Social and Economic Conditions and Trends - We’d like to know your thoughts?
As part of the New Planning Regulations that were released last January, our planning team is preparing a Comprehensive Evaluation Report that highlights key conditions and trends for the social, economic, and ecological resources of the forest. These conditions and trends were gleaned from a large universe of possible conditions and trends. Conditions and trends are based on a long list of assessments, inventories, reports, and other data sources.
At this point we intend to have a Comprehensive Evaluation Report highlights document that will detail the most important conditions and trends that are guiding our planning effort (development of a draft Revised Plan including sections on vision, strategy, and design criteria). In addition to a highlights document, we will have a series of longer, more inclusive (than the highlights document but not all-inclusive of possible conditions and trends) series of specialist condition and trend documents, and finally, a compilation of the many assessments, inventories, reports, and other data sources we consulted for our planning effort.
We know that many folks have an interest in the social and economic conditions and trends. Here is what we have written for these first two documents:
More Inclusive Conditions and Trends for Social and Economic Resources
We’d love your thoughts about these documents. Please post them here to the blog.
Excerpts from Draft Highlights: “General Social and Economic Conditions and Trends”
I think the tone of the summary is on the mark. Nice to see quality of life issues given their due. In any “summary” you might want to pull forward a little snippet from the bigger document on “Relationships with Tribal Governments.”
On the other hand I wonder why we bother, other than custom and tradition, to tally up “renewable and non-renewable” use figures (hundreds of cubic feet for timber, animal unit months for grazing, forest visits for recreation, etc.) AND include them in a summary or “highlights.” Why not footnote or hyperlink such and leave the summary even more general than it already is? Or do we violate some sacred Forest Service directive if we incorporate such by reference? Same goes for “recreation opportunity spectrum categories.” Why not just talk to trends, i.e. how such info relates to the past and do so in general word pictures? Or maybe compliment the word pictures with hyperlinks or other references to maps if this stuff is captured well with maps.
I don’t have the same problem with the off-highway use graph. So I have to ask myself whether I would have been OK with the former information had it been displayed with graphics in the summary rather than numbers? I really don’t know. So I’d recommend that you think about working all summary stuff with word pictures alone, else with comparable graphics for anything deemed useful to carry forward to the summary.
On “More inclusive conditions and trends….” I think it works, but there are data gaps at the end oddly filled, at least in part, in the “Highlights” document. I guess I ought to track back with other social scientists in the FS to see what they think these things ought to look like.
Comment by Dave Iverson — January 10, 2006 @ 6:03 pm