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  • Informing the CFLRP:Lessons Learned from New Mexico’s Collaborative Forest Restoration Program
  • Andrew Egan (bio)

Forest restoration in the southwest US and elsewhere has been receiving increased attention, due to climate change, changing land use practices, increasing populations in the wildland-urban interface and the historical mismanagement of some forests, as evidenced, in part, by the unusual number and severity of devastating fires in recent years. The Collaborative Forest Restoration Program (CFRP) was initiated in 2001 by the USDA Forest Service (USFS) as “a new approach to building agreement among people and organizations that care about New Mexico’s forest land,” by awarding grants that “restore forests on public and tribal lands and improve the use of small diameter trees thinned from those lands” (USFS 2001). Important program objectives also include reducing the threat of catastrophic wildfire on the stand or forest level and creating local employment and training opportunities.

Additionally, the Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Program (CFLRP), a federally-funded, nationwide, landscape-scale program, was established in 2009 “to encourage the collaborative, science-based ecosystem restoration of priority landscapes” (USFS 2009). While their purposes are articulated differently—with CFRP perhaps more explicit in its commitment to grass roots participation and equality of knowledge among all participants—ultimately, on the ground, the CFRP and CFLRP aim to accomplish similar objectives, albeit at different spatial scales. Given the experiences of the CFRP over the past twelve years, there are lessons from that program that could inform CFLRP, especially in the following critical areas: collaboration and equity of knowledge; project consistency, connectivity, and maintenance; and socio-economic monitoring.

The “Collaboration” in CFRP can be both its greatest strength and, at times, its biggest challenge. The idea of equality of knowledge among all CFRP participants, irrespective of background or experience, while perhaps laudable conceptually, can lead to the dilution of efforts to collect, analyze, and draw meaningful inferences from reliable data. Unfortunately, CFRP grantees, often more interested in completing a project and collecting grant funding than applying even the most fundamental rigor necessary to help the program answer questions related to, for example, treatment effectiveness and maintenance cycles, will sometimes take the easy way out when it comes to monitoring. The multi-party monitoring process is sometimes viewed by grantees as simply a checklist item to be signed off on and there is often little follow through by grantees in developing true multi-party monitoring plans.

Consistent with assertions by Force and Machlis (1997), implementing a system of social indicators, for example, often requires specific skills and knowledge. Complicating the issue is the “paradox of public involvement” discussed by Walker and Daniels (2001) and referenced by Egan and Estrada (2013) as it relates to forest restoration, which posits that, while citizens may want the best available science to inform management decisions, they also want to have input into decision-making processes. However, as [End Page 13] resource management and landscape restoration decisions and processes become more complex, few citizens have the scientific background and expertise to contribute or provide relevant criticism (Walker and Daniels 2001).

Unfortunately, the assumption of equity of knowledge among stakeholders can have devastating outcomes. Among the lessons learned from the 2010 Track Fire near Raton, NM, for example, was that pre-fire thinning was likely not aggressive enough, in part because there were those at the table who wanted to thin in a way that is consistent with the science, and those who didn’t want any trees cut. As a result, a process of compromise among diverse stakeholders led to fuel reduction practices that were outside of the range of residual stand stocking for effective fuels reduction (S. Berry, City of Raton Engineer, pers. comm.), with devastating results, including the temporary loss of the city’s main reservoir, Lake Maloya, due to excessive sedimentation from post-fire rains. When the city of Raton engineer was later asked what, in retrospect, he might have done differently, he responded “cut more trees.”

Virtually all efforts to restore forests and reduce hazardous fuels will require a long-term plan of successive interventions that accounts for treatment maintenance cycles, evolving science, and changing public values and land uses, including an expanding...

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