(Not) Counting Trees

The UWEX Learning Store has just published, Expanding Sustainable Forestry on Wisconsin Woodlands. This publication reports on recent research describing Wisconsin's woodland owners, focused in two areas:

In the July-August edition of the Journal of Soil & Water Conservation, we outline opportunities for expanding cross-boundary cooperation, primarily at the policy - management interface. The pdf should be freely available, just click the link in the citation or the one below.

According to this Reuters article, the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX) is pessimistic about its future. Participants, in the absence of cap and trade policies, see little value in continuing.

See the New report out on the factors that limit hunting access on public and private lands and opportunities for improving access. The national survey of hunters identified a variety of key problems, including the posting ("No Hunting") of private land and changes in private land ownership.

We will have an exciting opportunity to share our recent findings with an international research audience in Washington D.C. this coming April, as Tricia Knoot was awarded a fellowship through the the International Network of Research on Coupled Human and Natural Systems (CHANS-Net), see this website. As a fellow, she will present our research surrounding landowner decision-making, egocentric networks, and ecosystem services from private lands at the 2010 meetings.

Through Wisconsin's Forest Sustainability Framework, there is a basis by which to see how forests and services they provide are changing over time, but what about at the county or town level? Why should town or county care? What is needed?

Foresters are often central to private landowner management decisions and are required to negotiate pressing social and ecological concerns, such as changing ownership patterns, timber markets, and pest outbreaks. The relationships among foresters—their social networks—can allow for the exchange of information and knowledge concerning the changing environment. Therefore, foresters' social networks may be critical to their collective and individual capacity to contribute to landowner decision-making, ecosystem resilience, and the provision of ecosystem services.

Forests and their management are one of the most intriguing examples of the interconnectedness of social and natural resource systems—particularly those in private landownership. Central to understanding and managing these systems is how private forest landowners make decisions in their local social and ecological context. The purpose of this study is to investigate the egocentric networks of landowners in individual and collective decision-making related to two practices: timber harvesting and invasive species removal.

There is large amount of carbon sequestered on Wisconsin's private woodlands, but to receive the economic benefits of carbon sequestration the land must be certified as sustainably managed. Only a fraction of these lands—held in thousands of small landholdings—are certified and the sustainable management future of these lands are in doubt with potentially negative environmental and economic outcomes related to the provision of ecosystem services like carbon sequestration.