Frederick Cubbage

The research will develop a general conceptual model of the legal, institutional, and economic factors that are required to translate broad international and national policy goals to use forests to store carbon and mitigate climate change into practical on-the-ground approaches that will be required for public policies, public agencies, and public and private landowners to change their land management practices to participate in the programs. Next, we will gauge the amount of land area, funding, technical capacity and personnel, financial incentives, and costs and returns for landowners, and similar components to assess program needs and challenges. We will review the assessments and analyses carried out for our 2020 Criterion 7 Report, including Indicators 45 (Legislation and Policies), Indicator 47 (Taxation and Other Economic Strategies), and Indicator 50 (Programs, Services, and Other Resources), which will support the problem analysis of the subject and will be used to information detailed subsequent research.

Economic pressures felt by rural communities in the United States, combined with simultaneous social and environmental threats to forests in rural areas, require innovative approaches. Many communities seek support for preserving their ways of life and connections to the resources around them as well as help in adapting to changing social and environmental circumstances. Community forests are proposed as one option for addressing these goals and issues, but require sound scientific assessment to understand how and when they lead to enhanced forest protection and improved socioeconomic opportunities in the United States. This project will generate policy and practical insights for the establishment and support of community forests as an innovative approach to maximize forest conservation and rural prosperity in the U.S. The research will examine What factors and conditions enable community forestry initiatives in the U.S. to enhance the sustainability of forests while promoting rural prosperity and well-being?   The research objectives are: 1) Identify and inventory community forests in the United States, documenting key characteristics such as land ownership, management goals, governance structures, revenue generation, and forest type. 2) Classify community forests in the U.S. based on their characteristics. 3) Identify direct and indirect monetary and non-monetary benefits and costs of community forests. 4) Understand community forest governance and management as an innovative approach for advancing rural opportunities and pathway to prosperity. 5) Identify potential community, forest, governance, and management characteristics that may be linked to positive social, economic, and ecological outcomes from community forests. 6) Disseminate insights about community forests to community and regional organizations, policy-makers, researchers, and other key stakeholders. The methods will follow the objectives above, using stakeholder involvement, reviewing and collecting data from secondary literature and sources, and conducting mixed-methods detailed comparative case studies of a stratified sample of community forests. We will conduct in-depth, comparative case studies in the east of approximately five community forests to explore if and how they foster innovative approaches for advancing socioeconomic opportunities for rural entrepreneurs and communities in the United States and the factors and conditions that support or impede these opportunities.

The Forest Health Monitoring (FHM) Program is a long-term, national research and monitoring effort focusing on forest ecosystems. This interagency program is designed to assist resource managers and policy makers in managing forest resources in the United States, allocating funds for research and development, and evaluating the effectiveness of environmental policies. FHM national reporting includes an annual technical report that provides analysis and synthesis of technical information at the national level as well as other special publications that provide information about national forest health conditions and management priorities. Through the work in this agreement, the principal investigators and other research personnel will provide the Forest Health Monitoring Research Team of the USFS Southern Research Station’s Eastern Forest Environmental Threat Assessment Center (EFETAC) with data analyses, natural resource assessments, and technical writing skills in support of the national Forest Health Monitoring Program’s annual national reporting and research efforts. This will include performing and coordinating data analysis, technical writing, and editing for FHM’s annual forest health data report and contributions to other reporting and research efforts. The project will also provide support to the Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) Program in documentation development.

North Carolina has developed an innovative and successful environmental enhancement program over the last two decades based on measures to improve water quality throughout the state. In addition to continued water quality issues, the state is increasingly beset with vast problems of flooding and excess water quantities during major storm events. This project will focus on assessing means to use the existing practices and projects that have been employed by the North Carolina Environmental Enhancement Grant Program (EEG) and other state and federal conservation agencies and grants organizations can be used to provide co-benefits of water quantity and flood reduction or amelioration. Lead Partners for this project include NC State University’s College of Natural Resources (CNR) and College of Design (CoD), Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), and the NC Foundation for Soil and Water Conservation (S&W). The Project Partners will assess green infrastructure and natural resource mitigation solutions to determine if they can provide valuable co-benefits of flood reduction and disaster resilience, and cooperate with government and nongovernment organizations, agricultural producers, and community stakeholders to design and implement “FloodWise” programs. FloodWise will help develop programs for farms and agricultural communities in Eastern North Carolina (ENC), including Farm Demonstrations of best management practices for water quality and flood mitigation.

