Good Neighbor Authority Thunder Cat Environmental Planning Services for the Umpqua National Forest

The Oregon Department of Forestry is seeking a contractor to deliver environmental planning services for the Thunder Cat Integrated Vegetation Management project on the North Umpqua Ranger District of the Umpqua National Forest. The work is performed under a Good Neighbor Authority agreement with the U.S. Forest Service and supports the department's Federal Forest Restoration Program, which invests in project planning and environmental law compliance because planning remains a primary bottleneck to scaling up landscape resilience work on federal forests. The contract is phased. Phase 1, the only work offered now, runs from notice to proceed through June 30, 2027 and covers fifteen tasks: a virtual kickoff, project management and progress meetings, a resource topic and responsibility matrix, data inventory and gap identification, and GIS analyses, mapping, modeling and ongoing geodatabase administration. The core product is a set of resource-specific mid-level assessments, each with existing conditions, need for change, issues, constraints and possible actions, rolled up into reports covering silviculture, fuels and fire, hydrology, soils, fisheries, wildlife, botany, recreation and visuals, transportation, heritage and Tribal resources. These feed an integrated executive briefing memorandum, a report-out meeting with presentation materials, a preliminary proposed action, a heritage survey and report, and final reports, a final geodatabase and an assessment record. The department may later amend the contract to add Phase 2, which would cover additional data collection, amended assessments and a refined proposed action, estimated for February through June 2029, or it may end the contract after Phase 1 and solicit separately.