Opportunities to Incorporate the Ecological Values of Forests – During Land Use Change

• About the Event
• Agenda
• Speaker Biographies

The UF/IFAS Extension Office is proud to host the following event:
Opportunities to Incorporate the Ecological Values of Forests – During Land Use Change

About the Event

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• Date: March 23, 2009
• Place: University of Florida IFAS
  Hillsborough County Extension Office
  5339 County Road 579, Seffner, Florida 33584
• Cost: $20, lunch and breaks
• To Register Contact:
  Carol Carson at 813-744-5519 x104 or
• CEUs:
  American Institute of Certified Planners – 3.25 CM credits
  Society of American Foresters – 3 CFE’s requested: approval pending
  International Society of Arborists – 2.75 CEU’s

As noted by the Society of American Foresters, ‘the conversion of forest land to other land uses has many undesirable ecological, social, and economic consequences’. While fundamentally a result of population growth, loss of forest land to uncontrolled urban expansion, subdivision, and commercial development is to some degree avoidable and is too often a result of land use policies that have not kept pace with the rapid rate of growth of many urban, suburban, and rural communities.

We’ll examine the causes of forest land conversion and its long – term consequences for supporting a sustainable society. Through examples drawn from Florida, the southeastern, mid – Atlantic and northwestern regions of the United States we’ll discuss land use planning laws and explore some of innovative new programs that government, conservation organizations and industry are considering and implementing. We’ll conclude with a facilitated dialogue that considers the relative merit of using some of these innovative approaches to forest conservation in Florida.

Speakers include:
Michael G. Andreu, Ph.D., Asst. Professor of Forest Systems, University of Florida
Jeffrey Horan, Director of Watershed Services, Maryland Department of Natural Resources
Edward Macie, Urban and Community Forestry Program Manager, US Forest Service – Southeastern Region, Atlanta GA
Rob Northrop, Extension Forester, University of Florida IFAS – Hillsborough County Extension
Luke Rogers, Research Scientist/Engineer for the Rural Technology Initiative, College of Forest Resources, University of Washington, Seattle

Agenda:

8:00 – 9:00 Registration

9:00 – 9:30 Regional Sustainability – Why It Is Important to Conserve the Ecological Function of Forests.
Rob Northrop, UF IFAS – Hillsborough Co. Extension.
Urbanization has been an important driver is promoting climate change and fostering increased pollutant loading. Urban land use change leads to the modification of forest structure, function and dynamics which alters the availability of ecosystem services and natural resource utilization within, surrounding, and even at great distances from urban areas.

9:30 – 10:15 Building Spatial Tools to Reduce Conflicts between Conservation and Adjacent Land Uses
Tricia Martin, Peninsular Florida Director, The Nature Conservancy
Land use decisions are being made that greatly impact our ability to protect and manage the conservation landscape. Encroachment is a universal threat to landscape integrity; and inevitably leads to the erosion of our ability to protect species and provide ecosystem services. The Nature Conservancy is working with a suite of partners to develop innovative scientific assessment tools to quantify anticipated development impacts and provide visualization techniques to communicate threats effectively.

10:15 – 10:30 Break (light snack)

10:30 – 11: 15 Piedmont Crescent Region of the South - the Growth Corridor.
Ed Macie, US Forest Service, Southeastern Region.
The U.S. Forest Service has recently been focusing on the piedmont crescent region of the South - the growth corridor stretching from Birmingham through Atlanta and the Carolina's up to Raleigh. U.S. Forest Service work with American Forests illustrates the consequences of the interaction of the human network with natural systems in terms of fragmentation pollution, depletion, extinction, and erosion. This project has resulted in a new conceptual framework (beyond regulation and conservation) that we call co-evolution - the integration of the human network and natural systems.

11:15 – 12:00 Tools for Protecting Ecological Function in a Rapidly Urbanizing Environment.
Jeff Horan, Director of Watershed Services, Maryland Department of Natural Resource.
The State of Maryland has created a framework for forest conservation that uses state wide modeling and assessment tools like Green Infrastructure (GI), the Strategic Forest Lands Assessment (SFLA) to identify Priority Conservation Areas (PCA’s) for targeting land acquisition. Complementing fee simple acquisition are legal and statutory mechanisms such as the Forest Conservation Act and the Chesapeake Bay Critical Area Protection Act are employed to protect natural systems within county and municipal comprehensive planning and land use change processes.

12:00 – 1:00 Lunch

1:00 – 1:45 Mapping and Quantifying Washington’s Changing Forest Land Base. Luke Rogers, Research Scientist/Engineer, University of Washington.
Washington’s forestlands are being lost to urban and exurban uses at an alarming rate. Population pressure, forestry regulations, land use planning, industry restructuring and an aging nonindustrial forestland owner demographic all play a role in the loss of working forestlands. In this talk we’ll start by exploring Washington’s forest land base and how its changing. We’ll examine the economics of forestlands and look at how industry trends and family dynamics can impact land conversion. We’ll discuss Washington’s land use planning laws and conclude with some exploration of innovative new programs that government, conservation organizations and industry are considering and implementing.

