12 Fundamentals of Effective Leadership: Guest Post by Steve Ellis

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Steve Ellis in the field with Sally Jewell and Idaho Senator Mike Crapo in 2016

 

 

Steve Ellis wrote this piece for our own Steve Wilent’s Natural Resource Management Today.  Here’s the link. It’s on page 18. 

I thought it might open up an opportunity for an interesting discussion.  Do you agree with these? Do you have others to add?  Do you have stories you’d like to share about experiences good and bad? Lessons learned? Aspects that remain puzzling?

12 Fundamentals of Effective Leadership

By Steve Ellis

I have watched various leaders and leader­ ship styles during a federal natural resource career that spanned almost four decades. During this time, I also observed how em­ployees and the public responded to different  styles  of agency career  leadership.  I recently made a list of what is hopefully useful advice for others who strive to be successful leaders within agencies, companies, nonprofits , and other organizations. It is based on my observations and experi­ence in working for both the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management at many levels of tl1e organization, in both the field and Washington, D.C. This list is not in­tended to be in priority order as they are all fundamentally important. The list could reasonably be longer, but I decided to limit it to  12.

  1. Be ethical. To me this includes prin­ciples of sound natural resource management as well as integrity, honesty, and fairness. They are all key to being a true natural resource professional. I think most people know what is right and what is wrong regarding conduct, and what is lawful and what isn’t. An effective leader leads by ex­ample and encourages the professional and personal development of fellow employees and colleagues.  Together, you will help build a positive image of your organization internally and with the people they serve.
  2. Routinely communicate with em­ployees and be truthful. If there are still unknowns, tell them as such.
  3. Be honest with employees, your or­ganization’s partners, and the public. Give reasons for the decisions you make.  Employees and the public have the capability to figure things out and trying to mislead them has the potential of reducing your credibility.
  4. Treat employees with respect, re­gardless of where they work in an organization. I always watched how leaders treat people regardless of their status in the or­ganization. When I checked references  be­fore hiring an individual into a leadership position, I always looked down as well as up.  By that I mean ask people who worked for and were subordinate to the candidate what they saw as the individual’s strengths and weaknesses.  Good leaders evolve from good followers.
  5. None of us are irreplaceable.  If  you think you are, get over yourself It’s not about you, but about your team working together to accomplish the organization’s mission. Everyone has a key responsibility in getting the job done, regardless of their ability and where they work in the organization.
  6. Strive for having people in your workforce with a positive attitude. If a per­son has a positive attitude, they can generally learn or acquire skills they are deficient in. I always placed an emphasis on attitude when hiring people.  Negativity can  poison a work environment. Deal with issues involving performance and conduct as promptly as the system permits. Make sure to follow approved procedures in addressing such matters.  Avoid letting emotions or political pressure trip you up in the process. If you want an inappropriate conduct or adverse personnel action to legally stick, document it every step of the way and follow the procedures and  process.
  7.  Recognize that people have different skills and abilities. Work to find the best fit for an individual, one that that brings out their strengths.
  8.  Always watch for potential diamonds in the rough. I have seen unassuming employees blossom into becoming terrific leaders, given the opportunity. I would also always watch for the introverts who may not be the first to speak up, but may have tremendously valuable input and ideas.
  9. You are always being watched, so set a good example. Your actions and the words you say matter.
  10.  Stay calm in a crisis. Others will be watching and your behavior and response in a crisis will affect their reaction.  Don’t act as if your hair is on fire. Being calm and collected also helps you think more clearly. My experience working on complex wild­ fires helped me with this.  I vividly remem­ber the day when gunfire rang out just out side our office building and several anxious employees scurried into my office, visibly alarmed about an active shooter who had tragically shot someone in the employee parking lot  and was now on the bottom floor of our 3-story building. As a group, we quickly secured the upper two floors to deny the individual access to our work areas. I was impressed with how composed employees were in such a pressing situa­tion. The gunman was apprehended by local law enforcement before he could harm anyone else.
  11. Some people feel powerful behind a keyboard. My best advice is to be careful what you put in an email or text message. It’s a “paper” trail that reflects on you and can easily be shared. Think before you click on the send button.
  12. Always remember that it is your career colleagues who will carry you through­ out your career, so maintaining a good rapport with them is important. Within agencies, political appointees come and go with elections, but for the most part your career colleagues remain.  This career camaraderie can even carry and maintain its relevance into retirement. Also, it’s helpful to be a member of, and active in, professional societies. Positive relationships with colleagues in your field of expertise benefits your organization and contrib­utes to your personal development and continuing education.

