Forest Community Connections Implications for Research, Management, and Governance

The connections between communities and forests are complex and evolving, presenting challenges to forest managers, researchers, and communities themselves. Dependency on timber extraction and timber-related industries is no longer a universal characteristic of the forest community. Remoteness is also a less common feature, as technology, workforce mobility, tourism, and 'amenity migrants' increasingly connect rural to urban places. Forest Community Connections explores the responses of forest communities to a changing economy, changing federal policy, and concerns about forest health from both within and outside forest communities. Focusing primarily on the United States, the book examines the ways that social scientists work with communities-their role in facilitating social learning, informing policy decisions, and contributing to community well being. Bringing perspectives from sociology, anthropology, political science, and forestry, the authors review a range of management issues, including wildfire risk, forest restoration, labor force capacity, and the growing demand for a growing variety of forest goods and services. They examine the increasingly diverse aesthetic and cultural values that forest residents attribute to forests, the factors that contribute to strong and resilient connections between communities and forests, and consider a range of governance structures to positively influence the well being of forest communities and forests, including collaboration and community-based forestry.

Preface Introduction 1. Community and Forest Connections: Continuity and Change Part I: Understanding Forest Communities 2. Social Assessment of Forest Communities: For Whom and for What? 3.Socioeconomic Monitoring and Forest Management 4. Engaging Communities Through Participatory Research Part II: Communities in the Context of Emerging and Persistent Forest Management Issues 5. Evolving Interdependencies of Community and Forest Health 6. Communities and Wildfire Policy 7. Amenity Migration, Rural Communities, and Public Lands 8. Integrating Commercial Nontimber Forest Product Harvesters into Forest Management 9. Job Quality for Forest Workers Part III: Communities and Forest Governance 10. Institutional Arrangements in Community-based Forestry 11. Family Forest Owners 12. Creating Community Forests 13. Collaborative Forest Management 14. Taking Stock of Community and Forest Connections Index

Ellen M. Donoghue is a social scientist with the USDA Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station. Her research focuses on the institutional dimensions of community and resource management agency interactions. Victoria E. Sturtevant is professor of sociology in the Department of Environmental Studies at Southern Oregon University. Her research has focused on forest communities in transition; collaborative stewardship, monitoring, and planning; and the social dimensions of wildfire.