Project
Georgia
December 2025
The USFS is enacting the Foothills Landscape Project one chunk at a time, through Implementation Plans: groups of site-specific actions for sub-units within the Project area. One of these is the Lower Chattooga Implementation Area, which encompasses the Georgia portion of the Chattooga River watershed downstream (southwest) of Highway 76. This is where the Foothills Landscape Project is poised to take its next steps.
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.
Since the Foothills Landscape Project has already been approved—despite formal objections filed by the Chattooga Conservancy and others—specific FLP Implementation Plans are not required to have further environmental analysis or public review. Instead, in a nod towards public input, USFS has organized a “Collaborative Group” of stakeholders, which convene to provide feedback on FLP Implementation Plan proposals. Although we continue to have strong objections to the FLP, the Chattooga Conservancy participates in the 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.
What can you do?
- Learn: Many materials about the Lower Chattooga Implementation Plan (and other chunks of the FLP) are available online. Read the full draft of the Lower Chattooga Implementation Plan here or explore the “USFS Projects” layer on Chattooga Conservancy’s interactive map to see the areas where specific Foothills Landscape Project actions are proposed.
- Participate: There will be an annual meeting of the Foothills Collaborative Group in early 2026 (February or March), targeted at the general public. There is also discussion of a public field trip to proposed treatment sites in the Lower Chattooga area. When the 2026 Foothills Collaborative Group annual meeting and the potential Lower Chattooga Implementation Area public field trip are scheduled, we will let you know. Join us and make your voice heard about land management actions in the Chattooga River watershed!
- If you want to receive notice about Foothills Landscape Project meetings (and all other GA forest updates) directly from USFS, you can subscribe to Chattahoochee-Oconee National Forest alerts here.
Background
The Forest Service launched its “Foothills Landscape Initiative” in the fall of 2016. The project area encompasses a vast 157,625 acres of national forest land in north Georgia, including a significant portion of the Chattooga River watershed in Rabun County. We have been engaged in the Foothills Project’s “collaborative” process to push for the restoration of native forest types, old-growth forests and native canebrake ecosystems, and to also push for the protection of water quality, wilderness areas, and roadless landscapes within the project area.
After a series of public meetings and workshops during 2017, the Forest Service issued its “proposed action” for the Foothills Project. The agency also developed an online forum to solicit public participation.
We submitted 3 sets of comments on the Foothills Landscape Initiative in the early stages of planning:
On December 2, 2019, the Forest Service released the Foothills Landscape Project Draft Environmental Assessment (EA). After denying a request for a delayed start date of the commenting period, they published their official legal notice in Gainesville Times for the 30-day comment period ending January 10, 2020.
Over 2,000 comments were submitted by the Jan. 10th deadline! The Chattooga Conservancy submitted comments in partnership with the Southern Environmental Law Center, Defenders of Wildlife, Georgia ForestWatch, Sierra Club, and the Wilderness Society, as a document totaling more than 200 pages. We also prepared a separate brief set of comments:
In August of 2021, the Forest Service issued a lengthy 500+ page revised environmental assessment (EA), plus a suite of associated documents for the project. The agency gave citizens minimal time to review all of this paperwork and to submit comments by mid-August. Unfortunately, the revised programmatic EA still failed to provide essential details about exactly where, when, and what kind of actions will be implemented within the huge project area, and instead deferred these specific disclosures, as well as site-specific reviews of their full environmental impacts, until later on during the project implementation phase.
The project’s final environmental assessment and decision notice were approved in April 2022. We are continuing to monitor this large project through involvement with the ongoing “Foothills Collaborative Group,” an assembly of interested citizens, agencies, and NGOs.
This is a large project that is slated to be implemented over several years. Stay tuned for further updates, and thank you to all who have gotten involved!
