Welcome to the website for the Hawaii State-wide Assessment of Forest Conditions and State-wide Resource Strategy, otherwise known as SWARS. What is SWARS? you may ask yourself. For a brief write up, please visit the What is This State Assessment page. If you prefer to learn by hearing, we have produced a narrated slide show video as well which provides a snapshot of the progress that we have made on SWARS as of February 23, 2009.
First things first; get your computer up to speed.
In order to view some of the documents, videos and podcasts on this website you must have the following free programs installed on your computer:
- Adobe Acrobat Reader is required to be able to open “pdf” documents and you can download it from the official Adobe Reader website.
- Adobe Flash Player is required to be able to view “flash” videos and you can download it from the official Adobe Flash Player website.
- Apple Quicktime is required to be able to view quicktime videos and you can download it from the official Apple Quicktime Download website
- Java is required to be able to do many things on the web, and you can download it from the official Java Download website.
The web is an ever-changing technology, and for that reason, even if you previously installed these programs on your computer, I recommend that you take a moment and download the latest versions anyway. This will ensure that you have a pleasant, productive and safe experience on this and many other websites.
Done? Great.
Navigating the website and finding the information that you are looking for.
You will find links to our most important documents in the “Links” section at the left side of the page. The most important of these is the “Forest Service Guidelines for Assessments and Strategies“. That document is our “marching orders” from the Forest Service. There are many other links to documents and websites where you can learn everything you want to about the Farm Bill, other agencies, etc.
Above the “links” section, is the “pages” section. The most important of these pages is the blog/news page. That’s where you will find the latest news on what we are doing, documents in progress, links to polls, video clips and podcasts.
Anyone may submit comments or questions to any post by registering, logging in, and posting your comments/questions. We require people to subscribe in order to keep out the automated spam-bots whose only purpose is to read weblogs and fill their comment sections up with junk. Your confidential information will not be given/sold/traded or otherwise passed off to anyone else unless they have a subpoena.
Dialogue is encouraged, differences of opinion are welcomed, and everyone is free to have their say. However, this is a public resource, and so profanity, threats of violence, and intentionally deceptive or false information will be deleted. All comments are moderated, which means that they will not show up until the review committee (right now me) has had a chance to approve them.
You may subscribe to this weblog through a variety of means, either as an RSS feed, via email and bookmarks.
I will update this page as additional functionality is built into the system. Until then,
Ron Cannarella