STEW-MAP Oʻahu Survey Results (2019)

There are many community and civic groups that care for the lands and waters of Hawaiʻi. In so doing, these groups provide a vital service to maintaining the health, well-being, and resilience of our communities and ecosystems. However, many of their activities are undervalued or even unrecognized because there is limited public investment into assessing this non-agency based stewardship. The important roles of community leaders are particularly understudied. In response to these needs and to more comprehensively understand stewardship across geographical and social landscapes, the USDA Forest Service developed the Stewardship Mapping and Assessment Project (STEW-MAP), which is designed to work with environmental stewardship practitioners, groups, and organizations to document and map their stewardship activities. STEW-MAP seeks to address these three questions: 1) Who takes care of this region? 2) Where are there concentrations of care? And 3) Where are there stewardship gaps? Where STEW-MAP has been applied, the resulting data sets have been used to make more visible the work of stewardship groups, with STEW-MAP databases serving as a resource for community groups and partner agencies to: (i) more effectively collaborate with each other; (ii) better identify opportunities to support community-based efforts; (iii) increase the capacity of volunteers, teachers, agencies, funders, and others to communicate about community groups who steward their places; and (iv) help organizations, volunteers, and agencies to network, especially those groups serving similar geographic or mission areas. In 2019, we conducted a STEW-MAP survey for the Kona and Koʻolaupoko Districts of Oʻahu.