News from myminnesotawoods.org

This month we’re excited to announce a new way of aggregating and displaying news on MyMinnesotaWoods.org.  Our “In the news…” box is now set up with an RSS feed.  The new list will automatically display any news items tagged in the social bookmarking site del.icio.us.

The feed will display items tagged by anybody, not just us.  So if you find something online that would be of interest to MyMinnesotaWoods.org readers, and if you use del.icio.us, tag the item with “MMWnews” (no quotes).  It should show up on the site shortly.

When you tag news items, give them the shortest, clearest title possible.

We’re excited about this approach because it offers the community a new way to contribute content to the site.  This is one of several ways that we’re trying to do this.

If you’re not familiar with del.icio.us, it’s a free and simple way to store your bookmarks remotely.  This means your bookmarks are accessible from any internet-connected computer.  You can easily share your bookmarks, or just as easily keep them private.  Learn more about del.icio.us.

If you have a del.icio.us account, give it a try!  The tag is MMWnews.

Just a quick note about an excellent source of free, high quality woodland info:

Cornell University’s Forest Connect series is the source for monthly live web-based seminars on a wide variety of woodland topics. The presentations are designed for woodland owners, and are typically offered at both noon and 7pm on the third Wednesday of each month. Even though the seminars tend to focus on eastern forests, many topics would be highly relevant to Minnesota woodland owners. And they’re completely free.

What have you got to lose? See a list of past presentations, or register to receive announcements of future events.

Have you attended one of these seminars? What was your take? Leave a comment below.

The US Endowment for Forestry and Communities is looking for information about community-based forestry. If you’re involved in this kind of work, I hope you’ll take a moment to fill in their survey.

What is community-based forestry? The overview document defines it as “the practice of developing locally appropriate, collaborative initiatives to create and sustain healthy working forests that generate value streams and benefits that support all members of healthy, forest-reliant communities.”

Does that sound like you or your group? If so, here’s more info on the survey, forwarded from the Endowment:

The U.S. Endowment for Forestry and Communities needs to know what you know about community-based forestry (CBF). They need to know what works and why.

Please click here to complete the survey.

Your information is essential and will help the Endowment identify opportunities to advance community-based forestry through their foundation grant-making program. In addition this information will provide many opportunities for funders and other interested organizations to advance the CBF field. Please encourage other CBF initiatives to take this survey as this information is vital for capturing all CBF activity on a national level.

Every organization that completes out this survey will be entered into a Participation Award drawing for $1000. The drawing will be on May 15, 2008.

The U.S. Endowment for Forestry and Communities (the Endowment) was established in 2006 to work collaboratively with partners in the public and private sectors to advance systemic, transformative and sustainable change for the health and vitality of the nation’s working forests and forest-reliant communities. As a first step, the Endowment has contracted with the Consortium for Community Forestry to compile information about CBF initiatives around the U.S.

Thank you on behalf of the U.S. Endowment for Forestry and Communities. Please click here to complete the survey.

We’re working on a new story: Five things every woodland owner should know. The new content will be featured in the June email update and be a new featured page on MyMinnesotaWoods.org.

We need your help building the list!

For this story, you’re the expert. Imagine yourself talking over a cup of coffee with a friend who just bought wooded acreage for the first time. What would you tell her or him and why?

Leave a comment below with your thoughts. We’ll use your responses to build our June story.

The proposed 2009 Federal budget would include major cuts in private forest stewardship and protection programs. These programs are of great interest to family forest owners. They fund the development of forest stewardship plans by professional foresters, cost sharing, and education.

The magnitude of the cuts varies by program, but will have a broad impact. According to the Portland (Maine) Press Herald, funding for state and private forest programs would drop more than $100 million, about 58 percent.

Cuts in the Forest Legacy program are even greater, estimated at about 85% according to National Woodlands magazine.

About these programs:

The Forest Stewardship Program provides technical assistance, through State forestry agency partners, to nonindustrial private forest (NIPF) owners to encourage and enable active long-term forest management (source). In Minnesota, well over a million acres of private woodlands have a written Forest Stewardship plan.

Forest Legacy protects “working forests:” those that protect water quality, provide habitat, forest products, opportunities for recreation and other public benefits (source).

Both of these programs are administered as partnerships between state and federal agencies. The National Association of State Foresters, whose members administer most of these programs, has denounced the proposed cuts.

Many MyMinnesotaWoods.org readers have benefited from these programs. If you have a Forest Stewardship plan, you’re one of them. Likewise if you’ve ever attended a Woodland Advisor class.

You can learn more about the proposed budget cuts in news articles from the New Hampshire UnionLeader, the Portland (Maine) News Herald, the Environment News Service, and National Woodlands Magazine (see page 7).

