Strong civic engagement can yield strong communities. Leveraging stewardship capacity can be a powerful way for governments, non-profits, and other organizations to achieve outcomes that would otherwise be impossible with finite resources, and to create communities that are stronger, healthier, greener, and more resilient. Mobilizing this potential requires understanding what stewardship capacity and connections exist across a landscape and being able to connect these to form a model of shared stewardship.

As our cities, towns, and public lands face all kinds of challenges ranging from overstressed infrastructure to extreme weather, community-based civic groups often find themselves on the frontlines of response; these groups are capable of being nimble and coming up with effective locally driven solutions. In addition, today’s forest land managers face a range of urgent challenges, among them catastrophic wildfires, more public demand, degraded watersheds, and epidemics of forest insects and disease. All of these could benefit from an approach of shared stewardship, which STEW-MAP helps enable. STEW-MAP recognizes that there is an opportunity to discover and link the capacities of a range of stewardship groups that complement the capacities of government to create communities that are stronger, healthier, greener, and more resilient.

STEW-MAP does this by helping communities, governments, land management agencies, and nonprofits understand the social fabric of a landscape. STEW-MAP helps land managers make more informed decisions with stakeholders and stewards in mind. STEW-MAP data can accelerate landscape-scale conservation by promoting coordination, collaboration, and synergies across mixed ownerships and among diverse stewardship groups. STEW-MAP provides network information that can be crucial for emergency preparedness and recovery. The data can also help identify shifting social dynamics associated with megatrends affecting landscapes from city street corners to our nation’s forests.

Applications range from developing conservation goals or policies; to conducting and coordinating resource assessments, planning, and monitoring efforts; to effectively educating, messaging, and/or engaging stakeholders.