Antony S. Cheng

Place as an Integrating Concept in Natural Resource Politics: Propositions for a Social Science Research Agenda

This article lays out six propositions centering on a relationship between people-place connections and strategic behavior in natural resource politics. The first two propositions suggest a strong and direct connection between self-identity, place, and how individuals perceive and value the environment. The third, fourth, and fifth propositions tie together social group identity and place, particularly emphasizing the influence of social group identity on strategic behavior in natural resource politics. The sixth proposition relates to the geographic scale of place as a strategic choice in natural resource decision making. Taken together, the propositions suggest that natural resource politics is as much a contest over place meanings as it is a competition among interest groups over scarce resources. The place perspective suggests an expanded role for natural resource social scientists as giving voice to meanings and values that may not otherwise be expressed in natural resource decision-making processes.

A Framework for Assessing Collaborative Capacity in Community-Based Public Forest Management

Community-based collaborative groups involved in public natural resource management are assuming greater roles in planning, project implementation, and monitoring. This entails the capacity of collaborative groups to develop and sustain new organizational structures, processes, and strategies, yet there is a lack of understanding what constitutes collaborative capacity. In this paper, we present a framework for assessing collaborative capacities associated with community-based public forest management in the US. The framework is inductively derived from case study research and observations of 30 federal forest-related collaborative efforts. Categories were cross-referenced with literature on collaboration across a variety of contexts. The framework focuses on six arenas of collaborative action: (1) organizing, (2) learning, (3) deciding, (4) acting, (5) evaluating, and (6) legitimizing. Within each arena are capacities expressed through three levels of social agency: individuals, the collaborative group itself, and participating or external organizations. The framework provides a language and set of organizing principles for understanding and assessing collaborative capacity in the context of community-based public forest management. The framework allows groups to assess what capacities they already have and what more is needed. It also provides a way for organizations supporting collaboratives to target investments in building and sustaining their collaborative capacities. The framework can be used by researchers as a set of independent variables against which to measure collaborative outcomes across a large population of collaborative efforts.

Community wildfire protection planning: is the Healthy Forests Restoration Act's vagueness genius?

The Healthy Forests Restoration Act of 2003 (HFRA) encourages communities to develop community wildfire protection plans (CWPPs) to reduce their wildland fire risk and promote healthier forested ecosystems. Communities who have developed CWPPs have done so using many different processes, resulting in plans with varied form and content. We analysed data from 13 case-study communities to illustrate how the characteristics of HFRA have encouraged communities to develop CWPPs that reflect their local social and ecological contexts. A framework for analysing policy implementation suggests that some elements of HFRA could have made CWPP development and implementation problematic, but these potential shortcomings in the statute have provided communities the freedom to develop CWPPs that are relevant to their conditions and allowed for the development of capacities that communities are using to move forward in several areas.

Framing the Need for Active Management for Wildfire Mitigation and Forest Restoration

We present results of a Q-methodology study of how diverse stakeholders in northern Colorado framed the need for immediate, active management on federal lands to mitigate wildfire risk and restore forest conditions. From the factor analysis of the Q-sorts, three significant themes emerged that represent distinct perspectives about active management: (1) The regions forests are unhealthy and should be actively managed; (2) active management should comply with existing laws; and (3) in-depth studies and public subsidies are needed before making decisions. Because the need for active management is not universally shared at the local level, agencies should not assume that issue frames are shared. A process of negotiation, shared learning, and adaptation should be pursued to minimize stakeholder conflict and maximize collaborative opportunities.

Examining the adaptability of collaborative governance associated with publicly managed ecosystems over time: insights from the Front Range Roundtable, Colorado, USA

We examine the adaptability of collaborative governance regimes associated with publicly managed ecosystems as they move from direction-setting to implementation phases. This is an under-researched topic and is particularly relevant given the growth of collaborative environmental governance efforts around the globe. Through an in-depth analysis of a case study spanning 10 years of the Front Range Roundtable in Colorado, USA, we examine the effect of forces internal and external to the Roundtable on three attributes associated with the adaptive capacity of environmental governance: social capital, learning, and flexibility in implementing innovative actions. We find that the Roundtable has been highly sensitive to internal and external changes, and that the absence of mechanisms through which social networks and learning can be durably linked to implementation decisions of bureaucracies with management authority compromises the Roundtables continued adaptability. From this case study, we develop three empirically testable propositions related to social capital and learning, national policy change, and boundary objects as collaborative regimes transition to implementation, along with an analytical framework to examine collaborative governance change and adaptability over time.

