Using the Best Science to Guide Our Actions
Forest practices are the result of more than a century of experience from learning by doing and scientific study of the effects of forest management on the natural environment. Because forestry is a long-term investment, we can't know everything today about resource management, so we use the best science to guide our actions.
Today's forest companies employ scientists from a variety of disciplines including hydrologists, wildlife biologists, geomorphologists, and dendrologists. These scientists study a range of topics from silviculture, wildlife, soils, geology, disease, tree physiology, as well as all aspects of forest management and harvesting. Silviculture, the science of growing trees, has long been a part of forest management, but science wasn't center stage in public policy discussions until the Timber, Fish, and Wildlife Agreement in the late 1980s. One of the policy leaders at the time, Stewart Bledsoe, marked this new reliance on scientific research when he stated "we will go where the truth takes us." From the Timber, Fish, and Wildlife Agreement onward cooperatively developed science has been used to provide information upon which forest practices policy discussions are based.
Timber, Fish, and Wildlife (TFW) Provides an
Historic Shift
The Timber, Fish, and Wildlife (TFW) Agreement was designed to reshape the way we manage our forest-based natural resources in Washington State. This agreement recognizes that many different interest groups and government agencies must work together to make the best decisions when it comes to managing natural resources. With the success of the agreement, the different groups involved have been able to work together with a new way of doing business through cooperative resource management.
Incorporating Science into Decision Making
One of the fundamental changes that came out of the TFW process was the way we would incorporate science into decision making. In order to provide a basis for understanding resource management interactions and impacts of forest practices on public resources, procedures for cooperative and collaborative monitoring and evaluating forest practices was developed. Cooperative Monitoring, Evaluation, and Research (CMER) became the basis for developing scientific information needed to assist policy makers and carry out the process of adaptive management.