The St. Croix Chippewa Indians of Wisconsin (SCCIW) Environmental and Natural Resources Department is actively working to mitigate climate change through comprehensive forestry resource planning. To accomplish this, WSB helped the tribe create a series of GIS layers specific to the St. Croix Chippewa Reservation forests that can be used to refine the existing St. Croix Forest Management Plan.
WSB developed a plan consisting of five main goals:
- Develop a schema and GIS layers to guide future forest inventories and management planning
- Use GIS data to predict and identify potential areas of environmental concerns
- Create a terrestrial invasive species and tree pest/disease stand GIS layer with field verified maps
- Use U.S. Forest Service i-tree tools to quantify environmental benefits
- Identify a model that can be used to analyze available and created datasets to predict the status of St. Croix Chippewa Forest resources under various management scenarios.
Invasive species, disease, and climate change all pose serious threats to tribal forests, but in-depth planning with cutting edge technologies ensures that early identification and infestations can be successfully managed and monitored, preserving the integrity and health of the land today and for future generations.