Authors
- Primary: Ethan Bucholz, Ph.D., Forest Monitoring Program Manager, Colorado State Forest Service
- Ashley Prentice, Forest Carbon Specialist, Colorado State Forest Service
- Amanda West Fordham, Ph.D., Associate Director, Science and Data Division, Colorado State Forest Service
- Aaron Green, Associate Director, Forestry Services Division, Colorado State Forest Service
- Wade Tinkham, Ph.D., Research Forester, Rocky Mountain Research Station, USDA Forest Service
- Mike Battaglia, Ph.D., Research Forester, Rocky Mountain Research Station, USDA Forest Service
- Katie McNovak, Colorado Forest Collaboratives Network Coordinator, Center for Collaborative Conservation, Colorado State University
- Rob Addington, Forest and Fire Program Director, The Nature Conservancy Colorado
Disclaimer: The findings and conclusions in this publication are those of the author(s) and should not be construed to represent any official USDA or U.S. Government determination or policy.
Key takeaways
- Colorado is a diverse state, with many different landscapes, ecologies, community needs and economic drivers. The values different landowners and communities put on forests reflect this diversity. Common values include ecosystem protection, ecosystem services, recreation, carbon sequestration, aesthetics, wood products, resilience to wildfire, job creation, community adaptation to wildfire and more.
- The identified values of landowners/stakeholders guide forest management decisions.
- Collaboration is key to forest management in Colorado. We often share the same values, even if disagreement exists about the best way to promote those values.
- Conservation is a spectrum of choices and not a rigidly constructed binary choice between protecting systems vs intervening in systems.
- The forest management process is an adaptable, iterative and ordered process meant to explicitly consider landowner/collective values and move a stand toward a stated desired future condition.
- For those interested in finding collaborations near you, use the Center for Collaborative Conservation Atlas to find local groups to join.
Table of Contents
Introduction
If you ask Coloradans what forests mean to them, you will likely get numerous answers. Some value the spiritual, aesthetic, recreational or educational benefits they get from forests. Others value forests for the snowpack they protect, water provisioning and erosional control, as well as wildlife habitat. Many Coloradans depend on forests for their livelihoods, whether it be wood fiber or recreation economy. Together these cultural, regulating, provisioning and supporting values define how we collectively view forests across the state. It is from this centered, values-based approach that we consider the maintenance of forested values in the face of change.
At first glance, forests appear strong, stoic and constant, but they are, in reality, extremely dynamic. Just as humans are in an almost constant state of reactivity, forests, too, are constantly reacting to and balancing themselves with their environments. The forces that influence how an individual tree grows or endures disturbances scale to how a forest reacts at the landscape level. As forests react to issues facing them – from insect infestations, to wildfire, to drought-related interactions – humans are also inherently and persistently reacting to threats and changes to the forest benefits that we value.
For millennia in the Americas, Indigenous forest management processes (often termed forest stewardship by many tribes) included burning, harvesting and shaping understory plant communities for both community use and protection of cultural sites. The development of traditional ecological knowledge stemmed from these management practices, not for the sake of management, but for the many values that forests provide when ecologically managed. The conquest and colonization of the Americas and subsequent impacts represented both a definitive severing of Indigenous people’s place-based relationships with the land as well as a transformation over time of values, as western expansion led to a rapid increase in mining, timber extraction and grazing. Forests are, therefore, important socioecological systems as humanity and forests are inextricably linked to one another.
Indigenous forest management in Colorado
The CSFS develops and maintains partnerships with Indigenous tribes to collaborate on forestry activities. These partnerships help the CSFS incorporate landscape values of Indigenous communities into activities that demonstrate the connections between forestry and habitat. Outside of Gunnison, the CSFS is helping the Ute Mountain Ute update the forest management plan for its Pinecrest Ranch property. Management goals will likely focus on improving tree health while managing the understory to facilitate cattle grazing and improve wildlife habitat.
