Aaron Hohl Hometown: Columbus, Ohio Advisor: Chadwick Oliver

A growing awareness of the impact of human society on the global ecosystem has lead to a new management paradigm. Sustainable development is a management paradigm that arose in response to the realization that the expanding scale of human activity had the potential to negatively impact the world’s environment. Sustainable forestry is the application of this paradigm to the world’s forests. Sustainable forest management requires that managers and decision makers consider an array of values and spatio-temporal scales in making decisions. The pursuit of sustainable forestry presents several challenges: ! A single, widely accepted, operational definition of sustainable forestry has yet to emerge. ! It is not clear how best to situate an individual forests within the larger ecological, social, and economic context of the world’s forests. ! The analytical tools needed to make explicit tradeoffs among goods and services are still in the early stages of development. ! Improve data collection, processing and integration capabilities are needed to facilitate more sustainable management decisions. The dynamic nature of forests makes it impossible to determine exactly what forests will look like in the future, but developing decision support tools and monitoring systems will help to improve forest management practices and conserve forest resources. This prospectus details how my dissertation research will contribute to the pursuit of sustainable forestry by using an interdisciplinary framework to assess the environmental, social and economic impacts of forest management practices at multiple spatial and temporal scales. The goal of the research is to develop methods for improving the quality of decision support tools (e.g., ecological models, inventory systems). Using three location-specific case studies I will develop methods to: 1) improve the data collection, processing and integration capabilities need to facilitate sustainable management decisions; 2) assess tradeoffs between forest values made at the level of an individual forest; and 3) situate a forest within a larger social and ecological context and use this information to develop a monitoring protocol. I will also offer an improved operational definition of sustainable forestry which takes into account the myths and values of participants in the sustainable forestry policy process.