GIANT SEQUOIA NATIONAL MONUMENT

PLANNING PROCESS

 

Last year (June 2008) the Forest contracted with a third-party collaborator/facilitator who brought together the Forest Service, environmental groups, community leaders, forest products industry representatives, and others to assess how we can develop a new Giant Sequoia National Monument Plan.

This third-party contractor, the U.S. Institute for Environmental Conflict Resolution (which is an independent and impartial federal program, who has a mission and history of helping people find workable solutions to tough environmental conflicts ... anywhere in the United States) sub-contracted with Carie Fox to lead our collaborative planning effort.  Carie has been working with the forest for 1 ½ years in developing and hosting collaborative forums where people come together to discuss how the monument management plan should be developed and what desired outcomes should be analyzed during the planning process.

 

The enclosed powerpoint provides a good synopsis of the collaborative planning process to develop a new Giant Sequoia National Monument Plan.  It focuses on five main areas:

-         Collaboration

-         Linking Science

-         Stewardship Fireshed Assessment (which is a decision support system used by the Forest)

-         Partnerships (linking management across boundaries)

-         NEPA (the development of the environmental document as stipulated in the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969)

 

Monument Planning PowerPoint

 

The next steps under the monument planning process in 2009 will focus on the following:

  1. Development of the second Notice of Intent to be submitted to the public in March with a more refined proposed action and purpose and need
  2. Initiating the environmental documentation process to analyze issues, alternatives and effects of management actions
  3. Continuing the collaborative effort begun in 2008 working with the public and interested stakeholders through various groups focused on recreation or fire and fuels management
  4. Utilizing partnerships with non-profit organizations and communities to analyze socio-economic information to fully integrate social and economical statistics into the environmental documentation process
  5. Initiating a recreation visitor use research project to get specific data on who uses the recreation facilities in the monument
  6. Initiating a giant sequoia inventory to gain a better foundation of what is in the groves
  7. Summarizing the cumulative watershed analysis that has been conducted on the forest for over 15 years
  8. Summarizing various fisher projects since the Pacific Fisher is an important wildlife species in the southern Sierras