Modern ties to landscapes through forest management in Colorado are centered on socioecological values, as lack of industry, slow growth and difficult terrain limit more traditional visions of forest management for wood fiber production. Among some Coloradans, and the broader U.S., the general view that forest management exists to feed industry is commonly cited as the pervading value, thus building skepticism of forest management intent. While wood fiber and products can help offset high treatment costs, Colorado (largely owing to our climate and topography) is not a production forestry state where wood fiber production is the main reason for intervention. Colorado is a net importer of wood as the primary targets for forest management include smaller-diameter trees that have limited marketability (Baral et al., 2025). Colorado is a state firmly driven by ecological values, where we aim to manage in a way that amplifies those values (i.e., water provisioning, wildlife habitat, persistence of forests) rather than emphasizes timber extraction. It does not mean we do not have timber sales, but most forest management that occurs in this state is under service contracts or where wood fiber fails to appreciably offset treatment costs. The fundamental reality in Colorado is that wood fiber production exists to aid in offsetting costs but does not drive the value we place on our forests.
While values may diverge among groups, forest management seeks to uphold those ecological values of importance. Often, however, management actions and values are often shaped by public discourse. While not new to natural resource management, this discourse often includes a distinct separation between forest management and forest protection as representing two mutually exclusive paths. This is not new to natural resources as it echoes the debates of the late 19th and early 20th centuries between preservationists and conservationists. However, forest management and its inherent complexity has its message damaged by viewing it in a binary fashion. Nelson and DeLuca (2026) argue that conservation is a spectrum of choices and not a rigidly constructed binary choice between protecting systems vs intervening in systems. In this way, “protecting” via not managing is not the opposite of intervening via management, but merely two choices along this continuum. It reframes public discourse from two opposing sides with completely opposite values, to a more inclusive acknowledgement that values steer action, and can therefore help reframe debates toward building stronger collaboration rather than a more adversarial approach. Moving forward in a climatically altered and uncertain environment, forest and natural resource professionals will continue to work with the stakeholders they serve to coalesce around defining values statements for given landscapes, and then design strategies to promote those values, whether actively or passively, to maintain forest persistence into the future.
In Colorado, ongoing debates within natural resources center on the role of active forest management in addressing emerging threats of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Studies of historical and contemporary Colorado forests show that they are currently undergoing change, especially as it relates to wildfire. In certain systems, particularly dry forest types, wildfire has become more severe, eroding the forest’s resilience or ability to rebound to a given condition, while in others, fire is becoming more frequent and widespread, thereby accelerating the native disturbance regime but reducing the time a forest has to recover before the next fire. In both conditions, the effects are exacerbated by a changing climate. Because of these threats, increased investment at state and federal levels aim to address declining forest resilience locally and nationally. Concurrently, carbon emissions reduction goals and a general increase in broader public attention toward wildfire mitigation have enabled the broader appreciation of the forestry discipline and fostered discussion about how to best address the challenges faced. These discussions have been front-and-center in many ongoing debates over forest management both locally and nationally, highlighting how passionately visitors and residents of Colorado feel about these forests, while noting a need to incorporate broader viewpoints and considerations into the forest management process. In this article, we argue that all values and their determination are critical to collaborative forest management. We present considerations for how values are determined, while also building context for challenges that face Colorado. We end with a brief discussion of the forest management process and consider how we may move forward into an uncertain future. Wildfire will be a predominant topic due to its ubiquity in conversations around forest management, but readers should know that wildfire is just one of many interacting challenges to forest resources in Colorado. The authors hope to inspire a broader audience to take part in collaborative decision-making for local forest resources with a greater understanding of the forest management process and its challenges.
Values-based forestry
Before addressing value determination, the general notion of “should humans influence forests” deserves some attention. Several emerging movements, including proforestation, emphasize a more hands-off approach to forestry, where we reduce forest management and other interventions to essentially allow forests to grow and develop relatively naturally for the litany of benefits intact, mature forests provide (sensu Moomaw et al., 2019). Often highlighted in these movements is the maintenance of old-growth characteristics within forested stands as the ultimate value. While we appreciate what these movements bring to the forest management discussion, especially in more productive regions where timber industry harvesting tends to homogenize forest conditions, and acknowledge the benefits of allowing forests to develop naturally, in many cases preventing intervention by natural resource practitioners can lead to devastating consequences, especially in the disturbance-prone forests of Colorado. Further, the authors also acknowledge that the protection of old-growth and building old-growth characteristics can be aided by ecologically based active forest management decisions over a more “hands-off” approach. Initial feedback on the now-withdrawn National Old Growth Assessment emphasized the greatest threats to existing old-growth structures is the presence of uncharacteristic wildfire. Managing around these existing areas to reduce that risk is highlighted as an important characteristic of maintaining existing old growth within certain forest types (i.e., lower montane forests of Colorado). Therefore, for the remainder of the article, we consider value from the basis of why we manage, rather than consider whether it is right to manage. We do not intend to have this meaning twisted toward saying we believe in forest management for forest management’s sake; instead, we present arguments toward building a collective vision for the future of a given forest/forest landscape, which may or may not include human-based interventions. We also contend that it is nearly impossible to remove the influence humans have on forests, and to attempt to remove this influence would ultimately be unproductive to the message of building coalitions centered on maintaining values provided by a given forest landscape.
