Arizona Issues
What Can You Do?
To visit or learn more about our forest conservation program, contact Ethan Aumack.
To learn about restoration opportunities across the Kaibab Plateau, consider volunteering with us.
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Learn more at the USFS or 4FRI Stakeholder web sites.
4FRI: The Four Forest Restoration Initiative
In the late 1990s, we began working with pivotal partners to accelerate collaborative, science-based restoration of ponderosa pine forests on the Mogollon Rim. Originally, with the Grand Canyon Forests Partnership, which later became the Greater Flagstaff Forests Partnership, we helped design and implement 5,000-10,000 acre fuel-reduction and restoration projects in the area surrounding Flagstaff. These activities offered the perfect venue for scientific learning and provided a steppingstone for establishing a collaborative landscape-scale restoration effort of unprecedented size and scope — the Four Forest Restoration Initiative (4FRI).
In 2009, more than thirty organizations, municipalities, institutions, and agencies united to collaboratively plan and carry out landscape-scale forest restoration efforts across 2.4 million acres of Arizona’s Mogollon Rim. The 4FRI, which will cover portions of the Apache-Sitgreaves, Coconino, Kaibab, and Tonto national forests, aims to implement comprehensive restoration over the next twenty years, including thinning of predominantly small trees across one million acres, and safe controlled burning and natural fire management on much of the landscape.
The unprecedented alignment of several factors makes 4FRI a hopeful solution for implementing landscape-scale forest restoration:
- 4FRI involves diverse stakeholders
- 4FRI is working at the right scale — 750,000 acres for the first project phase
- 4FRI is guided by strong science developed by key stakeholders
- 4FRI engages appropriately scaled wood products industries
- 4FRI benefits from strong and capable National Forest Supervisors
Your donations and membership dues make our research, monitoring, and restoration work in Arizona possible.
