Management Goals & Treatments
A team of natural resources experts from Kentucky participated in a 3-day ASCC workshop in November 2022 to synthesize local knowledge and plan the silvicultural treatments for each of the adaptation options. The Kentucky team and the ASCC Network created management objectives, desired future conditions, and locally specific silvicultural practices to achieve their goals and to craft a plan for each of the following adaptation options:
maintain relatively unchanged conditions over time
Management Goals:
Maintain an even-aged stand with current species composition of oak, hickory, and mixed mesophytic species, allowing for landscape variation
Increase resistance to drought, insets, and diseases
Increase tree vigor and seed production in mature trees
Remove undesirable seed sources and species
Alter understory to promote development of advance reproduction of oaks
Maintain and protect hemlock where present
Strategies & Approaches:
2- or 3-step shelterwood
Preparatory cut (if needed) targeting ingrowth in the mid and understory to increase crown vigor and reduce midstory competition
Establishment cut to reduce stocking based on individual site conditions and allow for the release of advanced regeneration
A final overstory removal is expected in the future once desired seedlings and saplings have established
Chemical or mechanical understory competition control
Use of prescribed fire will be assessed following the final overstory removal
allow some change in current conditions, but encourage eventual return to original conditions
Management Goals:
Increase species, structural, and age class diversity by creating a multi-tiered, open structure with a more open canopy condition than what would have been seen historically
Favor native climate-adapted and drought tolerant species
Reintroduce fire to the landscape
Strategies & Approaches:
Extended irregular shelterwood
Establishment cut to reduce density to 70-75% stocking rate with larger gaps in lower productivity sites and reduced density in the matrix
Create 0.5 to 1.5-acre gap openings across 20% of the treatment unit to regenerate future-adapted, drought-tolerant native species
Periodic harvests and understory control to maintain a lower stocking rate
Prescribed fire may be used before or after the initial shelterwood treatments once oak species are able to recruit
actively facilitate change to encourage adaptive responses
Management Goals:
Create a complex, variable structure with lower stocking rates of ~60%
Encourage a shift to a pine-oak dominated ecosystem with future-adapted native and novel species from warmer and drier climates
Increase microsite diversity
Strategies & Approaches:
Variable retention harvest to reduce stocking rates and provide opportunity for regeneration
Create a mosaic of non-uniform gaps to mimic disturbance ranging in size (0.5 to 1.5 acres) and frequency across treatment units.
Natural and artificial regeneration of species on site and novel species from warmer, drier North American climates to enhance climate adaptation to warmer temperatures, flash droughts, and flooding
Allow forests to respond to climate change without direct management or intervention.