 Ladies and gentlemen, loha and good afternoon. My name is Michael Constantinidis, state staff forester with the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service based out of Honolulu, Hawaii. As with other countries, the US has committed to increasing forest cover to meet the BUN challenge. In our case, 15 million hectares of additional forests. A broad range of USDA programs will contribute to addressing this commitment. Our sister agency, the US Forest Service, is the primary leader for the US effort, but NRCS is also contributing through our Environmental Quality Incentives Program. So just a little history about NRCS. Our agency was born out of events that occurred more than a century ago. These included intensification and industrialization of our agricultural practices, then there were some extreme droughts that occurred from between 1932 to 1935. And as a result of those things, severe soil erosion was caused by wind and water across large areas of the United States. Those impacts were felt in both urban as well as rural landscapes. Some of the worst storms traveled over 2,000 kilometers from the plain states to East Coast cities, including New York City and Washington DC. So it sometimes takes compelling situations to bring about action or change. And in this image, you will see the effects of one of the bad dust storms that reached as far as Washington DC in March of 1935. One of the US government responses included establishment of the Soil Conservation Service one month later in April of 1935. And the Soil Conservation Service was tasked with research development and promotion of effective and sustainable agricultural practices. Later on in 1994, our agency was renamed from the Soil Conservation Service to the Natural Resources Conservation Service. And this was to help reflect a broader scope of our services, including both ecological sciences and engineering practices. As with China's Conversion of Cropland to Forest Program or CCFP, NRCS also addresses reforestation, forest management and delivery of environmental or ecosystem services at the landscape scale. We accomplished these objectives through several programs, but I will focus my talk today here on one of the more important ones, which is the last item shown here, or the Environmental Quality Incentives Program. We call that Equip for short, and that program was established in 1996. So this program is voluntary. We work primarily with private landowners, including small holders. And because we're a non-regulatory agency, we do not make or enforce laws. This is voluntary. In these images here, you'll see some examples of our work on Cropland. The Equip program also includes provision of technical assistance to improve the management, efficiency and sustainability of our agricultural livestock and forest systems. We also provide financial assistance, which is where the incentive part comes in. And that's to encourage our cooperators to adopt our technical prescriptions. The images here portray some of our livestock work settings, including range and pasture land and confined animal feeding operations. A few other key program objectives are that cooperators must address or fix at least one identified resource problem or concern on their land, while at the same time meeting their own management objectives. And for forest land, some of our common resource concerns include management or mitigation of issues such as soil erosion, organic matter depletion, water quality, forest structure and composition. And that kind of relates to invasive weeds many times in our settings here in the islands in particular. Also wildlife habitat and carbon sequestration. Some of the features of Equip include evaluation of applicant eligibility. As I said, provision of technical assistance and then development of a conservation plan. The financial assistance part includes practice payment schedules for each individual conservation practice that we prescribe. And those are designed to cover somewhere between 50 to 90% of the costs for installing our prescribed practices. The higher end of that scale is sometimes paid for what we call historically underserved producers. And those are people who may be beginning farmers, socially disadvantaged or other categories. And those folks might be eligible for higher payment rates. One key thing is that payments are made after installation of the practices. So that's a unique part of our program and that the cooperators pay up front and then come back to us after installation for reimbursement of a portion of the cost but not necessarily the entire cost. So we're kind of asking the cooperators to contribute part of the cost of the program from their own pocket. Here in this table are some 2015 data that summarized Equip forestry activity in the US. In that year, we worked with approximately 2,600 cooperators nationwide, treating over 91,000 hectares via forest management or reforestation with a budget of approximately $26 million. That total represents about 3% of the national Equip budget. So currently forestry is a small part of our total Equip program services. From 1990 to 2010, forest cover in the US increased by about 2%. And while I don't have direct data, I made some estimates that showed at our current level, Equip is supporting approximately 20% of annual reforestation in the country. The success of forestry projects that are supported under Equip is highly dependent on the quality of our initial planning that goes into developing the conservation plan, as well as the motivation and commitment of our individual cooperators. We really need their focus and commitment for success. So if we take a moment to summarize and compare the CCFP in China and the Equip in the US, it's clear that they share a number of technical objectives in common. And they also employ incentives for farmers. Some notable contrasts are in implementation approaches. In CCFP, we generally see that the program is employing broader incentives to advance national objectives, whereas Equip tends to be a little bit more customized to individual site and cooperator objectives. And while Equip has a focus on one-time payments for practice installation and occasional follow-up visits in terms of the frequency, CCFP involves multiple payments over time and repeated follow-up site visits. So this concludes my brief overview of how NRCS Equip forestry is implemented at the national level. This presentation provides an overview of Equip forestry efforts as they are implemented here in my service area, which is called Pacific Islands