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The
Foothills Landscape Project
Georgia
An Introduction:

The Foothills Landscape Project is a sweeping forest management proposal from the U.S. Forest Service that could reshape a vast portion of the Chattahoochee National Forest. Spanning more than 157,000 acres—nearly twice the size of the city of Atlanta—it is the most consequential Forest Service project in northeast Georgia in more than 15 years.   

While the majority of the project area lies within the hills of Dawson, Fannin, Gilmer, Habersham, Lumpkin, Murray, and White Counties—aptly earning the name “Foothills Landscape Project”—a corner of the project extends up into the Blue Ridge Mountains around Clayton.  

The total Foothills Landscape Project area. Map via US Forest Service.

The section of the Foothills Landscape Project between Clayton and the Chattooga River south of Highway 76 has been labeled the “Lower Chattooga Implementation Area.” You can read about it and view the implementation plan below.  

Despite formal objections in 2021 by Georgia ForestWatch, Chattooga Conservancy, Sierra Club, and The Wilderness Society, the Foothills Landscape Project has been approved. Therefore, some of the actions proposed for the Lower Chattooga Implementation Area are inevitable.  

However, the Forest Service has committed to seeking ongoing public input, and has expressed willingness to tweak the boundaries for its treatments based on feedback from area stakeholders. 

Although we continue to have strong objections to the FLP, the Chattooga Conservancy participates in the Foothills Collaborative as a member of the “Conservation Working Group” to represent the interests of our organization and advocate for preserving the ecological integrity of the Chattooga watershed ecosystems affected by Implementation Plan proposals. 

 To learn more about the Foothills Collaborative group, visit this webpage, and if you would like to be considered for membership, you can apply to join here.  

The
Lower ChattoogA
Implementation Area
New prescribed burn blocks within the Lower Chattooga Implementation Area. 
Areas prescribed for logging treatments within the Lower Chattooga Implementation Area. 

In late October 2025, USFS released a draft FLP Implementation Plan for the Lower Chattooga. The plan proposes actions beginning as soon as 2026 and continuing for the next decade. New timber treatments, including thinning, commercial harvests, and herbicide applications, are proposed for over 5,000 acres, and prescribed fire (on one-to-five- or three-to-five-year return cycles) is proposed for over 6,500 acres—although there is substantial overlap between the two, bringing the total affected area to approximately 8,500 acres.   

