerbating
           the challenge, the Forest Service was implementing a new
           procurement system at the time, which officials said took
           additional time to learn. In other cases, agency officials
           anticipated workforce and operational limitations, and accounted
           for them by developing long-range plans with annual workloads that
           could be accommodated within such limitations. However, because
           these plans covered longer time periods, planned work was still
           incomplete several years after a fire. For example, at the
           Coronado National Forest in Arizona, officials planned to spread
           the needed work out over a period of 10 years or more, scheduling
           a feasible workload each year, given projected staff and
           infrastructure constraints.

           Forest Service officials also noted that controversy about
           postfire activities presented challenges. General dissonance about
           the role of natural recovery versus managed recovery, as well as
           disagreement about specific decisions, such as whether to use
           chemical herbicides and whether to harvest burned timber as part
           of restoration efforts, created challenges for agency officials
           and sometimes prevented projects from being completed. Forest
           managers use herbicides to, for example, control the spread of
           invasive weeds or eradicate vegetation that competes with young
           seedlings planted to reforest burned lands. Its use is
           controversial, however, because herbicides can be harmful to
           native vegetation, wildlife, water, and soils. Harvesting burned
           timber is also controversial. Supporters say that the timber
           should be harvested to capture its economic value and remove its
           potential to fuel future fires, while critics say the burned trees
           should be left for wildlife habitat and to avoid any impacts that
           could be caused by harvesting operations.

           Because of the controversy surrounding these issues, agency
           officials said they often invested more time and resources in
           developing defensible documents to support their decisions, which
           sometimes delayed project implementation. Also, appeals and
           litigation of such decisions sometimes caused projects to be
           delayed. For example, after a 2001 wildland fire at the Tahoe
           National Forest in California, the Forest Service spent a year
           preparing a plan, finalized in 2002, that proposed harvesting and
           selling burned timber both outside and within a roadless area to
           help finance needed rehabilitation work. The agency began
           harvesting timber outside the roadless area and had virtually
           completed doing so by July 2004. However, in response to a
           lawsuit, a federal district court issued a preliminary injunction
           in August 2004, prohibiting the Forest Service from harvesting
           timber inside the roadless area. In February 2006, the agency
           settled the case, agreeing not to harvest timber in the roadless
           area. By that point-4-1/2 years after the fire-agency officials
           said that the value of the timber had declined to the point that
           it was no longer feasible to sell it.

           Faced with repeated decisions about harvesting burned timber, some
           Forest Service officials expressed concern that there is
           insufficient scientific evidence to support one action or another,
           and further noted that little research is being done to address
           the question. In a 2004 report entitled "Strategy for Post-Fire
           Recovery," an interregional group of Forest Service officials
           noted that there is "very limited scientific information on
           long-term effects of uncharacteristically severe fires, the
           effectiveness of post-fire rehabilitation and restoration
           treatments, or the impacts of post-fire timber harvesting."
           Without such information, they concluded, "Policy choices are
           often based on ideology and emotion rather than objective
           scientific information."15 According to one Forest Service
           scientist, there is an urgent need for more information on salvage
           logging-especially information about the effects of logging
           operations under various conditions and in different geographic
           locations because such effects vary widely depending on the type
           and extent of logging, site conditions, and climatic conditions.
           Moreover, such research is needed to improve the models used by
           agency decision makers to predict the potential impacts of
           proposed actions such as locations and rates of erosion because,
           currently, none of them account for the effects of salvage logging
           on the postfire environment.

           The 2002 Biscuit fire in Oregon, which has been a focal point for
           recent debates about harvesting burned timber, has also drawn
           attention to the role of scientific research. After the fire, a
           study was published stating that removing dead and dying trees
           from the Biscuit fire area would reduce the risk of recurring
           large-scale fires in the area.16 Forest Service officials decided
           to offer 12 sales of burned timber as part of a larger recovery
           plan, one purpose of which was to reduce the risk of such fires.
           The sales were controversial and were the target of legal
           challenges, but the timber was ultimately harvested in 2004 and
           2005. In 2006, a study was published concluding that salvage
           logging after the Biscuit fire may have been counterproductive to
           forest recovery goals in part because, during the logging
           operations, some seedlings were destroyed.17 Release of the study
           spurred additional controversy and media attention. In response,
           the study's authors issued a statement saying that "the
           controversy over the topic of postfire logging is indicative of
           how little is known about its effects." In a congressional hearing
           on the topic, other scientists and researchers told members of
           Congress that there is not a lot of peer-reviewed science on this
           issue, and a sustained commitment to such research is needed.
           Several bills pending before Congress contain provisions for
           research, pilot projects, and monitoring, related to the effects
           of postfire harvest.18