Steve Ellis’s federal career spanned 38-years and included 14-months as a Congressional Fellow in the U.S. Senate. He held leadership positions with both the US Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management (BLM) . He retired as deputy director of operations, BLM’s senior career position in Washington, D.C., in December 2016. He is chair of the National Association of Forest Service Retirees. He holds a bachelor’s degree in forestry and a masters in geographic and atmospher­ic science.

The Marshall Fire: Wind, Grasslands, Suburbs and Towns

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AP image of houses burned in the Marshall Fire covered by snow

A few thoughts on the tragedy of the Marshall Fire. I spend a fair amount of time in Boulder County, and watched the coverage in real time.

This is an area where no one expected a fire to have those kinds of impacts in those suburban neighborhoods. There’s been many grass fires and high winds but nothing before like this.

But given that and the speed that the fire moved,  evacuations apparently went smoothly. From what I’ve read, 35,000 people were evacuated and currently two are missing. Governor Polis called this “our New Year’s miracle.”

Not to speak of the difficulties of moving large animals quickly as in this video.

Governor Polis said that this wasn’t a wildfire, but rather a suburban and urban fire.  He pointed out that houses aren’t just houses but also homes, sanctuaries for families and “reservoirs of memories.” He got at the deeply personal and emotional aspect of losing your home.. something that is often in news stories, but harder for us wonky types to address (“social values?”) because we can’t quantify it.

Observing the reaching out of support across county and state lines, it was affirming that when tragedy strikes people want to help regardless of the divisions that occupy so much space in the media.

The Overwhelming Power of Overwhelmingly Bad Luck

Then there’s the almost unbelievably unlucky timing of the ignition event.  As you see in the photos above, there was a serious snowfall in the same area the next day.   If the ignition had happened Friday or later, the story would have been completely different. Or when it was not so windy.  Or perhaps later in the year when this snowfall has had a chance to stem some of the dryness.

Climate or Not (or “made more likely by some unknown percentage”)

Wildfire disasters have increasingly been characterized as due to climate change.  Historically, there have been a great many grass fires and high winds in the area, but until the last twenty years or so, not as many subdivisions.  So it seems like all those changes (grass burns fast, houses not) are interwoven, and difficult or impossible to tease apart.  Especially since the ignition source appears to be people living in places where they probably weren’t living twenty years ago.  For the foreseeable future we are stuck with a) whatever weather is happening and b) people’s need for housing in either grasslands, shrublands or forest (pretty much all we have to choose from in the Denver metro area). Here’s a story from the Colorado Springs Gazette that talks about some history and quotes some fire scientists in California.

Topography and development or lack of development, played a role in the disaster.

Boulder is rightfully proud of its open space.

The City of Boulder is an island of development in a ring of city and county open space. But open space means grassy prairies, and dry prairie grass has always been a serious fire hazard, just as it was in 1910.

This is from the Denver Post.

The snow’s arrival to the Front Range on Friday was expected to help authorities’ efforts to snuff the remaining fire.

However, climate scientists were unsure how much relief the snow ultimately will provide, given the increasing drought and warm temperatures the Denver metro area has faced this fall. The conditions, which have become more common due to climate change, provided all of the ingredients needed to spark a wildfire, they said.

“That’s made for a quite extreme climate,” said Becky Bolinger, assistant state climatologist at the Colorado Climate Center at Colorado State University. “We don’t experience that often.”

I’d argue that there is one more ingredient needed to spark a wildfire.. ignition. More likely in inhabited landscapes.

Importance of Gasoline-Powered Vehicles in Dealing with Emergencies and Their Aftermath

Furthermore, in order to adapt to current conditions (with an unknown component x of climate change)  communities need to use fossil-fuel powered vehicles to evacuate people and animals, fight fires, and so on. Also aircraft, in general, but in this case, they were unable to fly due to high winds in this case.

