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Bringing the Forest Home: Lessons Learned during the COVID-19 Pandemic about E-Planning in Community Forestry Contexts
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Journal of Forestry
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2021-09-11
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This paper examines “e-planning,” or the use of computer-based systems to conduct planning and decision-making, in the context of community forest management. E-planning is growing in the field of environmental planning, as it promises greater equity in terms of public participation. However, a lack of scholarly work exists on the applicability for forest planning. During the COVID-19 pandemic, county foresters and other natural resource professionals in Vermont turned to e-planning when safety restrictions limited their ability to engage in face-to-face efforts. This provided an opportunity to collect empirical data about the potential for e-planning to support the public engagement process in the context of forest planning. We provide an overview of e-planning theory and examine data from Vermont to explore the promise of e-planning for forest management. We make recommendations about the applicability of e-planning in the context of forest planning, and highlight areas for future research to investigate.
Citation
Beck S, Coleman K, Tapper JE (2021) Bringing the forest home: lessons learned during the Covid-19 pandemic about e-planning in community forestry contexts. Journal of Forestry fvab049. https://doi.org/10.1093/jofore/fvab049