(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:

Annually, the US Forest Service compiles forest tax tips for landowners. The latest version is available at either of the two links below...

http://www.timbertax.org/ or

http://www.fs.fed.us/spf/coop/programs/loa/tax.shtml

The Driftless Forest Network project is a novel living experiment that seeks to engage and empower landowners and to create an integrated support structure for them. It is has lots of moving parts. We (Jerry Greenberg, Alanna Koshollek, and I) do our best to describe all these in a recently submitted paper for an upcoming conference proceedings. Here's the abstract with the paper attached below (pdf).

Last week, Alanna Koshollek (Aldo Leopold Foundation) and I attended the Environmental Evaluators Network (EEN) Forum in Washington, DC. The format was novel in that topics were determined on the day of the event as opposed to in advance (called an "unconference"). 

Sara Bredesen, in a recent article in the Country Today "Economy deals death blow to Living Forest Co-op," reports that the Living Forest Cooperative based in NW Wisconsin voted to dissolve earlier this year.

Link may incur cost if you view too many Country Today articles.

Senate Bill 161 passed unanimously out of the Senate Agriculture, Forestry, and Higher Education Committee on Thursday.

Further action or, at least, enactment, though, is unlikely in this legislative session. The session is supposed to end on March 15 and no action on the Assembly version of the bill is planned (at least at this point).

As noted previously, the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Forestry, and Higher Education met yesterday. A sprained ankle prevented me providing oral testimony, but I did submit some thoughts in writing (pdf).

Made an error in my description of woodlands and landowners owning 10 or more acres on my recent post: Extent of Woodland Leasing in Wisconsin: Insights from a recent landowner survey. This has been corrected. My apologies.