I'm gonna talk about old forests
that we have now in the state
and then the future of old forests.
Old forests that we might never see
but will be out there someday.
And I just wanna start by talking
about what is an old forest.
And I think there's a lot of different concepts
around the idea of old forests,
and particularly the concept of old growth.
And old-growth forests that maybe have never been disturbed
in hundreds and hundreds of years,
they're almost as much a social concept
as they are a scientific concept.
And it's just a very complex one,
and it's too much for me to think about.
And we just don't really have much true old growth
in Vermont.
So I like to think about old forests.
Forests that have been operating under natural processes
for a significant amount of time.
Say, 150 years is a good cutoff.
They're biologically mature,
they have their natural species composition,
and they often, but not always,
have evidence of natural disturbance processes,
regeneration, lots of structure, dead and downed wood,
tip-ups, and minimal evidence of past human interference.
Old forests are rare in Vermont.
And I had to make my slides
before I could actually pull together the numbers.
So this is here.
But we have in Vermont I think
about 1,900 acres of old forest tracked
in our Natural Heritage database.
I'm gonna come back to that.
But that's just to give you a sense
of how rare old forests are in the state.
But rather than just numbers,
I thought it would be fun to look at some pictures
of old forests and just think
about the range of old forests we have now.
And one of them is this forest near Silver Lake and Barnard.
70 acres of hemlock-northern hardwood forest.
Big trees, rich soils,
so you get species like orchis spectabilis.
And then there's high-elevation forests,
like this one on Blue Ridge Mountain,
in the Green Mountain National Forest.
Montane, yellow birch, red spruce forest 600-plus acres up
on this mountain that, until recently,
when they were discovered during inventories conducted
by Aaron Marcus, no one really appreciated
that there was this very large area
of old forest up on that mountain.
And then there's what I think of as atypical old forests,
because they don't develop old trees
or some of those structures,
but cliffs and cliff brows or swamps.
And these red cedar woodlands are a great example of that.
And they might be some of our oldest trees in Vermont.
This is from work that Matt Peters completed,
Matt's sitting here in the audience,
coring some of these red cedars
and finding very old trees.
On the Austin Hill trees,
almost 300 years old.
That's trees going back to 1734.
And then from this private land site that we visited
and found this downed wood
and cut a slice of a 445-year-old tree lying
on the ground there.
Probably reflective of those twisted,
gnarly trees growing on the cliffs.
So there's a wide variety of old forests
that we have in the state.
It's been a priority
of the Vermont Natural Heritage Inventory
of the Vermont Fish & Wildlife Department
to find and describe and map more of these occurrences
of old forest.
And that's work that I've been working on
and others have been contributing to as well.
They're not easily found.
So it's a combination of using anecdotal evidence
and things like lidar mapping to find tall trees
that might indicate old undisturbed sites.
So again, that's where we're going out,
we're identifying them,
and actually working on developing a model of old forests
with the Wildlands Network.
Alex Vanko, who's shown there,
has been crunching our existing Natural Heritage polygons
of old forest and trying to come up with a map
that could predict places to go focus on.
It's using all those variables.
It's an iterative process,
and we're working on refining it.
But it's an exciting thing to think
that maybe we could have some ability to narrow the focus
of where we look for old forests.
We're putting these
into the Vermont Natural Heritage database,
which is the database that tracks our rare species
and significant natural communities.
And that's where that number of 1,900 acres
of old forest comes from.
But it's only 51 different examples.
And I know that there are more out there.
I know that there are people in this room
who probably know about other old forests
that aren't yet in that database.
And so partly this is just an effort to compile,
really, I think for the first time,
even though there's so much known about a lot of old forests
in Vermont, I don't know that it's all compiled
and mapped in one place.
And so this is really the effort to do that.
And I hope that those numbers will continue to go up.
But they still represent a very small portion of the state:
almost 2,000 acres out of 4 million acres of forest.
And we know that old forests are valuable
for all sorts of reasons.
The complex structures, the habitat diversity,
the soils, the carbon storage.
And so the idea of restoring old forests is a key part
of having an ecologically functional landscape in Vermont.
