JACKSON - Officials from the Shoshone National Forest said they would suspend a yearlong forest planning process pending more information about a legal decision affecting the management of national forests.

Bryan Armel, forest planner for the Shoshone, said there will be no more public meetings until the agency gets more information, possibly in the next few weeks. Several public meetings were planned for April.

"I don't know how we're going to proceed until we get more direction," he said, noting that a management plan had been expected to be finished in a year. That will likely be delayed, he said.

On the Bridger-Teton National Forest, Mary Cernicek said no public meetings are scheduled, but the agency is "holding the course" and will continue with public involvement as its forest plan, expected in late 2008, progresses.

A federal district judge ruled last week the Bush administration illegally rewrote the rules for managing 192 million acres of federally owned forests and grasslands in 2005 and must consider the environmental impact of its plan before offering another policy blueprint.

The ruling by Judge Phyllis Hamilton of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California suspends the forest rules the administration adopted on Jan. 5, 2005. Hamilton said the government did not adequately assess the policy's impact on wildlife and the environment and did not give sufficient public notice of the "paradigm shift" that the rule put in place.

The judge ordered the Forest Service to suspend its 2005 rule and subject it to a new round of analysis, taking into account the environmental protection and public participation requirements in the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act and the Administrative Procedures Act.

Shoshone and Bridger-Teton officials began the forest planning process under the Bush administration's 2005 guidelines.

The battle between environmental groups and the administration over the forest rules has raged for several years. Under the old policy, in place since the Reagan administration, the government had to maintain viable populations of native wildlife in forests and monitor some populations regularly, while limiting logging and drilling for oil and gas.

The new rule - which gave economic activities as high a priority as maintaining the forest's ecological health - made it easier to conduct drilling and logging in national forests while weakening protection for native fish and wildlife. It also accelerated the process for approving forest management plans, which can drag on for as long as seven years, thereby cutting planning costs.