Project Area
Management Goals
These silvicultural treatments are aimed at enhancing species diversity and structure 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; promoting age and structural diversity; and retaining biological legacies such as large trees, hard and soft mast, cavities and snags, and variable densities.
Climate Change Impacts
Challenges and Opportunities
Adaptation Actions
The proposed demonstration would utilize non-commercial treatments 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 would create distinctly different stand structures and shift species composition toward species that will fare better under future conditions, while serving important habitat functions. Additionally, tree planting is a rare practice in Vermont’s forests but the project would plant red oak saplings to facilitate the movement of this more southern, native species which is likely to become more common under a new climate regime. The integration of multiple forest landowners in cross-boundary management also allows for facilitating change at the landscape-level.