The Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Program: A History and Overview of the First Projects

Abstract

In 2009, Congress passed the Forest Landscape Restoration Act, a significant new piece of legislation guiding restoration activities on competitively selected National Forest System lands. The Act established the Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Program (CFLRP), which solicits collaboratively developed proposals for landscapescale ecological restoration projects that are socially and economically viable. In many ways, the CFLRP reflects a number of longer-term patterns in forest governance that have increasingly emphasized large-scale planning, collaboration, monitoring, and restoration. The program also represents an emerging trend of using competitive processes to allocate funding. We begin by providing an overview of the CFLRP’s primary objectives and requirements and then discuss how this program and the capacity to make it successful have resulted from a number of past policies and initiatives. We then provide an overview of the first 10 funded projects, which we evaluated based on a systematic review of their funding proposals, followed by a closer look at several of the projects. The piece concludes with a discussion of the primary challenges that lie ahead for the program.