ELR Citation: ELR 20120
(9th Cir. Jun 23, 2006)

The court upholds a U.S. Forest Service vegetation management project in the Klamath National Forest. An environmental group argues that the Forest Service should have prepared an environmental impact statement instead of an environmental assessment (EA) for the project and that the EA itself was inadequate. Although the project will have at least some short-term adverse effects on the environment, the EA provided detailed and adequate consideration of information from a wide range of sources, and the Forest Service's conclusion that the adverse effects would not be "significant" within the meaning of the National Environmental Policy Act was not arbitrary and capricious. The group also argued that the project fails to comply with the National Forest Management Act (NFMA). But the record does not reveal any specific flaws in the Forest Service's approach to assessing management indicator species (MIS), and the MIS assessment supports the agency's conclusion that the project complies with the NFMA.