Disturbance shapes the US forest governance frontier: A review and conceptual framework for understanding governance change.

Conflict in US forest management for decades centered around balancing demands from forested ecosystems, with a rise in place-based collaborative governance at the end of the twentieth century. By the early 2000s, it was becoming apparent that not only had the mix of players involved in forest management changed, but so had the playing field, as climate-driven disturbances such as wildfire and insect and disease outbreaks were becoming more extensive and severe. In this conceptual review paper, we argue that disturbance has become the most prominent driver of governance change on US national forests, but we also recognize that the governance responses to disturbance are shaped by variables such as discourses, institutional history and path dependence, and institutional innovation operating at different system levels.

Forest policy and management approaches for carbon dioxide removal.

Forests increasingly will be used for carbon dioxide removal (CDR) as a natural climate solution, and the implementation of forest-based CDR presents a complex public policy challenge. In this paper, our goal is to review a range of policy tools in place to support use of forests for CDR and demonstrate how concepts from the policy design literature can inform our understanding of this domain. We explore how the utilization of different policy tools shapes our ability to use forests to mitigate and adapt to climate change and consider the challenges of policy mixes and integration, taking a close look at three areas of international forest policy, including the Kyoto Protocol's Clean Development Mechanism, Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) and voluntary carbon offset markets.

Integrating Subjective and Objective Dimensions of Resilience in Fire-Prone Landscapes.

Resilience has become a common goal for science-based natural resource management, particularly in the context of changing climate and disturbance regimes. Integrating varying perspectives and definitions of resilience is a complex and often unrecognized challenge to applying resilience concepts to social-ecological systems (SESs) management. Using wildfire as an example, we develop a framework to expose and separate two important dimensions of resilience: the inherent properties that maintain structure, function, or states of an SES and the human perceptions of desirable or valued components of an SES.

Decision-making triggers in adaptive management.

We analyzed whether decision-making triggers increase accountability of adaptive-management plans. Triggers are prenegotiated commitments in an adaptive-management plan that specify what actions are to be taken and when on the basis of information obtained from monitoring. Triggers improve certainty that particular actions will be taken by agencies in the future.