- It's my pleasure to introduce Tessa McGann,
a graduate student at the University of Vermont's
Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources.
Tessa's presenting climate change adaptation
among urban and rural foresters
in the Northeastern United States,
an assessment of motivations, practices and barriers.
- Good afternoon.
I'm Tessa McGann
and I'm presenting some of the findings
from my master's research at UVM
on adaptive management
in the Northeastern United States:
Common strategies and motivations
of rural and urban foresters.
We are all well aware
that climate change poses a threat to our forests
to say the least.
Here in the Northeast, it's showing up
in our warmer winters
and more frequent extreme storms.
And then there's related challenges.
The more frequent invasions by non-native pests and plants.
These effects are compounding and unpredictable,
and left unaddressed,
we've seen that they can drastically impact the function
and form of our forests,
sometimes even leading to forest loss
as in the more dramatic pictures on this slide.
But even in less severe situations,
it's clear that in the face of these novel conditions,
forest managers can no longer rely
on the management activities
that were developed based on the conditions
of the last century.
Fortunately, there are a number of ways
that foresters can adapt their management
or mitigate the negative impacts
and take advantage of opportunities of climate change.
The common framework that I'm sure most of you have seen
breaks these practices into three different categories
according to their goals,
whether they're meant to resist change,
increase resilience to change
or help our forests transition to new conditions
in anticipation of change.
And the idea is that we want a mix
of all three strategies on the landscape
because having diverse conditions helps us better respond
to the variable and unpredictable ways
that climate change will play out across landscape.
But this begs the questions,
how are these three strategies represented
on the landscape?
Do we have that mix?
And then what limits or facilitates their adoption?
How do we get there?
These are the questions that are behind the research
I'll be presenting today.
But we broke it down even a little further.
I will be addressing what adaptation practices
are utilized by Northeastern foresters?
What adaptation strategies do these practices represent?
How do they sort into those three buckets?
What factors influence foresters' use
of different practices and strategies?
And I'm going from there,
how can foresters be supported
in advancing their adaptation?
Both deepening the practices they already use
and perhaps expanding that toolbox.
And then finally, I want to note
that I am asking these questions
at both urban and rural foresters.
There are a umber of studies around the world
that ask similar questions of rural foresters
but very, very few have looked
at urban foresters' adaptation.
But given how vital urban forests are
to the wider health and connectivity
of our region's forests
and our region's people,
we thought it was important
to include urban foresters' perspective in this work.
So how did I find out what the foresters are up to?
Well, I conducted in-depth interviews
with 17 rural foresters
and 15 urban foresters across New England and New York.
For this study, we define rural foresters
as people who are making silvicultural decisions
for forested land in rural areas.
So what people usually think of
when they hear forester.
And urban foresters were folks
who made management-level decisions
for naturally forested land in urban areas,
so places like Centennial Woods in Burlington
or Central Park in New York City.
And these folks didn't necessarily
make silvicultural decisions
but they were in charge of the ecology
and the adaptation of the forests.
My interviews were transcribed
and then my co-author and advisor,
Rachel Schattman and I read through the interviews closely,
pulling out major themes.
And I have been conducting further analysis
on those themes.
So this slide is about to get a little bit crazy.
We'll try to take it slowly.
But in my analysis of those themes,
I saw four major categories emerge
for the challenges and responses of participants.
First, there are the environmental challenges,
those climate change stressors
that foresters are responding to.
And then there are the ways that they are responding,
the adaptations that are showing up in their management.
But then there are these other challenges often.
Social and economic challenges
that foresters saw were acting as barriers
to their ability to adapt
and then finally, sometimes foresters spoke
about ways around those barriers or solutions.
I made this figure to really look
at what practices were common among foresters,
and look at the connections between these categories,
how things are playing out.
And the gray lines represent connections
that foresters made in the interviews.
And the width of the line represents the number
of foresters who made that connection.
So for example, this thick gray bar here shows
that 10 foresters said that they were redesigning access,
doing things like upgrading culverts and bridges
in response to extreme weather events,
more frequent extreme storms.