           In addition to controversy, Forest Service officials told us that
           factors related to market forces also hinder their efforts to
           harvest burned timber after fires. For example, sometimes the
           trees burned in wildland fires are too small to be of any
           commercial value. Other times, a long distance to the nearest
           timber mill or difficult access to the burned timber reduces the
           cost-effectiveness of a project for the timber purchaser,
           especially because burned timber loses value over time as it
           deteriorates. In some locations, the small number of nearby timber
           mills can limit competitive bidding. For example, at the Eldorado
           National Forest in California, the Forest Service offered burned
           timber for sale in 2005 but received no bids on most of the sales
           because the only timber company close enough to harvest the trees
           was already busy with timber from previous sales. Agency officials
           said they were concerned that if too much time passed, the timber
           would lose value and the sale would no longer be economically
           viable. In the fall of 2005, they lowered the price of the timber
           and completed the sales. While agency officials acknowledged that
           market forces had sometimes hindered their ability to sell burned
           timber, they said this had not always been the case, and it was
           difficult to predict whether or how such forces might affect a
           sale.

           To address challenges related to the controversy over salvage
           logging and in recognition of the shortage of related scientific
           research available, the Forest Service has begun to conduct such
           research in the past several years-for example, through its
           wildland fire research and development program. In addition, the
           Joint Fire Science Program-a partnership of six federal agencies,
           including the Forest Service-has called for and funded some
           research proposals in this area. In its October 2005 announcement,
           the program specifically sought proposals from agency and
           university scientists "that evaluate the effects and effectiveness
           of postfire management activities, including but not limited to
           burned area emergency stabilization, rehabilitation, restoration
           treatments, and postfire removal of woody material (e.g., salvage
           logging, biomass utilization)." In May 2006, the program funded
           several studies in this area. For example, one Forest Service
           researcher received funding to study the effects of different
           salvage-logging techniques at a few sites and develop some
           guidelines for use by land managers. While we commend the Forest
           Service for taking these initial steps, it will require a
           long-term commitment to the issue to accumulate research that
           provides sufficient information about the effects of salvage
           logging under various conditions, including diverse geographic
           locations and ecosystem types, and different burn severities,
           logging techniques, soil conditions, species types, and other
           features.

           To address challenges related to funding, Forest Service officials
           said they changed the formula for allocating rehabilitation and
           restoration funds to regions in fiscal year 2006, so that funding
           levels would be more stable from year to year, but did not request
           additional rehabilitation and restoration funds from Congress
           because of competing program priorities. The new formula for
           allocating funds considers the amount of lands burned in each
           region over the previous 5 years, in contrast to the old formula,
           which considered only the lands burned during the prior year. This
           way, if acres burned in a region fluctuate dramatically from year
           to year, funding levels do not follow the erratic pattern. Also,
           the new system considers only severely burned acres rather than
           also considering the total number of acres burned in each region,
           as did the old formula. According to agency officials, severely
           burned lands are more likely to need rehabilitation or restoration
           than are lands burned at moderate or low severity. Finally, agency
           officials plan to exclude wilderness acres beginning in fiscal
           year 2007 because, in many cases, wilderness lands need little or
           no active rehabilitation or restoration projects because they are
           managed to recover naturally. Agency officials said they have not
           requested more rehabilitation and restoration funding from
           Congress because, given the current environment of constrained
           budgets, they did not expect an overall increase in the agency's
           budget and did not want to sacrifice other critical programs'
           budgets. Also, the officials explained that by receiving
           relatively more funding for other programs, they maintained more
           flexibility to determine how to spend the funds. This way, if
           postfire rehabilitation or restoration work was the
           highest-priority work for a forest, it could direct its regular
           program funds to pay for it. On the other hand, if the forest had
           other higher-priority work needs, such as rehabilitating lands
           after a hurricane or repairing roads to meet basic safety
           standards, it could fund these needs.

