By Dave Publicover, AMC Senior Staff Scientist.
From the beginning of AMC’s Maine Woods Initiative, sustainable timber management has been one of the key elements of the project, along with backcountry recreation, land conservation, and community economic development.
We recognize that the wood products industry is, along with recreation and tourism, one of the two foundations of the local economy and will remain so for a long time. It is not our goal to replace timber harvesting with wilderness-based recreation, but to integrate the two. It is our hope that this combination can provide a model for future land conservation in the region, and demonstrate that conservation is not an “either-or” proposition that pits wilderness against timber. Our intention to sustainably harvest timber on a portion of our property is one reason our project has been strongly supported by the local communities, and community support will be critical to our overall success.
Unlike commercial landowners, AMC has a much broader range of goals and a long-term perspective. AMC’s primary goals are to maintain a significant portion of the property in a natural condition; provide a high level of protection to ecological, scenic and aesthetic resources; increase the overall maturity of the forests on the property; and promote the growth of high-quality sawtimber. Commercially-driven management often leads to extensive areas of young forest – in truth, there is no economically rational reason to grow big trees – and much of the forest on our property consists of young, small-diameter stands. Our goal is to manage for an older, higher-volume forest with a greater proportion of large trees.
Shortly after the land was purchased in December 2003, AMC hired Huber Resources Corporation, a family-owned forestry business based in Old Town, as our forest management consultant. Huber manages several hundred thousand acres of its own land as well as The Nature Conservancy’s property along the St. John River. AMC and Huber worked together for over a year to develop a forest management plan for the property, with AMC providing the overall goals and general direction and Huber providing specific recommendations based on their long experience in the region. Huber will oversee the timber harvests and handle road maintenance and other on-the-ground details.
In determining what land would be available for timber management, we first determined what land should not be harvested. The first step was the designation of over 10,000 acres (29% of the property) as an ecological reserve around the West Branch of the Pleasant River in the northern part of the property. Of the remaining land, about 13% is too steep to harvest and another 4% is wetlands and other nontimberland. About 6% of the property falls into riparian buffers along streams and ponds, and another 5% was designated as “retention areas”– smaller areas reserved from harvesting to protect specific ecological or scenic values such as existing older stands or important Appalachian Trail viewsheds. This left about 15,700 acres, or 43% of the property’s 37,000 acres, as “general management” available for harvesting.
AMC’s harvests in the near term will concentrate on improving the quality of hardwood and mixed hardwood-softwood stands that are in poor condition due to past harvesting and beech bark disease. We will be removing diseased, poor form and low-vigor trees while retaining healthier trees with the potential to grow in to valuable sawlogs. We will also be retaining large diameter trees and some longer-lived species (such as sugar maple and yellow birch) to provide a source of future large trees and dead wood. In most areas the result will be stands with a residual multi-layered canopy that is open enough to provide light to understory seedlings and saplings. Clearcutting will not be used, though some stands are in such poor condition that most overstory trees may be harvested. The harvested timber (mostly hardwood pulpwood) will be sold to a variety of mills across the region.
Annual harvest levels have been determined by forest growth modeling conducted by Huber. For the first decade harvesting will be at a level that is slightly higher than growth as we seek to get low-quality stands into a faster growing condition. After that harvest levels will decline for several decades and growth will significantly exceed cutting. The result is that even with harvesting the standing timber volume in the general management area should increase by about 50% over the next 50 years (and even more in the reserve areas). The result will be apparent to the long-term visitor, with much less “baby forest” and more taller, larger-diameter trees.
After getting a few years of experience as forest managers under our belts, AMC will apply for certification of its forest management practices through the Forest Stewardship Council. This certification is the gold standard for determining whether a landowner’s management is sustainable according to the best current standards. It will also provide an opportunity for outside review and constructive criticism that will help us do an even better job in this new and exciting undertaking.
