Jimmycomelately Project

The Jimmycomelately (JCL) project, named for Jimmycomelately Creek and its watershed, is located on the northeast Olympic Peninsula between Sequim and Quilcene, Washington (Fig. 1). The project area covers more than 30,000 acres of state and federal land and lies within the Point No Point Treaty area. In the rain shadow of the Olympic Mountains, the JCL area is substantially drier than the peninsula’s western forests and supports unique forest conditions shaped by a history of mixed-frequency and intensity fire and a legacy of logging and experimentation.

The JCL area is a shared planning priority for the Olympic National Forest and the Washington Department of Natural Resources (DNR), which have partnered with the University of Washington’s Olympic Natural Resources Center (ONRC) to pool resources, share information, and collaborate on planning efforts. Olympic National Forest is planning management actions for the National Forest portion of this area as part of their forest project timeline, and DNR’s Resiliency Division is conducting an overlapping All-Lands Evaluation (encompassing the project area) to support more coordinated forest management across ownerships. ONRC’s role has been to use an engagement approach, first developed on DNR’s Olympic Experimental State Forest through the T3 Watershed Experiment, that brings together researchers, managers, stakeholders, and tribes to integrate input, knowledge, and expertise into public lands planning and experimentation. This approach is grounded in ONRC’s ecosystem wellbeing framework, which holds that community and environmental wellbeing must be addressed together and with equal seriousness, and that community wellbeing begins with a formal process for engaging people, which ONRC calls learning-based collaboration (LBC).

ONRC’s learning-based collaboration in JCL primarily focuses on the National Forest and piloting a novel type of pre-NEPA engagement. This consists of conducting and analyzing semi-structured interviews with a wide range of interested Peninsula-based stakeholders and sustaining a monthly learning group with a balanced cross-section of representatives. Engagement is intended to highlight area-specific information, community values, and perspectives to better inform National Forest planning before and throughout the NEPA process, and to aid in aligning proposed actions with the needs of surrounding communities. Much like the T3 project, ONRC is using engagement to identify important questions to test through operational-scale adaptive management experiments (often where disagreement is strongest). Together, partners in the JCL project aim to work towards innovative, integrated solutions for forest and community health and build a place-based pilot model that can guide future landscape-scale forest planning.