Public Involvement in State Fish and Wildlife Agencies in the U.S.: A Thumbnail Sketch of Techniques and Barriers

Increasingly, the public is demanding greater voice in decisions over the management of natural resources. Limited case studies indicate that state fish and wildlife agencies have public involvement programs, but there is a knowledge gap regarding which public involvement techniques are being used by what states and with what level of effectiveness. This article presents the results of a national survey of staff identified as being responsible for public involvement in all 50 state fish and wildlife agencies. The survey results are descriptive, providing information about the frequency of use of public involvement techniques, perceptions of the importance of each technique, and barriers to effective public involvement. Respondents ranked commission or governing board meetings, public meetings, and advisory boards as frequently used techniques. Respondents ranked scientific surveys, citizen task forces, and commission or governing board meetings as the most important techniques. The top barrier to effective public involvement was a lack of public understanding of agency decision-making processes. Respondents also indicated that a combination of public involvement approaches is used, depending on the management issue.

Regulatory programs and private forestry: State government actions to direct the use and management of forest ecosystems

Implemented in the context of a long history of intense public debate, forestry practices applied on private forestland are regulated in some form by 38 states. State regulatory activities can involve many agencies implementing numerous regulatory laws or a single forestry agency administering a comprehensive regulatory program. Regulatory programs are designed to protect resources such as soils, water, wildlife, and scenic beauty. Program administration often involves rule promulgation, harvest plan reviews, coordination of interagency reviews, and pre‐ and postharvest on‐site inspections. Forest practice rules usually focus on reforestation, forest roads, harvest procedures, and wildlife habitat protection. Emerging regulatory trends include growth of state and local regulation, use of contingent regulations, specification of forest practice standards in law, collaborative program implementation, conflicting multigovern‐ment regulatory authority, inflexible rules limiting adoption of new technology, leg...

Return on investment from fuel treatments to reduce severe wildfire and erosion in a watershed investment program in Colorado

A small but growing number of watershed investment programs in the western United States focus on wildfire risk reduction to municipal water supplies. This paper used return on investment (ROI) analysis to quantify how the amounts and placement of fuel treatment interventions would reduce sediment loading to the Strontia Springs Reservoir in the Upper South Platte River watershed southwest of Denver, Colorado following an extreme fire event. We simulated various extents of fuel mitigation activities under two placement strategies: (a) a strategic treatment prioritization map and (b) accessibility. Potential fire behavior was modeled under each extent and scenario to determine the impact on fire severity, and this was used to estimate expected change in post-fire erosion due to treatments. We found a positive ROI after large storm events when fire mitigation treatments were placed in priority areas with diminishing marginal returns after treating >50-80% of the forested area. While our ROI results should not be used prescriptively they do show that, conditional on severe fire occurrence and precipitation, investments in the Upper South Platte could feasibly lead to positive financial returns based on the reduced costs of dredging sediment from the reservoir. While our analysis showed positive ROI focusing only on post-fire erosion mitigation, it is important to consider multiple benefits in future ROI calculations and increase monitoring and evaluation of these benefits of wildfire fuel reduction investments for different site conditions and climates.

Best management practices for creating a community wildfire protection plan

A community wildfire protection plan (CWPP) is a means of bringing local solutions to wildland fire management. In developing and implementing CWPPs, communities assume a leadership role in reducing wildfi re risk on federal and nonfederal land. In this publication, we identify best management practices for CWPP development and implementation based on the experiences of 13 communities in 8 states. These communities represent much of the social and ecological diversity found across the U.S. in the Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI)--where human development meets forested areas.

High resolution mapping of development in the wildland-urban interface using object based image extraction

The wildland-urban interface (WUI), the area where human development encroaches on undeveloped land, is expanding throughout the western United States resulting in increased wildfire risk to homes and communities. Although census based mapping efforts have provided insights into the pattern of development and expansion of the WUI at regional and national scales, these approaches do not provide sufficient detail for fine-scale fire and emergency management planning, which requires maps of individual building locations. Although fine-scale maps of the WUI have been developed, they are often limited in their spatial extent, have unknown accuracies and biases, and are costly to update over time. In this paper we assess a semi-automated Object Based Image Analysis (OBIA) approach that utilizes 4-band multispectral National Aerial Image Program (NAIP) imagery for the detection of individual buildings within the WUI. We evaluate this approach by comparing the accuracy and overall quality of extracted buildings to a building footprint control dataset. In addition, we assessed the effects of buffer distance, topographic conditions, and building characteristics on the accuracy and quality of building extraction. The overall accuracy and quality of our approach was positively related to buffer distance, with accuracies ranging from 50 to 95% for buffer distances from 0 to 100 m. Our results also indicate that building detection was sensitive to building size, with smaller outbuildings (footprints less than 75 m2) having detection rates below 80% and larger residential buildings having detection rates above 90%. These findings demonstrate that this approach can successfully identify buildings in the WUI in diverse landscapes while achieving high accuracies at buffer distances appropriate for most fire management applications while overcoming cost and time constraints associated with traditional approaches. This study is unique in that it evaluates the ability of an OBIA approach to extract highly detailed data on building locations in a WUI setting.