Criterion 7. Legal, Institutional, and Economic Framework for Forest Conservation and
Sustainable Management
National Report on Sustainable Forests—2010
Indicator 7.57.
Capacity To Measure and Monitor Changes in the Conservation and Sustainable Management
of Forests, Including Availability and Extent of Up-To-Date Data, Statistics, and Other Information Important to Measuring or Describing Indicators
What is the indicator and why is it important?
This indicator assesses the availability of information needed
to measure or describe the indicators associated with Criteria 1
through 7. Successful implementation of the criteria and indicator concept requires the availability of information to report on
the indicators.
What does the indicator show?
Compilation and development of up-to-date data, statistics, and
other information is mostly a Federal Government responsibility, with some data collected by States as well. Various laws
and regulations govern data collection, analysis, and release.
For example, the Federal Renewable Resource Planning Act
(RPA) mandates data collection and analysis to monitor the
trends of the forest conditions in the United States. The Federal
Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) program measures forest
inventories, forest health, and selected forest resource characteristics in the United States. FIA also collects and publishes
much of the forest products production data in the United
States These data are complemented with trade data from the
Foreign Agriculture Service (FAS) and the National Resource
Lands Inventory (NRLI), which measures land use and change
for all lands in the United States.
As of the National Report on Sustainable Forests—2003, 5 of
the 67 Montréal Process indicators had data available at the
national scale, and 17 had partial data at the national scale. The
rest had data available only at the State or local scale, if at all.
Federal, State, and university research and assessments
contribute to the availability and extent of the Montréal Process
statistics, and help foster continuous improvement of the data
generated within the budget constraints. Forestry sector private
firms and landowners also contribute to such efforts through
voluntary reporting and cooperation with Federal partners.
Private sector organizations also provide various production
and trade statistics to forest industry trade associations, which
compile and publish the statistics annually or periodically.
Certified forest organizations also report some management
data, at least, and perhaps most of their management planning
information. The full management plans for firms certified by
Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) are available from Web
sources, and the Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI) provides
a summary of the certification audits for forest management
certificate holders.
Table 57-1. Policy and Governance Classification.
Mechanism
Nondiscretionary/mandatorya
Informational/educationalb
Discretionary/voluntaryc
Fiscal/economicd
Market basede
Scale:
National (N),
Regional (R),
State (S),
Local (L)
N, S
R, N, S
N, R, S, L
N, S, L
Approach
Prescriptive
L, R, G
R, A
Process or
Systems Based
Performance or
Outcome Based
Private
Enterprise
R, A
S
M, C
Laws (L), Regulations or Rules (R), International Agreements (I), Government Ownership or Production (G).
b
Education (E), Technical Assistance (T), Research (R), Protection (P), Analysis and Planning (A).
c
Best Management Practices (B), Self-regulation (S).
d
Incentives (I), Subsidies (S), Taxes (T), Payments for Environmental Service (P).
e
Free enterprise, private market allocation of forest resources (M), or market based instruments and payments, including forest certification (C) wetland banks (W), capand-trade (T), conservation easement or transfer of development rights (E).
a
Last Updated June 2011 1
National Report on Sustainable Forests—2010
What has changed since 2003?
The national Forest Service FIA data system has converted most
of its national data collection efforts from a periodic survey
of each State to a continuous effort that samples a portion of
each sample frame each year. This shift to continuous sampling
provides some data each year, and over an extended period
should provide continual data with similar accuracy. The Forest
Last Updated June 2011 Service Forest Health Monitoring data efforts have also been
integrated into the FIA data system, and subsample a portion
of the same FIA plots, only with more detailed measurements
to monitor forest health over time. Various updates in data
collection have also been implemented specifically to support
the Montréal Process reporting effort. FIA soil sampling to
address Criterion 4 is a notable example of this.
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