OrCal Regional Restoration I FRB

Two years after launching the Rogue Valley I FRB together, Lomakatsi Restoration Project (Lomakatsi) and Blue Forest are expanding their partnership. Launched in 2025, the OrCal I FRB — the largest FRB geography to date — introduces a more adaptive financing structure that provides financial flexibility to align workforce with restoration needs, alleviating cash flow constraints and ensuring trained crews and operators are positioned to move when and where they are needed most. Lomakatsi, partner agencies, and tribes are financially responsible for managing funding sources that they’ve collectively secured for large-scale forest health and ecosystem restoration projects across thousands of acres. With project funding coming from numerous sources and reimbursement schedules, the FRB enables Lomakatsi to operate at a greater scale while ensuring timely payment to in-house crews, technical staff, and a cadre of forestry sector contractors. 

Lomakatsi brings decades of on-the-ground expertise and deep relationships with the U.S. Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, Natural Resources Conservation Service, Tribal Nations, state agencies, and private landowners — the kind of cross-boundary collaboration that turns landscape-scale restoration goals into real, measurable outcomes.  Lomakatsi implements projects through their Forest and Watershed Restoration Programs and supports forest-based communities through their  Inter-Tribal Indian Youth Service Corps, which helps develop Tribal workforce capacity to steward and restore ancestral lands.

We acknowledge that Lomakatsi operates programs across the ancestral lands of aboriginal peoples representing 18 federally recognized Tribes and Tribal communities who lived and live in the watersheds of the Willamette River, Columbia River, Rogue River, Klamath River, Umpqua River, Smith River, Great Basin, and Pit River, in what is now called Oregon and California. From sagebrush hillsides and mixed conifer forests, to oak woodlands and riverine systems, we offer our respect, recognition, and gratitude to the original past, present, and future inhabitants of these landscapes, to whom we dedicate this work.

Types of projects leveraging the OrCal I FRB at launch:

• McCash Hazard Tree Removal Project Located on the Six Rivers National Forest, the McCash Hazard Tree Removal Project is a post-fire effort implemented by Lomakatsi in partnership with the U.S. Forest Service, the Karuk Tribe, and the Mid Klamath Watershed Council. The project reduces hazardous fuels, supports the local forestry industry, creates rural jobs, and provides a portion of the resulting wood product as firewood for tribal elders and the surrounding community.
• Upper Rogue Oak Initiative As implementation lead for the Upper Rogue Oak Initiative — a Klamath Siskiyou Oak Network project — Lomakatsi is reducing hazardous fuels and enhancing oak habitat across Bureau of Land Management and private lands in southwest Oregon, advancing cross-boundary restoration across public and private lands alike.