Preserving our natural legacy with Stand Tall Oregon

We built a public-facing digital home for the Habitat Conservation Plan — a site that translates a complex, multi-decade policy document into something communities, recreators, and policy-makers can engage with. The site supports public comment, education, and ongoing transparency.

The Habitat Conservation Plan governs 2.7 million acres of state-managed forestland — timber revenue for rural counties, habitat for 17 threatened species, and recreation for millions of Oregonians. The source material was 1,400+ pages of federal permitting language written for lawyers and biologists. We had to make it legible to the people it actually affects: loggers, tribal councils, teachers, hunters, mill workers, county commissioners.

We rebuilt the information architecture around three audiences — communities, industry, and policymakers — with parallel narratives instead of a single dense trunk. Every claim links back to the primary planning document. A structured public-comment flow routes input directly into the Board of Forestry's review queue, replacing a scanned-PDF process that had suppressed participation for years.

The site became the canonical reference cited by Oregon Public Broadcasting, The Oregonian, and legislative staff during the 2024 session. Accessibility conformance hit WCAG 2.1 AA across every template, and the comment engine has since been reused for two additional rulemaking cycles. Post-launch analytics showed rural counties over-indexing 3× against the state average for time-on-site — the audience the plan needed most.