Over the break, I was catching up on my New Scientist reading.  NS is a publication from Britain. It seems common there for people to assert that for the sake of the environment people need to live in apartments, give up cars (including electric ones) in favor of public transit and riding bikes, and perhaps ride-sharing.  When it comes to evacuations, with fires moving at a great rate of speed, it’s easy to see that this approach could become a problem, and not just in rural areas. Not to speak of the trucks pulling the trailers to evacuate large and small animals.

Burning homes and other infrastructure release carbon, plus a variety of other nasty chemicals into the atmosphere.  People are going to rebuild.  New homes require lots of wood and other construction materials, plus large (fossil-fueled) trucks carrying them.  If the fires had been kept out of their communities and not burned their houses,  then that would seem to have less of a carbon impact. I’m a big fan of both/and- “preferably keep fires out of communities, but also homeowners invest in protection.”  I don’t really understand who decided that this should be either/or, or why anyone listens to them.

Fuels Always Matter

Grass burns differently than wooden fences, houses and so on.  One shot on the news showed the fire stopping where a farmer/rancher had had cattle grazing recently, as he said, due to less fuel. Perhaps there is a house proximity that is too close for fire conditions.  This is again an issue that would go against “densification is always great,” which is part of the current community planning view.

Everyone  Can Learn From Well-Funded Communities

More well-off communities are better equipped to deal with disasters.  There’s a great deal of different kinds of institutional and financial support. Broomfield and Boulder counties are among the counties with the lowest poverty rates in Colorado. While it may be a general truth that “disasters unequally affect the disadvantaged,” in certain cases disasters do affect the relatively advantaged. By studying how they approach the problem, other communities can learn. Among the houses that survived and the ones that were burned, will they be able to figure out differences? Or was it again some form of bad luck (wind patterns and so on)?

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My heart goes out to all who have been affected by this fire, and my appreciation for all those who have and are reaching out and helping. For those interested, here’s a list of places to donate.

 

 

 

 

The New BLM

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Since we spent some time talking about the old BLM, and then its new Director, I thought it worth sharing this interview with Tracy Stone-Manning by Lee Newspapers.  It’s too bad, though, that there wasn’t a question about what she thought about the Forest Service and interagency coordination.  Some key policy points …

As of today, Stone-Manning has a pretty large to-do list: Reform BLM’s oil and gas leasing system and achieve the agency’s energy mission largely through the use of renewables. Promulgate new rules governing grazing leases that are fair and good for the landscape. Ensure that recreationists will still be able to find beauty, quiet and solitude.  In short, she says, manage not for process but for outcome — leaving both the agency and the vast land it manages in better shape than they were when she started.

“I think people saw that confirmation process for what it is, a sign of our times. I’ve had nothing but a warm welcome here at the agency. People are relieved to have a confirmed director and they are ready to go.”

“The last Administration said it had an energy-dominant agenda for public lands. We need to get back to our true calling, under the law, of being a multiple-use agency. Addressing conservation and climate change is part of that multiple use.”

“The priority is already shifted to renewable energy development. I want to be able to prove up on that, to show we can power this country well with renewable energy. And as for the development that is continuing as a result of existing rights, I want to ensure that those doing the developing are paying their fair share for resources that come out of the ground that we all own together, and ensure that the siting is responsibly done.”

“Climate change isn’t blue or red, it’s affecting us all in the West. Every Montanan breathed wildfire smoke last summer. Every rancher is seeing impacts of drought on the landscape. One thing that typically unites Americans is that we solve problems. My focus is going to be consistently on trying to solve problems with people who are willing to come to the table to work on them. The only way through the polarization is to be frank and transparent and not to step into the fray but to acknowledge it.”

“We are going to come forward with a draft grazing rule… “We’re in the midst of what some people call a megadrought and others call the new normal. We have to figure out how to manage for the health of the landscape. In many cases cows can help us do that if we’re really smart about how we use the tool that we call grazing. Outcome-based grazing is the new effort at the agency. The thought behind it is exactly where we need to go: Determine the outcome we’re looking for on the landscape and graze accordingly.

I think it’s safe to assume that same “outcome-based” strategy would apply to its forest management program as well, which should align with what the Forest Service has said it is doing.  She added this other interesting comment, in response to a question about a proposal to graze bison on BLM lands in Montana.

