A Special Issue of the Journal of Forestry—Tribal Forest Management: Innovations for Sustainable Forest Management

Abstract

Native American forests and tribal forest management practices have sustained indigenous communities, economies, and resources for millennia. These systems provide a wealth of knowledge and successful applications of long-term environmental stewardship and integrated, sustainable forest management. Tribal forestry has received an increasing amount of attention from forest managers, academics, and tribal communities in recent years. Tribal forestry is seen as a way to provide approaches for solving our most complex social, economic, and environmental issues facing natural resource managers today. It is also considered as an important approach to build landscape- level partnerships and leverage funding for landscape- scale management. Tribal forest management provides numerous examples of balancing complex, multiple objectives in an era of shrinking budgets, novel ecologic interactions, and increasing human demands on our natural resources. This special issue of the Journal of Forestry seeks to capture a broad range of forest management practices occurring in Indian Country and beyond; to increase general recognition of the role that tribal forest plays in the greater landscape; and to engage broad audiences regarding the value of tribal forests and how they can serve as models for sustainability, integrated management, resilience, and restoration.