Management > Community Forest

Community Forest Management Tools

Canadian Forest Service,  Pacific Forestry Centre.

System Design: Dr. A. Thomson, N. Codding, Y. Trakhtenberg

A Community Forest (CF) brings together many different individuals and groups, including associations, organisations and institutions, each with their own set of interests. A challenge for community forest managers is to manage information about the different participants and keep different individuals and groups informed in an appropriate manner. This can be accomplished with the CF Information Management Tool, which is structured around the set of Principles, Criteria and Indicators on which the Community Forest is based.

Many participants contribute photographs to provide a record of the development and activities of the Community Forest. The CF Image Management Tool assists in keeping track of these images, and making them available over the World Wide Web.

A Community Forest FAQ (frequently asked questions) site provides a guide to the literature related to questions about Community Forest development. As Community Forest development has many similarities to the Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) process, a PRA FAQ is also provided.

The tools are written in Java, with a user interface written in HTML. The systems are implemented as CGI programs run through a web server, either on a local intranet, personal web server or publicly on the internet. The tools  are bilingual, presently being designed for use in either English or French, in a similar  manner to other systems at the Pacific Forestry Centre, such as our Traditional  Ecological Knowledge page.  Alternatively, they could operate in English or an aboriginal language (including  the use of special fonts). Note, however, that the reports produced by the  CF Information Management Tool can actually be generated in multiple languages.

For more information on any of these tools, please contact Dr. A. Thomson at the Pacific Forestry Centre.