The most basic question asked before conducting any forest management activity is why? That “why” is tied to the societal, ecological and economic priorities of both residents and visitors of Colorado. For some, it might be the recreational opportunities forests offer; for others, it may be optimizing wildlife habitat; for others, it might be the importance of forests to water quality; and others may place importance on strengthening the local wood products industry. Often, multiple priorities drive forest management decisions. As discussed earlier with ecosystem services, the “why” we ask here is firmly centered on the maintenance of the values/ecosystem services currently provided by a given system. Determining landowner values and where they are at risk becomes the crucial first step toward producing a collective vision for the future of a given forested stand. The “why we manage” question therefore is answered simply: to maintain/enhance values from expected (or unexpected) challenges in the future.
When centering forest management around values, the next logical question becomes how? How do we compile values? How do we rank values? How do we coalesce on a path forward? These are central questions in management and decision making. The simple answer is collaboration. However, the products of this collaboration set the stage for assessing specific forest management actions and their merit. Generally, one of the first steps in collaborative decision making revolves around what stakeholders want or need from forested stands/landscapes now and into the future. From this, articulating these desired future conditions (DFCs) then provides a future target that management actions will support. What determines DFCs are the values of the landowner/collaborative group that inform the target condition of the stand. Therefore, it is important to recognize that DFCs are not prescriptive, and they do not explicitly say anything regarding the type of management action chosen; instead they elaborate on what values the forest will continue to provide, emphasizing attributes of forest structure and composition, and how these relate to future disturbances.
The Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Program (CFLRP) in Colorado
In the early 2010s, the U.S. Congress designated a large portion of the Front Range’s Arapaho, Pike and Roosevelt national forest lands, along with the state, municipal and private lands that connect them, as a CFLRP area, authorizing the injection of millions of dollars to support forest management across all ownerships. Before beginning, a large collaborative process determined stakeholder values and then placed that into a purposeful desired future condition (DFC) description to serve as a foundational vision for this landscape. The DFCs highlighted aspects of forest structure to maintain/promote, the desired interactions with disturbance, as well as primarily human-driven values like the provisioning of water for Front Range communities and production of wood products to support economies. The CFLRP process also established a multi-party monitoring strategy where stakeholders could influence how treatments were evaluated for their effectiveness, with the group providing a critical midway review of treatments in the CFLRP area that led to change in how treatments were designed and implemented to better meet the DFC descriptions (Barrett et al., 2021). The key to programs like CFLRP is written into their names: collaboration. By headlining collaboration, the CFLRP process has enabled planning to occur at broader scales than previously, as multi-year investments help build trust among partners while facilitating conversations more broadly that incorporate a wider diversity of views (Schultz et al., 2018).
Often supporting these large, landscape-level processes are assessments like Quantitative Wildfire Risk Assessments (QWRA). QWRAs typically use programs like the Interagency Fuel Treatment Decision Support System (IFTDSS) to guide the definition and identification of highly valued resources or assets (HVRAs) within given landscapes. There are other factors to this analysis that are not detailed here, but the overall point is to collaboratively develop a map layer of values, whether they be developed values like homes or ecological values like wildlife habitat, and then incorporate these into broad landscape-level analyses of how these values are changed by aspects of burn probability and modeled fire behavior. The key is a collaborative focus on value determination, which then helps guide management actions aimed at protecting and enhancing the resources and assets most important to stakeholders.
Broadly, DFCs discuss patterns of tree size, species composition, understory composition and spatial patterns across a wide range of scales, from individual management stands to landscapes, in order to promote key conceptual values like ecological resilience to disturbance. While for specific management objectives and values, like improving wildlife habitat, DFCs describe a mosaic of age-classes, understory browse, snag densities and other ecological attributes associated with desired wildlife habitat for a given species. These DFCs serve as a succinct compilation of the values a given forest/landscape will continue to support, while providing criteria for assessing how management actions support/improve these values.
