207 Sustainability Water quality is one of many things that Starker carefully manages. The cable logging system the company uses pulls cut trees to the top of ridges and away from streams and wetlands. Road construction and maintenance are improved to minimize erosion to keep water clean. Buffers are maintained for spraying and harvesting to protect streams. Allen and the IT team are working now on harvest planning and scheduling workflows to improve these processes. “Everything starts with the harvest, and then all subsequent workflows follow—site preparation, spraying, tree planting, and thinning,” Allen said. “With the dashboard, the person responsible for each step can look and see when each process will be done for each unit so they can make sure a contractor is scheduled to move in when the prior work is finished.” Starker has a long history of sustainable forest management and is focused on improving tracking of sustainability metrics, with a dashboard that tracks seedling survival and growth, silvicultural treatments for young stands, and wildlife projects. The dashboard and data it collects demonstrates sustainable growth and harvest levels across the acres it owns. This allows the foresters to identify areas for improvement and plan for future generations. Under a stewardship agreement with the State of Oregon, a landowner that shows commitment to protecting natural resources, such as water and fish and wildlife habitat, can gain long-term regulatory certainty without fear of further restrictions by sharing evidence that it follows Forest Practices Act rules. Beyond better planning, the enterprise-level GIS that Starker has deployed makes it easier to monitor and report the actions the company takes. “It has been a process of awakening,” Allen said. “We identified early on that what we needed was more integration, moving from a culture of independent work by 12 people with 12 different workflows, to a single repository where we can see the status of the forest and all our work.” Map marks public access for recreation and also illustrates Starker Forests’ close connection to the forestry program at Oregon State University (OSU) where it sponsors a lecture series. Map courtesy of Starker Forests.
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