To date, most studies on the management of invasive species have been done in nature reserves or national parks. Few published studies demonstrate how scientists and local communities might collaborate to develop science-based management programs in private forests. We present an example of such collaboration. The Congregational Summer Assembly (CSA) is a mixture of common and privately owned lots within old-growth beech-maple forest in Lower Michigan. The community is trying to conserve the forest and, thus, is interested in ecological variables that should be considered when designing a long-term ecosystem based management plan. 
 In this base-line study we developed methods for volunteer-scientist teams to monitor 1) the abundance of... |