But if you follow through to this thin line here,
this shows that there's only one forester
who said that market conditions were acting
as a barrier to their ability to redesign access.
So hopefully that makes sense.
I know that there's a lot going on in this diagram.
I'm just going to focus on some
of the major patterns that I saw
from looking at this
and from getting further detail in the interviews.
And first of all, I wanna say that foresters,
these are just the rural participants.
And they're responding to an array
of environmental challenges.
But importantly, they're responding to the stressors
that are impacting their forests now
and they're trying to mitigate those stressors.
So they're doing things like upgrading roads
and equipment in response to warmer winters
and extreme storms.
They are very commonly utilizing invasive plant management
to resist invasive plants
and then they're changing their silvicultural prescriptions
to decrease the stress of beech and brows.
When rural foresters are thinking about the future,
what they're responding to really
is the uncertainty of the future,
uncertainty around future weather conditions
and future outbreaks of pests and pathogens.
And again, what they're doing
is upgrading their silvicultural prescriptions
to really emphasize diversity.
And that's species diversity, age class
and structural diversity
on the stand and landscape level.
And this was the single most common practice
among rural participants' adaptation practice.
In terms of barriers,
public perception was a huge theme.
It came up again and again.
And this captures both foresters' concern
around the regional growing opposition to cutting trees
and active management,
which really forms a barrier to silvicultural prescriptions,
as well as general land owner apathy,
not seeing climate change as something worth paying for
through these adaptation practices.
And this really relates to the other major barriers
of economics and markets.
A lot of the adaptation practices are expensive.
And given the general poor markets
and unpredictable markets,
it is harder to justify the investment.
Regarding the solutions to barriers,
I mostly wanna point out that it is far outweighed
by the barriers column.
But I also wanted to note
that a number of participants spoke
about the need to engage with the public,
especially to adjust that barrier
of public perception.
But far fewer of the participants actually went out
of their way to do so.
More often, they requested more tools
to better engage the public.
All right, so this is the same idea
but for the rural participants.
And a lot of the common patterns were the same
for urban and rural.
So I'm mostly going to point out the differences.
Again, urban participants are responding
by resisting those stressors
that they're already feeling:
invasive plants, more droughts, pests and pathogens.
And then they're emphasizing diversity
in the face of the uncertainty of future weather
and pest and pathogen conditions.
But whereas rural foresters
changed the silvicultural prescriptions
and the regeneration conditions
to increase diversity,
urban foresters are really planting trees,
and again, they're planting for species
and age diversity.
The big barriers for urban participants
are labor and economics.
That's a lack of human and financial resources.
And we saw this as tied to the fact
that many of the urban participants
were municipally employed,
and a lot of municipalities have tight budgets
and urban forest management
is historically very under funded.
But on a lighter note,
a greater number of the urban participants spoke
about finding ways around those barriers,
especially by successfully engaging
with the public and collaborating.
That was with other municipal departments
or local non-profit organizations.
And in fact, many of the participants
even named these elements
as being primary parts of their work
as urban foresters.
All right, so how does all this relate back
to those three categories
of resistance, resilience, transition?
You may have gathered that both urban
and rural foresters are primary engaging
in resistance and resilient strategies.
And so resistance
were those things like redesigning access
and invasive plant management,
and when we really dug in to see why foresters
are utilizing these adaptation practices more than others,
we saw two things for resistance.
One, these were often in response
to stressors that foresters are already feeling.
They don't require faith
in any specific future climate change outcome.
And then second, these practices often involved activities
that were already a big part of the manager's toolbox,
things that were really familiar to them.
In the words of a manager on conservation land
in this region.
"Adaptation is not really necessarily changing everything
you do on the ground.
You might make some slight adjustments to things.
But the things that you're doing that are appropriate
for good management also are good for climate."
And this is a general sentiment
that foresters were happy to engage
in adaptation practices
that they already saw as part of good management,
and they're already used to.
Resilience practices, those were the things
like harvesting and planting for species
and structural diversity.
