May updates ⏩

Q. Why should you never trust the trees?

(Scroll ⬇️ for the answer)

The Planscape cooperative recognizes that the approach taken to date in our software development has relied almost exclusively on Western Science (WS). While we are proud of work and its utility, we recognize that we need to do more to incorporate Indigenous Knowledge in planned treatments and projects. An early step in this journey is to amplify and celebrate some of the best work and contributors in the IK ecosystem. 

Braiding Indigenous Knowledge

This month we are sharing the excellent “Braiding Sweetgrass Report”  and its accompanying site “The Wise Path Forwards” by Cristina Eisenberg, Susan Prichard, Paul Francis Hessburg and Michael Paul Nelson

“This report builds on federal directives to respectfully and intentionally braid IK and WS knowledge systems in a Two-Eyed Seeing approach that informs climate- and wildfireadaptation strategies to conserve our public forests… 

…Given widespread departures from historical conditions and anthropogenic climate change, we cannot restore conditions to mirror the past. Instead, we can reinstate ecocultural practices that restore historical forest dynamics and climate resilience. Braiding IK and WS to inform an adaptive brand of stewardship offers the best chance of conserving forest landscapes for future generations, while addressing ongoing threats and losses …

…We provide five recommendations to address current challenges to our nation’s forests. “

1. Expand active forest stewardship

Expand active forest stewardship, including activities like cultural and prescribed burning, forest thinning, and restoration at a pace matching the scale of modern wildfires. Active stewardship can restore forest resilience and reduce the great financial and cultural expense of extreme wildfire disasters and response.

2. Partner with Tribal organizations

Partner with Tribal organizations at all stages of stewardship, including policy development, planning, monitoring, decision-making, and adaptive stewardship. The incorporation of Indigenous Knowledge is essential to forest stewardship and resilience.

3. Treat forests as dynamic landscapes

Managing forests based on the assumption that a landscape will remain static does not work. We must change to a flexible stewardship strategy, encompassing old-growth and mature forests, that recognizes the need to be adaptive and responsive to rapidly changing conditions.

4. Adopt ethics of reciprocity

Indigenous stewardship created sustainable and resilient landscapes. Indigenous-inspired and -led active management can help forests, similar to how forests help humans, both today and for generations to come. A reciprocal relationship is needed, where both humans and the landscape provide benefits to one another.

5. Fund adaptive stewardship & monitoring

Provide dedicated funding for long-term forest monitoring in order to learn what is working best on rapidly evolving landscapes, determine when changes in practice are needed, and implement innovative management practices based on learnings from monitoring.

Please do read and share the report. The call to action is clear, even if the steps to incorporate IK in your work are hard. Reach out with your ideas. 

Plan now available statewide

This month we launched ‘Plan’ user journey for the Central Coast region of California. Landscape planners can now create Plans based on their detailed Goals and Constraints in all four regions of the state. 

Use Plan today for your projects, read more in our user guide, or reach out if you’d like a demo or some help. We’re here for you.

More help for Goal setting

Based on user feedback, we’ve introduced more helpful explanations that describe what each of the Goal pathways include, so you always have a transparent understanding of the science and data being used. The pop-ups also give you tips on how to set up your plans to create the most useful outputs. Let us know if you have ideas on how to make Planscape better. 

Use Plan today for your projects, read more in our user guide, or reach out if you’d like a demo or some help. We’re here for you.

Next: Impact analysis

The engineering team is now focused on delivering our fourth User Journey: Impact Analysis. This will allow you to apply treatment scenarios, then model how they will impact the environment over 20 years to understand the expected impacts of those scenarios. More on that later in the summer. 

• Planscape is a free decision support tool built to maximize wildfire resilience and ecological benefits across the State of California. 
• Planscape helps regional planners prioritize landscape treatments to mitigate fire risk, maximize ecological benefits, and help California’s landscapes adapt to climate change
• Planscape is a collaborative effort by the California Natural Resources Agency, the USDA Forest Service, The University of California, The USDA Climate Hubs, and Spatial Informatics Group (SIG) with support from Google.org 

Q. Why should you never trust the trees?

A. Because they are shady