A federal judge has rejected the U.S. Bureau of Land Management’s request to dismiss an environmental lawsuit challenging its logging plan for 13,225 acres in Oregon.

Last year, the Cascadia Wildlands and Oregon Wild nonprofits filed a complaint alleging the BLM violated federal environmental law with a timber harvest landscape plan for 13,225 acres managed by its Siuslaw field office near Eugene, Ore.

The environmental advocates claim the agency didn’t take the required “hard look” at the plan’s site-specific and cumulative effects as required by the National Environmental Policy Act, among other allegations.

Though the BLM identified “dozens of issues” with logging under its landscape plan, the agency failed to conduct an in-depth “environmental impact statement” and instead settled for an “incomplete and cursory” analysis of the project, the complaint said.

Over the next decade, up to 1,360 acres would be clear-cut and between 300 and 900 acres would be commercially thinned within the landscape plan’s boundaries, which the BLM determined would cause no significant environmental impact.

The environmental plaintiffs disagree, arguing the plan includes “structurally complex, late-successional” forest stands that are interspersed with portions of another major timber project that allows logging on 16,000 acres.

“The overlapping projects will have significant cumulative effects on fish and wildlife, erosion and water quality, invasive species infestations, and wildlife habitat, yet the agency failed to analyze or disclose the combined and synergistic impacts,” the complaint said.

The BLM asked for the lawsuit to be thrown out, since the landscape plan creates a “management strategy” for the 13,225 acres but doesn’t actually authorize “any timber harvests or any other ground-disturbing activity,” which would undergo further environmental review.

Because the landscape plan doesn’t pose an imminent threat to environmental plaintiffs, their claims aren’t “ripe” for legal action and the nonprofits lack standing to pursue them in federal court, according to BLM.

“Permitting the litigation now would short-circuit the agency’s review of future proposals to harvest timber and could distract BLM from its efforts to address concerns raised by the plaintiffs and other entities regarding potential future timber sales,” the agency said.

U.S. District Judge Michael McShane has now agreed with the recommendation of a federal magistrate judge to deny the BLM’s motion to dismiss because the injury alleged by the environmental plaintiffs is sufficiently “concrete” to challenge in court.

Under legal precedent, procedural violations of NEPA are enough to establish ripeness and the nonprofits don’t need to show they’d be harmed on a “unit-by-unit basis” to pursue their claims, according to U.S. Magistrate Judge Mustafa Kasubhai’s recommendation.

“The BLM has identified and mapped out specific tracts on which it plans to authorize logging as part of the Landscape Plan, and logging will certainly occur when the BLM implements the Landscape Plan,” he said.