The Stewardship Mapping Project (STEW-MAP): Bridger-Teton National Forest

The Bridger-Teton Planning team began exploring different methodologies for partnership tracking and came upon STEW-MAP. Though STEW-MAP had previously primarily been applied in urban contexts, the forest staff immediately recognized the universal, durable benefits when applied to a mosaic landscape anchored by the Bridger Teton National Forest. These benefits include:

• Accelerating progress toward Shared Stewardship objectives, which include identifying shared priorities and working across boundaries (organizational and jurisdictional) to achieve outcomes at scale.
• Improving partnership tracking, inventory, and stewardship in an environment where both staffing and partnerships are evolving and dynamic.
  Developing a collective partnership knowledge bank among all forest staff, moving beyond the current paradigm where pieces of knowledge are held by various individuals.
• Improving understanding about partner organizations - not just who they are but where and with whom they are working, and their priority interests and capacities - knowledge that enables staff to develop and nurture partnerships in a more purposeful way.

In early 2020, the Bridger-Teton team sent out a preliminary internal survey to all forest staff to gather information on what partners each of these employees currently work with and who within the agency is responsible for maintaining these relationships. The first phase of the survey is a useful step in the process as it builds buy-in from staff for an external survey and also supplies data that will inform that sampling frame. The results of this partnership survey can be found HERE.

Thanks to the success of the partnership survey, the Bridger-Teton team, with support from the Northern Research Station and the Washington Office, is now moving forward with a full STEW-MAP survey in the fall of 2020. Both the process and outcomes of this pilot effort are informing the development of guidelines and a web platform that will allow other National Forests or other federal, state, or mosaic landscapes to use STEW-MAP to increase capacity and improve outcomes for the publics with which they engage and serve, for the benefit of current and future generations.