The U.S. Forest Service is planning a combination of logging and controlled fire in woods south of Bend that agency officials say will improve the forest for animals.

“We are thinking of wildlife and habitat, both,” said Holly Jewkes, district ranger at the Crescent Ranger District of the Deschutes National Forest.

The Rim-Paunina project will cover 40,000 acres of forest on both sides of U.S. Highway 97 between Crescent and Chemult. The thinned woods will provide more places to live for animals, according to the Forest Service, which the agency says prefers open stands.

The project will include logging on 11,000 acres and controlled fire on 13,500 acres, Jewkes said. “A lot of that is overlapping the same units, the same stands,” she said.

The work in the woods will likely start this fall, Jewkes said, barring any appeals to the plan. The project is open to appeal for about the next month and a half.

About 24 million board feet of timber will be cut in the project, Jewkes said. She said the timber has yet to go up for sale so it is unclear where it will be hauled to be milled.

The American Forest Resource Council supports projects that are on a “landscape scale,” such as the Rim-Paunina project, Irene Jerome, a John Day consultant for the group wrote in a Wednesday email. The group represents timber companies around the West.

“Generally we would like to see active treatment on approximately 50 percent of the project planning area and Rim Paunina is close to that,” she wrote.

“I think it is a good plan,” she said Wednesday by phone.

Parts of the plan also had the support of at least some conservation groups.

Tim Lillebo, eastern Oregon representative for Oregon Wild, said it is a “real positive” that 15 percent of any logging unit in the project will be left untouched as wildlife cover. The nonprofit is headquartered in Portland.

Lillebo, who is based in Bend, did say he has concerns about the cutting of large trees for the sake of stopping the spread of mistletoe and the building of eight miles of temporary roads. Whether the concerns and others with the project are enough to lead to an appeal of the project plan, he said he didn’t know yet.

“We just got the documents,” Lillebo said, “so we need to go through them in detail.”

On the Web

On the Web

For more information on the Rim-Paunina project go online to j.mp/WSppZt.