Taking Advantage of Online Natural Heritage Databases
As an ATFS Inspecting Forester, you work closely with landowners to help them learn about their woods and sustainable forestry, while achieving their stewardship goals. Tree Farmers are ambassadors for good forestry,which includes managing for some unique and less understood resources, such as imperiled species, special sites or high- conservation-value forests.
Natural Heritage programs are excellent resources for landowners, and can be a great education tool for foresters,too. These programs work at the state, national, and global levels to gather information about plant, animal, and fish species, as well as entire ecosystems of importance for conservation. Natural Heritage programs conduct ongoing surveys and inventories to better understand the health of species and ecosystems. These inventories help public agencies and conservation organizations understand the status of plant and animal populations, identify priorities for protection, and inform conservation planning and management.
The Natural Heritage programs catalog and classify the status of species of concern in Natural Heritage databases, which are available to the public and can also be used by woodland owners to inform the management of their woods. Using the web, woodland owners can conduct searches by location to learn about species of concern in their area. These landowners can also search for specific species, view maps of their range and learn about their habitats.
The ATFS Woodland Owner Resource is acomprehensive listing of resources and serves as anexcellent springboard for accessing state, national, andinternational natural heritage databases.
Statewide Forest Resource Assessments are also good information sources. The 2008 Farm Bill granted funding to states to develop these assessments, which serve as authoritative guides for forest health and issues in each state. Your state’s forest resource assessment is a portal to not only statewide information, but may also provide landowner-level data to inform research. Many states have even developed advanced GIS tools that let users search by county and watershed.
If the landowners you work with decide to explore these databases, be sure to remind them to document their research and the ways that they are incorporating what they learned into their management. This is true even if there are no high-priority species or ecosystems in their area. Showing evidence of thorough research is a hallmark of sustainable forest management and demonstrates conformance with the 2010-2015 ATFS Standards.
With the range of online tools available, identifying the natural features and species that inhabit family forest lands has never been easier. Exploring natural heritage databases and other resources is fun and can enrich landowners’experiences and long-term engagement in the management of their woodlands.
