Welcome to the Forest Stewardship Coached Planning Course

Class,

Welcome to the Forest Stewardship Coached Planning course! We are glad you are here and look forward to hosting you for this course. Please read this letter carefully, as it contains important information that you need to know before we get started.

Your team of instructors

WSU facilitators

My name is Kevin Zobrist, and I am a professor of forestry at WSU. I do not teach traditional undergraduate courses in Pullman but rather focus on public education in the area of forestry and woodland stewardship. WSU is one of our state’s two land grant universities (the other is Northwest Indian College). The land grant mission includes a strong emphasis on public outreach and making university resources available beyond campus. As such, in 1914 Congress established the Extension system as part of each state’s land grant university. Extension places university faculty and staff in the community to provide public education and assistance to extend the resources of the university to the public. WSU Extension has offices in all 39 counties, plus regional Research and Extension Centers and other sites.

I am stationed in Snohomish County, but my position is regional. I primarily serve Island, King, Pierce, San Juan, and Snohomish Counties. I also oversee certain programs in other parts of western Washington. For more information about our program, we have a lot of resources and information for you on the Puget Sound Extension Forestry website and the general WSU Extension Forestry website.

I work with two Extension Forestry Coordinators: Elsa Haun, and Sarah Stewart. Elsa is stationed at the Snohomish County Extension office in Snohomish, and Sarah is stationed at the King County Extension office in Renton. The three of us work together to provide regional programs.

Other coaches

A few other important people are the stewardship foresters from WA DNR, King County, and local conservation districts who will be doing your site visits. You will get connected with your stewardship forester midway through the course. In addition to the facilitation team, your other “coaches” for this course include experts from around the state who will be speaking to you at the weekly class sessions on various topics such as wildlife, climate change, invasive weeds, and more.

Course Content/Structure

The premise of this course comprises two parts. The first part is simply education, teaching you all aspects of forest stewardship and what you should know as a property owner. Completing this course is like completing a “mini forestry degree.” Seriously—you will learn a lot.

A broad-based education

Your classmates are predominantly owners of forested property and represent a diversity of property sizes, property conditions, and ownership interests. Some people are just starting out with young trees, while others have an older, mature forest. Some people may want to manage for periodic income from timber harvesting, and some just want to maintain a healthy, diverse, beautiful property. Many have a combination of different interests.

We teach to everybody, so that means we cover a broad range of topics. Depending on the size of your property (if you have property) and your ownership objectives, some of it will be directly relevant to you while some of it will not. What is not relevant to you will be relevant to other participants. Please keep this in mind as you learn. Also, your classmates represent a range of experience, from total beginners for whom everything is new to those who have some experience such that some things are review.

Some people ask us to tailor the class to just their personal specific needs (e.g., “I don’t want to hear about anything regarding logging since I’m never going to log,” or “I don’t live on my property, so I don’t care about managing around a home,” or “I already know that so let’s skip ahead to something else”). It is not possible nor practical with the resources we have to divide things up into different learning tracks. Rather, we give you a broad-based education that will serve everyone.

Another important thing to consider is that your property does not exist in a vacuum. Everything is connected on the landscape. Thus, what your neighbor does is going to impact you and your property. At the end of this class, you are going to be better educated about forestry and forest stewardship than most people out there. Your neighbors may look to you for advice, and you will want to share your knowledge with those around you. You will need a broader set of knowledge and skills to teach others with different objectives and site conditions how to make good stewardship decisions because their decisions also affect you and your community. Plus, everything you learn is interesting and fun, even if it does not pertain specifically to your property.

Forest stewardship plans

The other key premise of this course is the development of your own written forest stewardship plan. This is how the course got its name—we coach you in the writing of your own personalized stewardship plan. The topics we cover in class relate to different sections of a forest stewardship plan. Each course session’s agenda includes recommended activities that involve writing a piece of your plan that usually relates to what you will have just learned in class. If you follow along with these, by the end of the course you will have a complete plan.

Important: You do NOT have to write a stewardship plan if that is not your thing. It is perfectly fine to just come and learn and not worry about producing a document. That said, I do encourage you to consider writing a plan. Having a plan is useful for several reasons:

• You will get state recognition as a Stewardship Forest and receive a coveted metal sign to proudly display.
• It is often one of the eligibility requirements for financial assistance to do conservation/improvement projects on your property that would otherwise be cost-prohibitive.
• It is one of the eligibility requirements for forest certification, where your land is third-party certified as sustainably managed (more signs!).
• It is one of the eligibility requirements for special property tax reduction programs called “current use” that include Designated Forestland and the Public Benefit Rating System (PBRS). You will learn more details about these programs and their other eligibility requirements as the course progresses.

