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CORVALLIS, Ore. – The Oregon State University College of Forestry is hosting an input session next month about the college’s development of a new plan to guide management of the OSU-owned McDonald-Dunn Research Forest in the Coast Range foothills northwest of Corvallis.

OSU students, faculty, staff and community members are invited to the meeting from 6 to 8 p.m. on Wednesday, June 5, in Peavy Forest Science Center room 117. It can also be attended via Zoom (meeting ID 823 2250 1716). Accommodation requests related to a disability should be made by June 3 to Ann Van Zee, [email protected].

The college has developed a suite of strategies that will serve as the foundation for forest management and now needs to make decisions regarding how these strategies will be overlaid across the 11,500-acre forest. College leaders will provide an overview of decisions made to date and request input on how land is allocated within the forest among the different management strategies. The session will be structured as a two-way conversation with questions and answers regarding those possible allocations.

College officials note there will be a separate process to discuss forest recreation issues such as additional trails, more parking and lifting restrictions on electric bicycles. The process to develop a visitor use management plan will start once a new forest director is hired. In the meantime, people can direct their ideas regarding recreation and other topics to a webform the college has set up for collecting and archiving comments.

The forests, used by the public for a range of recreational purposes, are presently managed under a plan developed in 2005. A few months after starting as the college’s Cheryl Ramberg-Ford and Allyn C. Ford Dean in 2020, Tom DeLuca formed a College Research Forests Advisory Committee to create a draft vision, mission and goals statement and to build a process for creating a new forest management plan for McDonald-Dunn.