Shared Stewardship

With 245 million acres of forestland in the South, and 86% of it privately owned, the Southern Region of the Forest Service has a rich history working at a landscape scale and sharing stewardship to restore and conserve nature.

Shared stewardship is a mindset that gives us an opportunity to redouble our efforts, engage others, and produce impactful, landscape-level restoration outcomes.

Shared Stewardship in Action

Our “North Star” is delivering public trust by ensuring America’s forests and their communities are resilient. We are doing this by confronting the Wildfire Crisis and by managing our nation’s forests with resilience, conservation and community wellbeing in mind.

We are working at a landscape level and sharing stewardship of our lands. Landscape level simply means considering social, environmental, and economic goals, objectives, threats and opportunities at multiple spatial scales, often across administrative boundaries and political jurisdictions, to inform land and resource management.

Focus areas are an important aspect of this work and include:

Gulf Atlantic: address the threat of urbanization by examining how we acquire land (i.e., land protection)
Gulf Coast: restore longleaf pine
Interior Highlands: restore short-leaf pine and white oak
Southern Appalachian: increase pace and scale of watershed and red spruce restoration

We held webinars with Tribes and partners in 2023 to raise awareness of our efforts to work at a landscape scale and share stewardship, answer questions, gather feedback and identify ways we can continue to work together. View the webinar recording to learn more.