NEED

The Collaborative Forest Restoration Program (CFLRP) was established by Congress in 2009 with the purpose of encouraging collaborative, science-based ecosystem restoration of competitively selected National Forest system landscapes across the US. The program leverages local resources with national and private resources to encourage collaboratively developed landscape scale forest restoration management plans. In 2010, ten collaborative forest restoration efforts in nine states were funded through the CFLRP and in 2012 an additional 13 projects were selected for funding. The legislation includes Congressional funding of up to $40,000,000 per fiscal year including up to $4 million per project per year through fiscal year 2019. These funds can cover up to half the cost of carrying out and monitoring restoration projects in the National Forest System and provide seed money to foster management partnerships. Extending beyond simply forest restoration, CFLRP is designed to benefit other management activities including reducing wildfire risk, enhancing fish and wildlife habitats, and maintaining and improving water quality. With the stated goals of encouraging ecological, economic, and social sustainability, CFLRP represents the future of public lands management both in the West and nationally.

Due to variations in geography, stakeholder involvement, and project start dates, the various CFLRP sites' collaborative structures, decision-making processes, and engagement strategies differ widely. The Forest Service requires an annual report on the CFLRPs, but the report does not address the effectiveness of the current collaborative structures and activities within the funded projects. The SNRE Master's Project would undertake an analysis of the existing collaborative efforts, structures, and decision-making processes within all 23 forest restoration projects or within a smaller subset of the projects. These sites represent the diversity of public lands in the United States, with project locations ranging from California to North Carolina, Oregon to Florida, and Idaho to Arkansas. This diversity of location results in both unique ecological challenges and a wide range of social variation.            

The project client, the National Forest Foundation (NFF), is a non-profit chartered by Congress to engage Americans in community-based and national programs related to the the National Forest System. Its values include uniting diverse interests, restoring ecosystems, engaging citizens, sustaining communities, and adding value to public lands. One way that it achieves these goals is through providing collaboration resources to land managers including tools, best practices, and examples of successful collaborative structures. The master's project research on CFLRP would serve NFF's Conservation Connect program and provide them with valuable information and data regarding successful collaboration efforts and ecological outcomes for use by current CFLRP sites, future project cohorts, and collaborative structures outside of the CFLRP framework.

POTENTIAL RESEARCH QUESTIONS

While examining the collaborative structures of the CFLRPs more broadly, there are varying research questions that could be addressed by the master's project.

1)    How do geographic and cultural variations lead to differences in collaboration structure? Are there "eastern" and "western" styles of collaboration within the CFLRP and how effective are the various regional collaboration styles? What challenges have the different projects faced, and how have they addressed them?

2)    What strategies and tools are being used by CFLRP sites to develop collaborative restoration projects? Which of these are facilitating success of the projects, and how is that success measured? What best practices have emerged, and how can these be applied across sites?

3)    How has the timeline of the CFLRP funding impacted collaboration and decision-making structures? This question seeks to address how collaboration methods are altered when a project is getting off the ground (as the new 13 projects now are) as opposed to when the projects are engaging in a process of sustaining themselves over a period of time (as the original 10 projects currently are). Furthermore, how have the new project sites utilized lessons learned from the initial batch?

4)    To what extent has the CFLRP helped to seed or instigate successful collaboration? Was collaboration already happening amongst diverse stakeholders before the project was selected for CFLRP funding or did the CFLRP help to engender collaboration? In what capacities were existing collaboration structures altered through CFLRP funding to make them more or less successful?

5)    In order to adequately evaluate these questions, and others, the masters project will need to catalog information regarding each of the CFLRP sites including variations in geography, size, region, biomes, and relation to urban centers. How does the current state of the various ecological factors relate to the conditions described in each project's proposal for selection in the program?

6)    How has science been incorporated into the CFLRP process? The program's stated goals include various ecological factors including relating to fire and water issues. How has scientific observation and analysis been translated into action for cross-landscape collaboration? How have the CFLRP sites considered climate change in management plans, including, but not limited to, information from the U.S. Forest Service Climate Change Resource Center.

7)    Is collaboration within the CFLPR an effective means to support ecologically sound forest restoration and resource management? This larger scale question, though critical, would be somewhat harder to measure and evaluate within the scope of a master's project. The CFLRP reporting process currently doesn't provide data for linking elements of collaboration to ecological outcomes.