Great Old Broads for Wilderness: BHLP

BROADS HEALTHY LANDS PROJECT

Providing Comprehensive Citizens' Field Data for Effective Off-Highway Vehicle
and Travel Corridor Management on Public Lands

"This is not an easy issue to tackle, but if we wait a day, a week, or even a year, the impact on the land and the issues surrounding the problem will become even harder to deal with. We need to address the issue now."

--Dale Bosworth, Chief of the US Forest Service, speaking about off-highway vehicles

WELCOME

IMPORTANT DOCUMENTS

If you are planning on monitoring, the documents below will provide you with our monitoring protocols and what types of issues to look for while monitoring.

BHLP Volunteer Guide
BHLP Monitoring Form
BHLP Photos of Conditions

Welcome to Broads database of public lands travel corridor impacts. Our database, GINGER (Great Old Broads for

Wilderness Interactive National Grassroots Evaluation Resource) , was developed by Diane Tracy, a member of the Broads Board of Directors, and named after Ginger Harmon, a founding member of Great Old Broads for Wilderness who continues to serve on our Board of Directors. Diane, an avid hiker, became frustrated by the lack of management of public lands and the devastating impacts, primarily from indiscriminate motorized recreationists, she was witnessing on these precious wild lands. Working over the past few years with others in the conservation community and with public land managers, Diane and Great Old Broads for Wilderness have developed the BHLP initiative that provides objective, quantifiable system to document all types of impacts to public lands travel corridors. It is our hope that the data citizen volunteers collect along travel corridors, both baseline conditions and follow-up monitoring, will assist agencies in preserving our wild roadless public lands and the variety of benefits they provide for wildlife habitat, watershed protection, and quality recreational experiences.

On this web site you will be able to find travel corridor data that has been collected on certain named routes. While our pilot projects were focused in areas of Utah and Colorado, with new partnerships and projects getting underway, we add new information to the database daily. It is our goal to have projects, trained monitors and datasets collected per our protocol available in GINGER from public lands all across the country.

WHY IS A NATIONAL DATABASE NEEDED?

We recognize that there are many different types of impacts to our public lands from recreational use/abuse and thus our monitoring system and database collect information on all types of uses (off-highway vehicles, bikes, horses, and hikers) and impacts. However, off-highway vehicles (OHVs) continue to be the biggest current threat to the overall health of our wild public lands and are the main impetus for our monitoring efforts.

WHY ARE OHVS A PROBLEM?

OHV riders have increased seven-fold in less than 30 years. It is not just the exponential increase in riders that is creating the problem; the power and speed of OHVs have also multiplied, thus creating the potential for motorized access to previously inaccessible backcountry. The range, speed, noise and footprint of an OHV can cause substantial damage to wild, fragile ecosystems and have significant impacts on water quality, wildlife, and other users of the public lands who prefer quiet unspoiled landscapes. And it is not just a problem for the wide open western lands. A New York Times article pointed out that off-road vehicles have created 22,000 miles of deep ruts in the 729,000 acre Big Cypress National Preserve in Florida, and are changing water quality, water flow, wildlife behavior, and plant growth in the Preserve. OHV use on our public lands must be managed.

Public land agencies at all levels – local, state and federal – are attempting to develop balanced and responsible management plans, but the agencies do not have the staff to monitor the vast lands impacted by motorized use, or to enforce the established rules. Increased monitoring of our public lands is essential in order to provide land management agencies with accurate, thorough and reproducible information that they need to create and enforce balanced, effective management plans. With inadequate staff to carry out this monitoring, the help of trained citizen volunteers is essential. Please join us today to help make a difference.