Our Concerns with the “Lower Chattooga Implementation Plan”:  
(The text below is a general summary of our top concerns. To read our full concerns list, with accompanying reasoning and research, download it HERE.) 
Creation of pine plantations (684 acres): 
Following near-clearcut timber harvests (leaving only 15 ft2 basal area), the Implementation Plan only includes the replanting of Shortleaf Pine in spacing as narrow as 8’ x 8’.
This omission of species diversity and dense replanting of  Shortleaf Pine makes us infer that the goal of this treatment is to create Shortleaf Pine plantations rather than return the landscape to its natural condition of uneven-aged stands of mostly broadleaf forest dominated by oak-hickory forest types, with Shortleaf, Pitch, and Table Mountain Pine forests occurring on dry ridges and rocky bluffs.
We are watching this treatment currently play out in Andrew Pickens Ranger District, where Loblolly stands are being clearcut or heavily thinned, and Shortleaf seedlings are being replanted in this same manner. The resulting pine forest area is now a monoculture, and any other native trees have been crowded out. (For reference of this treatment’s results, drive down Damascus Church Road, Woodall Shoals Road, or Charlie Cobb Road in South Carolina).
Overprescription of pine (2,893 acres):
Within this plan, a total of 2,893 acres have been prescribed pine forest maintenance (1,244 acres), restoration (684 acres), or thinning (964 acres).  
Altogether, these pine prescriptions make up 54% of forest stands prescribed for timber treatments. This is a baffling over-prescription of pine for this area and does not qualify as “ecological restoration.”  
Historical records and ecological models suggest a much lower natural and historical occurrence of pine in the Chattooga River watershed area, which is instead more ecologically appropriate for a mosaic landscape featuring mostly oak-dominated forests. For example, a 1905 USGS survey estimated percentages of the principal timber trees within the Tallulah and Chattooga River basins at 55% oak, 10% chestnut, 2% white pine, 5% hemlock, 3% black gum, 1% birch, 7% hickory, 1% locust, 3% black pine, 2% shortleaf pine, and 11% species that constituted less than 1% each (Ayers & Ashe, 1905). 
Furthermore, the majority of SYP desired conditions in the Lower Chattooga Implementation Area do not line up with ecologically appropriate forest types as mapped in the Simone Ecozone Model, which USFS has named as the scientific reference for these prescriptions. In fact, the project documents even recognize this discrepancy in at least one area: in the “two-aged regeneration harvest to restore shortleaf/ pitch pine” treatment, USFS states that “regeneration to suitable southern yellow pine is desired” on some sites that would be “more ecologically appropriate for oak or mixed oak-pine forest” (USFS, 2025, p.19). 
The high prioritization of pine “restoration” efforts, despite the fact that both historical record and modeled future conditions advise otherwise, makes us question whether the designation of these stands has been influenced by USFS timber targets and the drive to cultivate crop trees.
Cutting old growth (450 acres):
There are approximately 450 acres of stands proposed for “woodland treatments” and “expanding gap treatments” which meet the USFS criteria for type 22 and type 24 old growth*.
In this context, “woodland treatments” mean that the old growth would be extensively thinned (leaving behind as little as 20 ft2 of basal area), “expanding gap” treatments mean that 1/3rd of the forest area could be cut in “gaps,” which would later be “expanded” to the USFS’s own discretion.
Today, the Southeast has less than 1% of its former old-growth forest. Cutting any of our scarce remaining old growth represents a misguided plan for our forests.
Furthermore, USFS has stated that, regarding expanding gap cuts, “if we are planning three entries, we would potentially cut up to 1/3 of the stand acres in gaps during each entry. For the example of a 30-acre stand, this may result in 20 half-acre gaps (10 acres total), with two or more follow up entries to expand the gaps that were established in the first entry.” This appears to suggest that nearly the entire stand could be cut over three stages: an unacceptable prescription for old growth.  
Studies of old growth in this area have estimated that “gap disturbance in old growth ranged from 0.8% to 2.9% per year” (Bratton, 1998).  Therefore, a far lighter touch within old growth is recommended if the goal of this prescription is truly to mimic natural disturbance.
* Minimum age criteria, as defined by USFS standards, for old growth types 22 (dry-xeric oak forest, woodland, savanna ) and 24 (xeric pine + pine oak forest, woodland) are: Type 22, southern subtype must be 90+ years, Type 22, widespread subtype must be 110+ years, and Type 24 must be 100+ years.  
Misuse of prescribed fire (6,500 acres): 
Over 6,500 acres of new burn blocks have been proposed in the Lower Chattooga Implementation area. These burn blocks are scheduled to burn every 1 – 5 or 3 – 5 years, and Forest Service comments suggest that some may even burn annually.
The Chattooga Conservancy supports the use of prescribed fire within smaller, appropriate parcels to restore historic open canopy forest, which helps create a mosaic of habitats across the landscape and benefits species of reduced abundance such as Table Mountain Pine and Smooth Coneflower. However, we do NOT support the large-scale homogeneous management of landscapes with fire exemplified by the prescriptions for burn blocks proposed within the Lower Chattooga Implementation Area. 
None of the scientific, historic, and social data and sources support a 1-to 5-year rotation in burning cycle should be applied to this vast area within the Chattooga watershed. 
Analysis of regional fire compartment size, topography, historical records, climate, vegetation remnants and soils suggest that this area experienced a generalized pre-colonial fire return cycle of 12 years or more (Frost, 2000, p. 99). Further, more recent and specific estimates of pre-colonial fire return intervals (FRI)s for the Blue Ridge ecoregion have suggested that high slopes, home to fire-dependent ecosystems (such as Table Mountain Pine), experienced FRIs of 5-13 years, but that this estimate does “not apply to the mesophytic forests of valleys, ravines, and lower slopes, where fire was undoubtedly less common” (Arthur, 2021). Needless to say, this estimate would also NOT apply to riparian areas such as the Wild & Scenic Chattooga River corridor, and other mesophytic forest types included in these large-scale burns.  
Burns of this short frequency are generally used to cultivate forests with a much higher percentage of pine, and a larger quantity of open grasslands than that should be present in the Chattooga River watershed. Here, this burning project is unnatural, too large, too frequent, and disproportionally weighted to favor propagating a homogenous shortleaf pine or pine-oak forest type which, while appropriate in some areas, was never the dominant forest type within this area and should not be prioritized as such (see Ayers & Ash study described above). The prioritization of shortleaf pine-oak forest cultivation strategies, we believe, is designed to establish crop trees rather than implement responsible ecosystem management. 
The prescriptions of these burn blocks also fail to take into account the impact of fire of the rare, fire-intolerant, herbaceous plants within the Wild & Scenic River corridor, and the effect that frequent fire would have on the “outstandingly remarkable values” (such as “scenery,” “recreation,” and “ecology”) of the river that the USFS is required to protect.