           Although BLM officials reported completing most of the agency's
           needed rehabilitation projects, some officials expressed concern
           that these completed projects were not always successful. BLM
           officials in several states told us that many of their seeding and
           planting projects did not successfully establish new vegetation
           because the seeds did not germinate, or germinated but later died.
           For example, after a 2002 wildland fire in Idaho, BLM officials
           seeded about 4,400 acres of land, but 3 years later, most of the
           plants had not survived. Field office officials speculated that
           this was due to several factors, including drought, competition
           from invasive weeds such as cheatgrass, poor seed viability, and
           an insufficient number of seeds. In an initial attempt to
           understand the extent of its planting challenge, a BLM official
           reviewed rehabilitation monitoring reports submitted after fires
           occurring from 1999 through 2003, and found that a significant
           portion of the projects were described as failures or as only
           partially successful. BLM officials qualified these results,
           emphasizing that success is a subjective standard, and cited a
           need for improved standards and guidance for determining and
           reporting success of rehabilitation projects. Nevertheless, the
           officials acknowledged that the low success rate should be a cause
           for concern.

           According to BLM officials, a variety of factors can cause
           planting and seeding projects to fail or to be only partially
           successful. For example, BLM officials we interviewed frequently
           singled out lack of precipitation as a key factor causing projects
           to fail. In some BLM locations, agency officials told us that
           months can go by with little or no precipitation, and many species
           will not germinate without moisture. Also, there are technical
           factors that can influence a project's degree of success.
           Sometimes seeds do not grow when initially planted because they
           are not viable or the variety selected is not appropriate for the
           environment in which they are planted. Other times, it is because
           the seeds are damaged during application, or planted too late in
           the season or too deep in the soil. Alternatively, seeds may
           successfully germinate, but the seedlings later die because, for
           example, there are not enough available nutrients or moisture in
           the soil. The BLM official who reviewed recent
           rehabilitation-monitoring reports highlighted the poor success
           rates of sagebrush-planting projects that relied on aerial
           seeding, a technique to distribute seeds by aircraft (see fig. 3).
           For the aerial-seeding projects, agency officials estimated that
           more than half either failed or were only partially successful.
           Another study concluded that aerially seeding sagebrush following
           select Idaho fires was "not a reliable, effective seeding method,"
           at least in the sites studied. Sagebrush shrubs were not
           established on 23 of the 35 projects in the study.19

           Figure 3: A Helicopter Prepares to Aerially Seed a Burned Area
           after a 2005 BLM Fire

           When postfire seeding or planting projects are not successful,
           invasive weeds can spread, crowding out native species, increasing
           fire frequency, and displacing wildlife habitat. This is because
           after a wildland fire burns in a forest or rangeland, an opening
           is left for plants to grow, and if land managers do not
           successfully establish plants in such an opening immediately,
           invasive species-which multiply rapidly and compete aggressively
           with other plants for nutrients, water, and sunlight-often fill
           the void. Once they have arrived, invasive plants are hard to
           eradicate. Some invasive plants, such as cheatgrass, have
           increased the frequency of wildland fires in western grasslands
           because they add to fuel loads, become dry early in the summer
           when wildland fires are most common, and can grow back after
           fires. In some locations where cheatgrass has invaded ecosystems
           that cannot handle frequent, intense fires, native plants and
           animals have been nearly eliminated. In other cases, failure of
           seeding or planting projects can directly result in a loss of
           wildlife habitat. For example, wildlife such as the sage grouse,
           pronghorn antelope, and mule deer are dependent on sagebrush for
           their survival, so when sagebrush projects fail, these animals
           lose their habitats.

           BLM officials are aware of and concerned about the success rate of
           postfire planting and seeding projects. In an effort to learn more
           about and improve the effectiveness of these projects, BLM has
           taken several actions. Specifically, in fiscal year 2005, BLM
           began requiring field staff to monitor all rehabilitation projects
           for effectiveness, and document the assessment in a closeout
           report completed at the end of the third year of rehabilitation
           activities. In fiscal years 2004 and 2005, monitoring work was
           funded through the emergency stabilization program under the
           wildland fire operations account. According to a BLM official,
           this was to ensure that funding would be available for monitoring.
           In fiscal year 2006, however, BLM began to use rehabilitation
           funds to pay for monitoring rehabilitation projects, in accordance
           with agency policy. In addition, in response to a previous GAO
           recommendation, BLM is working with the Forest Service and the
           United States Geological Survey to develop standard monitoring
           protocols, so that agencywide monitoring data will be comparable
           and can facilitate learning. With consistent monitoring protocols,
           agency officials expect to be able to isolate some of the common
           factors that cause seeding projects to fail under various
           conditions. For example, they hope to identify seed types and
           planting techniques that work best in arid climates, with certain
           types of soils, or in competition with particular invasive weeds.
           In response to another GAO recommendation, BLM, the Forest
           Service, and the United States Geological Survey are also working
           together to develop a data system that can serve as a repository
           of information and lessons learned through implementing and
           monitoring rehabilitation projects.20 The agencies have
           implemented a pilot to test the data system in Nevada, and they
           expect to begin development of the nationwide system in fiscal
           year 2008.

