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- Who receives a third party certificate?
- The American Tree Farm System national office will maintain third-party certificates for each of our 4 national regions; Northeast, Northcentral, Southern, and Western. Each Independently Managed Group organization and Individual Third Party Certification holder will maintain a separate third-party issued certificate. Each of these groups will undergo certification audits on a five year cycle with surveillance audits performed annually.
- How will the landowner experience change?
- ATFS is working hard to ensure that the landowner experience will only be enhanced as we moved forward with our new third-party auditing procedures. State Tree Farm Committees and Group Managers will continue to be the landowners’ connection to the Tree Farm program, and volunteer inspecting foresters will continue to perform inspections and recruit new landowners to the state tree farm programs.
- What is the role of the volunteer inspectors?
- Our volunteers, more than 4,000, come from state resource agencies, private consulting firms, and forest industry companies. Property inspections completed by volunteer foresters are an important part of our internal monitoring procedures.
- Does Tree Farm have an internal monitoring procedure?
- American Tree Farm System works with researchers from Virginia Tech to develop a statistically valid sampling program to ensure adequate annual internal monitoring procedures for our state programs. Each year, volunteer inspectors visit Tree Farm certified properties to assess conformance to the American Forest Foundation’s Standards of Sustainability on the ground. The efforts of the inspectors and the state leadership are essential to maintaining the credibility of our program through our internal monitoring procedures. Last year, our required sample showed 98.3% conformance of land management practices to the AFF Standards of Sustainability.
- Who is eligible to perform third party audits?
- The American Tree Farm System partnered with the ANSI-ASQ National Accreditation Board (ANAB) to develop an accreditation program for certification bodies (Please visit www.anab.org for a copy of the American Tree Farm System’s accreditation rule). All third-party audits for the American Tree Farm System must be performed by an ANAB accredited certification body (please contact Victoria Lockhart at vlockhart@forestfoundation.org for more information on eligible certification bodies).
Who are the auditors?
NSF-ISR (currently accredited by ANAB to perform ATFS audits)
Contact: Mike Ferrucci
Telephone: 203-887-9248
Email: mferrucci@iforest.com
PricewaterhouseCoopers (currently accreditated by SCC to perform ATFS audits)
Contact: Joann Cox
Telephone: 919-676-8285
Email: joann.cox@ca.pwc.com
Bureau Veritas Certification North America Inc.(currently accredited by ANAB to perform ATFS audits)
Contact: Michael Lyon
Email: Michael.lyon@us.bureauvertias.com
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