2:00 – 2:45 Facilitated Breakout Session – Identifying opportunities and constraints to forest conservation during land use change within Florida today.

2:45 – 3:00 Break (Drinks only)

3:00 – 3:30 Breakout Group Reports

3:30 – 4:00 Panelist Response

4:00 – 4:30 Moving Forward: Establishing a Baseline in the Tampa Bay Watershed
Michael G. Andreu, Ph.D., University of Florida, School of Forest Resources and Conservation.
When attempting to incorporate science with politics it is necessary to establish a baseline set of data that all parties agree provides an unbiased point of view. In particular when planning for land use change, one needs to quantify the value of the forests in the region as they vary by land use. This allows planners to better understand the functions and value of the services that the forests provide and scientist to monitor the impacts of development and change over time. We have started this process in the Tampa Bay Watershed region with an inventory of the forest within the city of Tampa and the surrounding watersheds. To date, this data is being used to aid the development of long term planning policies within the City of Tampa. Through the establishment of a factual baseline about the forests within the entire Tampa Bay Watershed, we hope to inform planners so that they can create a set of tools to plan for the sustainable development in our region

Speaker Biographies

Michael G. Andreu, Ph.D. - Assistant Professor of Forest Systems located at the Gulf Coast REC in Plant City. He is a native of Florida, having grown up outside of Jacksonville, FL. Michael earned a B.A. degree from the University of the South, Sewanee TN, a Masters degree from Duke University, NC and his Ph.D. from the University of Washington. He teaches numerous classes to support the Natural Resource Conservation degree program at Plant City including, Dendrology and Forest Plants, Fire Ecology and Management, Forest Ecology, and Natural Resource Sampling. In addition he has an extension appointment and is working on projects involving the issue of managing forests in the face of rapid urbanization.

Jeff Horan - is the Director of Chesapeake and Coastal Watershed Services for the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, whose responsibility is the protection of the Chesapeake Bay, coastal and ocean ecosystems. He has served as Deputy Director of Maryland Forest Wildlife and Heritage Service where he helped create and lead the first Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program (CREP) effort in the nation. He led the team that authored Maryland’s Forest Conservation Act, the first and only statewide law in the nation that attempts to retain forest ecosystem function during and after development. Mr. Horan was a primary author of “Maryland’s Strategic Forest Land Assessment” that used a Green Infrastructure approach to prioritize forest land in Maryland.

Ed Macie – is the Southern Region Urban Forestry Group Leader for the USDA Forest Service in Atlanta, Georgia. He has over 20 years of experience in Urban Forestry, having served as a County Arborist and an Arboricultural Consultant. For the past 15 years he has directed the Southern Regional Urban Forestry Program for the Forest Service. Mr. Macie established the Southern Center for Urban Forestry Research and Information in Athens, Georgia, and is founder and Project Leader of the Southern Research Station’s Center for Wildland Urban Interface Research and Information in Gainesville, Florida. He holds a bachelors degree in Environmental Horticulture/Arboriculture from the University of California-Davis and a masters degree in Urban Forest Ecology from the State University of New York, College of Environmental Science and Forestry at Syracuse University.

Tricia Martin –has been with The Nature Conservancy for 15 years. Her duties include developing cooperation among 15 private and public partners to acquire and manage 42 sites encompassing 198,000 acres. She provides leadership for the Lake Wales Ridge Ecosystem Working Group, the ecosystem's land management consortium. In addition she negotiates and implements federal, state, local and private contracts, cooperative agreements, and grants. She is helping to pioneer The Nature Conservancy’s approach to effective management in central Florida. She conducted graduate work in history at Cambridge University, England and holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science from the University of Connecticut.

Rob Northrop – is an extension forester with the University of Florida IFAS Extension in Hillsborough County where he focuses on teaching and applied research into the changing composition, structure and ecological function of Tampa Bay’s urbanizing forest. For 22 years he worked as technical watershed forestry leader for the State of Maryland where his work focused on comprehensive watershed forest planning. He has worked on urban and rural forest policy and programmatic initiatives as the Director of Governor’s Executive Committee on Trees and Forests in Maryland and served as the Executive Director of Alliance for the Maryland Forest, a non-profit educational organization for natural resource management professionals. He was a part time faculty member of the University of Delaware for 14 years teaching undergraduate and graduate classes in wildlife management, ecosystem management and the human dimensions of wildlife.

Luke Rogers – Luke Rogers is a research scientist and forest engineer working on quantifying the social, economic and ecological values of family forestlands for the Rural Technology Initiative at the University of Washington, Seattle. In 2001, Luke assembled the first spatially explicit database of private forestland parcels in Washington State. This database revealed the unique spatial distribution and geographic relevance of industrial and family forests in the state. Since that time, Luke has focused on increasing the understanding of Washington State forest geographies through the assembly of a statewide land parcel database, researched forestland conversion trends and pressures to identify conservation opportunities, mitigation strategies and incentives, and developed new tools for understanding land use change and its impact on natural resource lands