The Southern Appalachian Man and the Biosphere (SAMAB) Program is a public/private partnership that focuses its attention on the Southern Appalachian Biosphere Reserve. The program encourages the utilization of ecosystem and adaptive management principles. SAMAB's vision is to foster a harmonious relationship between people and the Southern Appalachian environment. Its mission is to promote the environmental health and stewardship of natural, economic, and cultural resources in the Southern Appalachians. It encourages community-based solutions to critical regional issues through cooperation among partners, information gathering and sharing, integrated assessments, and demonstration projects.
The SAMAB program is organized into the following components:
The SAMAB Cooperative is made up of 11 federal and 3 state natural resource agencies. The work of SAMAB is done by participating agencies, guided by an interagency Executive Committee and carried out by the Executive Director and his Coordinating Office. Essentially the participating agencies and the Coordinating Office make things happen.
In 1968, the UNESCO Conference on the Conservation and Rational Use of the Resources of the Biosphere launched the international Man and the Biosphere (MAB) Programme. This program proposed a network of biosphere reserves around the world, which were intended to demonstrate, by example, how to maintain a balance between conserving biodiversity and fostering economic and social development. The concept of a regional biosphere cooperative began in the mid-1970s. By then, three separate biosphere reserves within the Southern Appalachian region had been recognized by the MAB Programme. These were places that were highly regarded for their special character and were already protected by existing statute or regulation--the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, the Coweeta Hydrologic Laboratory of the Forest Service, and the Walker Branch Watershed on the Oak Ridge Department of Energy Reservation. At the same time, the MAB Programme was gaining wider recognition and people familiar with it began to see it as a way to encourage closer cooperation between the federal and state land-management agencies in the region. The Southern Appalachian Man and the Biosphere Reserve was officially designated a multi-unit regional biosphere reserve in 1988.
In the late 1980s outspoken visionaries in the Forest Service and the National Park Service were advocating a new paradigm for land management--ecosystem management. With its emphasis on a landscape-scale approach, ecosystem management brought to a focus the issues that extended beyond organizational and property boundaries--issues that could only be resolved by cooperation between adjacent landowners.
In 1988 a “cooperative and interagency agreement was signed to establish the SAMAB Cooperative. Seven agencies signed the original agreement, but it wouldn't be long before several more would be added. In the agreement the signatories listed four goals or functions for the cooperative. Briefly, they were:
In the years since SAMAB was formed, its focus has been on these tasks. SAMAB now has a new Strategic Plan (PDF file) and a new Program of Work that builds on these functions.
The overview and history presented on this page are excerpted from a paper entitled “The SAMAB Program--A Model for Management Need-Based Research” (a PDF file), which was written by Charles Van Sickle and Robert S. Turner and presented at the Southern Forest Science Conference in Atlanta, Georgia held November 26-28, 2001.