Challenges and opportunities for collaborative adaptive management in forest landscape restoration

Abstract

The Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Program (CFLRP) created the conditions for translating the idea of collaborative adaptive management (CAM) into practice. In theory, CAM engages stakeholders to collectively ‘learn by doing’ through a continuous cycle of goal-setting, implementing, monitoring, interpreting, and adjusting goals and actions. Our chapter examines the factors affecting how CAM was applied in practice in three CFLRP projects: the Colorado Front Range, the Four Forest Restoration Initiative, and the Uncompahgre Plateau. We identified three sets of factors: challenges associated with organizing a multi-stakeholder collaborative process vis-à-vis the US Forest Service; challenges arising from spatial and temporal scale incompatibilities between monitoring and restoration activities; and challenges associated with data incompatibilities and data stewardship across the multiple organizations conducting the monitoring. We present four recommendations to overcome these factors to better institutionalize CAM, not only for forest landscape restoration, but for national forest management in general: develop a ‘chartering’ document that provides detail for each step of the CAM process; utilize memoranda of understanding or similar processes to reaffirm commitment to CAM over time; ensure that leadership explicitly supports innovation and learning; and sustain boundary-spanning organizations tasked with conducting, monitoring, and convening collaborative learning processes.

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