For these, foresters were looking to the future
but again, they weren't placing any bets
on a specific future outcome.
Instead, they saw themselves as spreading that risk.
And again, I have a quote that really sums that up.
This one is from a manager
on national forest land who said,
"What we're doing differently,
we're emphasizing diversity.
We're just hedging our bets
because there's all this stuff going on.
Some of it we understand fairly well
what's happening and why
but then there's things that we have no idea,
we've never even heard of."
So here foresters used phrases like hedging our bets
or diversifying portfolios,
again really spreading the risk.
And so what about transition strategies?
Which do bet on a specific future outcome,
at least more than these other two.
Assisted migration is really the poster child
for transition, especially in the Northeast.
And that's planning species
that are not already present in our forests
but are predicted to move North
with the changing climate.
And I think it's a good practice
to look at to get a general feeling
of how foresters are thinking about the future.
And assisted migration is really rare
among the rural participants
and the general feeling is we're not ready
to go there yet.
The tree species that are on site right now
are not thriving,
so we're not going to jump that gun too much.
In other words, the change isn't great enough yet
or fast enough yet
to warrant doing something as wacky
as planting trees in New England.
Things are different for urban foresters
where planting trees
is already more common to them, more familiar.
And we saw that urban foresters are beginning
to plant things that are just outside
of their climate zone.
So in the words of one city forester,
"The one that's changed has really just been
how we view those species.
What used to be those very hard
and fast and rigid, no, that's from down south
or no, that's from a different climate zone.
We just have to kind of broaden our view a little bit."
Other urban foresters put this in terms
of pushing the envelope a little bit
and what I call this is transition light.
It's not really going too far out of their range
but they are engaging in assisted migration.
Of course, the exception to the rule
is what really makes it.
So I want to quickly talk about there were two foresters,
one urban and rural
who really leaned into assisted migration
and were planning things from Georgia.
And there were two things that stood out
about these foresters.
One, on portions of the forest they managed,
they had experienced climate change impacts
to the point where those forests
were at the point of collapse.
Sorry.
So when rural foresters talk
about not being ready to go there yet,
it seems like perhaps these two had reached that yet.
And the second thing is that both of these foresters
had engaged in climate change adaptation workshops
before they experimented with assisted migration.
And I also quickly wanna say
that there were a couple of rural foresters
who were experimenting with under planting things,
like pine and oak,
which are present on the landscape
but they wanted to see more of in light of climate change.
And these foresters were the ones
with the greatest access to financial resources,
which we saw as mitigating some of the risk of transition.
So quickly to sum it up,
I found in my work that adaptation is common, all right?
Foresters are mainly employing assistance
and resilient strategies
and transition is far less common in the Northeast.
And what we think we're seeing
is that part of these avoidance of transition
is a risk management strategy.
Transition just requires a little too much faith
in a specific future outcome
and it's hard when weather conditions
are still so variable
and so much isn't certain.
And then especially for rural foresters,
it requires engaging in practices
that are far less common and unfamiliar.
Things like planting.
We did see that the foresters who engaged in transition
had reached this point of collapse with their forest,
and as climate change progresses,
we think more foresters and forests
will reach that point as well,
and transition might become more common.
But if we would like to see that mix
of adaptation strategies in advance
of reaching these points of collapse,
we recommend more cost share programs
to mitigate that financial risk.
Perhaps framing having a mix of adaptation strategies
in the same terms as having a mix of species.
Throwing in a little transition in there
to help spread the risk.
Those trainings seem to be working.
It worked for the two foresters engaged in transition,
and they're widely available
but keep it up.
And then finally, I just wanted to note
that again that a number of rural foresters called
for more communication tools
to help them adjust those issues
of public perception.
And I know I'm over my time
but I wanna thank my advisors
and co-authors, Rachel Schattman at UMaine,
Tony D'Amato at UVM
and Todd Ontl with the Northern Institute
of Applied Climate Science.
Thanks to my committee members
and my two labs, and all of the participants
who were so generous with their thoughts
and their time.