C. Project Description C. 1 Introduction

C. Project Description

C.1 Introduction

Point A: April 1999. Neighbors in the rural community of Sawbrook, Oregon are coming to blows. Loggers and mill workers are losing work because federal and state timber sales have been scaled back. At the same time, the local chapter of Friends of the Fir is pushing to severely restrict logging near bull trout habitat and ban cutting of old growth timber. Also, newcomers attracted to Sawbrook by the beautiful forest are aghast at new clear cuts visible from town.

Clara Weaver manages forest lands for a lumber company with a mill in Sawbrook. She is being pressured by her manager to start logging the company’s Fox Valley plot, composed mostly of harvestable second-growth timber. Harvesting this timber without some form of consensus will further disrupt the community because the roads needed to log the plot would introduce culverts in streams where bull trout spawn. Further, the plot includes old growth timber visible from the main highway into town. Weaver is torn. She understands the need to protect the creek and the old growth. Yet the lumber company may close the mill if production levels decline further, taking jobs from over 35 families.

Weaver wonders if a combination of an uncut buffer zone around the trout habitat, selective thinning in the old-growth area, and careful siting of the culverts for the road could meet the concerns of the community, but she feels a woeful lack of information. Without evidence of any ecological benefits (such as improved forest health or reduced fire risk), the Friends of the Fir oppose all cutting. The lumber company, on the other side of the issues, wants to maximize profit particularly when there is no scientific evidence that the fish will be affected. All parties remain polarized due, in part, to the paucity of relevant information that they can trust. Weaver must make a decision. No matter what she decides, it is likely to be another stormy spring in Sawbrook.

Point B: April 2004. The owner of the lumber company instructs Weaver to stake out another plot near Sawbrook for harvesting. It has all the controversial elements of the Fox Valley plot: trout habitat, old growth forest, and high visibility. It also has enough timber to keep the mill in operation for 16 months. Weaver wants to avoid another Fox Valley episode.

But this time Weaver is equipped with a powerful new tool, the Adaptive Management Portal for forest information, hosted by the Adaptive Management Areas (AMA) of the Pacific Northwest. The Adaptive Management Areas are run by the USDA Forest Service, the USDI Bureau of Land Management, and the USDI Fish and Wildlife Service to develop and test innovative new approaches to forest management (using the approach in Figure 1) that integrate social, economic, and ecological objectives. The Adaptive Management Portal, easily accessible from her web browser, is a value-added service that provides multiple access paths to underlying forest-related information with superimposed structure, interconnections, and annotations.

In just a few clicks, Weaver sees the frame shown in Figure 2. She can access information based on Road/Stream Crossings or Aquatic Species at multiple levels of specificity. But more than that, she can pursue information that addresses how culvert installation affects trout. On the right side of Figure 2 we see one such information source with the relevant paragraph highlighted (a subset of the full document). More than that, this particular entry has been annotated by several parties, as shown in the lower right frame.

Figure 2: (Notional) View of the Adaptive Management Portal

This year will not be repeat of Fox Valley. Weaver, as well as all other interested parties, has direct access to the Adaptive Management Portal. The breadth of the base information (e.g., information on community partnerships, scientific results from the Forest Service and elsewhere, recreational opportunities), the relevance of the index terms and especially the connections among terms, and the diversity of the communities that actively contribute to the Portal helps to ensure that the Adaptive Management Portal is a living resource that can support the wide ranging and ever changing interests and issues of the stakeholders in our forests.

We propose to do the research and development to get from Point A to Point B.

C.2 The Proposal in a Nutshell

The Team

The Regional Coordinator of the Adaptive Management Areas of the Pacific Northwest and a computer science professor leads our team from the Oregon Graduate Institute. The team is further comprised of: a forest information specialist, the only US representative to the International Union of Forest Research Organizations’ (IUFRO) Global Forest Information Service task force, and researchers from the Oregon Graduate Institute who specialize in computer science, environmental science, and business and marketing. The final member of our team, a specialist in ecological monitoring, will conduct systematic and periodic evaluations of this project. The work of the USDA Forest Service and the Adaptive Management Areas is supported through generous in-kind contributions, detailed in the Budget Justification in Section F. An international Advisory Board, described in Section C. 7, below will guide our work.

The Problem

We focus on the problem of providing access to forest information because of the diversity of both its producers and consumers, e.g., local, state, and federal agencies and many other parties, and because of the significance of the issues involved in sustaining our forests. The response to date has resulted in independent information systems that increases the difficulty of finding and correlating relevant information across sites. This problem is of national importance¹.