Forest Service Planning

Since 1976, the U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) Forest Service has been required by law to develop a land and resource management plan for each national forest or for groups of forests and to revise each plan at least once every 15 years. Because of concerns about the potential costs, timeliness, and effectiveness of the Forest Service's planning process and broad-scale ecosystem-based assessments, GAO was asked to examine several planning efforts. GAO, the Forest Service, and others have concluded that assessments should have certain key elements or characteristics to maximize their value in addressing issues that extend beyond the boundaries of national forests.

GAO noted that: (1) in recent years, the Forest Service, others, and GAO have concluded that assessments should have certain key elements or characteristics to maximize their value in addressing issues that extend beyond the boundaries of national forests; (2) Forest Service officials in charge of assessments should make clear to Congress, the public, and their staff what the objectives of the assessment are and what its products will be, as well as who will be responsible for delivering the products, at what time, and at what cost; (3) if the agency does not conduct assessments at all or does not ensure that they contain these and other elements, it increases the risk that the planning process will continue to be costly, time-consuming, and less than fully effective; (4) in conducting the Great Lakes Ecological Assessment, the Forest Service has adopted some of these key elements and characteristics; (5) however, regional and forest officials have not viewed the assessment as a priority and have thus not provided the leadership, guidance, and funding necessary to successfully complete it in a timely manner; (6) in GAO's opinion, the Forest Service has not effectively integrated the assessment into its process for revising forest plans in the Lake States; (7) as a result, GAO believes that the agency risks repeating the inefficiency and waste of resources that occurred during the first round of forest planning, when it did not adequately address broad-scale issues and individual national forests independently attempted to gather and analyze data; (8) moreover, without the benefit of the assessment's analysis and conclusions on the range of ecologically viable and legally sufficient alternatives, the agency is more likely to find that the public will: (a) challenge the revised forest plans, causing the agency to delay, amend, or withdraw them; and (b) become frustrated with the planning process if the management alternatives it helped develop do not prove to be ecologically viable or legally sufficient; and (9) the Forest Service's proposed planning regulations also incorporate some of the key elements that are important to broad-scale ecosystem-based assessments, but they could be strengthened to ensure that future assessments have these elements and are better integrated into the forest planning process.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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