Empowering Our Forest Stewards: A New Era of Innovation
Day in and day out, across millions of acres of forestland, dedicated professionals are hard at work—the forest managers, scientists, and technicians who brave tough conditions to protect our watersheds, preserve wildlife habitat, and keep our forests healthy. Too often their passion for this necessary work is met by roadblocks from well beyond the forest’s borders. Over the past several decades, a suite of pervasive and mutually reinforcing problems have emerged within the Forest sector, from an overemphasis on process and documentation to poorly designed information systems and inadequate monitoring. As the challenges facing our forests evolve, it's time to evolve our approach to managing them by building a system that fosters innovation, encourages learning, and is biased towards proactive action.
How can we keep forest ecosystems on a path to health and resilience?
Forests provide a myriad of ecosystem services, from biodiversity conservation and climate regulation to water purification and support for livelihoods. Despite their critical importance, forests face accelerating threats from pests, disease, more intense wildfires, drought and shifting climates. Current management, often anchored in activity-based metrics, is not keeping pace with these risks or demonstrating needed progress towards resilience in many places. To effectively address these challenges, there is a growing need for management strategies that are adaptive, future aware, efficiently implemented, and demonstrably impactful. Outcome-based adaptive management (OBAM) offers a distinct alternative: it measures success by the actual condition of forests and the services they provide, a promising pathway that aligns incentives with tangible environmental and social improvements while encouraging innovation in achieving those improvements. Over time, it can allow work that was once difficult to justify to become routine by quickly and continually enabling practitioners to identify and showcase what’s successful. With climate pressures intensifying, bipartisan demand for accountability growing, and new digital tools making forest outcomes easier to track, this is the moment to scale OBAM so that every investment yields verifiable, lasting gains for both forests and people.
From Obstacles to Opportunities
Anyone who has worked in forest management knows that passion and expertise can often be constrained by the system. Well-meaning layers of static checklists and lengthy reviews accumulate to make action a years-long endeavor. Moving beyond it requires a framework that amplifies the incredible work already being done and helps the best of it become routine. True innovation, the kind that can meet the complex challenges of the future, is built on three powerful pillars:
A Shared Understanding of Success (Outcomes and Monitoring): Our forest managers do the hard work; they deserve a system that clearly defines and rewards the outcomes that matter most. That starts with a shift from focusing on activities (like acres treated) to measuring a broader suite of meaningful results (like improved forest resilience or successful post-fire recovery). While there are examples of this shift starting to occur, outcome-based metrics have not been comprehensively identified and adopted in forests. Once clear targets exist, monitoring that can track real changes on the ground needs to be ubiquitous at increasing granular levels (e.g. think informing planting decisions on a hillside). These shifts can empower managers and innovators inside and outside of government, with shared goals and a way to tangibly demonstrate the positive impact of their work. While many promising monitoring technologies using both remote sensing and local sampling are out there, precious few are tested, trusted and available at low-cost to help with analysis on the ground. That needs to change.
Unleashing Expertise (Freedom to Experiment and Learn): The most valuable asset in forestry is the on-the-ground knowledge of its professionals. We need to empower this expertise by giving managers the skill sets and flexibility to innovate. This means creating spaces to test new techniques—to see "failure" not as a setback, but as valuable data that guides us toward better solutions. It's about trusting people to adapt and discover both site-specific and scalable strategies as quickly as possible. These spaces need to span the digital, physical, and policy landscape, center experimental design, and engage new generations of experts and technologists to be most successful. They also need a pathway to move experiments from pilot to routine.
The Power of Connection (Effective Networks): Networks are what move information from where it is produced to where it is needed. Tremendous expertise exists across our landscapes—in federal and state agencies, tribal nations, university research labs, and private partnerships—but bringing it to bear is stunted and stymied by breaks in these networks. These breaks prevent information from flowing through the system as intended to make outcomes-based adaptive management possible. There is an opportunity to intentionally weave these threads of knowledge together by fostering stronger, more agile relationships and building better information systems that are interoperable by design. This is the only way to ensure that a breakthrough in one forest can quickly become a best practice in another.
