The Pinyon-Juniper Ecosystem Sustainable Management Project is a pilot project aimed at reinstating a time-tested and sustainable approach to managing the Southwest’s pinyon-juniper ecosystems. Once considered weeds by rangeland ecologists, and removed by the millions, pinyon trees are now recognized as critical ecosystem elements. However, a century of fire suppression and overgrazing has left a landscape densely thicketed with small diameter pinyon trees. Managing these landscapes as nut groves rather than as grazing, timber, or mining lands offers a cost-effective means to simultaneously restore the health of these ecosystems, reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfire, and provide important social and economic benefits to human communities. 

Project Objectives:

Educate land managers about the importance of state-of-the-art best management practices for pine nut production

Establish an interactive internet forum (http://pinonnuts.org/) for local harvesters/buyers and land managers to exchange ideas and concerns about the challenges of and opportunities for supporting sustainable economic development of the pine nut industry in the American Southwest

Elevate awareness among forest managers of on-going efforts by the BLM, U.S. Forest Service, and other land management organizations to implement sustainable NTFP management programs.

Press Release:
Pinyon-juniper ecosystems cover 36 million acres scattered across Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, and Utah. Pinyon trees exist in association with more than 1,000 species of plants, insects, birds, and mammals, and perform important ecosystem services, such as water and soil retention. For ten thousand years, human inhabitants in the Southwest also relied on pinyon trees, primarily for sustenance, shade, firewood, and building materials. To this day, pinyon trees are sacred among the region’s indigenous cultures, and pine nuts – the seeds of pinyon trees – are highly prized among Native American and Hispano residents for their flavor and nutritional value. Commerce in pine nuts is an old tradition in the Southwest, dating back at least a thousand years, and linking peoples of the Great Basin, the Colorado Plateau, and the Great Plains. As late as the 1930s, trading posts shipped millions of pounds of pine nuts each year from Southwestern forests to markets in New York City and Los Angeles.

Over the past 50 years, however, the flow of pine nuts from the Southwest’s forests has dwindled to a trickle. Much of this decline is directly linked to a century of unsustainable public land management policies. For much of the 20th century, rangeland ecologists treated pinyon trees as weeds and recommended converting wooded savannas in many parts of the Southwest to grasslands stocked with non-native grasses. By the late 1980s, the combination of wide-scale clearing, fire suppression, and intense livestock grazing had created landscapes dominated by abnormally dense thickets of small diameter pinyon trees across much of the Southwest. Prolonged drought during the 1990s increased the susceptibility of these forests to insects and disease, resulting in massive die-offs of pinyon over large portions of Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona and placing the remaining live pinyon trees at extreme risk to wildfire. Despite the negative ecological impacts of previous pinyon removal efforts, current efforts to restore pinyon-juniper ecosystems continue to rely on management techniques, such as hydromowing and chaining, that indiscriminately remove all pinyon trees, rather than retaining healthy specimens.

Land management approaches that encourage the restoration of healthy pinyon groves instead of eliminating them are badly needed. One promising alternative is to reverse the current management priorities and manage pinyon-juniper ecosystems primarily for nut production, and only secondarily for grazing, timber, and mining. Such an approach would benefit the land, water, and wildlife; it would also decrease the risk of catastrophic wildfire and provide a reliable supply of highly nutritious nuts, and increase the economic viability of the local pine nut industry. The notion of managing pinyon-juniper forests as nut groves is neither new nor far-fetched: humans have managed pine forests for nut production for thousands of years in the Mediterranean, and the indigenous peoples of the Southwest practiced a variety of management techniques to improve nut production, including selectively thinning unproductive trees, clearing around the base of the trees, and removing lower branches.

In 2007, with funding from the Colorado Wood Utilization and Marketing Program¹ the Institute for Culture and Ecology initiated a pilot project aimed at building the capacity of Southwestern communities and land management agencies to manage pinyon-juniper ecosystems as nut groves. In this phase we are establishing an interactive website (www.pinonnuts.org) where harvesters, buyers, land managers, and scientists can share information about pinyon nut crop locations and yields, permit prices and harvesting restrictions, pinyon nut prices, and methods for improving pinyon nut production. Penny Frazier, owner of Goods from the Woods, and long-time advocate for sustainable management of pinyon-juniper ecosystems, was the inspiration for the project and is coordinating the development of the website. The Institute for Culture and Ecology has produced several educational tools highlighting the many benefits of pinyon trees, including an overview of the pine nut industry, guidelines for managing pinyon-juniper forests for nut production, and a scientific poster on pinyon management. These materials are available at: http://www.ifcae.org/projects/pinyon/ and http://www.pinonnuts.org/.