Dr. Tony Cheng is a Professor in the Department of Forest & Rangeland Stewardship and Director of the Colorado Forest Restoration Institute at Colorado State University. He received is BA in Political Science at Whitman College, a MSc in Forestry with emphasis in forest policy at the University of Minnesota, and a PhD in Forestry with emphasis in forest policy at Oregon State University. Tony’s primary research focus is in forest governance, policy, and administration, with a special interest in collaborative, participatory approaches that attempt to achieve ecological, economic, and community well-being goals. His primarily involves collaborative planning and implementation strategies affecting national forest management in the US, community-based forestry initiatives, and community wildfire mitigation, and the interplay between these strategies and forest policy. In his capacity as director of the Colorado Forest Restoration Institute, Tony develops and administers programs to develop, synthesize, and apply locally-relevant scientific knowledge to define and achieve forest restoration and wildfire hazard reduction in Colorado. CFRI’s work is principally project-based in collaboration with land managers, interested and affected stakeholders, and research scientists, including the Front Range and Uncompahgre Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration projects. CFRI applies biophysical and social sciences to produce actionable knowledge about landscape-scale forest restoration. Tony is also a Senior Fellow with the Pinchot Institute for Conservation and a Senior Research Fellow with the Earth System Governance Project, a component of the International Human Dimensions of Global Environmental Change Programme.
Role(s) in BANR: Investigator on Task 3 activities related to Regional-Scale Socio-Economic and Policy Analysis