Forest policy and management approaches for carbon dioxide removal

Forests increasingly will be used for carbon dioxide removal (CDR) as a natural climate solution, and the implementation of forest-based CDR presents a complex public policy challenge. In this paper, our goal is to review a range of policy tools in place to support use of forests for CDR and demonstrate how concepts from the policy design literature can inform our understanding of this domain. We explore how the utilization of different policy tools shapes our ability to use forests to mitigate and adapt to climate change and consider the challenges of policy mixes and integration, taking a close look at three areas of international forest policy, including the Kyoto Protocol's Clean Development Mechanism, Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) and voluntary carbon offset markets. As it is our expertise, we then examine in detail the case of the USA as a country that lacks aggressive implementation of national climate policies but has potential to increase CDR through reforestation and existing forest management on both public and private land. For forest-based CDR to succeed, a wide array of policy tools will have to be implemented in a variety of contexts with an eye towards overcoming the challenges of policy design with regard to uncertainty in policy outcomes, policy coherence around managing forests for carbon simultaneously with other goals and integration across governance contexts and levels.

Climate Change Vulnerability Assessment for Forest Management: The Case of the U.S. Forest Service

Forest managers need access to targeted scientific information about the impacts of climate change in order to adapt to climate change. Vulnerability assessments address this need and are common across a range of disciplines and geographies; however, the practice of vulnerability assessment has revealed challenges that warrant further examination in a specific context. The U.S. Forest Service, a national forest-management agency in charge of 78 million hectares, has developed a collection of climate change vulnerability assessments to support adaptation by forest managers. We conducted a qualitative document analysis, informed by a series of research interviews with scientists, of 44 vulnerability assessments developed for the U.S. Forest Service. We found that partnerships between research scientists and land managers were central to the development of vulnerability assessments in the U.S. Forest Service. Assessment processes vary across settings. As the practice has developed, vulnerability assessments increasingly cover larger spatial extents and a broader range of resources associated with forest management. We identified ways in which vulnerability assessments can support decision-making, including approaches already in use and opportunities to improve practice. In particular, we discuss how vulnerability assessments are well-positioned to support the development of land-management plans, which set strategic management direction for periods of at least a decade. This paper provides baseline knowledge on a fundamental aspect of a large national forestry agency’s climate change adaptation strategy, with many findings transferable to the study of other forest-management organizations.

Policy Design to Support Forest Restoration: The Value of Focused Investment and Collaboration

To address rapid change and complex environmental management challenges, governance approaches must support collective action across actors and jurisdictions, and planning at appropriate spatial extents to affect ecological processes. Recent changes in U.S. national forest policy incorporate new tools to facilitate collaborative landscape restoration, providing an opportunity to examine the relationship between policy design and governance change. Based on 151 interviews with agency personnel and partners, and a survey of 425 agency staff members, we investigated how two new policy approaches affected the governance of forest restoration and also looked at the other factors that most significantly affected policy implementation. Our findings reveal that, under these policies, multi-year funding commitments to specific landscapes, combined with requirements to work collaboratively, resulted in larger scales of planning, improved relationships, greater leveraged capacity, and numerous innovations compared to the past. A history of collaborative relationships, leadership, and agency capacity were the most significant variables that affected the implementation of policies designed to support collaborative landscape restoration. Our findings suggest that policies that provide focused investment to undertake landscape approaches to restoration, along with specific requirements for interagency and partner collaboration, are yielding positive results and may represent a new era in forest policy in the United States.

Occupancy Modeling of Woodpeckers: Maximizing Detections for Multiple Species With Multiple Spatial Scales

Numerous forest birds benefit from woodpecker presence or have similar habitat requirements. Monitoring populations of forest woodpeckers can be useful for management decisions regarding these and other forest species. Usefulness of monitoring efforts depends on methods used and the quality of resulting parameter estimates. Estimating the proportion of area occupied by a species can be an attractive and affordable alternative to abundance or survival estimates. The purpose of this study was to assess the distribution and area of occupancy for pileated woodpeckers (Drycopus pileatus) and American three-toed woodpeckers (Picoides dorsalis) in north-central Idaho, and to compare occupancy estimates using silent point counts, playback surveys, and playback surveys that incorporated estimates of detection probability (p). We used a hierarchical multiscale framework that allowed estimation of occupancy at two spatial scales and applied a removal design such that repeat visits to sampling stations was not necessary to estimate p. The initial naïve estimate of occupancy (using presence–absence data) for pileated woodpecker was 0.39, which increased to 0.59 using playback surveys. The corrected estimate of occupancy at the 1-km2 unit scale was 0.70. The naïve estimates of occupancy for American three-toed woodpeckers using silent point counts and playback surveys were 0.14 and 0.34, respectively. The unbiased estimate of occupancy at the 1-km2 unit scale was 0.71. Detection probabilities are known to vary spatially and temporally for numerous reasons. Thus, comparisons of naïve estimates of occupancy to monitor forest woodpeckers would be imprudent and could lead to poor management decisions. We recommend incorporating detection probability for monitoring wildlife species and show how this can be done within a single sampling framework for species that utilize the landscape at disparate scales.