Problem Area 3
Active information exchange is essential to ensuring that science is used in management, and equally important in fostering relevant and useful science.
Problem 3a: FOUNDATION BUILDING. Opportunities to create and strengthen effective and efficient information exchange are enhanced by understanding and gauging stakeholder needs, and by using best practices for extension. The Center strives to increase its long-term effectiveness by formulating highly relevant research questions through active engagement and collaboration across organizational or administrative scales, from landscape to global.
Problem 3b: ENGAGEMENT WITH PROVEN AND NEW TECHNOLOGIES. A wide spectrum of products, tools, and services are needed to engage diverse, multi- faceted audiences; to increase their understanding of forest threats; and to encourage long-term adoption through collaborative development. The desired goal is an interactive, bi-directional information exchange to achieve coproduction in resource development. Everyone at the Center has an important role to play in achieving such engagement.
Problem 3c REPORTING. Scientists, managers, decisionmakers and policymakers tasked with characterizing and stewarding forest ecosystems require timely reports that summarize the status of current and emerging situations within and surrounding those ecosystems. Reporting is most likely to be well-received and used effectively when crafted to relay rigorous science in credible, digestible, and accessible communication formats.
As the amount and availability of scientific information grows, new challenges and opportunities arise for sharing science and information regarding forest threats and landscape change. The Center actively engages in sharing information, tools, and resources that partners, customers, and other users can readily use and apply to sustain natural resources, especially in the face of new, evolving, and interacting threats to forests. The Center also strives to engage partners throughout the full cycle of science production under the assumption that co-developed science is more likely to be relevant and used.
Responding to emerging forest threats and sustaining natural resources across changing landscapes require active information exchange between and among customers and scientists, including resource managers and planners, policy- and decision-makers, management and extension specialists, researchers, and stakeholders. Such collaborative research development and exchange is a key means for research to align effectively with departmental and agency strategic plans that emphasize forest and community threats involving diverse stakeholders and jurisdictions. This critically important exchange of information is complicated by complex networks of individuals with widely varying roles, responsibilities, interests, and understanding of natural resource values and threats to sustainability. The Center is uniquely positioned to interconnect these networks, to create advanced tools and products that streamline information exchange, and to establish methods to develop tools and products that meet diverse, multi-dimensional customer needs.
Fundamental to successful information exchange is identifying the scientific information most relevant to policy- and decision-makers, understanding the role of management and extension specialists to facilitate this critical information exchange, and recognizing societal values linked to natural resources. The Center works with customers to understand their priorities and needs, and to ensure that tools and products are designed and implemented in useful and meaningful ways. This understanding is gained through both direct and indirect methods—directly through consultations with representative customers, and indirectly through review of existing customer products. Both methods inform scalable solutions that include not only relevant information, but also mechanisms, techniques, and capacities to deploy successful products that meet customer priorities and needs.
The Center provides critical scientific leadership for regional, national, and global forest reporting efforts—one key aspect of effective science communication. Most of these efforts are mandated to follow a regular reporting cycle, typically annual or every 5 to 10 years. Center researchers produce summary products and documentation of targeted disturbances and other changes, providing yearly and multi-year context. This research provides the insight needed to distinguish normal forest dynamics from trends or type conversions of particular concern. Attention to the need for integration and synthesis, and the explicit consideration of multiple spatial and temporal scales in monitoring and assessment, puts the Center in a unique position to provide synoptic evaluations. In addition, Center research includes topical syntheses that help summarize and contextualize existing science at broad scales. These various efforts benefit from an intersection of scientific rigor and commitment to effective information exchange, which the Center is positioned to provide.
