LFN serves two audiences, 1. private land owners and volunteer groups by providing how-to instruction, and 2. practitioners by developing new practices. Its success depends on experience practitioners providing how-to instruction and coordinating with each other to speed up new solutions more efficiently. By creating and testing new methods, with multiple trials and variations, our toolkit of effective and efficient methods will grow much faster. Coordinated research saves much time and cost as we are not individually creating the same wheels or creating “new” solutions where good ones already exist.

To that end LFN is a community of restoration practitioners focused on accomplishing restoration on private lands by providing effective and efficient practices for on-the-ground field restoration on smaller lands. We provide detailed How-to-Do level instruction and collaborate to build and test effective and efficient best practices. This website is our hub. Success depends on experienced practitioners sharing instruction and participating in coordinated research. Our research is driven to find effective and efficient practices and not academic research. The goal is Good practices and not Best practices. Good means effective and efficient. Different users, different scales, different situations call for different practices.

How does the LFN site differ from using internet search? By providing vetted information organized by filtered indices users will have more confidence in the quality of the information. The use of filtering by the issue helps those not familiar with terms used by the restoration community as well as presenting multiple techniques to achieve similar outcomes. Much of the success of Wikipedia is because people knowledgeable about the topic review the content. Science publications rely on peer reviews to improve credibility. Again, this is totally dependent on active participation by practitioners. Ideally small teams will coalesce around a topic, collectively build the article and support materials. LFN will handle the site administration, links, etc.

Initially LFN’s focus are some of the communities of the US Upper Midwest. However; the LFN approach has application for restoration worldwide. The first phase is creation of known how-to practices by practitioners. These are specific and modest in scope, but highly useful for those interested in hands on restoration who need instruction to get started. Launching collaboration on the development of new practices needs a few pioneers to develop good ways to run LFN’s collaboration program.

LFN invites skilled practitioners to join this community, share in creation of content, and to let interested users know this resource exists.