GRANTS PASS — U.S. Forest Service plans to aggressively harvest trees burned in the 2002 Biscuit fire would harm old growth forest reserves for the next century and are not needed to reduce fire danger, says Jerry Franklin, a leading expert on old growth forest ecology.

The only thing worse for the spotted owl habitat burned in the fire than removing large dead trees would be logging large green trees, Franklin wrote in formal comments on the draft environmental impact statement on the Biscuit Fire Recovery Project.

"The consensus in the ecological community at this point is salvage logging rarely contributes anything positive to the recovery processes," Franklin said Monday from his office in Seattle.

Franklin, a professor of forest ecology at the University of Washington, was a principal architect of the 1994 Northwest Forest Plan, which created a network based on old growth forests to protect habitat for the northern spotted owl and other species on national forests in western Oregon, Washington and Northern California.

The Biscuit fire burned 500,000 acres mostly on the Siskiyou National Forest in southwestern Oregon, making it the largest wildfire in the nation for 2002.

Franklin's comments were among some 23,000 received by the Jan. 20 deadline on the salvage plan, said project spokeswoman Judy McHugh. The Forest Service will have no reaction to specific comments, but will consider them all before issuing its final decision this April.

The Forest Service proposal to log 518 million board feet of timber from 25,000 acres of the burned area starting this summer has become a hot-button issue. Environmentalists argue the plan calls for too much logging and replanting will create artificial landscapes ill-suited for wildlife and more flammable than a natural forest. The Forest Service and timber industry have complained that environmental analysis slows the salvage and restoration process so much they become uneconomical.

Franklin's comments contrast with statements made by Hal Salwasser, dean of the College of Forestry at Oregon State University, at a recent forum on the Biscuit salvage plan. Salwasser said that without cutting dead trees and replanting, the half of the Biscuit area that burned intensely was doomed to grow back as brush and hardwoods that burn over and over.