SUNDANCE, Wyo. (AP) - Three timber-thinning projects on more than 50,000 acres of the Black Hills National Forest in northeast Wyoming have been stalled by environmental appeals.

The delays show that despite changes in federal regulations and a new federal law to speed up such decisions, forest management disputes can still bring logging and thinning to a halt.

The three projects in the Bear Lodge Ranger District of the Black Hills would have resulted in the sale of almost 35 million board feet of timber. But the U.S. Forest Service withdrew each of the proposals this summer.

The projects are:

-The Cement Project, southeast of Sundance, included about 20,000 acres inside the project boundaries, between the Cement Ridge Lookout and Moskee.

-The Dean Project, northeast of Sundance, covered almost 15,000 acres.

-The Planting Project, at the northern end of the Bear Lodge Mountains, covers about 17,000 acres.

"This is a relatively undeveloped area of the Black Hills," Jeremy Nichols of Biodiversity Conservation Alliance said last week. "Management shouldn't be focused on industrial exploitation." By that, he means commercial logging.

Biodiversity, an environmental group based in Laramie, appealed the projects, saying they were based on incomplete data, failed to protect sensitive species, old growth timber stands and, most importantly, allowed extensive logging in one of the most remote parts of the Black Hills.

Nichols said old-growth timber and stands left to die and decay through natural process provide valuable habitat for such species as goshawks, pygmy nuthatches and bats.

Aaron Everett of the Black Hills Forest Resource Association, a timber industry group, disagrees. "This is environmentalism on paper only," Everett said Saturday.

The projects called for a combination commercial logging, noncommercial timber thinning, prescribed burns and brush removal in mosaic patterns inside the boundaries each of the three project areas. Much of the land inside the project boundaries would remain untouched, including patches of private land.

Everett contends, along with the Forest Service, that these projects would have reduced the risk of catastrophic wildfires and runaway bug infestation by thinning dense stands of Ponderosa pines. Everett also says thinning, including logging, can improve wildlife habitat and protect streams.

Biodiversity along with other environmental groups argues that natural processes such as wildfires and even insect infestations should be allowed to run their course on public lands in remote areas, where homes and businesses are not threatened.

The Bush administration's Healthy Forest Initiative and the Healthy Forest Act passed by Congress three years ago were designed to speed resolution of such disputes, but these new regulations apply mainly to projects near communities that are at risk for wildfire.

The Cement, Planting and Dean projects all in relatively unpopulated areas and were filed under the old rules.

Most local residents and virtually every government official in the Black Hills support the three projects.

Rancher and real-estate broker Nels Smith of Sundance, a former Wyoming state legislator who now serves on the federally chartered Black Hills Advisory Council, said the delay is "an abuse of the process."

"We need timber harvests for a number of reasons. If you don't cut trees, you end up with a biological desert. It hurts the availability of water and wildlife forage and the health of the forest," Smith said.

But Nichols said public lands in the relatively unpopulated Wyoming side of the Black Hills are best left to natural processes.