More importantly, though, is that writing a plan is the best way to learn and master the course content. After the first few sessions you will feel a little overwhelmed, like you are drinking from a “fire hose” of information. Do not fret—this is totally normal and resolves with time. As I mentioned above, some stuff will be relevant, some will not. E.g., you may have a certain disease present on your property, or you may have an insect problem instead. Writing the plan helps you to pull out the key info that pertains to you and organize it in a document. The act of writing these things down forces your brain to synthesize information in a way that nothing else can, and I do not know of any better learning tool.

Even if you do not have property yourself, you can use a friend’s property or a public park as a place to write a theoretical stewardship plan for. If you want to do something less formal, you could create your own “Forest Stewardship Journal” to record notes and observations about your property as they relate to the course material.
To sum up, none of the homework is required and there are no grades, due dates, or anything like that. I simply present you with suggested assignments each week as learning tools that you can choose to utilize or not. You have very busy lives and a lot of important things to attend to. I do not want plan-writing or assignments to be a source of pressure or stress; just learning opportunities. Another goal of this course is to have fun, and if you are stressed-out, it is not fun anymore and you stop learning.

If you do decide to write a plan, an advantage of following along with the recommended activities on each session’s agenda is that you will be writing while things are fresh in your mind, and you will be doing it incrementally so that it is not as daunting. My observation is that those who wait until after the class to write their plans struggle more to get them done. This is nothing insurmountable, though, so do not worry—we will be here to help you long after the course is over. Whenever you finish, even if it is years down the road, we will help you get it finalized and get you your stewardship forest sign.

Coaching and site visits

Remember that we are here as your coaches. You are not expected to have any forestry knowledge coming into this class. If you do, great—some things will be review for you and you can help out your classmates. But if not, do not worry—we are going to start with the basics and coach you every step of the way. As your coaches we are your guides and your cheerleaders as you move along in your learning. You will have lots of examples to look at, and we are always available to provide extra help during the course as well as beyond the course.

As part of the course, you will be getting a site visit if you have property. This is where a lot of things are going to more fully click for you. Your forester is going to walk your property with you, figure out what is going on (e.g., if you have a disease problem, overcrowding, etc.), and help you apply the course concepts to your specific property. Your forester will advise you on what specifically to cover in your plan and provide you individual assistance with it.

Midway through the course, we will connect you with your site visit forester, and then you will communicate directly with your forester to set up a mutually agreeable time for a visit. Most site visits will get done while the course is underway, but some may not get done until the weeks following the course. Some of you already had your site visit (and that’s how you ended up in this course!), which is great – you are ahead of the game. You will work with that same forester to complete your plan if you choose to do one.

Course Logistics

Class sessions

Date, time, and location information for the course sessions are listed on the website for your course. A link to this website will be provided by email. This is the same website you visited to register for the course.

For online courses, the class sessions are done over Zoom. A Zoom link and connection instructions will be provided by email. Hold onto this information, as you will use the same link for all of the sessions.

Field trip

The field trip is the most important session of the course! Many course participants have reported to me that the field trip was where everything came together for them. Whether or not you attend the field trip will make a huge difference in how you experience this course as a whole. Please make it a priority to attend. This is an integral part of the course, not a separate “add-on.” The field trip date and time are posted on your course website. Location information and other details will be provided in class.

Course materials

Hard copy materials

You will receive a binder, a book, and several other items. Your binder will contain handouts and worksheets for use in class; samples and examples for writing your stewardship plan; and copies of most (but not all) of the PowerPoint presentation slides. Some presentations we cannot provide hard copies for because they don’t print well or other logistical reasons. For in-person courses you will receive these materials in class. For online courses you will receive these materials in the mail before the start of the course.

Note: if you are “auditing” the course you will not receive these hard copy materials. Please use the materials you received when you first took the course and for documents that have been updated there will be current versions on the course website (see below).

Digital materials

Digital copies of the class handouts and worksheets, sample forest stewardship plans, a stewardship plan template, and a digital publication library are available on the course website. Scroll to the bottom, click on the course resources link, and enter the passcode that you will be provided with by email.

Communication

A lot of course communication will be by email, so expect to receive regular emails from me and the WSU team for the duration of the course. Some of these are time-sensitive and require a response from you, so please pay attention to these emails and keep up to date with them. Oftentimes course emails end up in people’s spam or junk folders. Please check your spam or junk folder regularly to make sure you are not missing critical information and whitelist our email addresses so that future messages get through.

We are available to answer email questions during the week, and we can also set up a phone or Zoom meeting with you if you ever want to chat—we will be very glad to set that up for you. A lot of questions and confusion can easily be resolved in a short one-on-one conversation.

See you in class!

We look forward to meeting you, and we hope you have a great experience with this course.

Best regards,

Kevin W. Zobrist 
Professor, Extension Forestry 
Washington State University 
425-231-4524 
kevin.zobrist@wsu.edu