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North-Central New Mexico Landscape Assessment

The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and the Forest Guild, together with other agencies involved in forest and fire planning in north-cenral New Mexico, recently formed a collaborative to develop landscape-scale data and to conduct a multi-jurisdictional analysis of wildfire risks and treatment alternatives and priorities. Their goal is to inform the management of forests and woodlands where increasing frequency and severity of high-intensity crown fire is a concern. This collaborative approached researchers at the Forest Ecosystem Restoration Analysis (ForestERA) Project at Northern Arizona University (NAU) about developing a science foundation for managers to strategically plan and prioritize fuel reduction and restoration treatments.

North-central New Mexico exemplifies the difficulty in designing and implementing land management strategies that effectively address critical issues related to forest health and the safety of human communities. Spanning six million acres, the region is a mosaic of land cover types, ranging from desert scrub at elevations of 5,000 ft. to spruce-fir forests at 13,000 ft.

It is also a mosaic of land management jurisdictions — Bureau of Land Management areas are intermixed with those of more than a dozen federal, state, tribal and local entities, including two tribal nations.

Stakeholders in this region are concerned about the risks to communities posed by the likelihood of high-intensity crown fire. While the overall goals of these entities are similar, the budgets for accomplishing these goals, the amount and quality of data, and the fire and forest management objectives of each differ.

Ecosystems do not necessarily line up with jurisdictional boundaries, and ecosystem-wide processes, such as fire, cross boundaries. If management treatments are to be effective in meeting the goals of community protection and forest restoration, we must design them from the landscape perspective, encompassing whole ecosystems. In north-central New Mexico, under a Joint Fire Sciences Program grant, the ForestERA Project is providing the tools and analyses for a collaborative and coordinated landscape-scale forest management planning effort.

Project Objectives

The first of three objectives for the New Mexico project was to develop a scientific framework through which collaborators could determine which forest areas pose the greatest fire risk to their communities, and then identify those areas that they consider the highest priority for fuel reduction treatments

The second project objective was to develop the data and analytical tools that would enable more than a dozen federal, state, local and tribal agencies to coordinate their fuels reduction efforts and leverage their resources to reduce wildfire risks.

The third and final project objective was to broaden the utility of ForestERA data and tools by expanding the breadth of the project to include pinyon-juniper woodlands and important New Mexico wildlife species.

In north-central New Mexico, ForestERA acquired and developed spatial data with the appropriate extent and resolution to support a regional analysis for restoration treatments. ForestERA also developed new data and methods for analyzing pinyon-juniper woodlands and wildlife species specific to the New Mexico landscape. Stakeholders for this region used ForestERA data and tools to facilitate a collaborative process for prioritizing areas in need of management attention. This will enable them to better coordinate their efforts and maximize the benefits of limited funding. Finally, ForestERA used geospatial analysis and modeling approaches to evaluate alternative restoration treatment plans by estimating the impacts of restoration plans on selected sensitive wildlife species and ecosystem attributes, such as fire risk. The data layers that have been developed are described in ForestERA's New Mexico Data Atlas (8 MB PDF file).

The primary collaborators in the North-central New Mexico project include the BLM/Taos Field Office, Santa Fe , Taos, Rio Arriba and San Miguel Counties, and the Forest Guild. The Santa Fe and Carson National Forests, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, individual tribal and land grant entities such as the Picuris, Taos and Santa Clara Pueblos, and the Nature Conservancy are also participating in the project development and actively contributed to implementation.

We worked with collaborators to identify needs and data gaps upon which data layers were developed. The final report of the Needs Assessment Survey is now available (239 KB PDF). Currently, we are working on the spatial analysis synthesis based on the work done by participants in Taos, New Mexico at the October 2006 workshop and the forthcoming final project report. For more information about the Needs Assessment Survey or other information about the project, please contact Eytan Krasilovsky of the Forest Guild or the ForestERA project directly.

In addition to the spatial modeling tools we developed, we’ve introduced social science tools into the ForestERA toolkit. This innovative component will enable us to evaluate ForestERA public participation processes in order to better understand how they affect participants’ attitudes toward forest management and restoration. For more information about the Social Science Evaluation, please contact Tischa Muñoz-Erickson.

Page last updated November 28, 2006