Members will assess how well the Forest Service, Park Service, Bureau of Land Management and Fish and Wildlife Service have implemented the 1964 Wilderness Act over the past 35 years. They also will try to determine how those agencies can improve their management of the nation’s wilderness in the next century.

The panel will look at coordination and consistency among the agencies, as well as the importance an agency places on wilderness, the location of wilderness management in the agency structure and how well it is staffed, Brown says.

“What we would hope is that we can prepare a report that energizes the leadership of the agencies and the departments in which they are located,” he says. “We also want to make sure that people in Congress who are interested in wilderness work to ensure that wilderness can be sustained into the future.” The panel’s work will be “fed into” the wilderness summit that Forest Service Chief Mike Dombeck plans to call next year, Brown says.

The 10-member panel includes former Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall; William Reffalt, retired chief of refuges at the Fish and Wildlife Service; and Wilderness Society President Bill Meadows.

The nonprofit Pinchot Institute for Conservation was founded in 1963 by President John F. Kennedy. Gifford Pinchot was the first chief of the Forest Service.