At smaller, non-landscape scales, especially with private landowners, working one-on-one to define values, develop a DFC and design management plans accordingly is a key service forest managers provide. Many programs, such as the Forest Ag Program, administered by the CSFS, require these elements in submitted management plans because they reflect a structured forest planning process. Working iteratively with landowners to define their values, inventory stands to assess current conditions, identify risks to those values, and design actions to address them encapsulates the forest management process. While individuals or groups of landowners may not have the technical expertise to assess risks or define ecological objectives, this is one of the primary roles of forest managers. They help identify values and determine landowner concerns and highlight trade-offs including adequate mitigation of adverse effects from management. At this scale, forest management becomes more intimate. Rather than building consensus across groups and diverse stakeholders, it becomes about working with individuals to build a cohesive vision of the values they wish to protect within their own forested stands. While this may differ from the process followed by collaborative groups, it is also similar in that it tasks forest management experts to help translate values, envision a future condition and implement steps to reach it.
Colorado is a diverse state, with many different landscapes, community needs and economic drivers that are complex and interwoven with one another. Our values reflect this diversity: ecosystem protection, ecosystem services, recreation, carbon sequestration, aesthetics, wood products, resilience to wildfire, job creation, community adaptation to wildfire and more. This diversity of values reflects foundational compacts, like the grand compromise of public land management, where spatial context places boundaries on how forest management may proceed. Further, the uncertainty of a climatically altered future necessitates building consensus among different groups as our current actions can influence forest resilience into the future and create new collaborative paths toward determining collective values.
Climate change and Colorado
Climate change poses a threat to the values that Colorado forests provide. In general, warmer and drier conditions, coupled with precipitation changes (i.e., snow becoming rain) threaten forests in many ways. With increased temperatures and variable but slightly increased precipitation (i.e., Bolinger et al., 2024), increased moisture deficits will result in increased drought stress, a phenomenon that has been observed for some time globally (i.e., Allen et al., 2008). Increased drought can trees either directly through loss of the ability to transport water through the xylem (e.g., Adams et al., 2017), while also increasing susceptibility to pests and pathogens.
Mountain pine beetle past and present
No disturbance to Colorado forests, whether fire or insect, occurs without interaction. The interaction among both living and non-living components of an ecosystem often exacerbates individual disturbances. As a result, disturbances often occur for myriad reasons rather than one alone. An example is the last epidemic outbreak of mountain pine beetle (MPB) from 1996-2013. It was not simply that populations of MPB increased to explain the disturbance, but a complex interaction between drought, forest stand conditions and winter temperature, highlighting the complex interaction of living and non-living ecosystem components. Forest conditions were relatively homogenous, with an estimated 87% of lodgepole pine forests comprised individuals greater than 8” in diameter (Negron & Cain, 2019). Couple this with preceding drought that made many of these individuals highly susceptible to attack and warmer winter temperatures not limiting population development, this enabled populations to build rapidly (Bentz et al., 2010).
The current MPB outbreak, which has impacted ~5,000 acres of Front Range ponderosa pine forest, carries many of the same features. Abundant hosts of susceptible size ranges (see Prentice et al., 2026, for more information), drought and warmer winter temperatures, causing the Governor’s Office to assemble a MPB taskforce, along with Executive Orders aimed at mobilizing resources to combat this growing issue. While much remains to be seen in how this current outbreak grows, it is a stark reminder of how ecosystem attributes, both living and non-living, contribute to disturbance generation and growth.
In climate-limited (i.e., fires occur during climatic periods conducive to fire that historically occur infrequently) fire regimes, such as the spruce-fir forests that make up a majority of high-elevation Colorado watersheds, fire frequency has been increasing over the past few decades thereby indicating the ongoing challenge of managing wildfire in these forests (e.g., Higuera et al., 2021). In lower elevation forests that were historically more fuels-limited (i.e., fire frequency relates to presence of combustible fuels rather than climatic conditions), a legacy of grazing, timber harvesting and fire suppression in the 19th and 20th centuries coupled with increased drought frequency and high-wind events has led to increasingly larger patches of high-severity fire. These changes create persistent regeneration challenges due to limited seed availability (e.g., Chambers et al., 2016) and loss of climatic conditions conducive to regeneration (e.g., Davis et al., 2019). Fire season has also expanded since the 1970s, owing to decreased snowpack, earlier snow melt and warmer temperatures further into the fall, thereby making fire a potential all-season threat (Westerling et al., 2006), with Colorado now experiencing wildfires nearly every month most years.