And so thinking about future old forests in the state.
And we have Vermont Conservation Design,
which is an overall vision
for an ecologically functional landscape in Vermont.
Having a landscape that's intact, connected, and diverse.
And it comes from the mission
of the Vermont Fish & Wildlife Department.
And I don't really have time to go into all of this,
but it's a coarse filter conservation design
at multiple scales,
using coarse filter features to meet the needs
of many, many individual species.
Something like 20 to 40,000 different species
that we have in Vermont.
And old forests are one key coarse filter
that's a part of Vermont Conservation Design.
Along with young forests, too,
I should mention even though they're not the focus of this.
But it's really thinking about both ends
of that forest structure spectrum.
In Vermont Conservation Design,
there's a target to have about 10%
of Vermont's forest as old forest,
to develop back into old forest,
to reintroduce that function to the landscape.
At one time, it was much more than 10% of the landscape.
But to reintroduce it at a scale that is meaningful
but also practically achievable.
And we have that target is to be divided
across all the state's nine biophysical regions,
shown here, and proportional to the matrix forest types,
the natural community types in that region.
So the broad widespread forest types.
So this is not focusing on those cliff brows and red cedar,
but the common northern hardwood,
red spruce northern hardwood,
hemlock-northern hardwood forests.
And this is kind of way into the weeds here,
but Vermont Conservation Design identifies
these highest priority forest blocks in each region.
And that 10% number is derived from 15% of the matrix forest
within all of those forest blocks in the region.
And when you break that down into the numbers,
you get what's up there for a total of 419,000 acres.
And again, that's meant to be representative
of the different natural community types.
And we know a lot about natural communities in Vermont,
but we don't have a statewide map.
We do, however, have work done by Mark Anderson
and Charles Ferree mapping habitat types
across all of the northeast.
And this crosswalks very well to natural communities.
Not perfectly one-to-one, but very close.
And so we can look at those forest blocks
and the matrix habitat types in them,
crosswalk that to natural communities,
and get a sense of what type of forests are out there
and where they are.
Then we can take the wildlands report
that Liz just talked about.
For those of you who weren't here for this talk,
the two-sentence introduction is that the
Wildlands, Woodlands, Farmlands, & Communities Organization
did a inventory of wildlands across New England,
places that will be managed to be,
manage forever wild natural processes, going forward.
Places that, over time,
will likely develop into old forests.
We can take that information for Vermont,
overlay it with that statewide habitat map,
and see how we're doing
towards meeting those Vermont Conservation Design targets
for old forests.
Not old forests we have now,
but what will likely become old in the future.
And Brian Hall from the Harvard Forest was able
to do that analysis and create a huge spreadsheet.
You can't read it, it doesn't matter,
but it's got all sorts of overlay of habitat type,
biophysical region, ownership type,
whether it's wild, not wild.
All of that's in that spreadsheet.
And so I could run analysis, then, on that
and start thinking about how those numbers play out
at the regional scale.
The map image is an example of a parcel overlaid
on those habitat types.
The takeaway, the upshot from that,
is that in each region of the state,
here's how we're doing
towards having areas of future old forests
that might meet those Vermont Conservation Design targets.
So the two colors, green and blue, both represent wildlands.
The green is wildlands that are managed to be wild
but not permanently protected.
The blue is areas that are more strongly protected
with more confidence in their longevity.
This is all still ownership, but not necessarily.
It's not like Use Value Program.
It's all conservation ownership, but at varying levels.
So some of it is like,
administrative designations of agency lands in the green,
which theoretically could be changed,
but are unlikely to be changed.
So the big takeaway from this:
Can you read the biophysical region names, I hope?
Those two really long bars with the blue,
those are the mountains, the Green Mountains.
Northern and southern Green Mountains.
And we have a lot of future old forests
up high in the mountains.
And as much as I love places like this,
this is not where we need to focus more effort
on developing future old forests.
We need to go down into the valleys,
into the other natural community types
that are not well represented in these wildlands.
I just wanna show that in two examples here.
The first is the southern Green Mountains.
So there's that region.
