Strengthening partnerships across the landscape: Bridger-Teton National Forest STEW-MAP report 2021

Abstract

The Bridger-Teton National Forest (BTNF) in western Wyoming comprises over 3.4 million acres of public land. This rich and diverse landscape borders Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks and includes the headwaters of the Green, Snake, and Yellowstone Rivers. Robust and diverse partnerships are needed to steward this landscape on behalf of the American public. Currently, these partnerships are not systematically tracked or available as a dataset. The Bridger-Teton Planning Team identified the following priorities for partnership planning: (a) accelerate progress toward forest planning objectives by identifying shared priorities and working across organizational and jurisdictional boundaries to achieve outcomes at scale; (b) improve partnership tracking, inventory, and planning in an environment where both staffing, funding, and partnerships are dynamic; (c) develop a collective partnership knowledge bank among all forest staff; and (d) improve understanding about partner organizations, including who they are, where they work, whom they work with, and their priority interests and capacities. The Stewardship Mapping and Assessment Project (STEW-MAP) research tool was used to develop a better understanding of the number and types of partnerships present on the BTNF and the services the partnerships provide. Among the key results, partners were found to be agents of change, to be working on issues beyond natural resource management, and to be responding to disturbance. This report reflects an important snapshot of the Bridger-Teton National Forest partnership landscape in the year 2020. These data serve as an important baseline that can be updated in 2030 and beyond to identify key shifts in growth, capacity, interest, and engagement with new and existing groups. STEW-MAP data can be integrated with other data layers and initiatives relevant to forest management and revisited in future studies to understand how stewardship groups and their territories, impacts, and networks evolve over time.

Citation

Campbell, Lindsay K.; Johnson, Michelle; Svendsen, Erika; Goldberg, Brian; Guzik, Evan; Archual, Paul; McCollister, Chris; Plitt, Sophie; Radwell, Molly. 2023. Strengthening partnerships across the landscape: Bridger-Teton National Forest STEW-MAP report 2021. General Technical Report NRS-213. Madison, WI: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Northern Research Station. 30 p. https://doi.org/10.2737/NRS-GTR-213.