Climate change in Colorado forests indicates the need for the forest management process to consider a wider range of future conditions when planning. This is especially difficult given the uncertainty in how growth and regeneration of different tree species will respond to these climate shifts, and how this will challenge our ability to maintain forests that support the values we cherish. Aiding in these considerations across scales are climate adaptation frameworks. These decision-making frameworks, such as Resist-Accept-Direct (RAD) and Resistance-Resilience-Transition (RRT), can help forest managers evaluate vulnerability, assess trade-offs and identify management approaches aimed at either maintaining current conditions, accommodating change or actively moving forest ecosystems toward desired future states under climate change. Additionally, research experimental networks, such as the Adaptive Silviculture for Climate Change (ASCC) network, which has three experimental sites in Colorado support climate adaptation strategies. The ASCC research network integrated a wide range of stakeholders to design experimental treatments that demonstrate RRT to expected climate change impacts, thereby establishing important research to benefit our understanding in the future (Nagel et al., 2017;2026). This research framework explicitly considers what the future holds for collaboratively determined values, then builds field-based experiments to empirically test management strategies.
Explicitly considering climate change impacts to forested values will continue to be a process that builds collaboration in Colorado forest management and encourages active learning. As recreation dominates our natural resource economy, each year millions of residents and visitors come to Colorado forests to raft and fish its rivers, ski its mountains, hike and bike its trails, and simply enjoy the rugged beauty of its landscapes. Therefore, to maintain these landscapes, especially the persistence of our forests for our recreation economy, we need to consider and then continue monitoring different treatment strategies to assess their effectiveness at maintaining/promoting specific values. This is not to say that we intend to, or have the ability to, prevent all negative impacts from increased disturbance, but that good collaboration does not stop at implementation. Assessing management actions and their effectiveness via monitoring and then applying lessons learned will be paramount toward meeting the challenges posed by climate change.
The forest management process
Throughout this publication, we have alluded to the forest management process. Forest management is an iterative and adaptive process. Forest managers address value concerns of other landowners and are constantly learning from management actions, whether through applied scientific research or personal observations (and everything in between). The critical first step for any manager approaching a forest management project is defining the values a landowner wants to prioritize. From these values, foresters can work with landowners to define the desired future conditions that will either maintain or improve how the values are realized within the target area. Foresters then normally conduct an inventory or access the best available data for a given treatment area to define current conditions and highlight vulnerabilities within the area. By interpreting current forest structure and conducting different modeling simulations (e.g., using the Forest Vegetation Simulator), foresters can determine if a stand currently supports its desired future conditions. When the current forest structure departs from the desired future conditions, foresters develop management goals/objectives to address the departure. Management goals/ objectives tend to be broad (i.e., reduce wildfire severity) and generally reflect the values landowners hold (i.e., lower wildfire-caused mortality to maintain ecosystem service provisions).
Once the objectives are defined, managers can set evaluation criteria that serve as quantitative targets toward meeting objectives and therefore desired future conditions. Developing alternatives (i.e., different management actions for a given stand) enables land managers to assess how different management actions may or may not meet evaluation criteria. Alternatives that meet the evaluation criteria more frequently than others are recommended to landowners. From this point, land managers move toward implementation. This includes preparation of the stand (i.e., tree marking), assessing how wood products may offset treatment costs, and accepting bids from contractors, among many other features of forest management project administration. Once management is concluded, managers move into the assessment phase, where monitoring of treatment outcomes becomes important. This last step is crucial toward adaptive management as it represents the iterative step by which we assess and refine management suggestions based on the reality of their implementation.
The forest management process is front-loaded with explicit considerations of the values held for the land, potential risks to those values, the options to reduce these risks and building consensus among stakeholders. At small, individual landowner scales, this collaborative input is generally more quickly gathered and considered, but at large, landscape scales, the process of values determination can be protracted. Developing DFCs for landscapes, building consensus among stakeholders and coming up with a plan to adequately assess progress toward the DFCs require discussion and collaboration. Therefore, it is critical for stakeholders to participate in this process, to voice their opinions and discuss potential options, and they must do so with an open mind as inflexibility of stakeholders does not lend itself to collaborative consensus. We often share the same values, even if disagreement exists about the best way to promote those values. By committing to collaboration, participants commit to being willing to learn, to cooperate and to understand other perspectives.