area or PIA. NRCS PIA is a broad service area. We serve customers and localities ranging from or characterized by very high diversity. So for example, seven countries spanning over nearly 8,000 kilometers, five time zones, 10 languages. In our service area, we have 11 of the 12 world soil orders. Our geographic elevations range from sea level to 4,200 meters, and rainfall levels can commonly range from 250 to 6,000 millimeters per year, which in the tropics is extremely dry to extremely wet. I'd like to go over a little bit of our regional land use history. Historically in the islands, our land uses have gone through an interesting evolution. It began with subsistence and people collecting food from the land and the ocean on and around their islands. But then in the 19th century, island ecosystems evolved to accommodate commodity crops, such as coconut, pineapple, sugarcane, cattle and other livestock ranching, many of which you see in these images here. And finally, in recent decades, the trend has been a shift back to subsistence, a good example being in Hawaii where there's a famous history of large scale sugar cultivation, but we now expect the closure of our last large sugar plantation in the islands, the Hawaiian islands, sometime in the next few years. So that's a big shift. And it seems like the trend is a shift back to subsistence, by the way. So some of our important resource management issues that we work on here include indigenous cultures and their resources, native wildlife and ecosystems, particularly biodiversity. And as an example of that in the United States, our government has listed nearly 600 threatened and endangered plant and animal species, but in Hawaii alone, there are over 430 or 27% of the national total. So those land uses I talked about and other factors have led to a very profound changes to our islands. Basically, we have had large scale ecosystem modification via deforestation. That in turn caused very serious changes in our critically important watersheds into watershed function. Suddenly, we had situations where flash floods and fire risk were greatly exacerbated. In the image on the right, you can see the effects of long-term grazing on what was once a full stature native forest. On the left, there's a landscape dominated by alien trees and grasses that is perpetuated by a weed wildfire cycle. And so that landscape periodically burns and that regenerates the alien and invasive plant species. Such land uses have modified ecosystems and have led to severe soil erosion and associated water quality and sedimentation impacts. As you can see here in the image on the left with sedimentation of our near shore coral reefs. As I mentioned, abandonment of commodity cropping has led to other problems, such as the encroachment of very fast growing invasive tree and weed species, such as those seen in this former sugar cane field on the right. Climate change causing greater fluctuation in weather patterns, more extreme weather events and sea level rise are also of great importance in the islands. We tend to be highly exposed to such changes and many islands are only a few meters above sea level. So equipping the islands is implemented much in the same way as it is on the mainland. We have the same land uses, common ones being crop, range, forest, but there's others as well. One thing we do here that's a little different is seen in the image on the left where site preparation has been used to remove a forest, a dense forest that was comprised of almost 100% alien or invasive forest species which do not really produce any meaningful products for society and may provide some ecosystem services but not the best. We used equip to clear weedy forests such as this one in order to replace them with desirable species and designs such as timber plantations and native forest restoration efforts and also for the installation of agroforestry systems. Our forestry practices in the islands differ in another way from projects on the US mainland. We still address the ecosystem services of course but we are rolling back the clock and focusing on subsistence in the provision of foods, medicine, fodder for animals, spices and other things that we term non-timber forest products that provide important benefits to our local populations. Many of these efforts are implemented via agroforestry systems. To illustrate this point, I would ask what do you see here? This is an example of multi-story cropping which to the untrained eye might look like a forest or a jungle. This is actually a system in which all the major plant components are intentionally grown by a family or by a village and these plants are meant to provide specific products or services in a system that is characterized by passive management and again a subsistence focus. This example here is a forest that includes banana, breadfruit, citrus, kava, coconut as well as annual crops. A simpler version of multi-story cropping can be called forest farming and these systems are often characterized by more cash type crops in an orchard-like setting. They're also more intensively managed and in these images we have systems that include timber trees or crop trees that produce valuable wood or other fruit products growing over cash crops such as cacao or coffee. What are some of our other agroforestry systems? They include these, which are wind breaks and they're providing protection from or management of issues such as wind, dust, odor, salt spray if we're near ocean sites or for field crops, livestock or buildings which often need shelter. Here we're planting wind breaks that also provide secondary benefits such as fruit, fodder for animals to eat, pollinator and or wildlife habitat. In this image we have an example of a field that was cleared by hand as seen in the right and then later the same field on the left planted out with two things. Contour plantings of vegetative barriers and those are for erosion and sedimentation control but also a native tree seedlings between the vegetative barriers and those will grow up to provide wildlife habitat and fruit production for the village. Lastly, here's an example of Sylvopasture where the management objective is simultaneous production of both tree and animal products. In this case, coconut over cattle pasture. So I'll end my talk here. I would encourage you to take a look at this website where many high quality publications relating to agroforestry systems and management are available such as the document shown here, the Grower's Guide. Thank you again for your attention and have a good day.