This research will continue to perform U.S. assessments of the Montreal Process for Sustainable Forest Management Criteria and Indicators (SFM C&I) for Criterion 7, the development of the legal, institutional, and economic framework for forest conservation and sustainable management. The research will establish a baseline characterization of community forests in the United States. This will begin with documenting and tallying a representative cross section of community forests in the U.S., including but not limited to all those funded through the USFS Community Forest program, by ownership, funding, management, key stakeholders, and other key characteristics. We will analyze the commonalities and differences in community forest definitions by federal, state, and local governments, civil society organizations, and private sector actors. Last, we will analyze tallied/documented community forests in terms of permitted types of land use, access, and benefits in line with property rights theorists (e.g., Schlager and Ostrom 1992; Ostrom and Hess 2007) to better understand the range in ownership and bundles of rights associated with community forests in the U.S.

The Forest Health Monitoring (FHM) national program of the USDA Forest Service determines status, changes, and trends in indicators of forest condition across all forested lands. FHM reports, produced in cooperation with North Carolina State University, quantify forest area affected by insects and disease only on a yearly basis. Similarly, the forest health section of the Resource Planning Act (RPA) Assessment, which reports on status and trends of renewable resources on forest and rangelands, has summarized recent FHM reports and provides mortality statistics from the Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) database. A retrospective analysis examining trends in different aspects of forest health over recent decades would provide context to annual FHM reports (highlighting the periodicity of threats), lay the foundation for developing forest health projections within the RPA Assessment, and inform land management planning.

This research and development project will perform a strategic analysis of wood fiber production opportunities for these two most promising wood fiber supply regions, and drilling down on the merits of a few countries that show the most promise for expansion of wood fiber production and investments in the near future. The overall objective for this research is to perform an analysis of global timber and wood fiber production opportunities for selected regions and countries in the world, focusing on newly developing timber regions and specific countries that are likely to have the most opportunity for expansion of wood fiber production. We will focus on (1) current fiber production and trends, (2) international trade, production and consumption trends of wood products (3) fiber production costs and technology (4) land availability and costs, and (5) institutional and infrastructure factors.

The Forest Health Monitoring (FHM) Program is a long term, national monitoring and research effort focusing on forest ecosystems. This interagency program is designed to assist resource managers and policy makers in managing forest resources in the United States, allocating funds for research and development, and evaluating the effectiveness of environmental policies. FHM national reporting efforts include an annual technical report that presents analysis and synthesis of technical information at national and multi-state levels as well as other publications that provide information about national forest health conditions and management priorities. Through the work in this agreement, the principal investigators and other research personnel will provide the Forest Health Monitoring Research Team of the USDA Forest Service Southern Research Station’s Eastern Forest Environmental Threat Assessment Center (EFETAC) with data analyses, natural resource assessments, and technical writing skills in support of the national Forest Health Monitoring Program’s annual forest health status and trends report, and other research, analysis, and reporting tasks. The principal investigators and other personnel will also provide support to the Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) Program in documentation development and updates for field procedures and the FIA public database.

In order to address the critical problems in wood procurement modeling for pulp and paper mills or major solid wood mills, the proposed Pilot project will develop a Decision Support System (DSS), called Stochastic Timber Supply Model (STSM), that integrates a Harvesting Schedule Model (HSM) for wood procurement with a Timber Supply Model (TSM). The purpose of this model would be to provide integrated, endogenous wood fiber supply analyses through harvest scheduling linked to timber supply and landowner characteristics. The STSM will incorporate landowner decisions in its response to market price changes, and provide explicit means to assess the variability of the input in the outcomes of TSMs. First, we will build a new DSS which users can add their forest asset data and analyze the interaction between individual supply and market variables with an option of a stochastic component. This will include market data for an individual mill or wood basket, then scaled up to a region. Second, we will investigate how minor changes in the NC State University SubRegional Timber Supply (SRTS) model inputs and assumptions can lead to different outcomes.

We propose to use Participatory Action Research approaches to cooperate with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, National Wildlife Refuge Southeast Region Inventory and Monitoring program in order to establish and assess the biological planning foundations for Strategic Habitat Conservation for the Refuge units of the Southeast Region, with an emphasis on developmental approaches and outcomes for Resources of Concern and Management Objectives, as established by NWRS Policy 620 FW1, under the authority of the National Wildlife Refuge System Improvement Act.