New federal standards protecting a small bat apparently won’t hamper timber harvesting in South Carolina significantly, forestry industry officials said Wednesday.

The plan seems “so much more manageable,” said Cam Crawford, president of the S.C. Forestry Association. “There may be some issues here and there, but we can address those.”

Officials at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service settled on listing the northern long-eared bat as threatened, a step short of saying it faces extinction as first proposed.

That allows flexibility in dealing with conditions that vary locally, officials said.