How has the Forest Stewardship program affected you and your land? Share your story in the comments.

It’s been a while since I checked in on site usage stats. Overall there seems to be a steady trend upward in monthly pageview and visitor counts between our launch on April 1 and the end of October. Some figures to illustrate the trends:

The first chart (above) shows monthly pageview and visitor counts between April and October, 2007. The y-axis shows the total number of pageviews (blue) and unique visitors (red) for each month. For example, in October about 3400 different people viewed about 7800 different pages.

I interpret the trend as a big initial curiosity-based jump after the launch, then a drop and steady trend upward from month to month thereafter. (The server, and our site, were down for about 10 days in August, and we got no usage data for most of the month.)

Next, a typical one-month trend in pageviews and visitors (above). This period starts on October 9, the day the email update went out. There’s a spike after the email, then normal variation or perhaps a slight decline for the rest of the month. The last day on this chart is November 11, the day before the November email update goes out.

Finally, daily visitor counts between April 1 and October 31, 2007 (except for the server outage in August). There’s a monthly spike in visitor counts on the day that the email update goes out. After the spike, we pretty quickly return to normal variation in daily visitor counts.

Median daily pageview and visitor counts for the period October 12 - November 11 are 228 and 88, respectively. These numbers are 12-15% higher than the corresponding median values over the total 7-month span.

Good evaluation goes well beyond these numbers, but for the time being this is what we’ve got. We’re saving data as we go and hope to develop a more thorough understanding of how the site is being used over time.

For now, we’re pleased to see an apparent steady upward trend in usage.

Philip created a new template for the web version of the monthly email updates.  The November 2007 update is built on the new template.  This is a vast improvement over previous web versions, created by copying, pasting, and then trying to fix the HTML from a preview message.

Constant Contact, which we use for our email updates, has some nice features.  But one feature that makes us mad month after month is how hard it is to build a web version of your email.  They want to charge extra for that.  The HTML is a complete mess, and this process is never as easy as it should be.

Now that we have the new template, we just have to manually copy and paste each story from CC into our page.  Still a waste of time doing something CC could very easily provide for free, but at least it allows us to avoid fighting with CC’s coding.  And this way it actually renders properly.

The October MMW email udpate included a feature story on carbon credits for forestry. Carbon credits are currently traded on the Chicago Climate Exchange, and standards and criteria are in development. At least for now, growing timber in plantings established after 1990 is eligible for carbon credit trading.

No Minnesota woodland owners (that we know of) are yet receiving carbon credit payments. The system is still in development, and it’s uncertain whether forestry activities will ultimately be eligible.

With that in mind, was this story premature? Maybe. We went with it now because we wanted to make sure that family forest owners and professional foresters in Minnesota are aware of this issue. The potential carbon credit payments are significant - about $12 per acre on average in Minnesota - and this is an important time for interested individuals and organizations to weigh in as standards and criteria are being developed.

We hope the story will encourage action to help ensure that growing wood will be recognized in carbon credit markets for its value in reducing atmospheric carbon and helping to mitigate the impacts of carbon emissions.

You can read the new content at our carbon credits page.

-eli

The site was down for a full week early in August.  The explanation?  A “catastrophic hardware failure” on the Extension server.  We apologize for the outage, and hope it didn’t cause too great an inconvenience to site users.  To our knowledge, everything was back up and running by about August 8.

I’ve had a few inquiries from other Extension website managers about our discussion board. Here’s what I’ve been sending out in response:

We use Website Toolbox for the discussion board platform. It’s relatively cheap and seems to work well. (According to my records a one-year subscription cost us $42.) By far its most important strength is spam control: Knock on wood, we’ve had no spam problems at all in the 4 months or so that it’s been up. That may change (?), but it’s good for now.

Website toolbox is easy to set up and use, but has some limitations. A more expensive product might have more functionality. Some settings that should be modifiable seem hardwired, which at times is annoying. This is a relatively minor thing though, and overall I’m pretty happy with the software.

Discussion board usage has been good. In the first three months after launch, there are 34 threads, averaging about 100 views each. There are a total of about 100 posts, so each thread includes about two replies. There is significant variation by topic.

There’s room for growth, but overall I’ve been pleasantly surprised with this. The discussion board is not meant to be an ask-the-expert thing, it’s supposed to be a forum for discussion. But, in most cases I write the first reply, and I try to do that within 24 hours of the original post. With that in mind, although more questions would be nice, a lot more questions would strain my capacity to address them.

The discussion board is not moderated, so we do not review posts before they appear. They go up as soon as the writer hits “submit.” We do, however, receive email notifications of new posts, and we tend to check them rather frequently.