           Faced with millions of acres of burned federal lands, the Forest
           Service and BLM have a daunting task in identifying and addressing
           postfire rehabilitation and restoration needs. Given the enormity
           of the task and the scarcity of funding to address needed
           rehabilitation and restoration work, the Forest Service has chosen
           to give its regions and forests the discretion to decide what, if
           any, rehabilitation or restoration work is warranted, given
           competing priorities. While we agree that a degree of freedom is
           appropriate, so that the agency can accommodate diverse ecosystems
           and unique circumstances, the Forest Service must balance this
           freedom with its obligation to be accountable to the public and
           Congress. Without complete information on the magnitude of its
           rehabilitation and restoration needs relative to its capacity to
           address them, the Forest Service can neither make informed funding
           decisions nor show Congress and the public whether it is keeping
           pace with the most critical postfire work. Because the Forest
           Service already has a system to capture and report some data on
           rehabilitation and restoration accomplishments, expanding its use
           might be a straightforward way to provide a more complete picture
           of the agency's high-priority rehabilitation and restoration needs
           relative to its accomplishments.

           For its part, BLM has acknowledged that one limitation of its
           rehabilitation program is its 3-year time constraint, which
           precludes any subsequent restoration work from being implemented
           under the program. In some cases, the time constraint also limits
           the agency's ability to monitor rehabilitation projects long
           enough to ascertain whether they are successful, a critical
           shortfall given BLM's challenge with success rates. In recognition
           of this limitation, agency officials have said-and we agree-that
           the program could be improved by extending management and
           data-tracking efforts beyond the initial 3 years to better
           understand whether long-term restoration needs are being
           addressed.

           With millions of acres of burned lands, the Forest Service and BLM
           face significant challenges in addressing rehabilitation and
           restoration needs. While there are no quick fixes for these
           challenges, there are some actions the agencies could take to
           smooth the way. BLM has already taken the first steps toward
           improving its understanding about how frequently its
           rehabilitation projects fail and why. The Forest Service could
           improve the foundation from which it makes decisions about
           postfire work that may be controversial, including postfire timber
           harvests, by conducting additional research in this area, so that
           such decisions can be informed by ample scientific evidence rather
           than the limited number of studies currently available.

           To help Congress and the Forest Service make more informed funding
           decisions, and to help the Forest Service better address its
           high-priority postfire rehabilitation and restoration needs, we
           recommend that the Secretary of Agriculture direct the Forest
           Service to take the following two actions:

           o  Track and report to Congress all high-priority rehabilitation
           and restoration work needed and accomplished, regardless of
           funding source.

           o  Conduct additional research on the beneficial and harmful
           effects of postfire projects, including but not limited to,
           postfire timber harvests.

           To help ensure that long-term postfire restoration needs are
           addressed on BLM lands, we also recommend that the Secretary of
           the Interior direct BLM to address postfire restoration needs that
           persist more than 3 years after a fire by establishing a procedure
           to transfer any incomplete work-including monitoring-from the
           rehabilitation program to other ongoing programs, and by tracking
           and reporting to Congress the status of all needed and completed
           postfire restoration work in those programs.

           We received comments on a draft of this report from the Forest
           Service and Interior. The Forest Service, in comments provided via
           email, generally agreed with our findings and recommendations.
           With respect to our recommendation to conduct additional research
           on the effects of post-fire projects, the Forest Service noted
           that it will need to set priorities for this work. While we
           recognize that the Forest Service must balance competing
           priorities when allocating its resources, we continue to believe
           that such research warrants particular emphasis because of the
           heightened controversy surrounding some postfire projects,
           including postfire timber harvests, and the relative shortage of
           available scientific information in this area. The Forest Service
           also provided additional comments, which we have incorporated in
           this report where appropriate. Interior, in a written letter
           reproduced in appendix II, concurred with the report's findings
           and recommendations.

           As arranged with your office, unless you publicly announce its
           contents earlier, we plan no further distribution of this report
           until 30 days from the report date. At that time, we will send
           copies to the Secretary of Agriculture, Secretary of the Interior,
           Chief of the Forest Service, and Director of BLM. We also will
           make copies available to others upon request. In addition, this
           report will be available at no charge on the GAO Web site at
           http://www.gao.gov.

