Ethnoforestry and adaptive management: generating new pathways to manage forests on the Olympic Peninsula, WA.

Abstract

In the last century, there have been significant changes to forest management policies in the Pacific Northwest. In the mid 1990s, the Northwest Forest Plan (NWFP) was developed and implemented, in part, to prioritize the protection of old growth habitat and species that depend on these forests. Adaptive management was a key component of the NWFP and was seen as a way to identify uncertainties, test new approaches, and learn from the results. Unfortunately, adaptive management was largely unrealized with few studies getting off the ground. In a changing climate and society, and uncertain future, creating and testing new approaches to forest management will be critical to expand our management toolbox and enhance our adaptive capacity. This dissertation seeks to demonstrate some methods of better incorporating and integrating sciences, both biophysical and social, into management decisions, to assist in improving the collective capacity of managers, researchers, stakeholders, and tribes to adapt to a rapidly changing world. In this dissertation, I first highlight an adaptive management experiment that was successfully implemented in the mid-1990s. This long-term ecosystem productivity study is located on the Olympic Peninsula, WA and includes two silvicultural approaches, 1.) an early-seral treatment planted with Douglas-fir and red alder; and 2.) a pure Douglas-fir plantation treatment. The first 25 years of overstory and understory growth were evaluated to understand stand development and differences between treatments. This study included extensive collaboration with forest managers during the design phase, which was an important step at the time. From what we know now, this approach to adaptive management might have been even more successful if it had included people as part of the ecosystem, rather than being driven by narrow research or management questions. Our current approach began with developing an ecosystem wellbeing framework to drive adaptive management, where ecosystem wellbeing is made up of two key components that must be addressed simultaneously: community and environmental wellbeing. To apply this framework, I proposed the field of ethnoforestry to be an appropriate and useful way to study new approaches to forest management. Ethnoforestry, or a people-focused forest management, considers the knowledge, input, values, and beliefs of people who are affected by forest management outcomes. This, paired with collaboration with stakeholders and tribes, can lead to the co-development of research questions and studies that can be beneficial for the whole ecosystem, people and the environment. This approach is being applied to the operational-scale Type 3 Watershed Experiment and is also highlighted through a small-scale ethnoforestry field trial study located on the Olympic Peninsula that includes two ethnoforestry prescriptions where understory species beneficial to ungulates and nearby communities are planted alongside timber seedlings. Ethnoforestry prescriptions are compared to a standard practice of planting Douglas-fir and controlling competing vegetation, no-action controls, and several science-driven prescriptions. Improving the quality and quantity of stakeholder engagement is also required to make ethnoforestry work in practice. I developed, with other team members, an approach to continue, expand, and focus engagement, called learning groups. This approach, derived from the discipline of social learning, prioritizes collaborating to address issues that could be studied while learning through the outcome of the work and learning about learning itself. Groups are focused on a particular topic (e.g., invasive species, cedar browse, etc.) and are made up of managers, researchers, stakeholders, and tribes. In this dissertation I detail the development and implementation of these groups and key insights to this approach.