Tools for conservation planning in changing forest landscapes: Collaborative landscape scenario modeling in Michigan's Two Hearted River watershed

The Two Hearted River watershed has been the focus of collaborative conservation and forest management efforts by The Nature Conservancy, the State of Michigan, local timber management organizations, and private landowners since 2006. Conservation practitioners and land managers in this watershed and other landscapes are faced with the challenge of developing and applying cross-boundary conservation and management strategies in the face of uncertain changing climate and ecosystem dynamics. The Forest Scenarios Project was created to provide insight into which strategies best achieved watershed conservation goals under current and potential future climate conditions. Rather than a traditional research approach where scientists conceptualize, plan, and carry out research independently, the Forest Scenarios Project applied a collaborative scenario modeling approach in which stakeholders collaboratively develop and model scenarios representing a range of alternative conditions. Collaborative scenario modeling and other transdisciplinary approaches have the potential to improve conservation and natural resource management by expanding stakeholder knowledge about the socio-ecological dynamics of the system and enhancing their ability to collaboratively make decisions.;The primary goal of this research was to apply and examine a collaborative scenario modeling approach to provide insight into the possible consequences of management actions and climate change impacts in the Two Hearted River watershed. First, I examine the process of developing alternative landscape scenarios with the input of local stakeholders and identify the various approaches to knowledge sharing most appropriate for eliciting stakeholder knowledge at each stage. Next, I describe the modeling process and analyze results of simulations of alternative landscape scenarios to compare their ability to achieve conservation goals of maintaining landscape spatial heterogeneity and conserving mature forests and wetlands in the Two Hearted River watershed. Finally, I suggest a framework for the design, implementation, and evaluation of social objectives for collaborative scenario modeling projects when continued collaboration among stakeholders is a desired outcome. I use these three studies to draw conclusions about the ability of specific management and conservation tools to maintain landscape spatial heterogeneity and conserve mature forests and wetlands and the broader applicability of the collaborative scenario modeling approach in other natural resource management contexts.