New Website and Forestry Awards🌳

This month, we have two exciting awards to share with you; the recipients of the 2025 Kansas Agroforestry Award and the 2025 Forest Stewardship Tree Farmers of the Year Award! We also have a great podcast about what it takes to become a wildland firefighter and our freshly published 2025 Annual Report!

Before we dive into that, I cannot tell you how excited I am to share that the Kansas Forest Service website has a new look, a new layout, and new features, all curated for our clients. This redesign has been a major effort over the past year, and we want to highlight the people who helped shape it—because this project was truly built with our users in mind.

Kansas Forest Service staff from across the agency contributed their time and insight to help us determine what information our audiences seek most, how our programs should be organized, and what tools and features would be most useful. Their close connection to landowners, fire departments, natural resource professionals, and community partners ensured the site accurately reflects the real needs of our stakeholders.

Earlier this fall, we hosted several informal focus groups with clients and partners to gather their feedback—what worked, what didn’t, and what they wished they could find more easily—which played a crucial role in refining the structure and layout of the new site. Even small suggestions helped us make meaningful improvements!

Whether you’re here for wildfire resources, landowner assistance, urban forestry information, or educational materials, the new site was built to help you find what you need quickly and confidently. Our users were the center of this project from the start, and we hope you’ll feel that when you explore the new design.

Thank you to everyone who contributed their time, their ideas, and their honest feedback. We’re proud of the final product—and even more proud of the community that helped create it!

Visit the new website and let us know what you think!

Enjoy!