“Our job is to manage for the health of landscape and implement the law. We’re certainly aware of the sensitivities of that cultural question. But that’s what it is, a cultural question. We don’t manage culture, we manage landscape outcomes.”

“Big fires demand a big response”

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An essay from The Conversation, “Big fires demand a big response: How 1910’s Big Burn can help us think smarter about fighting wildfires and living with fire.”

Excerpt:

A new fire paradigm

The response to the Big Burn was not only wrongheaded, in our view, but also crude in its single-mindedness. “Put all forest fires out” had a clarity to it, but a 21st-century fire paradigm shift will have to be connected to broader conversations about environmental knowledge and how it can best be shared.

The U.S. has learned that it cannot suppress its way to a healthy relationship with fire in the West. That strategy failed even before climate change proved it to be no strategy at all.

Building a more successful coexistance with fire includes figuring out how to work cooperatively. This includes broader conversations about environmental knowledge, what constitutes it and how best it can be shared. Indigenous communities have long lived with fire and used it to cultivate healthy ecosystems. Prescribed and cultural burning are important tools in mitigating catastrophic fire and simultaneously aiding forest health.

Living with fire also requires teaching everyone about fire. Schools at all levels and grades can teach fire knowledge, including the science of fire and its consequences for communities, economies and lives; the history and cultural practices of fire; and the plants, landscapes and materials that can help prevent fires.

Fire, Forests, and Carbon

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An addition to our discussions of forest carbon and the management practices that impact carbon storage and ems, and calls for preservation, rather than active management. A new study from Cambridge University: “Fire effects on the persistence of soil organic matter and long-term carbon storage,” Nature ($), Dec. 23, 2021.

A Cambridge press release boils it down:

“Using controlled burns in forests to mitigate future wildfire severity is a relatively well-known process. But we’ve found that in ecosystems including temperate forests, savannahs and grasslands, fire can stabilise or even increase soil carbon,” said Dr Adam Pellegrini in the University of Cambridge’s Department of Plant Sciences, first author of the report.

He added: “Most of the fires in natural ecosystems around the globe are controlled burns, so we should see this as an opportunity. Humans are manipulating a process, so we may as well figure out how to manipulate it to maximise carbon storage in the soil.”

Fire burns plant matter and organic layers within the soil, and in severe wildfires this leads to erosion and leaching of carbon. It can take years or even decades for lost soil carbon to re-accumulate. But the researchers say that fires can also cause other transformations within soils that can offset these immediate carbon losses, and may stabilise ecosystem carbon.

Fire stabilises carbon within the soil in several ways. It creates charcoal, which is very resistant to decomposition, and forms ‘aggregates’ – physical clumps of soil that can protect carbon-rich organic matter at the centre. Fire can also increase the amount of carbon bound tightly to minerals in the soil.

“Ecosystems can store huge amounts of carbon when the frequency and intensity of fires is just right. It’s all about the balance of carbon going into soils from dead plant biomass, and carbon going out of soils from decomposition, erosion, and leaching,” said Pellegrini.

When fires are too frequent or intense – as is often the case in densely planted forests – they burn all the dead plant material that would otherwise decompose and release carbon into the soil. High-intensity fires can also destabilise the soil, breaking off carbon-based organic matter from minerals and killing soil bacteria and fungi.

Without fire, soil carbon is recycled – organic matter from plants is consumed by microbes and released as carbon dioxide or methane. But infrequent, cooler fires can increase the retention of soil carbon through the formation of charcoal and soil aggregates that protect from decomposition.

 

Lawsuit over Hiker’s Death on USFS land

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This item was listed in Nick Smith’s HFHC newsletter yesterday. The trailhead in question is a few miles from my home. I walked the footbridge before the USFS stopped installing it each spring. Without the footbridge, hikers must ford the Sandy River, a glacier-fed stream that often is to fast and furious to cross.

The court’s opinion is interesting for its mention of USFS “parking fees” in the form of day-use fees and passes, which I think the USFS has been at pains to avoid calling “parking fees.” Also, an Oregon state law worked in the USFS’s favor: “a property owner is immune from tort liability if it charges a parking fee of less than $15 for use of its land.” Why $15? I have no idea.

