The PEER study further reveals that BLM has vastly exaggerated the success of reforestation efforts, a factor that further contorts agency timber harvest targets. The BLM information base for the agency's forests is largely fictional. The PEER study revealed that despite an agency policy that forest inventories be updated every 10 years, most of the BLM districts inventories were last updated in the 1960s and 70s and in some cases even those plans were based upon aerial photography taken in the 1950s.
Some districts lack inventories altogether.
BLM is, by law, required to practice sustainable forestry. BLM's sustained yield unit is a misnomer. Because the agency's basic planning tool supporting its timber sale program is inaccurate and inflated, the claim of sustainability is indefensible and patently false. Worse, the claimants knowingly and deliberately mislead. Compounding BLM's timber planning problems is the failure of reforestation efforts to replace harvested stands.