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CLAMS is a multi-disciplinary research effort sponsored cooperatively through OSU's College of Forestry, the US Forest Service's Pacific Northwest Research Station, and the Oregon Department of Forestry. Our main goal is to analyze the aggregate ecological, economic, and social consequences of forest policies of different land owners in the Coast Range.
The research project, titled the Coastal Landscape Analysis and Modeling
Study (CLAMS), was designed to develop and evaluate concepts and tools to understand pattern
and dynamics of provincial or subregional ecosystems such as the Coast Range and to analyze the
aggregate ecological and socioeconomic consequences of different forest policies and strategies
across multiple ownerships. CLAMS was also an experiment in ‘‘anticipatory assessments’’ in which
an independent group of scientists uses current and expected policy issues as the focus for research
that could help policy makers and stakeholders to see unintended consequences of current policies to
compare with consequences of new policies, and thereby possibly avoid future policy crises.
In this Invited Feature we present the major findings of this decade-long research effort. CLAMS
is a highly integrated effort in the sense that all of the studies focused on the same overall question: How might current and alternative policies and forest management activities affect ecological and socioeconomic conditions within and across ownerships at multiple spatial scales? To answer this question the studies shared the same spatial databases, simulation models, spatial resolution, time frame, and measures of forest structure and composition.
CLAMS was an experiment in anticipatory assessment for policy makers and other stakeholders.
Johnson et al. discuss the lessons learned from working at the interface of scientists, policy makers, and
the public. They conclude that CLAMS was successful in developing models and understanding policy
effects at multiple scales. They also find, however, that so far policy makers have shown relatively little
interest in independent evaluations of existing and alternative policies at broad scales. The reasons for
this are numerous. Not the least of these is the fact that policy institutions operating at this scale are
generally too weak or do not exist, and that interest in environmental policy analysis stems as much
from the pursuit of power as the pursuit of knowledge. Also, biodiversity problems often are framed at
finer or coarser scales than a subregion or province. Nevertheless, cross-boundary issues will not go
away: species and ecosystems do not respect lines on maps depicting ownership.
CLAMS clearly demonstrates that policy differences and variations in management practices
across owners can result in major differences in biological diversity and that there can be unintended
consequences as a result of uncoordinated policy development. Given the political constraints,
policy-focused science will have to be patient, but ecological research will be better able to contribute
in the future if it can develop better tools for understanding the complex mix of combined forest policy effects, both today and into the future.
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