A Closer Look At Forests On The Edge

Privately owned forests provide many public benefits, including clean water and air, wildlife habitat, and recreational opportunities. By 2030, 44.2 million acres of rural private forest land across the conterminous United States are projected to experience substantial increases in residential development. As housing density increases, the public benefits provided by private forests can be permanently altered. We examine factors behind projected patterns of residential development and conversion of private forest land by 2030 in northwestern Washington, southern Maine, and northwestern Georgia. Some key factors affecting the extent of future residential housing include (1) population growth from migration into an area; (2) historical settlement patterns, topography, and land ownership; and (3) land use planning and zoning.

Privately owned forests provide many public benefits, including clean water and air, wildlife habitat, and recreational opportunities. By 2030, 44.2 million acres of rural private forest land across the conterminous United States are projected to experience substantial increases in residential development. As housing density increases, the public benefits provided by private forests can be permanently altered. We examine factors behind projected patterns of residential development and conversion of private forest land by 2030 in northwestern Washington, southern Maine, and northwestern Georgia. Some key factors affecting the extent of future residential housing include (1) population growth from migration into an area; (2) historical settlement patterns, topography, and land ownership; and (3) land use planning and zoning.

The private working land base of America's forests is being converted to developed uses, with implications for the condition and management of affected private forests and the watersheds in which they occur. The Forests on the Edge project seeks to improve understanding of the processes and thresholds associated with increases in housing density in private forests and likely effects on the contributions of those forests to timber, wildlife, and water resources. This report, the first in a series, displays and describes housing density projections on private forests, by watershed, across the conterminous United States. An interdisciplinary team used geographic information system (GIS) techniques to identify fourth-level watersheds containing private forests that are projected to experience increased housing density by 2030. Results indicate that some 44.2 million acres (over 11 percent) of private forests--particularly in the East, where most private forests occur--are likely to see dramatic increases in housing development in the next three decades, with consequent impacts on ecological, economic, and social services. Although conversion of forest land to other uses over time is inevitable, local jurisdictions and states can target efforts to prevent or reduce conversion of the most valuable forest lands to keep private working forests resilient and productive.

The continued conversion and development of forest land pose a serious threat to the ecosystem services derived from forested landscapes. There are unavoidable challenges involved in quantifying the threats from forest conversion and their related costs to human well-being: (1) most attempts to quantify the costs of forest conversion on ecosystem services will necessarily rely on specific ecological science that is often emerging, changing, or simply nonexistent; (2) given the interconnected nature of ecosystem products and processes, any attempt to quantify the effects of forest conversion must grapple with jointness in production; (3) the ecology and the human dimensions of ecosystems are highly specific to spatial-temporal circumstances.

The ecology of the ever-changing Maine forest

Hugh P. Possingham Landscape-scale conservation planning is coming of age. In the last couple of decades, conservation practitioners, working at all levels of governance and all spatial scales, have embraced the CARE principles of conservation planning – Comprehensiveness, Adequacy, Representativeness, and Efficiency. Hundreds of papers have been written on this theme, and several different kinds of software program have been developed and used around the world, making conservation planning based on these principles global in its reach and influence. Does this mean that all the science of conservation planning is over – that the discovery phase has been replaced by an engineering phase as we move from defining the rules to implementing them in the landscape? This book and the continuing growth in the literature suggest that the answer to this question is most definitely ‘no. ’ All of applied conservation can be wrapped up into a single sentence: what should be done (the action), in what place, at what time, using what mechanism, and for what outcome (the objective). It all seems pretty simple – what, where, when, how and why. However stating a problem does not mean it is easy to solve.

From a fire policy of prevention at all costs to today's restored burning, Between Two Fires is America's history channeled through the story of wildland fire management. Stephen J. Pyne tells of a fire revolution that began in the 1960s as a reaction to simple suppression and single-agency hegemony, and then matured into more enlightened programs of fire management. It describes the counterrevolution of the 1980s that stalled the movement, the revival of reform after 1994, and the fire scene that has evolved since then. Pyne is uniquely qualified to tell America’s fire story. The author of more than a score of books, he has told fire’s history in the United States, Australia, Canada, Europe, and the Earth overall. In his earlier life, he spent fifteen seasons with the North Rim Longshots at Grand Canyon National Park. In Between Two Fires, Pyne recounts how, after the Great Fires of 1910, a policy of fire suppression spread from America’s founding corps of foresters into a national policy that manifested itself as a costly all-out war on fire. After fifty years of attempted fire suppression, a revolution in thinking led to a more pluralistic strategy for fire’s restoration. The revolution succeeded in displacing suppression as a sole strategy, but it has failed to fully integrate fire and land management and has fallen short of its goals. Today, the nation’s backcountry and increasingly its exurban fringe are threatened by larger and more damaging burns, fire agencies are scrambling for funds, firefighters continue to die, and the country seems unable to come to grips with the fundamentals behind a rising tide of megafires. Pyne has once again constructed a history of record that will shape our next century of fire management. Between Two Fires is a story of ideas, institutions, and fires. It’s America’s story told through the nation’s flames.