Landscape Management Demonstration Areas as an Approach to Monitoring Outcomes

Forests throughout much of the western United States are no longer resilient to disturbances such as wildfire and drought.  Decades of fire suppression, intensive logging, and other factors have homogenized forests compared to their historical conditions.  If these broad-scale changes are not addressed, forests are unlikely to continue providing the ecosystem services that society values.  The concept of a Landscape Management Demonstration Areas (LMDA) involves identifying a suitable working landscape that can address large scale restoration with a meaningful role for research to investigate the efficacy of and response to an accelerated pace and scale of restoration.

Implementing LMDAs can provide field sites for demonstrating what management strategies to restore forest resilience at a landscape scale actually looks like.  These select locations will be given the maximum administrative latitude and sufficient personnel necessary to assess, plan, execute, and monitor/research the effects of efforts to restore ecosystem resiliency.  This becomes a long-term commitment to push the limits of scientific and socio-economic capabilities to achieve these goals.  These demonstration areas will become experimental sites to validate successes and learn from failures of the process.  Site selection a) involves willing landowners/managers within a given landscape, b) addresses restoration at a pace and scale that can effectively change forest conditions and restore resiliency of forests to the daunting suite of disturbance factors (e.g. fire, insects, climate change, etc.) that challenge land managers, and c) provides a rigorous scientific foundation for both the treatment methods chosen and the evaluation of response to management.