Management Goals & Treatments
What approach best prepares forest ecosystems for climate change? Adaptation options occupy a continuum of management goals related to their levels of desired change. A team of natural resource specialists and researchers familiar with the Second College Grant convened for a three-day workshop in the summer of 2016 to develop the study design for the ASCC project site. The team developed a set of desired future condition statements, objectives, and tactics for each major climate adaptation trajectory:
maintain relatively unchanged conditions over time
Management Goals:
Encourage a multi-aged / size structure and maintain quality across all size classes
Maintain hydrological cycle and erosion
Stable carbon pools with accreting living biomass carbon
Maintain/increase vigor and quality of residual trees while maintaining current productivity levels consistent with type
Strategies & Approaches:
Reduce competition for moisture, nutrients, and light
Single-tree selection (70-80 ft2/acre)
Multi-aged cohort
Retain biological legacies
Increase downed dead wood
allow some change in current conditions, but encourage eventual return to original conditions
Management Goals:
Multiple combinations of species composition and structure present (e.g., multiple pathways to recovery from disturbance)
High overall tree species and functional diversity with increased component of local species adapted to future climate conditions/disturbance compared to current condition
Multiple age classes present
Increased amount of biological legacies and dead wood
Same growth/productivity as Resistance treatment, but allowing for some deviation/oscillation
High production of beech hard mast for wildlife
Strategies & Approaches:
Reduce competition for moisture, nutrients, and light
Group and single-tree selection (20% in gaps of 0.1-0.25 acre in size, 20% in reserves, 70-80 ft2/acre matrix)
Maintain and restore diversity of native species
Increase drought-adapted species (red maple and beech)
actively facilitate change to encourage adaptive responses
Management Goals:
Increased dominance of species adapted to future climate change currently on site plus increased proportion of planted species (≥ 20% composition) not currently on site that are better-adapted to future climate change
Increased amount of biological legacies and dead wood
Increased diversity of tree functional traits
Strategies & Approaches:
Variable density thin / irregular shelterwood (20% in gaps of 0.25-1 acre, 10-20% in reserves, 70-80 ft2/acre matrix)
Increase future-adapted, off-site species (northern red oak, bitternut hickory, eastern white pine, eastern hemlock, basswood, black birch, bigtooth aspen, chestnut)