ABSTRACT
Community forests have existed around the world for centuries. Community forests are properties historically owned and managed for a variety of forestry values by a village, city, town, school district, township, county, or other political subdivision of the state. In the United States, community forests have been owned and operated for more than a century by Native Americans, Spanish land-grant (Hispano) settlers in the Southwest, and by early colonists in New England (Baker and Kusel 2003; McCullough 1995). In the early twentieth century, the establishment of community forests was advocated by a small group of professional U.S. foresters, but their advice went largely unheeded (Brown 1941; Reynolds 1939). Today, efforts to establish community forests are coming from a new source—community-based conservation organizations seeking to avoid landscape parcelization and to maintain local access to and control of nearby working forests for the conservation of wildlife, rural lifestyles, jobs, recreation, and ecosystem services (Belsky 2004; Braxton-Little 2006; Duvall and Belsky 2005).
