Challenges and opportunities for integrating inventory and monitoring into the work of a land management agency

Inventorying and monitoring the forest ecosystems of the United States are important missions of the U.S. Forest Service in order for it to know if it is meeting its management objectives, to determine the best adjustments to make to management, and to meet the public's needs for resource information. Despite the agency's long history and substantial investments in inventorying and monitoring, the Forest Service still faces many challenges and opportunities. New and increasing demands for information by both the agency and the public; agency culture, organization and procedures; and the need for perpetual, continuous forest ecosystem inventorying and monitoring contribute to these challenges. This paper explores these challenges and offers some approaches for dealing with them. The challenges are organized into eight categories: (1) information management, (2) indicator development and selection, (3) inventory and monitoring methods, (4) scale issues, (5) adaptive management, (6) science, research, and development, (7) organizational constraints, and (8) coordination with others. Each section contains a description and rationale for the category, a discussion of the major challenges to integration of inventorying and monitoring for the Forest Service, and some suggestions for overcoming these obstacles and barriers. The paper presents a Forest Service perspective. However, since these challenges are not unique to the Forest Service or to the United States, the paper has the potential for much broader application.