• Completed management activities on natural and working lands. 
• Woody vegetation management activities including but not limited to: 
  • Forest canopy techniques. 
  • Surface management techniques. 
  • Reforestation activities. 
  • Prescribed fire. 

• Does the activity involve woody vegetation management? 
• Is it mapped with associated data? 

• Non-woody vegetation management activities (noxious weeds, botany surveys, etc.)  
• Planned or in progress activities. 
  • The forest tracker is not a real-time-update site to track future planned projects. 
  • Only completed projects are included in the Forest Tracker as a record of what has been accomplished. 

• Structure and building modification focused wildfire risk management activities. 
• Point-data location. If you have point data please contact the tracker team to inquire about submitting data and how to contribute/how to create polygons from this data. 
• Urban individual tree management activities. 

• Defensible space and home-hardening  
  • The focus of the data is on woody vegetation management. 
  • YES: If defensible space or home-hardening includes vegetation management. 
  • NO: If it is only structure modification, removing herbaceous vegetation within 5ft of home, etc.  

• Grazing 
  • Generally, no. There is grazing on some targeted woody vegetation, so if you can sort that out then yes. But general grazing targeted at herbaceous vegetation is not included. 

• Urban forest management 
  • YES: Woody vegetation management in community parks, open spaces, defensible space. 
  • NO: Management of individual trees on road medians, sidewalks, etc.  
  • When in doubt, we encourage you to submit woody vegetation management data in urban areas. 

Anybody who is doing anything regarding forest management should submit! Whether it’s land managers, non-profits, Homeowners Associations, private homeowners or any other agency. If you have data regarding woody vegetation management on natural and working lands in Colorado, you should submit your data!

There are multiple fields that can be filled in, but these are minimum fields we require your data to have to be on the Forest Tracker: 

• Agency 
• Management type 
• Activity type 
• Year completed 
• Managed acres

Reference the Concept Paper and Submission Instructions on the Tracker website for more details. 

No, these treatments need to be submitted as two individual records. It’s okay if you submit the same spatial polygons of treatment areas under different records. If you have LOTs of these records, please contact the Tracker team for assistance. 

Generally, there are no restrictions about sharing data on private lands; however, some funding sources used to support private lands management have privacy restrictions. Most state funding sources are public knowledge and do not have sharing restrictions. We are working closely with the Natural Resource Conservation Service (NRCS) about data permissions with some of their funding programs that have privacy restrictions.  

Please submit data by Nov. 10, 2023. Even if you are unable to format the data, submit the data and fill out “not formatted” on the google form so this data is flagged, and our team can provide further support.

• If your project has spatial project data + you or your agency has some GIS support, we ask that you format your data using forest tracker template (option A). Follow these steps: 
  • Read data submission instructions.  
  • Review your data. 
  • Organize your data to match the forest tracker standards. 
  • Append your data to forest tracker template. 
  • Clean up field using domain dropdown lists. 
  • Submit final layer to the google form. 

• If you don’t have polygon data but you have fewer than 10 activities, then you should submit an activity through survey 123 (option B). 
• If you don’t have polygon data and more than 10 records, then you should submit a google form to either submit unformatted data directly or ask for GIS support (option C).  

• Share the reasons why you believe it is important! There have been a lot of requests for this tracker from local to national levels, so share your perspective with your partners. 
• Community and forestry professionals will have more transparency across forest management data to improve planning. 
• It will benefit firefighters to have better information about forest management when engaging in fire suppression. 
• The Forest Tracker can also increase efficiencies in agency accomplishments reporting, allowing agency staff more time to support on the ground work.

• Colorado State Forest Service 
  • Nic Kotlinsky, Geospatial Data and Analysis Program Manager, Nicholas.Kotlinski@colostate.edu 
  • Rebecca Dannels, Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Specialist, rebecca.dannels@colostate.edu 
  • Amanda West-Fordham, Associate Director, Science and Data Division, amanda.west@colostate.edu 

• Colorado Forest Restoration Institute 
  • Brett Wolk, Assistant Director, brett.wolk@colostate.edu 
  • Stephanie Mueller, Stephanie.Mueller@colostate.edu