           If you or your staff have questions about this report, please
           contact me at (202) 512-3841 or [email protected]. Contact points
           for our Offices of Congressional Relations and Public Affairs may
           be found on the last page of this report. GAO staff who made major
           contributions to this report are listed in appendix III.

           Sincerely yours,

           Robin M. Nazzaro Director, Natural Resources and Environment

           The objectives of our study were to determine (1) how the Forest
           Service and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) identify and plan
           postfire rehabilitation and restoration activities; (2) how much
           needed rehabilitation and restoration work the agencies have
           completed for wildland fires that occurred between 2000 and 2004;
           and (3) the challenges the agencies face in addressing their
           needs, and any actions they are taking in response.

           To learn how the Forest Service and BLM identify and plan postfire
           rehabilitation and restoration activities, we reviewed agency
           documents and interviewed officials in headquarters, regional and
           state offices, and local units. We collected and reviewed
           documents on policies, procedures, and practices relevant to
           rehabilitation and restoration activities in both agencies. These
           included interagency agreements, such as one establishing common
           definitions for rehabilitation and restoration, as well as
           departmental, agency headquarters, and regional or state guidance
           for nonemergency rehabilitation and restoration activities. We
           reviewed relevant portions of agency manuals and handbooks,
           documents detailing procedures for identifying needed postfire
           activities, as well as any documents describing prioritization and
           funding approval processes. For select fires, we reviewed
           environmental impact statements, needs assessments, rehabilitation
           plans, and other relevant planning documents. When we adjusted
           dollars for inflation, we used the gross domestic product
           (chained) price index, with 2001 as the base year.

           We also visited regions and states with large numbers of acres
           burned by wildland fire-excluding Alaska, where the agencies
           conducted little or no rehabilitation or restoration work after
           wildland fires. For the Forest Service, we visited the Northern,
           Pacific Northwest, Pacific Southwest, and Southwestern regions to
           interview officials that manage lands in Arizona, California,
           Montana, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oregon, Washington, and parts
           of Idaho. In each of the four regions, we visited one or two
           forests and interviewed forest- and district-level staff. In
           addition, we contacted officials in Forest Service headquarters
           and all of the agency's regions by telephone to discuss how the
           Forest Service identifies, plans, and funds postfire
           rehabilitation and restoration activities. For BLM, we visited
           Idaho and Oregon to interview officials in BLM's state and field
           offices there. We also contacted, by telephone, officials in BLM's
           headquarters and Utah and Nevada state offices to discuss how they
           identify and plan rehabilitation activities.

           To determine how much needed rehabilitation and restoration work
           the Forest Service and BLM have completed, we collected available
           national, regional, state, and local data on project needs and
           accomplishments, interviewed Forest Service and BLM officials at
           all levels to ascertain their subjective assessments of the extent
           to which they had addressed postfire rehabilitation and
           restoration needs, and reviewed relevant agency reports. We also
           met with field staff to discuss proposed and completed projects
           for select fires and conducted detailed reviews of these needs and
           accomplishments using a structured data collection instrument. In
           addition, we conducted a Web-based survey of agency officials in
           the field, but after checking a sample of survey responses against
           supporting documents, we determined that the information provided
           in the survey was not sufficiently reliable to report.

           We selected a stratified random sample of 276 fires from the
           population of BLM and Forest Service fires that burned more than
           500 acres and occurred between 2000 and 2004. The sample was
           stratified by agency and by year (2000-2002 and 2003-2004), so
           that results could be generalized for each stratum as well as in
           the aggregate. To identify the universe of these fires, we
           combined two separate lists of fires obtained from the Forest
           Service and BLM. We excluded fires that occurred in Alaska because
           Forest Service officials reported little, and BLM officials
           reported no, postfire rehabilitation activity in Alaska during
           this period.

           Our survey asked agency officials to provide qualitative
           information about needed projects, the portion of those projects
           completed, factors that hindered their ability to complete needed
           projects, and any effects associated with not completing projects.
           We surveyed Forest Service officials about both rehabilitation and
           restoration projects, but we surveyed BLM officials only about
           rehabilitation projects because BLM's postfire programs do not
           include restoration. Also, to account for BLM projects implemented
           before BLM separated its emergency stabilization projects from its
           rehabilitation projects in 2004, we requested that agency
           officials use the current interagency definitions of emergency
           stabilization and rehabilitation when providing information about
           all rehabilitation projects.

