CONTEMPORARY FUTURE TRENDS EXECUTIVE MEMO

Contemporary Future Trends Executive Memo



Contemporary Future Trends Executive Memo

Introduction

The Nature Conservancy has long been a leader in determining landscapes of conservation significance, and in pursuing broad partnerships in those places to achieve compatible goals. The following list represents a cross section of sites in the United States where The Nature Conservancy is working closely with partners at a grand scale, and which would seem to be appropriate sites for “proof of concept” for the All Lands approach. Almost universally, the Conservancy works closely with public and private partners, and so these sites represent areas of immediate opportunity. As the Conservancy has conservation staff associated with each of these sites, we would be happy to provide additional information about any of them, or to help create linkages with state agency staff as appropriate (Chung, Little, Steinberg, & Altschuler, Feb.2005).

In the last 120 years, Northern Great Lakes Forests have changed from mostly complex, mature forests to younger and less diverse forests, reducing their capacity to provide a diversity of ecosystem services, including quality habitat, production of a variety of forest products, resistance to invasive species and resiliency to climate change and other stresses. To address this need, TNC and partners including the US Forest Service, DNRs in Minnesota, Michigan, and Wisconsin, county and private forest managers are working to develop landscape-scale goals and desired future scenarios, refine management prescriptions at the scale of managed forests, and implement experimental and proven silvicultural practices that account for ecological and economic goals. At the landscape scale, TNC is bringing tools such as LANDFIRE (developed in cooperation with the USFS) to assist land managers in modeling future scenarios, enabling an assessment of the costs and benefits, both in economic and ecological terms, of various treatments in light of increasing stresses ...