Invasive species management, whether to preserve natural landscapes for future generations or to conserve the productivity of ecosystem services, faces numerous challenges including limited actionable options, uncertain outcomes, complex pathways and interactions, and a changing climate. Land managers dealing with forest pest risk have multiple, sometimes competing objectives such as reducing economic losses, ensuring human health and cultural values, maintaining wildlife habitat, and maximizing water quality as well as carbon storage and sequestration. There is a critical need to make risks to multiple societal assets explicit in decision making, and to weigh the consequences of pest outbreak prevention and mitigation actions in the context of societal and environmental objectives.
To address this need, we are applying and testing a knowledge coproduction approach. We created a working group of managers and researchers, as well as people experienced in interdisciplinary work at the interface of science and practice, representing state agencies, forestry and entomology extension, urban forestry and academia, as well as the US Geological Survey, the US Forest Service and the National Park Service. Through a facilitated two day workshop and series of video conference calls, we built a shared understanding of the management context and desired outcomes of our effort.
Results/Conclusions
We are using a set of indicators of successful coproduction of climate science to evaluate the effort. A survey following the two day workshop found very positive process outcomes, and enthusiasm for the perceived outcomes, tempered with a lack of clarity about the exact form those outcomes would take. In response, we have clarified project outputs and outcomes informed by group discussion and online voting. We agreed to develop multi-pest management guidance that contextualizes risks to societal assets and trade offs among mitigation choices in a Structured Decision Making framework. The completeness of the considerations in the Structured Decision Making framework prevents collaborators from limiting their view (e.g., only thinking about hazard or the provision of forecast information). In this presentation, we will share lessons learned about coproduction for forest pest risk, as well as the pest management guidance we are developing, which provides a structure for approaching forest pest risk, with illustrative examples of key pest-host pairs.