           To identify potential survey questions, we interviewed Forest
           Service and BLM officials at headquarters and in the field, and
           reviewed agency documents and other reports. We took several
           quality assurance steps to minimize nonsampling errors, which can
           be introduced, for example, when respondents do not understand
           questions or do not have the information required to answer
           questions. Social science survey specialists designed draft
           questionnaires, and we conducted six pretests with agency
           officials in the field. After each pretest, we conducted an
           interview to determine (1) the extent to which respondents
           interpreted questions and response categories consistently, (2)
           whether respondents had the necessary information to answer the
           questions, and (3) how long it took individuals to complete the
           survey. In addition, we asked headquarters officials with national
           responsibility for postfire work in each agency to review our
           draft questionnaires and provide comments. Based on the results of
           these pretests and comments, we made multiple revisions to the
           survey.

           To determine to whom to send our survey, we contacted forest
           supervisors or natural resources directors in the Forest Service,
           and state office rehabilitation coordinators in the BLM, and asked
           them to identify the field staff most knowledgeable about
           rehabilitation and restoration for each fire in our sample. In a
           few cases-where we lacked timely contact information or the person
           we initially contacted referred us to someone else-we asked agency
           field officials to forward the survey to the appropriate person.

           We administered the survey via the internet for 8 weeks between
           November 21, 2005, and January 13, 2006, and at the close of our
           administration period, we had received a total of 256 responses
           for an overall response rate of 93 percent. After the survey, we
           checked the survey data and verified the data analysis
           programming. We also verified select responses for 10 percent of
           surveys that we randomly selected from those that had been
           completed. Specifically, we verified responses to questions about
           the proportion of projects completed for a particular fire and the
           funding sources used to pay for such projects by contacting
           respondents and requesting supporting documents-such as project
           plans, accomplishment reports, and contracts-to compare their
           survey responses with information in the documents. Our
           verification revealed that a significant portion of responses were
           not supported by the documentation we received. As shown in table
           1, we found that in 6 of the 26 cases, none of the responses we
           checked were fully supported; in another 6 cases, only some of the
           responses were supported; and in 14 cases, all were supported.

           Table 1: Verification Results for Survey Responses about Project
           Completion and Funding

           Source: GAO.

           For example, sometimes responses were not supported because
           respondents had mistakenly reported information about emergency
           stabilization activities or funding, rather than rehabilitation
           and restoration activities or funding. Other times, respondents
           had either erroneously transferred the information from supporting
           documents to our survey, or had no documentation to support their
           answers. Overall, this outcome indicates that there is a degree of
           nonsampling error in our survey results that is not quantifiable,
           but which we determined is too great to ensure sufficient
           reliability.

           To determine what challenges the Forest Service and BLM face in
           addressing postfire rehabilitation and restoration needs, and what
           actions, if any, they are taking in response, we relied on
           interviews with agency officials and agency documents. In our
           interviews with agency officials at all levels, we asked about
           challenges at the program level as well as the project level, and
           about actions the agencies are taking to address such challenges.
           During our visits to the field, we also observed rehabilitation or
           restoration project sites and discussed challenges officials faced
           in successfully completing those and other projects. We reviewed
           Forest Service and BLM reports describing agencywide challenges as
           well as select reports detailing challenges to addressing
           rehabilitation or restoration needs for a specific fire. To better
           understand some challenges agency officials reported, and some
           actions they are taking in response to challenges, we conducted
           additional interviews with agency research scientists, biologists,
           and ecologists, and reviewed relevant agency studies.

           We conducted our work from May 2005 through May 2006 in accordance
           with generally accepted government auditing standards.

           Robin Nazzaro, (202) 512-3841 or [email protected]

           In addition to the contact named above, David P. Bixler, Assistant
           Director; Carl Barden; Mark Braza; Sandy Davis; Christine Feehan;
           Rich Johnson; Alison O'Neill; Anthony Padilla; and Judy Pagano
           made key contributions to this report.

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3Dollar amounts are presented in nominal terms-unadjusted for
inflation-unless otherwise noted.

                                Results in Brief

                                   Background

    Forest Service and BLM Differ in How They Plan Needed Rehabilitation and
                                Restoration Work

4The Forest Service uses appropriations from sources that include its
national forest system, capital improvement and maintenance, and wildland
fire management accounts, as well as the Knudsen-Vandenburg fund and the
reforestation trust fund. GAO is exploring with the Department of
Agriculture the availability of these appropriations for this purpose.

