Abstract
Understanding perceptions and attitudes of forest managers toward climate change and climate adaptive forest management is crucial, as they are expected to implement changes to forest resource management. We assessed the perceptions of forest managers toward climate adaptive forest management practices through a survey of forest managers working in private firms and public agencies in New England and the Klamath ecoregion (northern California and southwestern Oregon). We analyzed the motivations, actions, and potential barriers to action of forest managers toward climate adaptive forest management practices. Results suggest that managing for natural regeneration is the most common climate adaptive forest management approach considered by forest managers in both regions. Lack of information about the best strategies for reducing climate change risks, lack of education and awareness among the clients, and perceived client costs were forest managers’ primary barriers to climate adaptive management. Our findings suggest useful insights toward the policy and program design in climate adaptive forest management for both areas.
Highlights
Anticipated climate change poses many challenges to successful forest management to provide and protect ecosystem services [1,2,3]
We address three important and interrelated questions in forest management: (1) Are forest managers modifying management practices to adapt to the effects of climate change? (2) If so, what are their key motivation(s) for doing so?
Climate change is a serious threat to forest health and viability which has the capacity to alter the extent, composition, and growth of forest resources
Summary
Anticipated climate change poses many challenges to successful forest management to provide and protect ecosystem services [1,2,3]. Our current suite of forest management tools emerged from long experience with each landscape and reflected abiotic conditions, natural variability, and biological diversity [4]; policy, social context, and cultural practices are important [5]. As the biotic and abiotic ecosystem components are rapidly changing, a mismatch is emerging between management goals and the tools designed over the past century to achieve them [6]. The social and political landscape is rapidly changing and these changes may be as or more important than the anticipated biotic/abiotic changes [7,8,9]. The Healthy Forests Restoration Act (or Healthy Forests Initiative, HFI)
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