Management Goals & Treatments
A team of natural resource specialists from the Ohio Hills, regional managers, and scientists came together for a three-day workshop in May 2022 to develop the study design for the ASCC project site. Overarching management goals for the project include:
Manage for a compositionally and structurally diverse sustainable oak ecosystem
Consider visual aesthetics where timber harvesting is recommended
Support Ohio’s timber industry by promoting important commercial species such as white oak
Mitigate risks of invasive species establishment or spread
Sustain and promote organismal and functional diversity
Protect known or discovered archaeological resources
Employ all applicable water quality best management practices during timber harvest
Support and provide recreational opportunities, including hunting and wildlife watching, through diversifying forest age and structure
Support demonstration and science delivery
Each ASCC site utilized three adaptation options (resistance, resilience, and transition), as well as a control or “no action” treatment where no management takes place. The team developed a set of Desired Future Condition statements, Objectives, and Tactics for each major climate adaptation trajectory. These three trajectories are briefly summarized below:
RESISTANCE
maintain relatively unchanged conditions over time
Management Goals:
Maintain an oak-dominated stand where understory matches overstory
Relative density 70%
Resistance to disease (oak wilt and future novel diseases)
Regeneration matches composition of the overstory
Low incidence of invasive species
Protect state endangered and threatened wildlife species (bats, birds, timber rattlesnake)
Strategies & Approaches:
Pre-commercial and commercial treatments
Lower stand density to ~70% relative density through thin from below
Overstory thinning as needed
Promote advanced regen of oak-hickory component & prepare for future recruitment
Prescribed burn to favor oaks
allow some change in current conditions, but encourage eventual return to original conditions
Management Goals:
Multi-cohort stand with diversity of ages, structures, species, and light conditions within natural range of variation
Natural regeneration of oaks and hickories
Maintain large oaks
Promote wildlife habitat and herbaceous understory
Introduce fire throughout treatment
Low incidence of invasive plant species
Protect state endangered and threatened wildlife species
Resilience to wind, drought, ice storms, fire, and disease
Strategies & Approaches:
Thin matrix to ~70% relative density through thin from below
Overstory thinning as needed
Expanding gap / irregular shelterwood with variable retention (two entries).
Range of 1/10th ac to ½ ac gaps based on desired species (~20% of stand)
Total ~4.5 acres
Mechanical and chemical site prep
Shelterwood prep cut
Prescribed burn following harvest
Natural regeneration of oaks and hickories; accept yellow-poplar, sassafras, and others in gaps
actively facilitate change to encourage adaptive responses
Management Goals:
Complex, multi-aged, variable structure
Native and novel future-adapted, drought-tolerant species (pine-oak woodland)
Maintain 50% canopy cover of white oak
Maintain productive forests that align with future conditions
Accommodate mixed to high severity levels of disturbance (drought and fire)
Low incidence of invasive species
Resistance to disease
Protect state endangered and threatened wildlife species
Strategies & Approaches:
Thin matrix to ~70% relative density through thin from below; overstory thinning as needed
Patch clearcuts with residuals in clumps
Leave seed trees
10 acres in gaps that are 1 acre in size (50% gaps, 50% matrix)
Prescribe burn
Chemical site prep
Plant mix of conifers and xeric deciduous species in clusters
Based on shade tolerance (silvics) in a grid across stand (openings, edges, and matrix)
Seed sourcing from Missouri and Arkansas to match Ozark-like climate projections
Plant C4 grasses mix from Ozarks
Consider shrubs for wildlife habitat
allow forests to respond to climate change without direct management intervention
Since climate change impacts all forests globally, we cannot maintain a true “control.” With this in mind, we consider an approach in which forests are allowed to respond to climate change in the absence of direct silvicultural intervention as an appropriate baseline for many questions.