With as many as 75% of private woodland owners online the Internet offers tremendous potential to reach a segment of the private landowner population that isn’t responding to traditional methods of outreach.

Goals and Objectives: This integrated research and extension project will use experimental approaches to develop and test an innovative management strategy to lead to the improved conservation of private forestland. The complexity of landownership patterns, due to parcelization and impending ownership turn over, requires a new tool to more efficiently reach a lager number of private woodland owners with a broader conservation message. The importance of greater public benefits from these lands warrants improved methods to appeal to a larger segment of the landowner population than has been heretofore “reached” with traditional forestry messages and programming.

Actions taken by their owners are often reactive to immediate need, and made on an uniformed basis. The cumulative effect of hundreds of thousands of uncoordinated and potentially ill-advised actions (e.g., such as unsustainable harvesting, or the subdivision or conversion of land) can have an adverse impact on valuable ecosystem services. Landowners who are more engaged with their land through its stewardship are less likely to subdivide, convert to a non-natural land use, or harvest unsustainably.

Figure 1.

Or, they are at least more likely to know who to contact for more information, if they are in a position to make a decision about the future of their land. Landowners with full knowledge of their alternatives and a better understanding of how their parcel is situated and its role in the surrounding ecosystem are more likely to make educated decisions. Those landowners may be involved with their property or the surrounding landscape at many different levels of engagement, each corresponding to different intensities or degrees of activity. Some more active levels of engagement (e.g., E2 or E3 in figure 2), may even involve some degree of management outcomes, compared to simply enhanced awareness in E1.

Figure 2.

In Figure 2 these have been simplified into 4 levels, each with a corresponding example of activity. The base level (E1) corresponds to relatively low engagement activities such as membership in a conservation organization or conducting a timber harvest. Engagement at this level may provide ecosystem benefits in the near future. At a more moderate level of engagement (E2) a landowner might volunteer with conservation organization, have a forest management plan or have some limited networking within the natural resource community. The highest level of engagement (E3) would include a conservation restriction, forest based business or coordinated landscape level management activities. It is the E3 level where longer-term ecosystem functions can be maintained for the future.

Ecosystem functions will come under increased pressure as population continues to rise and fragmentation occurs at increasing rates. It is private landowners who currently hold much of the land base that are the key to maintaining/preserving these critical ecosystem functions. We hope new outreach methods such as ACORN that provide an integrated source of information at a local, relevant level and which are available in sink with our modern time schedule will foster new awareness and will result in enhanced stewardship at the ecosystem level, while increasing overall public benefit. This is not to say that ACORN will supplant current outreach methods (local land trust, service forester) but rather it will compliment, act as a gateway for information reaching landowners, landowners reaching landowners, and even unifying through commonality of purpose other conservation organizations.