It’s been a while since I last posted. Been devoting pretty much all of my time to this project, but now that we are entering the review phase of producing our SWARS, looks like I’ll be posting more often.

Today we have a Technical Advisory Committee (a committee of the Natural Resources Conservation Service) via PeaceSat so that all of the Pacific Islands can participate.

Here is the Outline and Issues for Hawaii’s Assessment of Forest Conditions and Trends. The Strategy document will mirror this structure, and will address the items in the Issues section.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Message From the Chair     9
Hawaii State Motto     10
Introduction and Objectives for this Assessment     11
Methodology     17
Scope     17
Data     17
Process     17
Stakeholder Groups Consulted     17
Priority Landscape Areas (where and why)     18
Hawaii’s Themes     18
Hawaii’s Forests: Historical Context     20
The Aina (working title)     33
The Ahupuaa Paradigm and Ecosystem-Based Management     33
Land Use and Zoning in Hawaii     35
Conservation zone     37
Agriculture zone     40
Urban Zone     41
Coastal Zone     46
Near Shore Zone     48
Issue-Based Themes     49
Watershed Management     49

1. Benefits     53
2. Threats     54
3. Trends     54
4. Present Condition     54
5. Priority Landscapes     54
6. Data Gaps     54

Conservation of Biodiversity     55

1. Benefits     55
2. Threats     55
3. Trends     55
4. Present Condition     55
5. Priority Landscapes     55
6. Data Gaps     55

Forest Products     55

1. Benefits     59
2. Threats     59
3. Trends     60
4. Present Condition     60
5. Priority Landscapes     60
6. Data Gaps     60

Forest Health: Invasive Plants, Insects, and Diseases     60

1. Benefits     62
2. Threats     62
3. Trends     62
4. Present Condition     65
5. Priority Landscapes     65
6. Data Gaps     65

Wildfire     66

1. DOFAW’s Fire Management Program     66
2. Fire History     67
3. Collaboration     67
4. Planning     67
5. Harmful Effects of Wildfires in Hawaii     67
6. Threats and Trends     68
7. Impacts on Watersheds and Groundwater     68
8. Soil erosion and coral reef impacts     68
9. Threats to Native Biodiversity     68
10. Threats in the Wildland Urban Interface (WUI)     72
11. Wildfire and Fuel Loading Cycle     72
12. Present Condition     72
13. Fire Response Zones     72
14. Funding     73
15. Establishment of a Land Fire Protection Law     73
16. Wildland Urban Interface     74
17. Community Wildfire Protection Plana 74
18. Priority Landscapes     74
19. Firewise Hawaii Program     74
20. Data Used     76
21. Hawaii Fire Danger Rating System (HFDRS)     76
22. Hawaii Fuel Models     76

Climate Change/Sea Level Rise     79

1. Threats     79
2. Trends     79
3. Present Condition     79
4. Priority Landscapes     79
5. Data Gaps     79

Coastal Issues     79

1. Benefits     79
2. Threats     79
3. Trends     79
4. Present Condition     79
5. Priority Landscapes     79
6. Data Gaps     79

Recreation & Tourism     80

1. Benefits     80
2. Threats     80
3. Trends     80
4. Present Condition     80
5. Priority Landscapes     80
6. Data Gaps     80

Health of Our Urban Forests     80

1. Benefits     80
2. Threats     84
3. Trends     84
4. Present Condition     84
5. Priority Landscapes     84
6. Data Gaps     85

Multi-State and Regional Issues     86

1. Benefits     87
2. Threats     87

• Movement of Invasive Species
• Impacts of Climate Change/Sea Level Rise on the Pacific Islands Region

1. Trends     87

• Access to Various on-line resources documenting trends of climate change/sea level rise
• Education and Capacity Building

1. Present Condition     89
2. Priority Landscapes     89
3. Data Gaps     89

Graphics for Document (Temp)     90
Appendix A: Timeline of Forest Management in Hawaii     91
Appendix B: Plans Considered     105
Resource Land Acquisition Plans and Priorities in the State of Hawaii     106
County Plans & Priorities     106
County of Hawaii     106
County of Maui     106
County of Kauai     107
State Plans & Priorities (organized by agency)     108
Department of Land and Natural Resources     108
Department of Agriculture     110
Department of Business, Economic Development, and Tourism     110
The University of Hawaii     111
Other Plans & Priorities (within Hawaii, but not State or county)     112
Appendix C: Stakeholder Involvement     113
City & County of Honolulu Watershed Partners and Projects     113
Appendix D: Orthography and Language     117
Appendix E: Acronyms     119
Appendix F: Glossary and Place Names     121
Appendix G: 2008 Farm Bill Summary of Forestry Title VIII     125
Bibliography     141

Did you miss the 2009 Hawaii Conservation Conference? Have you heard the latest information on climate change, cultural practices, invasive species, the economic crisis, and where Hawai`i is heading? Do you want to hear from islanders from Hawaii and Micronesia in their own words? Would you like to hear for yourself Dr. Stephen Schneider, Nobel Peace Prize winning climatologist on what can be done to mitigate the effects of climate change and sea level rise. Do you care about these Hawaiian Islands; our people, our biodiversity, our culture, the awesome power of our oceans, volcanoes, coral reefs and traditions?

