Maritime live oak (MLO) forests along the Georgia (U.S.A) coast and barrier islands are highly regarded for their multiple natural and cultural heritage values. In recent decades, MLO forests have faced various environmental stressors including hurricanes, invasive plant species, and intensifying deer herbivory. With evidence of limited live oak (Quercus virginiana) recruitment, these stressors could create undesired long-term effects on tree community structure, function, and resilience. Through an initial collaborative process, we found common interest among several MLO forest stewards and scientists for conserving forests by planting live oaks to augment existing populations. But there is uncertainty regarding potential management actions because knowledge about MLO ecosystem dynamics is limited and fragmented among stakeholders. This posed an excellent opportunity to synthesize ecological knowledge among the MLO forest management community and use structured decision-making to collaboratively develop a decision-support tool for live oak restoration via tree-planting.
Results/Conclusions:
We devised a three-step strategy to co-produce knowledge and develop a decision-support tool. For the first step, we held a workshop with forest stewards to elicit: 1) the suite of MLO forest managers' long- term objectives and shorter-term success indicators, 2) the spatial and temporal scales at which stewards envision taking management actions, 3) a set of potential tree-planting options, and 4) constraints including data needs, legal contexts, and required resources. Next, we conducted a series of interviews with live oak growers to elicit information about live oak seedling and sapling growth dynamics under varying conditions. Thirdly, we compiled insights from managers and growers to construct a semi-quantitative decision support tool that projects likely outcomes, costs, associated uncertainties of alternative tree-planting strategies, and the degree to which they would meet different management objectives. This process allowed us to capitalize on diverse understandings and perspectives to address uncertainty and limited ecological knowledge, while also ensuring that the decision support tool would be directly relevant to stewards' values, objectives, and information needs.