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The Forest Service and the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission have entered a new agreement to help heal Helene’s adverse impact on wildlife and outdoor economies, and to prepare for the future.
They’re engaging in the largest good-neighbor agreement ever enacted by the two agencies. They’ll share in $290 million allocated by the federal American Relief Act, which passed in December 2024. They’ll be using the funds to staff a 90-person temporary division for a decade to oversee the work.
The NCWRC and the Forest Service frequently collaborate, often on projects like prescribed burns on hunting lands and brook trout restoration projects. But, according to James Melonas, National Forest supervisor for North Carolina, the scale of Helene restoration is so enormous that neither agency felt they could fully tackle it with their staff alone, prompting the agreement.
Melonas said part of the work is shoring up the infrastructure that supports the region’s outdoor economies.
“We kind of had a double whammy with the time of year when the storm happened, which was right in the busiest part of outdoor recreation and visits to Western North Carolina,” Melonas said. Some of the work will focus on fixing trails, access points, and other recreation infrastructure.
NCWRC chief of Helene restoration, Doug Besler, said the partnership will also ensure the forest can withstand future shocks.
“Western North Carolina has got a tremendous number of people that live here and recreate in the forest, and that use continues, and we have impacts from climate change,” Besler said. “All of those things make us really take stock in terms of thinking how do we build stuff better?”
The money will also be used to help create wildlife corridors, get trails in shape, assess trout populations, and rethink how things like roads and parking relate to flood safety. Besler is particularly concerned about threatened and endangered species like the Appalachian elktoe mussel and the cerulean warbler.
“Even in 2025, it was a challenge to get access to a lot of locations, even where we knew populations were,” Besler said. “So the first year or so, there's going to be a lot of assessment going out there and trying to find where these populations are and try to determine and what the impacts to them were.”
