Working Session: Forest Management Across Property Boundaries: The Woodlots Program Toolkit

Uploaded by vmc on 02/05/2023

Tags: Forest Management  

Attachments: PT 3 WorkingSession_WoodlotsToolkit.srt (152KB) Slide24.jpeg (118KB)

This was a working session led by Monica Przyperhart as a part of the 2022 FEMC Annual Conference. With over 80% of land in Vermont in private ownership, maintaining forest health and resilience relies heavily on the decisions and actions of landowners. Cold Hollow to Canada (CHC) has addressed this challenge by creating a program that convenes neighboring landowners in high priority forest blocks who together learn strategies for maintaining forest resilience, receive technical assistance, and when possible are connected with funding opportunities to put plans into action. News of the program's success has spread throughout Vermont and even out of state, and Cold Hollow to Canada has been asked by numerous groups for detailed information on how to initiate similar programs, methods for running them, and guidance on how to make similar initiatives successful elsewhere. Thanks to funding from the High Meadows Fund and a Vermont Watershed Grant, CHC has developed an online "Woodlots Toolkit" to enable adoption by conservation groups in other geographies. In this session, we will share the Toolkit and provide tips on how it can best be used. We will then shift to an engaged discussion about how groups can use or adapt this tool to advance forest stewardship and conservation in locations with different social and physical settings. We recommend attendance by those who work with private landowners with goals of forest stewardship and conservation.