A New Approach to Forest Restoration in the American Southwest
The North-central New Mexico Landscape Assessment conducting in 2004-06 was a collaborative, landscape-scale effort that engaged stakeholders in a series of meeting and workshops to identify and prioritize areas of forest an associated lands in greatest need of managment attention. The focal landscape assessment area included public, tribal and private lands within a 3.4 million-acre study region. Our 2-year process culminated in a three-day workshop in Octover 2006, where over 50 regional stakeholders were convened to address these issues using a spatial decision support system designed by the Forest Ecosystem Restoraiton Analysis (ForestERA) Project at NAU. ForestERA staff, along with staff fromt he Bureau fo Land Management, Forest Guild and the Austalian National University, provided a forum where stakeholder values, concerns,and ideas could be translated into spatially-explicit prioritizaton and management action scenarios based on the best available science. The result was a set of science-based solution which met national policy piorities, while remaining grounded in the needs of local stakeholders.
The North-central New Mexcio Landscape Assessment represented on of the first efforts in the nation to engage stakeholders in a collaborarive, landscape-scale assessment of public lands using a dynamic map-based interactive and integrative science-based approach. It is also unique in that it addressed several national policy directives simultaneously. The broad concurrence in stakholder values and perceived risks that were identified druing this spaitally explict process provided an unprecedented opportunity to inform and integrate planning efforts in the region at multiple spatial scales.
Products from this effort, including the Spatial Data Atlas and final report or requests for relevant spatial data are available from our products page under the New Mexico section.
