Brief Summary of Minutes of Annual Meeting

Highlights of needed key decisions

1. Electing a vice chair to follow Andy Perlerg’s term, Darren McAvoy UT
2. Deciding where to hold the 2017 meeting – Denver/Ft. Collins CO or Arizona?
3. To re-sign the currently expired MOU between WCC 1003 and 3 National Forest Research Stations
4. To better coordinate with the State and Private Forestry (SPF) units across the NFS Regions in the West ( Decided that relevant region associated with state of WCC 1003 chair will be asked to participate in WCC 1003 –
5. How to better coordinate with Western Forestry Leadership Coalition (WFLC) and Western Governors Association (WGA) who have strong political connections but currently lack strong operational interactions with cooperative extension forestry entities across the west.
6. Process to get stronger working groups on emerging themes of high shared interest (Megan Dettenmair of USU sent out questionnaire with the themes)

Meeting Notes

State updates – challenges with few permanent forest extension personnel and huge needs – private forest management

USFS SPF have state level – forest stewardship committees to oversees SPF grant funds. In CA , SPF funds that are not spent directly by the USFS go mainly to forest legacy acquisitions.

The three shared themes from the 2015 meeting in California were

1. Resource management before and after increasing wildfires in the West,
2. Improving distance outreach to dispersed family forest landowners, and
3. Potential synergies between fire risk reduction, bioenergy production and increased forest resilience at an ‘All Lands’ scale.

Scott Reed – vice provost for outreach and engagement at Oregon State University

laid out 4 strategic issues that should be addressed at this meeting

1. Growth and development of the WCC 1003 Committee – who to recruit? The MOU with the 3 USFS research stations expired and needs to be reconsidered and resigned. Another opportunity is USFS State and Private Forestry (SPF) programs that are major financial supporter of projects run by extension foresters on a state by state level. Coordination is a bit more challenging as there are 6 NFS regional SPF programs that we would need to coordinate with in some manner.
2. New partnerships and what they would look like. For example for private forest owners, there are many state level forest landowner associations. Keith Argow of the National Woodland Owners Association is another contact but there are many more owners in the East. If they are really are key clientele, we need to bring them in and also find out what issues and strategies they see as part of our strategy to make WCC 1003 more effective. The Western unit of ANREP also reached out to the WCC 1003 to discuss partnering with co-meetings on years when there is not a national ANREP meeting.
3. Whether to proceed on a regional extension forester (like Jim Hubbard in SE where he has ~13 people on soft money, funded by all states but is able to bring in large multiples of the state funds to support him. All states cooperate as they have many identified and acknowledged similarities. In the West we have many FS regions – 1,4,5,6,10, and a greater diversity in the forestry extension issues and opportunities.
4. 2018 Farm Bill – will have specific titles and that is where new funding can be built in. Verne xxxx from Cornerstone works for APLU and gets ink on paper as an effective lobbyist. Randy xxx works for NAUFRP but is not as effective.

Jim Johnson (OR) – Stressed that we need to make our group as strong and functional as we can. Then we can offer a strong collaboration. We need to prove our relevance to entities with funds such as NFS’s SPF in each region that often end up with lots of unspent project based funds at the end of their funding cycles. Everyone will continue to fight against extension forestry if we try to get written into to base budget allocations, but many of our members have been single state beneficiaries of end of year SPF funds.

Eric Norland – they will ask ‘what do you bring to the table?” We need to have good answer. An advantage of WCC 1003 is by sharing expertise and experience across states as we are often dealing with similar issues and can skip re-inventing some of the wheels.

State and Private Forestry – 17% by formula for competitive projects. We need to have compelling ideas to win new funds. All projects have to have an educational component (and this is an angle WCC 1003 members could possibly get in on in a more permanent way) . Jim Hubbard is the deputy chief for SPF, gives money to Yale projects and American Forest Foundation (who then lobbies for overall USFS budget but not for extension forestry $$$). JH is ex state forester, so prefers them to university based extension foresters.

Other funds - regional RREA pool. Would state’s pitch in for common themes? Or could we sell states on advantage of pooling RREA funds to get more funds from nonRREA sources. In CA, RREA are already competitively allocated, have high leverage AND are locally led. RREA currently only gets 14% of maximum that could be allocated. Fights against all the other under funded programs.

More $$ to RREA is never on the short list of APLU.

