DEPARTMENT OF LAND AND NATURAL RESOURCES
DIVISION OF FORESTRY AND WILDLIFE
PLANNING & INFORMATION SERVICES
February 25, 2009
MEMORANDUM
TO: Jim Henry, Jim Henry, Ph.D.
FROM: Ronald Cannarella, Planning & Information Services Forester
SUBJECT: Potential Technical Writing Projects
Hi Jim,
I am thrilled about the prospect of working with you and your students on the Hawaii State-wide Assessment of Forest Conditions and State-wide Resource Strategy (SWARS). I have developed a website to help coordinate the development of the Hawaii SWARS. In a nutshell, SWARS consist of two documents 1) the Assessment and 2) the Strategy. These two documents must be submitted from the State Forester (my boss) to the US Secretary of Agriculture no later than June 18, 2010 in order to qualify for billions of dollars of funds authorized by the 2008 Farm Bill.
We are just now beginning to work on the Assessment. I am holding back on beginning any work on the Strategy until May 2009.
I have attached a pdf of our instructions from the Forest Service for writing the Assessment document titled “Farm Bill Requirements and Redesign Components: State Assessments and Resource Strategies, Final Guidance”. Appendix A spells out exactly what must be addressed in our Assessment.
My perfect world would have each section of Appendix A have its own methodology section clearly spelling out what data sources we will use (specifically GIS data), how the analyses will be conducted, and how values for various mapped attributes will be assigned.
Every section in Appendix A is “up for grabs”. If you have a team that wants to tackle one of those sections, I will be happy to direct them to the resources and individuals that they would need to contact.
A simpler assignment, but interesting nonetheless, would be a paper on “The History of Forest and Wildlife Management in Hawaii”. I would love to have that be the first chapter in our Assessment. How can we comment on the existing condition and trends in our forests, if we don’t know where we have been. This assignment would be a combination of literature review and interviews. I have a file folder of previously written articles written up to the mid 1980’s. A lot has happened since then however, and to the best of my knowledge, no one has written the definitive up-to-date story of forest management in Hawaii.
Simpler yet, but perhaps more important would be to write up the methodology for a project that I have another student working on, which is to develop a map and mailing list of the owners of “Non-Industrial Private Forest”, or NIPF as it is commonly referred to by foresters. NIPF is a BIG DEAL because much of the Farm Bill is targeted at owners of NIPF. In other words, if you are a NIPF landowner, you qualify for $billions of Farm Bill money. Hawaii has never had a map or list of NIPF landowners. Until last week. I have an undergraduate intern who is learning GIS and she has begun to create the definitive list of NIPF for Hawaii. I have asked her to write up her methodology once her analysis is complete, so that we can produce a report to go with the GIS coverage, printed maps and table of landowners. I don’t know if writing up the methodology report this is meaty enough for your students to make a whole semester project, but this NIPF product is a huge money maker. Larry Yamomoto, The State Conservationist, and head of Natural Resources Conservation Service for the Pacific Islands region can hardly wait to get that document.
Here are my thoughts on potential project deliverables. We have this website, hawaiistateassessment.info, which is at its core, a Wordpress blog set up as a Content Management System (CMS). One way that I would like to utilize the site would be to add authors to the blog, and have them write articles directly into the blog, and then open the articles up for comment. In this way, we can get the word out there, capture the public dialogue, and effectively create an open “record of decision”. I am not yet a Wordpress expert (but I am getting there), and I am very open to suggestions on how to better organize and utilize the website for this type of collaborative process. I would also consider wikis, but frankly, I don’t have the time to ramp up to running a wiki site.
I would love to incorporate other kinds of multi-media in the website, so if you have students who are interested in podcasting, for example, that would be really cool.
I am pretty much drawing the line at going full twitter on this project, but I reserve the right to change my mind on that, should the right person or persons come along.
So there you have it. Please feel free to call me at (808) 587-4189 if you or your students want to develop any of these ideas further.
All the best,
Ron Cannarella
Forester