Project Area

Management Goals
These silvicultural treatments are aimed at enhancing species and structural diversity to affect the following near term (0-15 year) habitat and timber quality as well as and long-term (50+ year) adaptation:
- Maintain or improve the ability of forest to resist pests and pathogens be retaining and releasing the most vigorous trees, and developing a more complex structural and species diversity. Research has shown that maintaining biodiversity buffers against pests and pathogens. Diversity of structure and enhanced vigor also enables the forest to resist and respond to disturbances by pests and pathogens.
- Prevent the establishment of invasive plants with pretreatment removal and post treatment monitoring.
- Manage herbivory by keeping tops unlopped and retaining coarse woody material
- Protect forest from severe disturbance and prepare for these disturbances by enhancing residual vigor and growth using crop tree release and promoting regeneration throughout the treatment area.
- Maintain and enhance species and structural diversity by implementing a variety of silvicultural treatments across the harvest area and by retaining biological legacies such as large trees, hard and soft mast, cavity trees, and snags.
Climate Change Impacts
Challenges and Opportunities
Climate change will present other challenges and opportunities for accomplishing the management objectives of this project, including:
Challenges
Opportunities
Adaptation Actions
The demonstration utilizes non-commercial treatments (Cold Hollow to Canada Woodlots) and commercial treatments (Mud Pond Forest) that will have an immediate effect of improving the overall resilience of the forest (i.e., the ability of the system to maintain its ecological state given increased disturbance and change) to changing conditions, while simultaneously beginning a longer-term transition toward future-adapted forests. These silvicultural treatments aim to create distinctly different stand structures and shift species composition toward species that will fare better under future conditions, while serving important habitat functions. Additionally, although tree planting is a rare practice in Vermont’s forests, some sites include planting future climate-adapted tree seedlings (e.g., red oak) to facilitate the movement of more southern, native species which are likely to have suitable habitat under future climate conditions.
- VLT's Mud Pond Forest also serves as a research demonstration site which is testing the outcomes of Resilience and Transition treatments compared to a no-management control. Experimental harvests were implemented in fall 2022- winter 2023.
- In the Cold Hollow to Canada Woodlots region, the integration of multiple forest landowners in cross-boundary management also allows for facilitating change at the landscape-level.
Specific adaptation approaches and tactics used at the demonstration sites include:
5.2. Maintain and restore diversity of native species.
5.3. Retain biological legacies.
9.7. Introduce species that are expected to be adapted to future conditions.
2.3. Manage herbivory to promote regeneration of desired species.
5.1. Promote diverse age classes.
5.2. Maintain and restore diversity of native species.
Monitoring
At the Cold Hollow Woodlots, some landowners are monitoring for presence of bird species post-treatment.