FREMO = Forest resources + NEMO

It has long been understood that the forested landscape is closely linked to water quality, and, more broadly, the overall ecologic, economic, and public health of our communities. As communities continue to grow and develop, the health of our forest lands is threatened by their conversion to other uses, fragmentation, and division into smaller lots (i.e., parcelization). Because the majority of forested land is privately-owned, the majority of educational efforts seeking to protect the forest resource have focused on individual land owners. It is becoming increasingly apparent that community land use decision makers (the focus of NEMO programs) are also critical to the sustainability of the forest resource.

Enter the NEMO Network’s Forest Resource Education for Municipal Officials (FREMO) project. Launched in 2006 in partnership with the USDA CSREES Forestry Program and the U.S. Forest Service, FREMO is an effort to integrate the forested landscape more fully into the efforts of NEMO programs to assist communities in protecting natural resources through land use planning. The approach is to facilitate the adaptation and development of educational workshops, materials and resources by Network members throughout the country that convey the impacts of forest fragmentation, parcelization, and conversion to local land use decision makers and provide land use planning based solutions for addressing those challenges.

Interested Network members will participate in a workshop in September 2007 focused on the community-wide benefits of forests, forests and watershed health, the challenges of forest conversion, fragmentation, and parcelization, and what local land use officials can do to protect the forest resource. The workshop will serve as a springboard to the development of new education efforts and materials by individual NEMO programs and collaboration with the “traditional” forestry education community. The project will also look at using geospatial technology to help analyze and visualize the forest landscape.

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The National NEMO Network is a program of the Center for Land Use Education and Research (CLEAR).
Land, Sea and Space Grant collaborating.