Other potential partnerships

Western Forestry Leadership Coalition   - http://www.wflccenter.org (access 8 4 2016)

Priority issues (5) –

forest health

wildland fire

sustainability

climate change

water

Western Strategies (3):

Conserve – Our goal is to conserve and manage working forest landscapes through 1) promoting and sustaining a viable forest products industry and 2) minimizing forest conversion and fragmentation

Protect – Our goal is to protect forests from threats through 1) maintaining federal, state, and local agency capacity in wildland fire preparedness, prevention and response, 2) minimizing risks to individuals, firefighters, property, and communities from wildland fire, 3) focusing on priority areas and species

Enhance – Our goal is to enhance public benefits from trees and forests through: 1) actively and sustainably managing trees, forests and watersheds; 2) facilitating the sustainable use of biomass; 3) sustaining and enhancing urban and community forests; 4) mitigating and adapting to climate change impacts

The six point plan

• Strengthen partnerships and collaborative approaches

• Effective collaboration allows partners to make the most of available funding, capacity, resources, and information.

• Build adequate and flexible capacity and funding

• Shared priority strategies offer compelling arguments to support capacity and funding to accomplish work, as well as to undertake new initiatives.

• Capitalize on “co-benefits”

• Focus on opportunities to meet multiple objectives with one management action, e.g., fuel reduction projects that maintain watershed benefit.

• Actively manage all forestlands

• It is only through a landscape-scale approach that major threats to western forests can be mitigated and managed, and benefits can be provided to citizens and communities.

• Support research to inform science- based decision making

• Research and the best available science must be a part of an ongoing, collaborative effort to define and act upon the forestry issues of the West.

• Gain support through effective engagement

• Successful strategy implementation will only occur if citizens — collectively and individually — understand, accept, and support the principles, strategies, and actions envisioned in the Forest Action Plans.

State Fact Sheets : CA - Calfire and USFS (Forest Legacy/Stewardship Pgm Mgr) never mentions University Cooperative Extension. Same for other states. Pacific Coast states are quite different than Rocky Mtn states with respect to the overall size of state forest/fire organizations, acres of productive non-industrial private forest land, inter-relationships of state and federal fire protection agencies, and relative area impacted by wildfires and beetles. The following summaries were calculated from the WFLC state fact sheets and the recent Hicke et al 2016 paper.

Fire and Beetle mortality by area across the West but varies among states

Hicke et al (2016) estimated a tree mortality of 19.6% within fire areas versus a tree mortality of 2.6% for beetle mortality areas, so that the overall tree mortality was similar from fire and beetles over the study period. Proactive strategies for the two types of natural disturbance may be best designed and implemented separately.

Hicke, J.A., Meddens, A.J.H. and Kolden, C.A. 2016 Recent Tree Mortality in the Western United States from Bark Beetles and Forest Fires. Forest Science, 62, 141-153.

Climate hubs – http://www.climatehubs.oce.usda.gov/ These never got a line item funds under Obama budgets and typically involve shuffling money around from other line items. Are they useful for our non-federal clientele? The ‘forestland’ page on the website never mentions the positive climate value of harvested wood products that are especially important to private owners who need positive cash flow from their land asset http://www.climatehubs.oce.usda.gov/focus-forestlands .

Fire Science Consortiums – they were designed to mainly work with federal fire and land managers, but WUI issues involve private land (where the buildings usuall are) and many states (CA included) have active participation by non-federal parties. There may be complex coordination issues dealing with firesafe, firewise, etc programs that are sometimes run independently of forestry extension programs.

After exec session, we had presentations by 2 fire science consortiums that are active in Utah and further discussions. The final day we had a field trip through the Wasatch Mountains and in industrial areas of Salt Lake City. We visited two operational pilot operations with new biomass-to-power technologies.

http://utahbiomassresources.org/mobile-pyrolysis

http://www.active-energy.com/aeg-coalswitch

Short Term Outcomes 

Growth and development of the WCC 1003 Committee - and the need to recruit new members. It was decided that extension foresters from different USFS Regions will contact their representative for 'State and Private Forestry' and the regional rep from SPF that aligns with the current chair will be invited to the meetings. All states noted that they have a number of individual projects funded through SPF funds, often with very similar themes, but the WCC 1003 could benefit through better coordination of work as a step to developing strong multi-state fundable projects .

We also committed to researching new partnerships of membership organizations such as state and national family forest organizations. Similar issues in terms of both implementation and federal funding formulas were noted. 

In addition, we will work on strengthening our links with the Western Forestry Leadership Coalition as the shared network of extension foresters have goals and skills that are closely aligned with WFLC. 

Outputs : Multi-state funded projects are to be developed over the coming year. 

Activities: 

Milestones: It is expected that we will have a proposed work plan to discuss with WFLC and WGA when we meet in Colorado next year.