Then you should check out the HCC presentations. They’re online. And free.

The link for the conference index is http://hawaiiconservation.org/2009hcc_presentations.asp

Or you can get one or all of the podcasts on your itunes. Make sure that you are connected to the internet and that itunes can access the itunes store. In itunes, choose Advanced – then Subscribe to Podcast  and then copy and paste this URL into the dialogue box:

http://hcc09.blip.tv/rss/itunes

The podcast directory will load, and you can download one or more of the presentations complete with abstract (in the lyrics section of the podcast).

Enjoy

Society of American Foresters honor Bob Merriam for 50 years as an SAF member.

This years Hawaii Conservation Conference ”Hawaii in a Changing Climate” was a big success. Mahalo to everyone who helped put this together.

This conference, now in its 17th year, has grown to three intense days plus a Friday field-trip day, four or five concurrent sessions per day, an Open Public Day, an amazing array of posters, lots of great interaction, and the latest news on research, management, and climate change issues relevant to Hawai`i.

The keynote speaker was Dr. Stephen Schneider, a world renound climatologist from Stanford who shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore and several others for their work in identifying climate change, and for advocating a coordinated response to the impending impacts due to changes in weather, rainfall, and sea level.

Hawaii SWARS had a two-hour session on Public Information Day that was very well attended. Ron (your author) gave the general overview of SWARS; Dr, Kimberly Bennett (University of Hawaii Economist) gave a presentation on the economics of water and complex systems; Teresa Truman-Madriaga presented on the Urban Perspective of SWARS, Darren Johnson; a fire ecologist who assisted with the Hawaii LANDFIRE project presented this brand-new dataset, Dawn Greenlee (US Fish & Wildlife Service) and Glenn Shishido (DOFAW) presented on the latest fire data and how it will be used in Hawaii SWARS.

At the conclusion of our talk, we presented Bob Merriam a placque on behalf of the Society of American Foresters for celebrating his 50th year as an active SAF member.

We got a lot of great feedback and make some powerful new connections with our partners.

And, since Aaron Lowe (DOFAW’s Na Ala Hele program manager for the island of Oahu) and his hot-shot team of multimedia techs were managing the hundred twenty plus powerpoint presentations, we decided to record all of the presentations using Camtasia Studio. Several speakers did not want to be recorded, and a few presentations were not successfully recorded due to technical issues, but we did manage to produce nearly 90 of the conference presentations.

Many of these presentations are of direct relevance to Hawaii SWARS. Not only our own session, but others as well. For example, NOAA is in the process of producing a similar type of plan to SWARS, but specifically geared to the response to climate change in Hawaii. We too, must address this in Hawaii SWARS. So, they held a two hour planning workshop, all of which was recorded.

I have done virtually all of the post production, and it has been quite a learning experience. As soon as the whole conference is up on the web, checked, and an index is created, we will announce the results and you can see for yourself the most current information that we have on research, science, cultural practices, and management of Hawaii’s unique environment and culture.

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

PIC logo

Well, we survived the 2009 Annual meeting of the Pacific Islands Committee (PIC) , which was held this year in the Republic of Palau. One of the main topics of this year’s meeting was of course, SWARS. The PIC is a committee of the Western Forestry Leadership Coalition (WFLC), which is in turn, a subgroup of the National Association of State Foresters (NASF). In these recent economic hard times, many WFLC committees have gone by the wayside, and PIC is the only committee still standing, which demonstrates how important this meeting is to WFLC.

US Affiliated Islands in the Pacific

This annual meeting is the most important event for the foresters working in the Pacific US States (Hawaii), Territories (Guam, American Samoa and Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas Islands – OK the fine points of the status of each can be clarified if there is interest) and the Freely Associated States (formerly Trust Territories of the Pacific), and now comprising the Federated States of Micronesia (Kosrae, Phonpei, Chuuk and Yap), the Republic of the Marshall Islands (too many atolls to mention), and the Republic of Palau.

Basically, at a PIC meeting, 50 forestry-related people get together to talk about common issues, discuss administrivia (exactly HOW do you fill out a Federal f310-a form to get reimbursed under grant C2009g699hs(a7). But more important than that, relationships between individuals, nations, islands and programs are strengthened. Problems are solved (especially the tricky people problems). Information, technology and data are shared.

Conferences are exhausting, no way around it. You awake at 6 AM, go down to the hotel restaurant for breakfast, but breakfast is a pre-meeting since inevitably, several other colleagues will be there. Then you go to the venue, meet, strategize, tear through the tear sheets, compile, synthesize, break-out, strategize some more over dinner, and then retire to your room to prepare for the next day.

My four take-away points from this meeting:

1. Everyone is behind schedule on their SWARS
2. Every data set, Federal program, every agency and every ecotome (i.e., forest, mangrove, shoreline, reef) has their own language, jargon, data structure – and for SWARS we must learn them all
3. This being the first time for every State/Territory/Freely Associated State, nobody quite knows what to do, and nobody quite knows what their exact role is.
4. I cannot live without being in email contact at least once a week. 12 days without internet was like turning off the electricity at home, and coming back to dead plants, a dead aquarium, a flooded bathroom, and a fridge full of rotten food. Never again!

But one thing is for sure. Palau is THE most spectactularly beautiful place I have ever been (and I have been a few places)

-Ron