Engaging Partners

Collaborative Modeling ←→ Collaborative Conservation

At heart, and by design, the Forest Scenarios project is a collaboration. The University of Wisconsin and The Nature Conservancy have worked with key partners to explore and improve the long-term outcomes of landscape-scale forest conservation and management in the upper Great Lakes region.

The immediate tangible outcomes of this collaboration include the maps, conclusions, and recommendations you see throughout this site. But these are not the only outcomes. It is well known that models and plans to support conservation are more reliable, more feasible, and more likely to be implemented when they incorporate the input of key partners (e.g., see Thompson et al. 2010).

We are truly grateful for the time, technical expertise, and thoughtful input of a wide variety of partners--experts in forest ecology, forestry, wildlife ecology, and modeling--from our study sites and around the region, including:

• Site experts:
  
  • Two-Hearted River Watershed: Michigan Department of Natural Resources; Seney National Wildlife Refuge, US Fish and Wildlife Service; The Forestland Group; Compass Land Consultants; The Nature Conservancy, Michigan
  • Wild Rivers Legacy Forest: Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources; Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest, US Fish and Wildlife Service; Huber Group; The Nature Conservancy, Wisconsin
• Modeling experts: The LANDFIRE Program; ESSA Technologies Ltd; Apex Resource Management Solutions; The Mladenoff Forest Landscape Ecology Lab, University of Wisconsin at Madison; The SILVIS Lab, University of Wisconsin at Madison

We engaged with these partners using an iterative process that alternated between 1) obtaining partner input and vision (Price, et al. 2012) and 2) generating outputs. Through these iterations, we have been able to continually refine--and significantly improve--the resulting scenarios. At the same time, regular interactions with experts have fostered trust, communication, and a landscape-scale vision for forest management that transcends ownership boundaries.

Over the course of this project, we've learned much about engaging partners in a process:

• The journey is as important as the destination
  The maps and spatial narratives we have collectively produced are important for informing forest management, and the process by which these products have been produced is equally important. The modeling provides a structured framework for relationship-building. Time invested by partners helps provide the necessary tools for implementation and action, including mutual trust, communication, broader landscape awareness, and shared views on desired future condition.
• Trust is key
  Our models are fueled by many types and sources of data, including data about management plans. Initially, lack of trust issues may create hurdles to sharing data across ownership boundaries. But ultimately, trust crystalizes when partners who have shared data are able to see the footprint of their forest management plans in the mapped outputs.
• Transferability and takeaways
  It is our hope that the scenarios and spatial narratives we've produced in these two landscapes--the Two Hearted River watershed and the Wild Rivers Legacy Forest--will be relevant to other landscapes as well. While the specifics of scenario modeling may vary among sites and in different geographies, our overarching conclusions concerning the relative efficacy of broad-scale forest conservation and management options should be transferable to guide work at additional sites. The existing models may also be useful for additional questions at our study sites; e.g., what would the long-term implications be if timber harvest were increased within one or more ownerships? Finally, we believe that the iterative process we employed, alternating modeling with stakeholder input, is a particularly useful approach that could improve modeling, and the integration of modeling results into stakeholder decision-making.