A social and economic profile is a key element of a social assessment. A social and economic assessment or profile is used by line officers, planning staff social scientists, and others to inform both forest planning activities and project-level work. It is important to discover how planning and management decisions made by National Forest System staff will affect social and economic conditions in communities surrounding the forest. Since the writing of this technical guide, the 2005 Planning Rule 36 CFR 219.6 has been released. The new rule again requires that social assessments (evaluations) be done as part of plan activities. Page 41 of the rule, which addresses evaluations and documentation, specifies that the plan document or set of documents will include reports on current social and economic conditions and trends. These evaluation reports are expected for all plan revisions and must be made available to the public.

The broad objective or business requirement this guide strives to meet is to "provide the ecological, social, and economic information necessary for the Forest Service to achieve its mission to sustain the health, diversity, and productivity of the Nation's forests and grasslands to meet the needs of present and future generations" (USDA 1940).

A guide for constructing and using composite indicators for policy makers, academics, the media and other interested parties. In particular, this handbook is concerned with indicators which compare and rank country performance.

This book introduces researchers to all aspects of the new classification. In particular, it: - Fully describes the NS-SEC and elucidates its conceptual basis - Guides readers in how the NS-SEC has been validated as a measure - Evaluates how well NS-SEC works in describing and explaining the relationships between social class and key health and employment variables - Demonstrates the applications of NS-SEC in research

The connections between communities and forests are complex and evolving, presenting challenges to forest managers, researchers, and communities themselves. Dependency on timber extraction and timber-related industries is no longer a universal characteristic of the forest community. Remoteness is also a less common feature, as technology, workforce mobility, tourism, and 'amenity migrants' increasingly connect rural to urban places. Forest Community Connections explores the responses of forest communities to a changing economy, changing federal policy, and concerns about forest health from both within and outside forest communities. Focusing primarily on the United States, the book examines the ways that social scientists work with communities-their role in facilitating social learning, informing policy decisions, and contributing to community well being. Bringing perspectives from sociology, anthropology, political science, and forestry, the authors review a range of management issues, including wildfire risk, forest restoration, labor force capacity, and the growing demand for a growing variety of forest goods and services. They examine the increasingly diverse aesthetic and cultural values that forest residents attribute to forests, the factors that contribute to strong and resilient connections between communities and forests, and consider a range of governance structures to positively influence the well being of forest communities and forests, including collaboration and community-based forestry.

"The Economic Profile System (EPS) is designed to allow any user to automatically and efficiently produce a detailed socio-economic profile using the spreadsheet program Microsoft Excel."-- inside front cover.