Watersheds Research Cooperative

More than 12 million board feet of timber was harvested in the first harvest entry in the 10-year Hinkle Creek Paired Watershed Study.

The timber was harvested from five harvest units covering 380 acres (154 hectares) of Roseburg Forest Products (RFP) land in the headwaters of the South Fork of Hinkle Creek between August 2005 and April 2006. Four of the harvest units were intentionally located adjacent to non-fish-bearing, headwater streams directly upstream of four stream gauges in the South Fork. The fifth harvest unit was located adjacent to the watershed divide. The accompanying map shows the location of the harvest units and the stream gauging stations.

RFP felled the trees by hand then yarded them tree length using an aerial cable logging system to the landings, where they were cut into logs. A slack-line skyline system with a motorized carriage handled most of the logging. The 12.2 million board feet comprised 3,281 loads of logs transported to RFP manufacturing facilities.

RFP made 5,000 acres of its forestland available for the Hinkle Creek study, agreeing to defer logging on half the acreage as a control for the study.

For the first harvest entry, RFP built 1.96 miles of new road and reconstructed 3.51 miles of existing road to access and remove the timber from the watershed. RFP also transported and placed 17,325 cubic yards of rock to surface the roads in the watershed for hauling during the winter.

“RFP went above and beyond the call to complete the first harvest entry within the constraints imposed by the objectives of the research,” said Arne Skaugset, director of the Watersheds Research Cooperative and a principal investigator on the Hinkle Creek study. “While normal contemporary forest practices are sought in the study, the constraints made some aspects anything but normal.”

First, a more normal harvest entry would spread the units further apart, both in space and time. Researchers requested the arrangement to optimize an observable harvesting effect. Second, because of the short calibration period, RFP put the road system in place and harvested and hauled the logs all in the same season. This put tremendous logistical constraints on RFP. For example, as many as three logging contractors worked in the South Fork of Hinkle Creek at the same time.

“Completion of the first entry marked the second benchmark in the 10-year study,” Skaugset said, noting that the first benchmark was completion of the calibration phase of the research.

The percentage of the area upstream of each gauging station harvested is listed in Table 1 along with the watershed area and area harvested upstream of each gauging station. The percentage area harvested ranged from 68 percent for Fenton Creek to 13 percent in Russell Creek and for the South Fork of Hinkle Creek, 14 percent of the watershed area was harvested during this first harvest entry.

Table 1. The area of the watershed, area of the harvest unit in each watershed, and the percentage area harvested for each of the four gauged, non-fish-bearing, headwater watersheds and the South Fork Hinkle Creek.

Another management variable is the length of stream adjacent to harvesting in each of the study watersheds (see Table 2). The harvest units were located directly upstream from the stream gauging locations for each of the watersheds and the harvest units occurred on both sides of the stream for all the harvest units. The length of stream adjacent to harvesting was similar for all of the small watersheds. Fenton had the smallest value at 621 meters and BB had the largest value at 1,063 meters. However, given the range of watershed sizes, the percentage of stream length adjacent to harvesting had a much greater range with a high at Fenton of 70 percent and a low at Russell of 35 percent. For the South Fork of Hinkle Creek, 4,166 meters of stream length was adjacent to harvesting, 16 percent of the stream length in the watershed.

Table 2. The length of the stream in each watershed, the length of the stream adjacent to harvesting, and the percentage of stream length adjacent to harvesting for each of the four gauged, non-fish-bearing watersheds and the South Fork of Hinkle Creek.

This treatment did not stop with the harvest operations. Silvicultural herbicides were applied aerially in fall of 2006 as a site preparation treatment for all five harvest units. In the winter of 2006-2007, the five harvest units will be hand-planted with Douglas-fir seedlings. Herbicides will be applied in the future depending on the competition to the crop trees from grass, shrubs, and brush.

The second harvest entry in the South Fork of Hinkle Creek is scheduled starting in the summer of 2008 along the fish-bearing tributaries and main stem. Data collection, which began in 2001, is scheduled to continue until at least 2011.

Hinkle Creek research presented at NABS Annual Meeting

Dr. Judy Li, a principal investigator with the Hinkle Creek Paired Watershed Study, sponsored a special session on headwater streams research at the 54th Annual Meeting of the North American Benthological Society (NABS) held in Anchorage, Alaska June 4-9, 2006.

In the session titled “Connection of Small Streams in Time and Space,” Dr. Li summarized the objectives:

Two additional presentations at the NABS Meeting featured data from the Hinkle Creek study:

Influence of geomorphology on emigration rates of coastal cutthroat trout in headwater stream networks of western Oregon, presented by D. S. Bateman with co-authors R. E. Gresswell, and B. P. Hockman-Wert. Click here for abstract and here for presentation

Landscape analysis of stream-upland connections: Implications for runoff generation, biogeochemistry, and in-stream habitat. Presented by B. L. McGlynn with co-authors J. Seibert, R. E. Gresswell, and D. S. Bateman. Click here for abstract

The first two masters’ theses using data from the Hinkle Creek Paired Watershed Study have been successfully defended at Oregon State University. In addition, four masters’ students and three PhD students have work underway using data from the Hinkle Creek study.

Lance George, a graduate student in the College of Forestry, defended his master’s thesis for the dual degrees of Master of Science in Forest Science and Forest Engineering. Titled Baseline Stream Chemistry and Soil Resources for the Hinkle Creek Research and Demonstration Area Project, George’s research addressed the opportunity to obtain baseline data for both stream chemistry and soil resources for an intensively managed forest watershed, encompassed by the North and South Forks of Hinkle Creek.

Marc Novick, a graduate student in the Fisheries and Wildlife Department at Oregon State University, defended his master's thesis, Persistence of Spatial Distribution Patterns of Coastal Cutthroat Trout in a Cascade Mountain Stream. Marc's work evaluated the persistence of spatial patterns in the distribution of coastal cutthroat trout in a section of the South Fork Hinkle Creek.

Watersheds Reseach Cooperative newsletter:

First harvest entry in Hinkle Creek completed