The 2.4 million acre Four Forest Restoration Initiative (4FRI) is the largest collaborative forest restoration project in the United States.  The objective of 4FRI is to restore ecological resilience and function across 2.4 million acres of  northern Arizona’s ponderosa pine forest and to attract appropriately sized industry to the region and to increase the pace and scale of our efforts to meet the objectives above.

Tackling this large of a project is challenging, as is defining and measuring what success is across the landscape.  The talk will focus on various ways to define success (acres treated, meeting desired conditions, and outcomes) and where we are as a project to date with these various measures.  Finally, the talk will look at challenges facing 4FRI including 110+ years of Forest Service tradition, how do we accelerate restoration with low value material and biomass, how do we accelerate the use fire across the landscape, how do we integrate monitoring into management and NEPA.  For each of the topics, there will be a discussion of the each of these challenges, how are we getting to success with these challenges, and where there is more work to be done.