CHICAGO — In a case arising from a man’s drowning on U.S. Forest Service property in Oregon, the Seventh Circuit ruled that a $5 pass qualifies as a parking fee of less than $15, and the government is thus immune from tort liability. The man drowned after a logjam ruptured, sending a tall wave and debris at a seasonal bridge across the Sandy River while the man and his friend were crossing.

/ December 27, 2021

Read the opinion here.

Happy Holidays, Everyone!

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Peace on Earth and Good Will Toward Folks!

It is that special time of the year during which we can sing to trees without risking societal opprobrium. Here’s Nat King Cole in German:

And the Holly and the Ivy.  an interesting historical piece on the Holly and the Ivy, pre-Christian and Christian. apparently some of the earlier versions referred to foresters in this line ”

Holly hath berries, as red as any rose,
The foresters, the hunters, keep them from the does.

 

May peace, love and hope fill your hearts, your families and our world this season of  Christmas/Solstice/Kwanzaa.

 

I’ll be back January 3rd or thereabouts.  If you do donations at the end of the year, The Smokey Wire would greatly appreciate them.  Donations are not tax-deductible. However.

Industrialization of Federal Lands Underway: But It’s OK. Biden Admin Pushing Utility-Scale Solar Development

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AP story today..by Matthew Brown in the Associated Press, here’s a version via NBC News.

But without the climate bill, tax incentives to build large-scale solar will drop to 10 percent of a developer’s total capital costs by 2024, instead of rising to 30 percent, said Xiaojing Sun, head solar researcher at industry consulting firm Wood Mackenzie.

Incentives for residential-scale solar would go away completely by 2024, she said.

“It will significantly slow down the growth of solar,” Sun said.

Many people wonder how solar can be cheapest and also require subsidies.  But the answer to “without BBB” might be to pass a specific and targeted “renewable energy” bill.  It also makes a person wonder things like “what is fair market value for federal land leases of a more or less permanent nature?” and “should biomass from fuel treatments have equivalent tax treatment?”

However, she added that streamlining access to federal land could help the industry, as large solar farms on non-federal lands face growing local opposition and cumbersome zoning laws.

And we all know that there are no problems with local opposition and cumbersome regulations on federal lands, so this should be easy.

The Bureau of Land Management oversees almost a quarter-billion acres of land, primarily in Western states. Agency director Tracy-Stone Manning said boosting renewable energy is now one of its top priorities.

Forty large-scale solar proposals in the West are under consideration, she said.

The agency in early December issued a draft plan to reduce rents and other fees paid by companies authorized to build wind and solar projects on public lands. Officials were unable to provide an estimate of how much money that could save developers.

In Nevada, where the federal government owns and manages more than 80% of the state’s land, large-scale solar projects have faced opposition from environmentalists concerned about harm to plants and animals in the sun- and windswept deserts.

Developers abandoned plans for what would have been the country’s largest solar panel installation earlier this year north of Las Vegas amid concerns from local residents. Environmentalists are fighting another solar project near the Nevada-California border that they claim could harm birds and desert tortoises.

Stone-Manning said solar projects on public lands are being sited to take environmental concerns into account.

The solar development zones were first proposed under the Obama administration, which in 2012 adopted plans to bring utility-scale solar energy projects to public lands in Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico and Utah. Officials have identified almost 1,400 square miles (3,500 square kilometers) of public land for potential leasing for solar power.

Here’s the link to the 2012 Solar PEIS if you want to see maps to all the states. Also, for Coloradans, here’s the comments for the 2011 meeting in Alamosa. It will be interesting to watch how this programmatic is used in site-specific approvals. Also, not sure why only the southwest was analyzed, the reasoning is probably buried in here somewhere. A quick look at the map and the county poverty maps in Colorado suggest that environmental justice concerns might come into play.. unless solar doesn’t evoke those concerns.

I think it would be interesting to get a map of full-scale solar and wind build out on federal, state and private lands before people got too involved in Wilderness-y designations for Biden Admin priority 30 x 30.

“We fully intend to meet our clean energy goals,” Haaland said. She said the Trump administration stalled clean energy by shuttering renewable energy offices at the Bureau of Land Management and undermining long-term agreements, such as a conservation plan tied to solar development in the California desert.

“We are rebuilding that capacity,” Haaland said.

At the same time, environmental groups were criticizing the Trump Admin for approving “the nation’s largest solar project” in 2020. So there must have been some capacity? Puzzling.

