PARENT SESSION
Oral Session - Management and Planning Chair(s): White, Mary¹, ¹ US Environmental Protection Agency Region V, Chicago, IL
Wednesday, March 31, 2004 3:00 PM - 5:20 PM Apollo Room 3

Spatial Tools Supporting Public Participation in Planning Forest Restoration. ^*HAMPTON, HAYDEE M. ¹, PRATHER, JOHN W. ¹, XU, YAGUANG ¹, AUMACK, ETHAN N. ¹, DICKSON, BRETT G. ² and SISK, THOMAS D. ¹, ¹ Center for Environmental Sciences and Education, Flagstaff, AZ, USA² Department of Fishery & Wildlife Biology, Fort Collins, CO, USA

ABSTRACT- The Forest Ecosystem Restoration Analysis project has completed a 2.5-year effort to develop a spatial decision support system for assisting public participation in forest management decisions. Our system is being used in a collaborative planning effort across two million acres of forests in northern Arizona. Collaborators include federal, state, and local government agencies, environmental organizations, community groups, and academics. In recent years, progress towards developing agreement on forest restoration plans has been impeded, in part, by the challenge of incorporating diverse stakeholder values for multiple criteria, such as watershed and community protection, and of predicting the impacts of forest treatments across hundreds of thousands to millions of acres – the scale at which wildfire and many other ecological processes operate. Our transdisciplinary GIS-based tools are comprised of an integrated set of spatial data and models, including predicted vegetation, fire risk and hazard, post-fire erosion, sedimentation, and flooding, wildlife habitat quality, and invasive plant occurrence and spread. Our decision support system allows alternative landscape-scale plans to be developed according to user preferences, and it can be used to predict their cumulative effects on wildlife and fire hazard, greatly facilitating the comparison of alternative plans. Applications are open and inclusive of all interested parties, and transparent and clearly documented, complete with uncertainty analyses. Our results demonstrate a new capability for bringing scientific understanding and science-based tools to a broad community involved in formulating goals and desired outcomes for the restoration of degraded forest ecosystems.

KEY WORDS: restoration, forest, planning, fire, models