Speakers:
1) Emily Jane Davis, Assistant Professor & Extension Specialist, OSU
2) Tony Cheng, Director of the Colorado Forest Restoration Institute & Professor with an Extension appointment, CSU
3) Darren McAvoy, Extension Assistant Professor of Forestry, USU & Fellow of the Society of American Foresters
Co-sponsored by Oregon State University, Colorado State University, Environmental Workforce Partnership, Oregon State University Forestry & Natural Resources Extension, Colorado Forest Restoration Institute, Joint Fire Science Program.
Many land managers in the US West increasingly are trying to expand the pace and scale of wildfire risk reduction by working across larger landscapes and ownership boundaries. What does it take to truly coordinate this work at scale among organizations with different missions and mandates? From an applied social science perspective, we will use case studies of both forests and rangelands in Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, Oregon, and Idaho to explore this question, providing several actionable examples of how boundaries may be spanned for more collective action.
Emily Jane Davis is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Forest Ecosystems and Society, and an Extension Specialist in the Forestry and Natural Resources Extension Program at Oregon State University. As an applied social scientist, she examines natural resource collaboration, public lands policy, and rural community development; and provides technical assistance and service to a variety of collaborative efforts. Emily Jane is also the co-associate director of the Ecosystem Workforce Program and the vice chair of the Rural Voices for Conservation Coalition leadership team.
Tony Cheng is Director of the Colorado Forest Restoration Institute and Professor with an Extension appointment in the Department of Forest & Rangeland Stewardship at Colorado State University. His primary research interest is in forest governance, policy and administration, with a focus on multi-stakeholder collaborative approaches to promote resilient social-ecological systems linked to forest landscapes. In his capacity as director of CFRI and Extension faculty, Tony oversees programs to develop, compile, and apply locally-relevant scientific information to achieve forest restoration and wildfire hazard reduction goals.
Darren McAvoy is an Extension Assistant Professor of Forestry at Utah State University and a Fellow of the Society of American Foresters. He directs the Utah Forest Landowner Education Program and chairs the Utah Biomass Resources Group. He was formerly a Consulting Forester and prescribed fire specialist at Inland Forest Management in Sandpoint, Idaho. He was a sawyer on the Montana based Flathead Hotshot Crew and is a veteran of the 1988 Yellowstone Fires. He holds a M.S. in Communications from Utah State University and a B.S. in Forestry from Colorado State University.