The National Forest Foundation is hosting two peer learning sessions next week. These sessions are designed to offer real-life examples and practical applications for collaborative groups. There is still time to RSVP for these sessions:
Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Desired Conditions? CFLRP Five Year Reporting
Monday, May 13, 2013 | 2:00-4:00 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time
Who’s afraid of the big bad desired conditions? Not us! You’re invited to join the Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Program Monitoring Network and National Forest Foundation in this upcoming webinar on developing desired conditions and ecological and indicators.
Here’s why this is important: In order to fulfill the requirements of the Omnibus Public Land Management Act of 2009, which established the Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration (CFLR) program, the USDA Forest Service must submit a 5-year report to Congress that assesses whether, and to what extent, the program is fulfilling its purposes. In 2011, the National Forest Foundation facilitated a meeting with Forest Service staff and agency partners to develop a suite of national indicators for the 5-year report. The result of this meeting was five draft indicators covering the purposes of the Act, including one covering ecological impacts.
Guidance for the ecological indicator, which will assess the ecological outcomes of the CFLRP projects, was released by Deputy Chief Leslie Weldon in 2012. As part of the guidance, project collaboratives must develop desired conditions that are specific to their collaborative group and the landscape and they are working on. This webinar will highlight three CFLR projects where collaborative members have been hard at work developing desired conditions and monitoring indicators to address the national indicators for wildlife, fire, and invasive species. Participants will hear about the design and development process, and see examples, from representatives of the Dinkey Landscape Restoration Project, Uncompahgre Plateau Project, and Selway-Middle Fork Clearwater Project. There will be time to delve into the details, ask questions, and share experiences.
Evaluation and Adaptation in Collaborative Resource Management – A New Sourcebook
Tuesday, May 14th, 2013 | 12:00 p.m.- 2:00 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time
We hope you can join us for a discussion about a newly-published sourcebook, Closing the Feedback Loop: Evaluation and Adaptation in Collaborative Resource Management. The sourcebook explores strategies and tools that collaborative groups use to systematically evaluate their work and adapt plans and management actions based on what they have learned. Presenters will share examples from the field, and we will discuss process tools from nine rapid assessments that are described in the sourcebook. This session builds on a previous peer learning session (May 4, 2012), held during the sourcebook’s development. We invite you to join the discussion, share other examples and discuss opportunities for integrating shared learning, systematic evaluation, and adaptive change into collaborative resource management.
The sourcebook was developed by Ann Moote in coordination with a project team of the following organizations: Ecological Restoration Institute, Forest Guild, National Forest Foundation, USFS Ecosystem Services and National Partnership Office, Watershed Research and Training Center, and Sustainable Northwest.