• Socioeconomic Monitoring & Assessment
  
  
• Community Forestry & Natural Resources
  
  
• Environmental Justice
  
  
• Rural Community Development

Community Forestry and Natural Resources: Community-based natural resource management posits that in order to sustain healthy ecosystems, communities and workers that depend on those ecosystems must be sustained as well. Healthy forests and watersheds and healthy communities are not independent entities, but two halves of a common whole. Sustaining healthy communities and ecosystems requires changing the ways we do science and formulate and practice democracy, economic policy, and resource management.

Community forestry and community-based resource management work to integrate each leg of a three-legged stool: environment, economy, and equity. This approach to problem solving involves workers and people with local knowledge in creating integrative solutions and stewardship at the appropriate scale.

Examples of our work in community forestry and community-based natural resource management include:

• A study of stakeholders in the Almanor Basin, and establishing a citizen advisory group for managing the Lake Almanor watershed
  
• Center of Forestry tours to showcase innovative community-based land and water stewardship
  
• Developing principles and piloting multi-party monitoring, a process that includes community members, scientists, land managers, and other forest users in monitoring forest health
  
• A participatory project to help diverse, low-income mushroom harvesters monitor the harvest on national forest lands
  
• Helping Western scientists and Maidu people develop principles for collaborative monitoring of the Maidu Stewardship site
  
• Participatory research with underserved communities through the Pacific West Community Forestry Center (2000-2004)
  
• Case studies of the integration of community wellbeing and community-based forest management

For more information on community forestry and community-based approaches to resource management, see our book, Community Forestry in the United States (Island Press, 2003) or request our free summary booklet. See box below.

For examples of community-based forestry from around the country, see our book Forest Communities, Community Forests (Rowman and Littlefield, 2003).

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