Forest Service Regions and Forests Have Discretion to Plan Projects Using Varied
Procedures

5The Wilderness Act of 1964 defines wilderness as areas of undeveloped
federal land retaining their primeval character, without permanent
improvements or human habitation. The act provided that wilderness areas
would be designated by Congress and directed federal agencies to protect
and manage such lands to preserve their natural condition. The act
generally prohibits road construction and the use of motorized equipment
within wilderness areas. The Roadless Area Conservation Rule, issued by
the Forest Service in 2001 and in effect during most of the period we
reviewed, generally prohibited road building, timber cutting, and certain
other activities in inventoried roadless areas, which are roadless areas
identified in a series of analyses conducted prior to the 2001 rule. A new
roadless rule, issued in 2005, does not include the same prohibitions as
the earlier rule, but forest plans may still restrict activities in
roadless areas.

6Because the Forest Service's Alaska, Southern, and Eastern regions do
very little, if any, postfire rehabilitation and restoration, they do not
have formal processes for prioritizing and funding projects.

7In the Northern region, rather than submitting project proposals, forests
are directed to input project needs and funding requests into the National
Fire Plan Operations and Reporting System, a national fire management
database. Regional officials then query the database to assess total
regional needs and select projects for funding.

8In 1980, Congress created the reforestation trust fund by directing a
portion of tariffs on imported wood products to provide dedicated funding
for reforestation and related treatments. The roads and trails fund,
established in 1913, authorizes use of a portion of Forest Service
receipts (for example from the sale of timber and grazing permits, and the
collection of recreation fees) for the construction and maintenance of
roads and trails.

BLM Follows a Standard Process to Plan Rehabilitation Projects

9In fiscal years 2004 and 2005, monitoring of both emergency stabilization
and rehabilitation projects was paid for through the emergency
stabilization program, using fire suppression funds. In fiscal year 2006,
BLM began to use rehabilitation funds to pay for monitoring rehabilitation
projects.

Forest Service Lacks Data on Rehabilitation and Restoration Work; BLM Lacks Data
                              on Restoration Work

Forest Service Lacks Data to Know Whether High-

Priority Needs Are Being Addressed

10U.S. Forest Service Interregional Ecosystem Management Coordination
Group, "A Strategy for Post-Fire Recovery" (Dec. 3, 2004).

11The National Fire Plan Operations and Reporting System is an interagency
system designed to assist field personnel in managing and reporting
accomplishments for work conducted under the National Fire Plan, including
hazardous fuels, rehabilitation, and restoration activities. Planned and
completed activities may be entered into the system with funding sources.

12Because Forest Service regions independently developed prioritization
criteria, the regions have different categories, as well as a different
ordering of the categories, and they are not directly comparable.

BLM Officials Report Completing Most Rehabilitation Work, but Do Not Know
Whether Restoration Needs Are Being Addressed

13Each year, BLM publishes a Public Lands Statistics report. In this
report, BLM reports rehabilitation accomplishments combined with emergency
stabilization accomplishments.

Forest Service and BLM Officials Cite Different Challenges to Rehabilitating and
                             Restoring Their Lands

Forest Service Reports Funding and Other Issues Hinder Its Rehabilitation and
Restoration Efforts

14Although the Forest Service transferred funds from various programs to
help pay for fire suppression in fiscal years 2002 and 2003, agency
officials said they did not need to do so in fiscal year 2004 or 2005.
Furthermore, in the Consolidated Appropriations Act for Fiscal Year 2005,
Congress appropriated an additional $400 million to the Forest Service as
a supplemental appropriation for urgent fire suppression needs-which can
be carried over from one year to the next if unspent-to help address
suppression needs in unusually costly years and avoid the need to transfer
funds from other land management accounts. For more information, see GAO,
Wildfire Suppression: Funding Transfers Cause Project Cancellations and
Delays, Strained Relationships, and Management Disruptions, GAO-04-612
(Washington, D.C.: June 2, 2004).

15U.S. Forest Service Interregional Ecosystem Management Coordination
Group, "A Strategy for Post-Fire Recovery" (2004).

16J. Sessions, R. Buckman, M. Newton, and J. Hamann, "The Biscuit Fire:
Management Options for Forest Regeneration, Fire and Insect Risk Reduction
and Timber Salvage" (unpublished report, College of Forestry, Oregon State
University, Corvallis, Oregon, 2003).

17D.C. Donato, J.B. Fontaine, J.L. Campbell, W.D. Robinson, J.B. Kauffman,
and B.E. Law, "Post-Wildfire Logging Hinders Regeneration and Increases
Fire Risk," Science, vol. 311 (2006).

