Forest Management and Planning

Chapter 1. Management of Forests and Other Natural Resources

1. Assessment of a forest plan. Either through a search of the Internet, or through an investigation
of the forest plans contained in your colleges library, locate a federal, state, or county forest
plan. From the official documentation of the plan, report the following two features:
a) What goals or objectives guided the development of the plan?
b) What were the steps used in the planning process?
Each forest plan has a look and feel that is uniquely its own. The only similarities among plans
may be the standard formats used by large organizations such as the U.S. Forest Service.
However, when comparing two more different plans for U.S. National Forests, a number of
differences will be evident. This being said, locating the objectives of a plan may require some
significant reading on your part, and may require deciphering the steps used during the
planning process.
For example, in the 2004 Chattahoochee National Forest plan, it suggests that the objectives
are the measurable steps that the forest will take over the life of the plan to achieve the
forest's broad goals. One of the broad goals is to contribute to the viability of native and other
desirable wildlife species, and another relates to the development or maintenance of habitat
for desirable wildlife. In fact, there are fourteen wildlife-related goals, some of which include
measurable objectives, such as a target number of acres to treat in various ways. Other goals
include those related to threatened and endangered wildlife, old-growth forests, water quality,
wood products, aesthetics, recreation, wilderness, and forest health. Each of these may have
a number of specific measurable objectives which you can elaborate upon, but this short
answer should give you a feel for what guided the development of the plan.
To carry the example further, the steps that were used to develop the Chattahoochee National
Forest plan included the following:
1. Identification of issues, concerns and opportunities
2. Development of planning criteria
3. Inventory of the resources, and data collection
4. Analysis of the management situation
5. Formation of alternatives
6. Estimation of the effects of alternatives
7. Evaluation of alternatives
8. Recommendation of an alternative
9. Approval and implementation
2. Forest planning process. Assume you are employed by a small natural resource consulting firm
(three people), and you needed to develop a management plan for a private landowner in
central Pennsylvania. What types of internal (to your consulting firm) organizational challenges
related to the development of the management plan should you consider?
As we noted in Section V, students should consider the technological challenges, the
challenges related to personnel, the challenges related to data (or lack thereof), and the
challenges related to the level of support provided by upper management. Some elaboration
on the part of the student would be helpful.
3. Types of forest planning processes. Assume you are employed by a small forest products
company in northern Minnesota, and the owner of the company wants your team (several

foresters, a biologist, an engineer and a few technical staff managing the inventory and
geographic information system) to develop a strategic forest plan for the property that you
manage. The owner has suggested that they want a rational plan to be developed, one that
explores several alternatives. Develop a one-page memorandum to the landowner describing
the three general types of planning processes, and the advantages and disadvantages of
each.
We assume that students will formulate their responses in the form of a memo, but they
should cover the following:
Rational model: gather all of the relevant information, analyze all of the possible scenarios,
and reach the best solution based on complete information
Irrational model: use limited information, assess a few alternatives, and base a decision on
these. This is similar to the semi-rational model that uses the best information that can be
collected during a limited time period, considers a sub-set of alternatives, and bases a
decision on choosing one that is "good enough."
The garbage can model: here the goals and objectives are unclear, the technology for
achieving the goals and objectives is also unclear, and the membership of the planning team
varies according the amount of time each can provide.
4. Cooperative planning and adaptive management. Assume that you are a natural resource
management consultant in a small town in central New York. As part of your nonprofessional
life, you serve on your towns land planning committee. The committee is actively involved in
the management of a small public forest within the towns limits, yet none of the other
committee members have your natural resource background. They have mentioned at various
points in time over the last year the need for adaptive management and cooperative planning.
Develop a short memorandum for the committee that describes the two approaches.
As we noted in Section IV.D., collaborative forest management, or community forestry, is a
system where communities and governmental agencies work together to collectively develop
a plan for managing natural resources, and each share responsibilities associated with the
plan. In developing countries, community interest in these programs generally is based on
basic needs for fuel, timber, food, and other non-timber forest products. Aspects of successful
collaborative planning programs include measurable benefits (financial and others) from which
the community can gain, local organizational control over the natural resources, and an
absence of governmental control. These types of management and planning systems require
that groups reach consensus on contentious forest-related issues, and find agreement on the
use of communal forest resources.
Adaptive management is similar to commonly employed natural resource management plans
except when utilizing this approach, a monitoring phase is specifically employed to provide
feedback to the planning stages, which could allow the management plan to better recognize
some of the uncertainties related to management activities. Here, the success or failure of
management actions to produce the desired effects are evaluated both quantitatively and
qualitatively. The conditions under which management activities fail to produce the desired
outcomes are considered, and revised management prescriptions, constraints, or objectives
are developed. An updated plan is then developed using the adjusted, and perhaps improved.
This type of management does not necessarily involve communities and governmental
agencies working together to collectively develop a plan for the management of natural
resources.
5. Public and private forest planning. Assume that you are having dinner with some of your
friends and during the various conversations that arise, you learn that one of them has a very
negative opinion of how management plans are developed for public lands. Further, they

dislike how private landowners seem to not do any planning at all for the management of
natural resources. These are generalities, of course, so to help clarify the matter, describe
briefly the similarities and differences between management plans developed for public land
and private land.
While management planning is usually mandated on public land, and usually only suggested
on private land, land managers for each generally go through a number of steps prior to the
implementation of activities. For example, whether done formally or informally, each group will
consider the following steps:
Determine the goals for a management area
Inventory the conditions necessary to evaluate the goals
Analyze trends in land use changes and vegetative growth
Formulate alternatives for the area
Assess the alternatives for the area
Select an alternative and develop a management plan
Implement the management plan
Public land managers will also likely allow public participation, monitor the plan, and update it
as needed. In addition, with public land management planning, plans may need to be
coordinated with other organizations, and the public may have the ability to appeal the
decision.