The North Shore Forest Collaborative has scheduled a pair of events next month in Grand Marais to discuss what is happening with the North Shore forests.
A “Northern Sustainability Symposium” will take place May 1-3 at the North House Folk School. The agenda includes such items as “Restoring Lake Superior’s North Shore Forest” with Becky Bartol, “Stewarding Northeast Minnesota’s Forests through a Changing Climate” by Jim Manolis of the Nature Conservancy and a forest restoration tour.
For more information contact the North House Folk School.
In other Forest Collaborative news, the next meeting will take place May 29 in Grand Marais. A likely topic will be the Joint Chief ’s Partnership, which provides help and funding for North Shore Forest restoration efforts. As part of a national partnership, the USDA Forest Service and Natural Resource Conservation Service are coordinating technical resources and funds totaling $200,000 in Fiscal Year 2015 (up to a potential $950,000 over a three-year period) to support forest restoration efforts along the North Shore of Lake Superior.
Since much of the North Shore is in private ownership, a concerted effort between public and private landowners is essential to achieving forest restoration at a landscape scale. With this new partnership and funding, agency staff will be jointly dedicated to coordinating small scale work on private land with larger scale activities on the national forest.
The collaborative has also announced that its plan to help guide its operations and projects is completed. The plan identifies the mission, goals, objectives, and strategies of the collaborative and lists various projects important to restoration. It will also be used in seeking funding to implement the identified projects. The plan can be viewed or downloaded at northshoreforest.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/ NSFC-plan.pdf
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