Tradeoffs of forest management
Values-driven management actions come with associated tradeoffs. No one management action can address every forest concern on every acre managed, which is why the forest management process requires careful consideration of actions that maximize or optimize success. This highlights the importance of DFCs that provide detailed descriptions about the desired values a given area will continue to provide following management. Management actions designed in this way push a stand/landscape toward that DFC. Each stand is unique in terms of current conditions and its context within a given landscape. There are many overlaps between and across geographic areas and forest types, but while forested stands/landscapes may be roughly similar in terms of species composition and structure (i.e., tree density, size differentiation), their placement in the greater landscape will frame challenges in different ways. A stand in the middle of a watershed that supplies drinking water will likely require different management strategies than stands directly adjacent to a housing development. For the watershed, values are likely balanced and relate to the maintenance of ecosystem services (i.e., water quality and provisioning) more so than the housing development where structures and lives/livelihoods are the values most strongly emphasized.
The tradeoffs associated with the above scenarios are where values and management actions must meet consensus, further highlighting normal considerations under the forest management process. In the case of the housing development, performing a treatment that promotes structure survival should secure its most important value, but may also impact other values like increased home privacy since home defense treatments tend to reduce vegetation surrounding structures and therefore privacy. For the watershed, promoting canopy heterogeneity by creating larger canopy openings experiences a short-term tradeoff with greater risks of potential tree blowdown due to decreased wind resistance while trees expand their root network to the newly opened space. This highlights how prioritizing one value like strengthening forests to withstand and recover from wildfire may cause adverse effects like creating conditions conducive to windthrow. This is not a comprehensive list of tradeoffs but is meant to highlight how different management strategies can result in different tradeoffs. These tradeoffs highlight the importance in considering alternative treatments as part of the management process.
Alternatives represent different management strategies to promote landowner values by changing treatment design, assessing outcomes, and deciding on the best course of action to meet objectives and protect values at risk. Developing alternatives is an important part of the forest management process because it crucially requires presenting multiple management options to landowners. One action may strongly support one value while negating another value, whereas a different action could moderately support both values. Alternatives therefore represent the explicit inclusion of tradeoffs in the forest management process. They present management actions that augment structures in different ways and then assess how each meets stated objectives and goals, thereby promoting landowner values. The differences between the ability of alternatives to address landowner values represent resource tradeoffs and provide necessary information to guide decision making. While climate change may necessitate the development of more complex alternatives more routinely, the general idea remains: developing alternatives enables land managers to articulate tradeoffs of given strategies and therefore build consensus more comprehensively.
Conclusion
Several unifying themes are present in the management of Colorado’s forests. Successful forest management integrates both individual and collective values – values based on a shared vision for the forested stand/landscape in the broad provisioning of ecosystem services. The forest management process is adaptable, but it is an ordered process meant to explicitly consider landowner/collective values and move a given area toward a DFC. It is a process that enables land managers to consider different options and build consensus on actions, and it is made more transparent with greater stakeholder involvement. This is not to say that management objectives are always accomplished quickly, forests and their associated disturbances are dynamic, but following this management process enables the iterative adaptation of management strategies so that outcomes are progressively closer to the set DFCs.
Colorado has an active and robust culture of collaboration, with numerous groups working collectively to coordinate planning, share resources and implement forest management activities. As we move forward in Colorado with an uncertain climate, abiding by this process, building collective vision, and learning from successes and failures ultimately benefits our ability to respond to threats and risks in an ordered fashion. Tradeoffs are present in any choice made, as is true in many disciplines, but making conscious choices about the future of our forests while acknowledging these tradeoffs engenders a greater culture of knowledge surrounding forest management decisions. While management may not be appropriate in all situations, we know that in many, an absence of management may lead to dire outcomes for ecosystem services and the values we hold dear.