Reforestation: A Case Study
Imagine a dedicated Forest Service team tasked with reforesting a landscape after a fire. They conduct assessments of the land's condition, determine if natural regeneration will be sufficient, and prescribe specific treatments, such as planting seedlings or direct seeding. The team creates more favorable conditions for tree growth by reducing competing vegetation and preparing the soil. They acquire seedlings from a nursery and have them transported to the site. Once there, they are planted, generally by hand, with the prescribed spacing. The team reports the planted acres into a database as an accomplishment. Some members of the team do subsequent monitoring through regeneration examinations to check seedling survival. They discover after three years that over 90% of the seedlings failed to establish themselves and grasses have begun reclaiming this patch - no forest will be growing here in the near future. This seems like a clear case of wasted investment in a failed project. In isolation, that may be true but a system truly built for innovation treats this reforestation effort as data that shapes future efforts.
A System Built for Experimentation and Smart Innovation
Now, imagine empowering that same team within a system built for experimentation and innovation. The reforestation effort proceeds as envisioned, but, before they’ve even planted, a continuous monitoring strategy is in place to understand the baseline conditions at the site, such as the soil moisture and any existing vegetation. They plant according to the prescribed treatment, but after only a few months they leverage continuous monitoring of seedling and forest health conditions to give them early warning that, if left alone, a significant portion of the seedlings won’t survive. They immediately prepare proposals for several interventions (i.e. removing invasives, planting other species) to improve seedling health and analyze the opportunity cost of doing so. They decide that removing invasives is too costly and share that information with an innovation office charged with communicating the need for lower cost invasive species removal to innovators and entrepreneurs.
Meanwhile the reforestation team plants new species and sees their results show up in the continuous monitoring data. As they monitor the site, they have access to continuously updated software and data streams that help them leverage local and scientific knowledge. They use it to analyze what they are seeing and develop and test several promising new planting strategies across similar areas. These strategies adjust different aspects of the prescription and the specific tools and technologies used to carry out the work. They use these alternatives on another nearby site and have comparable monitoring data to watch the outcomes in each site diverge and continue to learn for the next project. Information systems built with learning in mind carry information from this team to a network of teams across the region to amplify these learnings and set many more reforestation projects on better paths. Over time, these new interventions become the norm and are so well demonstrated in the data that additional funds flow from public and private sector investors.
Getting from Here to There
Running a real-world laboratory to rapidly adapt as conditions change can seem a world away, but there are practical steps that we can prioritize to move toward this vision:
Clearly Communicating Outcome-Based Metrics: Outcomes-based metrics are not new to forests, many of them exist today. The gap is more about how they are communicated and how universally they are adopted. Scientists may be focused on dozens of metrics of forest health, while statutes and regulations point toward acres planted as the measure of success. The gap between these creates uncertainty, limits investment, and makes it unclear what innovators should be aiming for; do land managers need help planting more acres or predicting seedling mortality? The answer may be both for now, but the direction of travel should be clear. There needs to be better awareness and alignment on metrics across the board and clear communication that this is what we care about now and in the future.
Lowering the True Cost of Monitoring: Actually using outcome-based metrics in practice depends on being able to monitor them and analyze the resulting flood of data at a reasonable cost. Today measuring and analyzing everything we want to in forests is prohibitively expensive and, until it isn’t, a system built for experimentation and adaptation cannot scale. We need a focused initiative to shape, test, and iterate on monitoring technologies faster - smart use of artificial intelligence, blockchain, and remote sensing offer promising paths to doing so. We also need to ensure that monitoring information is actually easy to produce and use for those in the field.
Evolving the Land Management Craft: Every facet of this system built for learning and innovation depends on people making informed choices at every level and having the curiosity and confidence to chart a new course, learn from it, and change again. Comfort with evaluating and using digital technologies is part and parcel of that. We need to prioritize and support new skill sets to fuel this vision.
Creating Intentional Spaces for Experimentation: Giving everyone more freedom to experiment and innovate starts by creating the policies, resources, and structures to facilitate it - an experimentation with experimentation. Sandboxes that allow for different policies, practices, and technologies have been successful in other domains - let’s apply them in forests.
Connecting Information Systems: Elements of OBAM have been around in various forms for decades and there are already information systems geared towards planning, implementation, monitoring, evaluation, and science. The problem is that they are often disconnected from each other. Sometimes the workflows that they embody aren’t connected, sometimes trust is broken between stewards of them, sometimes the data or interfaces aren’t compatible. We need connected systems to enable fast learning and innovation.
At EPIC, we’re always looking for ways to encourage innovation and collaboration. If this vision for the future resonates, please get in touch at reed@policyinnovation.org so we can work on it together!
