Southern Urban and Interface Forests - What's New

Years ago, John Warner, an urban district forester with the Texas A&M Forest Service and a longtime InterfaceSouth partner, recognized that landownership patterns in the southeastern part of the state around Houston were changing rapidly. Latino, Chinese, and Vietnamese families from Houston were moving to the interface and buying 5–20 acre tracts of forestland within his rapidly growing multi-county district. He realized that the agency was going to have to change its communication approach to reach many of these new forest landowners. “As an agency, we know how to communicate with traditional landowners,” says Warner. “However, outreach to different ethnic groups is something new for us.”

In 2007, an opportunity to reach these new landowners presented itself when Warner met Tamberly Conway, a graduate student in the College of Forestry and Agriculture at Stephen F. Austin State University. Conway was working with Latino Legacy, a program established by the university and funded by the USDA Forest Service’s [USFS] More Kids in the Woods program to connect Latino communities with the public lands and forestlands in the Houston area through bilingual conservation education programming. (Conway has since been hired by the USFS as a conservation education specialist working remotely in Texas for the USFS’s office in Washington, D.C.)

El Yunque National Forest, located in eastern Puerto Rico, provides a variety of ecosystem services—including clean air, water, and recreation—that are essential to the well-being of people in communities surrounding the forest and beyond. Rapid changes in urban and built-up areas in eastern Puerto Rico have put El Yunque under high pressure for urban development. These changes can alter forest processes and functions, and thus the services provided by the forest. Zoning regulations for guiding urban expansion and minimizing its effects on the forest have had limited success; much of the urban expansion during the past decades has occurred within zoning districts where urban uses were not originally planned. This limited success has resulted from poor enforcement of zoning regulations; it could also be a result of the implementation of top-down models of land use and resource management that often excludes people at different levels, such as local communities and other stakeholders.

To begin to address these issues, we developed a study that incorporated the views and perspectives of different stakeholders regarding the ecosystem services provided by El Yunque. We developed a methodology that integrates different research methods and participatory techniques. The techniques can help natural resource managers, specialists, and researchers of other national and state forests better understand peoples’ knowledge and awareness of ecosystem services and the factors affecting these services. The techniques and the products resulting from them can be used to assist in the management and planning of land use, ecosystem services, and natural resources in general.

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