18For example, the Forest Emergency Recovery and Research Act, H.R. 4200,
109th Cong. (2005), and the National Forest Rehabilitation and Recovery
Act, H.R. 3973, 109th Cong. (2005).

BLM Cites Challenges to Ensuring Success of Completed Seeding and Planting
Projects

19BLM Idaho State Office, ID Technical Bulletin No. 2004-01: Establishment
of Aerially Seeded Big Sagebrush Following Southern Idaho Wildfires
(August 2004).

20GAO, Wildland Fires: Better Information Needed on Effectiveness of
Emergency Stabilization and Rehabilitation Treatments, GAO-03-430
(Washington, D.C.: Apr. 4, 2003).

                                  Conclusions

                      Recommendations for Executive Action

                       Agency Comments and Our Evaluation

Appendix I: Methodology Appendix I: Objectives, Scope, and Methodology

Planning Rehabilitation and Restoration Activities

Amount of Needed Rehabilitation and Restoration Work That Has Been Completed

  Survey Design

  Survey Administration and Data Verification

                                  Mix of supported, unsupported,              
                  All responses   and uncertain level of support No responses 
                      supported                    for responses    supported
Forest Service             5                                5            3 
fires                                                         
BLM fires                  9                                1            3 
Total fires               14                                6            6 

Challenges to Addressing Needs

Appendix II: Comments from the Department of the Interior Appendix II:
Comments from the Department of the Interior

Appendix III: GAOA Appendix III: GAO Contact and Staff Acknowledgments

                                  GAO Contact

                             Staff Acknowledgments

(360589)

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Highlights of GAO-06-670 , a report to the Chairman, Subcommittee on
Forests and Forest Health, Committee on Resources, House of
Representatives

June 2006

WILDLAND FIRE REHABILITATION AND RESTORATION

Forest Service and BLM Could Benefit from Improved Information on Status
of Needed Work

Since 2001, Congress and federal agencies, including the Forest Service
and Department of the Interior's Bureau of Land Management (BLM), have
recognized the importance of rehabilitating and restoring lands unlikely
to recover on their own after wildland fires. However, while funding has
increased for fire prevention, suppression, and first-year emergency
stabilization, it has decreased for rehabilitation (work up to 3 years
after fires) and restoration (work beyond the first 3 years). GAO was
asked (1) how the Forest Service and BLM plan postfire rehabilitation and
restoration projects, (2) how much needed rehabilitation and restoration
work they have completed for recent wildland fires, and (3) what
challenges the agencies face in addressing their needs.

What GAO Recommends

GAO is recommending that the Forest Service and BLM improve their
information on whether postfire rehabilitation and restoration needs are
met, and that the Forest Service augment research to help guide decisions.

In commenting on a draft of this report, the Forest Service and Interior
generally agreed with GAO's findings and recommendations.

The Forest Service and BLM use similar procedures to identify
rehabilitation and restoration needs, but differ in how they plan and fund
related projects. Given the variety of ecosystems they manage, Forest
Service field staff have the discretion to locally prioritize projects,
and the agency addresses them through various programs with appropriations
from multiple accounts. In contrast, BLM has a standard process for
planning needed rehabilitation projects and, through a single account,
funds projects for up to 3 years after fires. For restoration
projects-that is, work needed beyond 3 years after a fire-BLM requires
them to be addressed through other programs such as rangeland management.

With available information, it is not possible to reliably determine how
much needed rehabilitation and restoration work has been completed for
recent Forest Service and BLM fires. The Forest Service does not know how
much work has been completed because it does not collect nationwide data.
BLM reported that, according to its data, it has completed most of its
rehabilitation work, but the agency does not collect data on postfire
restoration work, which is done through other programs. GAO surveyed
Forest Service and BLM officials to determine how much needed work has
been completed, but the information provided in the survey was not
sufficiently reliable to report.

Forest Service and BLM officials face different challenges to addressing
their rehabilitation and restoration needs. Forest Service officials cited
factors such as competing priorities within constrained budgets and
controversy over certain activities. Agency officials said that
controversy over harvesting burned timber can be exacerbated by the
limited scientific research available to guide such decisions. BLM
officials cited challenges to achieving long-term success when seeding
burned areas. The agency is taking several steps to improve success rates.

Forest Service Building Partly Buried by Postfire Flood Debris (left) and
Restored Later
*** End of document. ***