Sustainable Forestry Archives - Page 2 of 4

5 Hidden Benefits of Forests

Posted on August 12, 2020 by Jeff Easterling

Forests are commonly known as the lungs of the planet, providing much of the oxygen we breathe. Covering about a third of total land area on Earth, they host millions of species of trees, plants, animals and fungi. These benefits are obvious, but the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations is pointing out a few more you may not have realized.

Did you know, for instance, that forests are natural aqueducts? Most of the world’s population lives downstream of forested watersheds. A 2003 survey of 100 of the world’s most populous cities revealed a clear link between forests and the quality of water provided by catchments. They reduce the number of pollutants entering headwaters, reducing the need for treatment and reducing the supply cost. There’s also evidence that forests help maintain water flow. Many forests are managed to prioritize water supply.

Forests also help provide a livelihood for 86 million people around the world. Often, that’s through jobs related to recreation, conservation or the forest products industry – foresters, geologists, biologists, technicians, equipment operators and even high tech jobs like drone pilots. But sometimes it’s as simple as a nearby forest providing shelter for a farmer’s free range flock.

Of course, they give us material things, too: shelter, furniture, paper, fuel and byproducts that go into everyday items like medicine and detergents. More than 1 billion people around the world also rely on wild foods like meat, insects, plants and mushrooms foraged from forests.

FOA notes that forests nurture the soil. They’re host to vast unseen worlds of microorganisms involved in the cycling of nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorous, helping in the decomposition of dead plant mass and animals, and supporting the incredible biodiversity of forest species. Forest soil also traps and stores 1.4 billion tonnes of CO2 every year, keeping it out of the atmosphere.

You may associate all of these benefits with nature preserves where trees go untouched for many decades or even centuries, but they apply to working forests, too. As commercial timberlands cycle through different phases of growth and re-growth, they play different roles in the local ecosystem.

An estimated 420 million hectares (about 1.6 million square miles) of forest have been lost through conversion to other land uses since 1990, even though the rate of deforestation has decreased. Large-scale agricultural expansion, mostly for cattle ranching and the cultivation of mono crops like soybeans and oil palm, is responsible for 40 percent of tropical deforestation. In other places, smaller forests are often lost incrementally to development. Once a forest is turned into a neighborhood, it’s unlikely to ever return to its original state.

Learn more about how sustainably managed working forests support rural families, keep our water sources healthy and play a crucial role in the fight against climate change.

Students Learn Forest Management Skills in the Face of California Fires

Posted on November 1, 2019 by Jeff Easterling

forestry challenge

When a utility company’s poorly maintained power lines spark a blaze in dried-out vegetation amidst hurricane-force winds, even the most well-managed forests are at risk. But in many places, forest management can help reduce unwanted effects when fires do occur, especially in drier forests.

The entire Forest Products industry is facing a shortage of workers as many older employees retire. To keep our forests in good shape, we need a new generation of foresters ready to take the reins. We previously covered a program in Calaveras County, California that provides forestry jobs for people who live in the fire-prone Sierra Nevada foothills. Now, let’s take a look at a statewide program called the Forestry Challenge that’s stepping up to train high school students in technical forest skills and management.

From EdSource:

“‘Forestry is a little bit invisible to most folks. Most people think of park rangers and that’s a very limited way of looking at land management,’ said Erin Kelly, an associate professor of forest economics and administration at Humboldt State University. Foresters have a broad range of responsibilities from managing tree growth to providing technical expertise for improving the health and economic viability of forests.”

“A 2018 survey by Shasta College found that 45 percent of natural resource businesses in Northern California — including forestry, fuel production and environmental consulting — are experiencing or anticipate a workforce shortage. State government employers reported the most difficulty finding qualified forestry applicants in the last five years, according to a 2019 study by Kelly and Greg Brown, head of the Natural Resources Management and Environmental Sciences Department at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. Forestry Challenge is trying to change that by teaching students new skills and career pathways.”

Founded in 2003, the Forestry Challenge program draws in participants from five countries around the state to learn from professional foresters how to collect forest data, analyze it and present their findings to a panel of judges. In Santa Cruz this year, 84 students evaluated a piece of land to make recommendations for a timber management plan, considering tree health and density, future harvesting, economic cost and biological impact.

Many students return year after year. Organizers say they’re showing them that earning a STEM degree doesn’t have to mean working in an office for a tech company. Instead, they could be outside, having a direct impact on the health of the environment.

Check out the piece at EdSource to learn more about how the Forestry Challenge works.

How Well-Managed Forests Help Keep Our Water Sources Healthy

Posted on June 12, 2019 by Jeff Easterling

newport news forest

The benefits of maintaining large tracts of forest lands can sometimes come in unexpected forms. Few people would guess it, but an interesting story from down in Virginia illustrates how working forests contribute to higher groundwater quality even better than older forests that are left primarily untouched.

A team of foresters on the Newport News Waterworks crew spend a lot of time checking on the health of trees in the heart of the Virginia Peninsula, which is bounded by the York River, James River, Hampton Roads and Chesapeake Bay. Within these 8,100 acres, trees are performing an essential function that can’t be seen: filtering contaminants out of water before it makes its way into the utility’s reservoirs. The watershed forest is currently the oldest and largest certified tree farm under the American Tree Farm System.

The foresters work to maintain species diversity among the trees to keep the forests healthy, noting that single-species forests are highly susceptible to being wiped out by a single disaster like a storm or pest. Loggers bid to be able to harvest the wood when trees need to come down. The utility brings in classes or scout troops from local schools to reseed and plant new trees, teaching them about conservation in the process.

