Hispanic Forestland

Despite increasing attention to diversity in forestry, there have been limited national studies of racial and ethnic minority family forest owners in the US.  Most programs and policies have focused on nonminority family forest owners’ statistics. The National Woodland Owner Survey estimates that minority owners hold 5.1 percent of the family forestland in the US; 10.5 million acres and comprise 209,000 owners (Butler et al., 2019). 

Using applied learnings from the Sustainable Forestry and Land Retention Program (SFLR), the Endowment works with the U.S. Forest Service and other partners to reach a more in-depth understanding of Hispanic forestland owners, including population, land ownership macrotrends, and what support is needed to retain working forests and build wealth for those landowners and their communities.  

Enumeration Study of Hispanic Forest Landowners in the United States

In the first phase of this project, the Endowment worked with Mano y Ola, a Hispanic and woman co-owned consulting firm, to create an enumeration of HFLOs. In Phase 2 of the project, the creation of a Trusted Hub for Hispanic Forest Landowners will be developed.  

If you are interested in this project, please contact Delie Wilkens at 864-233-7646 or delie@usendowment.org