Field-Tested Tools for Sustainable Forest Stewardship in the Pacific Northwest

Commodities

• Additional Plants: trees

Practices

• Crop Production: forestry
• Education and Training: technical assistance, workshop

This project will equip private, non-industrial forest owners in western Washington with easily accessible tools to help them to navigate the opportunities available to them as forest producers, and to manage the risks associated with stewarding a resource that takes decades to grow to maturity.

It builds on the findings of three previous SARE projects on the stewardship of Pacific Northwest forests, which each addressed a different phase of the management process and the forest's development. With the help of these resources, producers will have better information available to them to practice good stewardship; will be able to improve the financial returns from managing their forests; and will improve the wildlife habitat and water quality produced by their forest as ecosystem services. Through in-person workshops, a webinar, and individualized site visits, we will share the tools and knowledge developed in the previous projects, aimed at improving producers' ability to map, evaluate, and understand their own landholdings; to nurture seedlings until they have escaped understory competition; and to properly manage the density of their forest through both precommercial and commercial thinning.

We will integrate the findings of the completed SARE projects and distill their findings into a more user-accessible format - a Forest Stewardship Guidebook - which will be developed with structured producer input at several stages. By testing its elements at producer workshops and in one-on-one site visits where we provide technical consultation to forest owners, we will refine both the content and presentation to match producer needs and demands. Finally, we will produce a finished guidebook, available online and in hard copy, that will serve as a resource for producers even after the end of the grant period.

1. By the end of the workshop series, 110 producers have learned how to access remote sensing information about their forest, including data available on the user-friendly Landmapper platform.
2. By the end of the workshop series, 110 producers have learned how to delineate their land into management units, and how to use remote sensing data for guidance in doing so.
3. By the end of the workshop series, 110 producers have learned how to characterize their forest using quantitative density metrics.
4. By the end of the workshop series, 110 producers have learned how to interpret density data to guide management interventions such as thinning, underplanting, or regeneration harvest.
5. By the end of the grant period, 75 producers will have adopted or updated forest management plans to apply the skills they learned in workshops, site visits, or in using the guidebook.
6. By the end of the grant period, 60 producers will have taken new actions to improve quality of their forest stewardship across at least 1,500 acres.