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Federally designated wilderness areas in the US are mandated to fulfill social and ecological goals. Long‐term monitoring is key to this mandate, yet is seldom consistent across boundaries. Our purpose is to compile literature and data to examine the utility of a strategic forest inventory for meeting wilderness management objectives and for enabling coordinated interagency responses to boundary‐crossing challenges (e.g., pollution, wildfires, plant invasions, global changes). We provide examples from a national forest inventory (NFI), which provides nationally consistent information that helps stakeholders comply with protected‐areas policy, reduce risks to public safety, define economic opportunities, guide conservation efforts and forecast key ecological processes. For example, the NFI has helped detect long‐distance air‐pollution, document high‐elevation whitebark pine declines and evaluate the risk of wilderness fires spreading to adjacent lands and private property. We identify opportunities to improve monitoring by expanding existing measurements of nonforest ecosystems and linking supplemental monitoring efforts to the existing framework. Though the NFI alone cannot fulfill all monitoring functions, strategic monitoring enables effective wilderness management by revealing socioecological feedbacks between human communities and the wildlands on which they depend.

The adopted rotation age and prescribed cut are found not to be fully respected at any stage of regulation, planning and implementation of cutting plans. As a result, timber, the main crop in forestry, is not uniform in terms of rotation age and fails the adopted criteria of crop maturity. Protective forests are not subject to management unless cut determination derives from silvicultural needs, without specifying the criteria for these needs. The level of cuts subjectively determined by quality control inspectors is not respected in forest management practice and should be recommended for use in the forests administered by the State Forests., Sylwan 157 (4): 298-305