Retiree network scuttlebutt says there is indeed a great deal of pressure to get out these decisions at BLM, including some push to downplay environmental concerns. Should be interesting to watch how this goes, plus any “streamlining access” efforts.

Some litigation and other loose ends from November-December 2021

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A holiday gift?  Header links are to news articles.

(New case.)  In a December 7 lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Labor, a group of Colorado river guides claim the federal government has arbitrarily imposed a $15 minimum wage on the outdoor industry, rendering extended tours through public lands less attainable.  The article includes a link to the complaint.

(New case.)  On November 29, the Center for Biological Diversity sued the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service over a Trump administration rule that expanded hunting on national wildlife refuges when it determined that listed species found in or near the refuges would not be adversely affected by the expansion.  Species mentioned the grizzly bear, jaguar, ocelot, jaguarundi, Audubon’s crested caracara, wood stork, and whooping crane.  The article includes a link to the complaint.

(Update.)  The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and multiple conservation groups reached an agreement to conduct a new Endangered Species Act status review of California spotted owls by Feb. 25, 2023. The stipulated settlement stems from a suit the Center for Biological Diversity and other groups filed against the Trump administration in 2020 for not adding the spotted owl to the list of endangered species.

(Follow-up.)  A proposal to add the Pearl River map turtle to the federal endangered species list was published on November 23 by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service after two environmental groups sued the agency last year for missing the determination deadline by a decade.  The proposed listing (the article contains a link) mentions the Bienville National Forest in Mississippi favorably.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (Service) published a final rule revising the critical habitat designation for the northern spotted owl.  The final rule rescinds a previous rule issued by the Trump Administration on January 15, 2021, which would have excluded approximately 3.4 million acres from the species’ critical habitat designation.  We talked more generally about critical habitat and spotted owls here.  Related litigation was discussed here.

Oregon Democratic Sens. Jeff Merkley and Ron Wyden announced legislation to establish a new national monument in central Oregon on BLM lands.  According to Merkley’s press release, the proposal has the support of several conservation groups as well as the city of Mitchell, which has seen economic benefits from Painted Hills tourism and visiting cyclists.

The Rio Grande National Forest announced the inclusion of an administrative change in its revised  forest plan. The change addressed recently acquired lands that were not included in the Rio Grande National Forest’s land base when the plan was revised.

The 2012 Planning Rule allows administrative changes for “corrections of clerical errors to any part of the plan, conformance of the plan to new statutory or regulatory requirements, or changes to other content in the plan (§219.7(f)).”  Hmmm.

 

Journal of Forestry: Piloting a Climate-Change Adaptation Index on US National Forest Lands

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The November 2021 edition of the Journal of Forestry just arrived in my mailbox. One open-access paper may be of interest to Smokey Wire folks:

Piloting a Climate-Change Adaptation Index on US National Forest Lands

It’s open to SAF members only.

Abstract

Climate change presents a novel and significant threat to the sustainability of forest ecosystems worldwide. The United States Forest Service (USFS) has conducted climate change vulnerability assessments for much of the 193 million acres of national forest lands it manages, yet little to no research exists on the degree to which management units have adopted considerations of climate change into planning or project implementation. In response to this knowledge gap, we piloted a survey instrument in USFS Region 1 (Northern region) and Region 6 (Pacific Northwest region) to determine criteria for assessing the degree to which national forests integrate climate-change considerations into their management planning and activities. Our resulting climate-change adaptation index provides an efficient quantitative approach for identifying where, how, and, potentially, why some national forests are making more progress toward incorporating climate-change adaptations into forest planning and management.

Study Implications

We used a self-assessment survey of planners and managers on US National Forests in Forest Service Regions 1 and 6 to design a climate change adaptation index for measuring the degree to which national forests units have integrated considerations of climate change into their planning and management activities. Our resulting index can potentially be used to help understand how and why the USFS’s decentralized climate-change adaptation strategy has led some national forests to make comparatively significant progress towards adapting to climate change while others have lagged behind.

Excerpt from the authors’ conclusion:

The national forests with the most robust responses were using vulnerability assessments to drive management priorities on their forests and were integrating climate change activities into their work with outside partners. Additional research is need to better understand the factors that drive national forest management units to adopt more robust considerations of climate change into their management and planning activities.