Forests require maintenance and forests make for clean water, said Eddie Harrah, Waterworks’ director of forest resources. “An old forest isn’t necessarily a healthy forest.”

Harrah and James McCabe, the other forester in Newport News Waterworks, spend much of their time on the clock making observations about the trees — looking for crowding, signs of bad health or unwanted infestation. They make decisions about clear-cutting an area and whether to replant or just let nature bring in new trees.

They know that about 15 years after trees are planted, about half will need to be cut down to let the others flourish. Another 20 years after that, the less-healthy trees will be thinned out, and in another three or four decades, those fully-grown trees will be cut down and the cycle starts over.

Check out the whole article at the Daily Press.

Top photo by Jim Rhodes/Flickr Creative Commons

Wood Magic: Educating New Generations About the Wood Products Industry

Posted on August 6, 2018 by Jeff Easterling

Forest in Maine

The logging practices of yore have bred a tenacious misperception about the wood products industry, one that prompts visions of clearcutting picturesque landscapes and destroying habitats in the process. Ask most young people what they think about logging, and the response will likely be something along these lines. Sustainable logging practices and responsible forest stewardship have changed the game over recent decades, but a lot of people (of all ages) aren’t engaging in conversations about reforestation and renewability, so that perception is hard to shift.

Oregon State University’s College of Forestry is changing that by reaching out to career technical education (CTE) students at the high school level throughout Oregon and Washington in a bid to recruit the next generation of forest-related careers. Chris Knowles, an associate professor of Wood Science & Engineering at OSU, and Michelle Maller, Internship & Education Coordinator at the same program, visit classrooms to talk about professional opportunities and educate the public one student at a time.

Our undergraduate program provides four tracks from which to choose: science and engineering; marketing and management; art and design; and advanced wood manufacturing. Selecting the most enticing track means each student is on the path to a very distinct part of the lumber products business. Ten years ago, we found that most of our students were heading toward the manufacturing side. Today, we see people going toward all four of these disciplines, to corners of the wood products industry they may not have even known existed.

Knowles and Maller say they’re finding it vital to reach young people long before they’re considering a major. They host an interactive program on wood as a resource for third and fourth graders both on the OSU campus and in underserved areas of Portland, Oregon. The three-and-a-half hour program walks kids through 13 stations with themes like common forest products, wood burning and durability. They learn about renewability, too, piquing interest in how the forest products industry can actually be beneficial to the environment when managed sustainably.

It’s a promising program, and similar undertakings around the country could help make the future of wood brighter than ever.

Image via Jordan Pond / Flickr CC by 2.0

Rising Demand for Wood Leads to Forest Growth, According to New Report

Posted on August 9, 2017 by Jeff Easterling

Screen Shot 2017-08-05 at 5.57.33 PM

As appetite for lumber, paper, packaging, wood pellets and other forest products has grown, so have the nation’s forests, according to a new report. Forest2Market’s ‘Historical Perspective on the Relationship between Demand and Forest Productivity in the US South’ analyzed forest service data and other research to understand how changes in demand and supply have interacted over a period of nearly sixty years.

Key findings of the report include:

– Annual timber removals nearly doubled between 1953 and 1996 due to appetites for furniture, paper and packaging
– Forest product companies improved forest management practices and increased their productivity in turn
– Increased demand has not depleted forests, remaining stable while total inventory has doubled
– Increased demand is also associated with more acres, better growth and larger inventories
– Urbanization is a bigger threat to forests in the United States than demand for forest products

“Unfortunately, much of the discourse about the forest products industry’s impact on forests and carbon has focused on only one side of the story: harvesting trees,” says the report’s lead analyst and author, Hannah Jefferies. “This ignores one of the most basic tenets of forestry: grow trees.”

“At its core, this report shows that southern landowners do more than just harvest trees. Because those trees have value as a raw material, landowners regrow their trees and take steps to maximize the productivity of their timberlands,” Jefferies added.

Read the whole report at Forest2Market [PDF].

High-Tech Tools from The Nature Conservancy Make it Easier to Manage Forests

Posted on May 10, 2017 by Jeff Easterling

For decades, the easiest way to manage a forest tree-by-tree has been to simply take a walk through it with a can of spray paint, designating which trees need to come down. While there’s definitely nothing wrong with this old-school approach, The Nature Conservancy is cooking up some new high-tech forestry management tools that make the process a whole lot faster and more accurate. They’re testing their Digital Restoration Guide in Northern Arizona, where a million acres of ponderosa pine forest have burned in catastrophic wildfires over the last fifteen years.

In an interview with TechCrunch, Neil Chapman of The Nature Conservancy explains how digital tools can make it easier for timber managers, conservationists, park services and fire control to keep forests alive and thriving. Workers will still walk (or ride ATVs) around in the forests to get an in-person, up-close look at the trees, but instead of using spray paint, they’ll have a tablet in hand, noting the tree locations with GPS coordinates. The data can be adjusted, archived and sent to harvesters – resulting in a lot less paperwork and other labor on the back end.

forest fires app

This could be especially useful for larger forests, where you might need to keep track of hundreds of thousands of trees every year. In-cab GPS helps wood harvesters make sure they’re using the right treatment in the right location, and track the date, time and location of a tree cut to manage project contracts. In the future, bar codes could be used to follow trees from cut to wood product manufacturing.

It’s a pretty interesting advancement in tech for the industry, and it’ll be cool to see how it develops. Read more details at TechCrunch.