Research Notes: Investment priorities in the Adirondack North Country

How would you invest your dollars in a sustainable future for the Northern Forest?
William Porter and Anne Woods, SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry
Jon Erickson, University of Vermont
Graham Cox, Audubon New York

In November 2006, at the Adirondack North Country Association’s annual meeting in Saranac Lake, researchers from SUNY ESF and UVM presented a summary of their focus group and opinion surveys to assess how people in the Adirondack/North Country would invest in a sustainable future for their communities. The summary of the results was published in the last edition of AJES. We are pleased to report that the ESF and UVM research team has been funded for the coming year by the Northeast States Research Cooperative (NSRC) to expand our survey to all four states in the Northern Forest – New York, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine – to ask 1,200 residents to express their opinions about a sustainable future. Saranac Lake consultants Holmes & Associates will work with the research team to conduct the telephone interviews, help analyze the results and compare them to the initial focus group and e-mail survey results reported in November 2006. In the initial project NSRC funded the research to ask two questions: if additional funds were available to invest in your community for a sustainable future, what would your priorities be? Second, would they get the same answers from local communities as they would get from a regional or statewide planning group? In short, the researchers set out to compare a ‘top down’ approach to setting priorities to a ‘bottom up’ approach. The intent of this expanded research project is two-fold: first, to use the survey results to help guide and influence future federal, state and private investment decisions at the community, state and regional levels; and second, have available a survey questionnaire and procedure that is replicable and repeatable, ready and adaptable for use and comparative purposes in any of the Northern Forest communities, state and regional segments.

For more information on this research see Adirondack Journal of Environmental Studies, Vol. 14, No. 1, 2007.