policy Design and Governance of Multiparty Monitoring under the USDA Forest Service’s Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Program Courtney A. Schultz, Dana L. Coelho, and Ryan D. Beam Project-level monitoring is a necessary component of forest restoration and has historically been neglected. The 2009 Forest Landscape Restoration Act, which created the Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Program (CFLRP), authorizes funding for collaboratively designed restoration projects on US National Forests. It is the only statute requiring that the US Department of Agriculture Forest Service conduct project-level monitoring, specifically requiring collaboratively designed and implemented multiparty monitoring for 15 years after a CFLRP project begins. We conducted research to understand the design of these monitoring programs, their purposes, and their associated governance structures. Our goal was to investigate how this innovative aspect of the CFLRP is proceeding in the early years of the program and to set the stage for longitudinal research on this aspect of the CFLRP. We conducted and systematically analyzed semistructured interviews with 45 participants, including federal and nonfederal partners, from the first 10 CFLRP projects. We found that monitoring programs are being designed for a variety of purposes, such as tracking ecological impacts, maintaining trust with stakeholders, supporting “adaptive” planning documents meant to cover multiple years of treatment, and “telling the story” of these projects in terms of social and economic impacts to communities. Governance structures include formal roles and responsibilities for participants but lack formal processes for incorporating monitoring data into long-term project planning. Major challenges relate to the timing requirements of the CFLRP legislation, a lack of capacity among all parties in terms of time and expertise, navigation of the distinction between research and monitoring, and the design of adaptive planning documents to cover activities for multiple years over large landscapes. Keywords: forest planning, monitoring, adaptive management, collaboration, restoration N atural resource management litera- ture has explored and highlighted the importance of monitoring and adaptive management (Ringold et al. 1996, Stankey et al. 2003, Stem et al. 2005). A consistent theme is that, despite the potential value of monitoring to promote learning, improve management, and diffuse conflict, it has been challenging to imple- ment monitoring successfully, fund it consistently, and ensure that it happens in the political and legal context of US public lands management (Doremus 2008, De- Luca et al. 2010, Biber 2011, Schultz and Nie 2012). In the context of forest restoration, monitoring is particularly important. Resto- ration is associated with numerous uncer- tainties and is highly complex, particularly in the context of a changing climate (Larson et al. 2013). Without adequate monitoring, the ability to understand the impacts of res- toration activities on ecosystem integrity and sustainability is severely limited (De- Luca et al. 2010). Monitoring of forest res- toration activities specifically at the project level is important for four reasons: (1) resto- ration is a process, and steps in the process should be evaluated; (2) restoration science is relatively new; (3) forest plans are increas- ingly predicated on the application of adaptive management, which requires mon- itoring to assess outcomes and adapt accord- ingly; and (4) restoration treatments may have negative impacts that can be mitigated before similar treatments are applied in the future or at broader scales (DeLuca et al. 2010). In US forest policy, monitoring has been required in some form for decades, Received September 9, 2013; accepted February 7, 2014; published online March 6, 2014. Affiliations: Courtney A. Schultz (courtney.schultz@colostate.edu), Colorado State University, Department of Forest and Rangeland Stewardship, Fort Collins, CO. Dana L. Coelho (dana.coelho@gmail.com), Colorado State University. Ryan D. Beam (beam.ryan.d@gmail.com), Colorado State University. Acknowledgments: We thank the Mc-Intire Stennis Cooperative Forestry Program and the USDA Forest Service’s Pacific Northwest Research Station’s NEPA for the 21st Century program for supporting this research. Thanks to all the interviewees who graciously gave us their time, documents, and assistance with this projects. RESEARCH ARTICLE 198 Journal of Forestry • March 2014 J. For. 112(2):198 –206 http://dx.doi.org/10.5849/jof.13-070 Copyright © 2014 Society of American Foresters