Forest Science Dialogues: Informing Community-Relevant Research in the Northern Forest

In October 2014, HBRF organized and facilitated a Hubbard Brook Roundtable entitled “Forging a New Model of Public Engagement with Science” as part of its Forest Science Dialogues initiative. The group was charged with the goal of identifying areas of overlapping interest and concern between ecosystem scientists and public audiences in the Northern Forest region of the northeastern US. Among the outcomes of the roundtable was agreement that social science should be embedded in the Forest Science Dialogues project and process. The first step in doing so was conducted by graduate students in an environmental ethics class as part of Plymouth State University’s Masters in Environmental Science & Policy program, who reviewed existing resources and data on “what people care about” in the Hubbard Brook Valley, Pemigewasset Watershed, and more broadly, the Northern Forest region. The report, Informing Community-Relevant Research in the Northern Forest, which was authored by the PSU Environmental Science and Policy students, presents the results of this first step and offers recommendations for future work.