Federal Forest Restoration

Restoration of our national forests benefits the environment and creates jobs in rural communities. Increasing the pace of restoration of the Nation's forests is critically needed to address a variety of threats - including fire, climate change, the bark beetle infestation, and others -- to the health of our forest ecosystems, watersheds, and forest-dependent communities. The Forest Service within the Department of Agriculture and the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), Bureau of Land Management (BLM), Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), and National Park Service (NPS) within the Department of the Interior have increasingly promoted landscape-scale forest restoration as a way to improve forest health. Through landscape-scale projects, agencies can treat tens or hundreds of thousands of acres, in contrast to projects commonly of under 1,000 acres. Such projects must comply with NEPA by assessing the effects of major federal actions that significantly affect the environment. This book examines the number of such projects the agencies have conducted and how they are scoped; the actions taken by agencies to track the projects' progress; successes and challenges experienced by agencies; and steps taken by agencies to help increase NEPA efficiency for such projects.

This book assesses the Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Program (CFLRP) and identifies lessons learned for governance and policy through this new and innovative approach to collaborative forest management. Unlike anything else in US public land management, the CFLRP is a nationwide program that requires collaboration throughout the life of national forest restoration projects, joining agency partners and local stakeholder groups in a kind of decade-long restoration marriage. This book provides a comprehensive assessment of the governance dynamics of the program, examining: questions about collaborative governance processes and the dynamics of trust, accountability and capacity; how scientific information is used in making decisions and integrated into adaptive management processes; and the topic of collaboration through implementation, an underdeveloped area of collaborative governance literature. Bringing together chapters from a community of social science and policy researchers who have conducted studies across multiple CFLRP projects, this volume generates insights, not just about the program, but also about dynamics that are central to collaborative and landscape approaches to land management and relevant for broader practice. This volume is a timely and important contribution to environmental governance scholarship. It will be of interest to researchers and students of natural resource management, environmental governance, and forestry, as well as practitioners and policy makers involved in forest and ecosystem restoration efforts, and collaborative natural resource management more broadly.

In the last two decades, a concern on how federal forests in the United States are managed has provoked concerns among different stakeholders, including NGOs. The purpose of this thesis is to contribute to the understanding of NGO influence on forest management legislation. Eight aspects were selected and compared in different study cases referring to legislative proposals dealing with forest management in order to define success criteria for a legislative initiative. The study indicates that the following criteria are particularly important to fulfill in order to influence forest management legislation: - The issue to address should be on the political agenda and have high public interest. - Environmental and social aspects should not be at the expense of economic aspects. - The legislative initiative should be prepared in multi-stakeholder processes, including local government and organizations. - The supporters of the initiative should take part in all decision-making processes and advise the Government in aspects related to their areas of expertise. NGOs would likely improve their chances of influencing forest management legislation if they hold a flexible position regarding legislative proposals containing similar or even less strict measures than their own initiatives, look at market oriented schemes as alternatives to legislation, and maintain good relationships with other major stakeholders.

Changes in forest management have detrimentally affected the economic health of small communities in the Blue Mountain region of Oregon over the past few decades. A build-up of small trees threatens the ecological health of these forests and increases wildland fire hazard. Hoping to boost their economies and also restore these forests, local leaders are interested in the economic value of timber that might be available from thinning treatments on these lands. This study identified densely stocked stands where thinning could provide a reliable source of wood, and examined the quantity, distribution, and economic value of the resulting timber for 5.5 million acres of national forest lands in eastern Oregon. Our findings verified local land managers' observations that the land base to support timber harvest targets in the region is smaller than anticipated in the past. Legal restrictions and current management practices have reduced the acreage available for harvest and mechanical restoration. Additionally, we found that on lands where active forestry is allowable, thinning of most densely stocked stands would not be economically viable. Findings from this analysis can help establish a common understanding of Blue Mountains vegetative and economic conditions for managers trying to restore the region's national forests.