Often, forest management carries the stigma of resource extraction. While forest product generation is a collective value within Colorado, it is not the driving force behind management, as limited/weak markets make product generation offset only a portion of total treatment costs. Markets control the types of products that are desired/produced, but these are often the byproduct of successful collaboration as ecological and human livelihoods/safety form the impetus to manage forests, not the wood products themselves. The fact that across Colorado trees do not effectively “pay their way” off the landscape highlights the folly in the assumption that forest management in this state revolves around generating money from timber, when most contracts across lands routinely lose money to conduct management. Collectively standing up for thoughtful input to forest management discussions only betters our ability as land managers to collect values and build collective vision for the future of our forests. For those interested in finding collaborations near you, please use the Center for Collaborative Conservation Atlas to find local collaborative groups to join. If you are interested in learning more about the last five years of forest management across Colorado, please see the 2020 Colorado Forest Action Plan Five Year Review.
References
Baral, S., Mackes, K., West Fordham, A., Anderson, N., & Gaetani, M. (2025). Woody biomass utilization, consumption and production in Colorado (RMRS-GTR-445; p. RMRS-GTR-445). U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Research Station. https://doi.org/10.2737/RMRS-GTR-445
Barrett, K. J., Cannon, J. B., Schuetter, A. M., & Cheng, A. S. (2021). Effects of collaborative monitoring and adaptive management on restoration outcomes in dry conifer forests. Forest Ecology and Management, 488, 119018. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foreco.2021.119018
Bentz, B. J., Régnière, J., Fettig, C. J., Hansen, E. M., Hayes, J. L., Hicke, J. A., Kelsey, R. G., Negrón, J. F., & Seybold, S. J. (2010). Climate change and bark beetles of the Western United States and Canada: Direct and indirect effects. BioScience, 60(8), 602–613. https://doi.org/10.1525/bio.2010.60.8.6
Chambers, M. E., Fornwalt, P. J., Malone, S. L., & Battaglia, M. A. (2016). Patterns of conifer regeneration following high severity wildfire in ponderosa pine – dominated forests of the Colorado Front Range. Forest Ecology and Management, 378, 57–67. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foreco.2016.07.001
Davis, K. T., Dobrowski, S. Z., Higuera, P. E., Holden, Z. A., Veblen, T. T., Rother, M. T., Parks, S. A., Sala, A., & Maneta, M. P. (2019). Wildfires and climate change push low-elevation forests across a critical climate threshold for tree regeneration. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116(13), 6193–6198. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1815107116
Higuera, P. E., Shuman, B. N., & Wolf, K. D. (2021). Rocky Mountain subalpine forests now burning more than any time in recent millennia. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118(25), e2103135118. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2103135118
Moomaw, W. R., Masino, S. A., & Faison, E. K. (2019). Intact forests in the United States: Proforestation mitigates climate change and serves the greatest good. Frontiers in Forests and Global Change, 2, 27. https://doi.org/10.3389/ffgc.2019.00027
Nagel, L. M., Palik, B. J., Battaglia, M. A., D’Amato, A. W., Guldin, J. M., Swanston, C. W., Janowiak, M. K., Powers, M. P., Joyce, L. A., Millar, C. I., Peterson, D. L., Ganio, L. M., Kirschbaum, C., & Roske, M. R. (2017). Adaptive silviculture for climate change: A national experiment in manager-scientist partnerships to apply an adaptation framework. Journal of Forestry, 115(3), 167–178. https://doi.org/10.5849/jof.16-039
Nagel, L. M., Janowiak, M. K., Clark, P. W., Peterson, C. L., Vicini, M. R., Palik, B. J., D’Amato, A. W., Battaglia, M. A., & Swanston, C. W. (2026). Ten years of adaptive silviculture for climate change: An applied, coproduced experimental framework. BioScience, 76(2), 157–170. https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biaf170
Negrón, J. F., & Cain, B. (2019). Mountain pine beetle in colorado: A story of changing forests. Journal of Forestry, 117(2), 144–151. https://doi.org/10.1093/jofore/fvy032
Nelson, M.P., & DeLuca, T. H. (2026). Forest conservation beyond false dichotomy: Notes from the Pacific Northwest. Journal of Forestry. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44392-026-00100-0
Schultz, C. A., Mclntyre, K. B., Cyphers, L., Kooistra, C., Ellison, A., & Moseley, C. (2018). Policy design to support forest restoration: The value of focused investment and collaboration. Forests, 9(9), 512. https://doi.org/10.3390/f9090512