The Good Neighbor Authority (GNA) is an important partnership tool enacted by Congress with the intent to increase the pace and scale of forest, rangeland, and watershed restoration across jurisdictional boundaries.
Permanently authorized in the 2014 Farm Bill and amended in subsequent legislation, GNA enables States, Counties, and Indian Tribes to act as an agent of the USDA Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the National Park Service to complete authorized restoration services on federal and non-federal lands.
This webpage provides a repository of informational and educational resources about GNA for western state forestry agencies, federal agencies, and partners.
GNA Spotlight - Arizona
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A view from inside unit 1 showing effects roughly 2 months post-burn. Photo: Colby Powers
February 2025
Submitted by Colby Powers, AZ DFFM GNA Coordinator
The Poco Pino Fuels Reduction Project on the Tonto National Forest was put to the test when the West Fire spread into the project area.
Working under a Good Neighbor Authority agreement with the Payson and Pleasant Valley District, the Arizona Department of Forestry and Fire Management completed the thinning of the 718-acre fuels reduction project. This included removing merchantable timber, thinning non-commercial timber, and removing subsequent biomass from operations to protect the wildland urban interface community of Pine.
Thinning work was completed in July 2024, and in early August, a lightning strike ignited the West Fire a few miles northeast of the project area. This fire was allowed to burn as a managed wildfire and grew to encompass over 15,000 acres, including three units of the Poco Pino project. The project had not yet been closed out, and landings were used as staging areas for fire personnel and some skid trails were used as holding features to contain the fire and stage firing operations. The outcome of the fire was a mosaic of burn severity across the landscape, ranging from low-severity underburn in the timber to high-severity on steep slopes covered in manzanita.
Overall, the treatment of the Poco Pino project area met its goal of reducing ladder fuels and increasing tree crown spacing, and provided more options to the fire operations team to overall better manage the landscape-scale fire.
GNA Learning Series - Collection of recordings from the virtual GNA Learning Series, hosted by the Western Forestry Leadership Coalition (WFLC) in Fall 2020.