There's the target identified in Vermont Conservation Design
for old forests back into the landscape.
Here's an example of a current wildland there.
This is the Lye Brook Wilderness.
Beautiful spot.
But here's another example.
This is the Hamilton Falls Natural Area
at Jamaica State Park
and the Turkey Mountain Natural Area owned
by the Nature Conservancy in the West River Valley.
Very different habitats
than what you find up on the ridge
in the Green Mountain National Forest.
We can take all the wildlands in the region
and look at them by different habitat types,
and that's what this graph is showing.
The green here is how the matrix forests are distributed
across the biophysical region,
and the blue is how they're currently,
or is how wildlands represent those types.
So where the blue bar is higher than the green,
that habitat type is overrepresented in wildlands.
And where that's flipped,
particularly where you see those gray arrows,
those are places where that habitat is poorly represented,
and more representation of that in wildland
to become future old forest would help meet the targets
of Vermont Conservation Design.
I don't know if those are readable,
but that's Appalachian hemlock-northern hardwood forest
and Laurentian-Acadian pine-hemlock-hardwood forest.
So lower-elevation forests.
And just to contrast that again,
we don't need to be up on the mountain ridges.
We need to be down in the valleys looking at oak, pine,
and hemlock forests.
And we can look at the region
and see where those habitats are,
and we can also see where they aren't.
So I've just taken the habitats and only showing them
within the Green Mountain National Forest.
We could not likely meet that target of representation
by focusing only on adding more wildlands
in the Green Mountain National Forest.
We need to get out of that into other places.
So it's not as simple as just looking
at currently conserved lands
and shifting the way they're managed.
It's really, I think, about finding new conservation lands
that could meet these goals.
Lastly, I just wanna contrast that with the Champlain Hills,
the biophysical region just to our northeast here.
Smaller region, less forest,
so there's a smaller target.
But look at the progress there.
The target is to have 13,000 acres
of old forest in the future,
and we currently have 184 acres
that are contributing towards that.
1.4%.
And while there's really cool natural areas
in Champlain Hills, like Franklin Bog,
I just threw this in because it's such a great spot
and wanted to have a photo
at this point in the presentation,
there really isn't much wildland.
There really isn't that much conserved land
in the region to begin with.
But here's two examples.
There's the Lake Carmi Bog Natural Area,
and there's a private lands easement
in Jericho that also is,
I believe that's a Northeast Wilderness Trust easement
that's contributing to that target.
But they're small specific areas.
And there's a long way to go.
And it's not even worth putting up a map
of habitat type representation here
'cause everything is needed.
So there's the overall progress again.
And I'm really looking forward to doing more analysis,
digging down into that level of detail for every region,
and thinking about what that could say
about the conservation in all those regions.
So just to kind of sum that up in a couple of key messages,
that old forests are rare.
I think we still have lots
of examples out there awaiting discovery.
But this restoration of old forests piece is key
and really needs to focus on these habitat,
ecosystem, natural community types
that are not currently well represented in lands
that are being managed to become old forests.
We need to focus on those and direct effort there.
And I think I'm right on time to allow for questions.
Thank you.
(audience applauds)
Yeah, so if you didn't hear that,
the question was that wildland
and wilderness can be loaded terms,
and how to work around that.
Don't know if I have a perfect answer for that.
I think that's the challenges and the perceptions
that people bring to those conversations.
What I hope in doing work like this
is that by having data
and a scientific reasoning
for why we benefit from having certain areas as becoming,
whether you call it wildland or future old forest,
that we can show the reasoning behind it,
and we can show that it is targeted
and specific and intentional.
I think that that can go a long way
towards showing why these are reasonable
and achievable goals, as opposed to just having a blanket,
almost philosophical position
on why something should be the way it is.
The Vermont Conservation Design in particular
is a science-driven project with a very specific goal.
And I think that is very helpful
for articulating why we should be working on these,
and why they're not exclusive
of all the other benefits, uses, management strategies,
and approaches we can take to conservation in forests.
Thanks for that question. Yeah.
Okay.
Not a particular place,
but I haven't looked into this in detail.
But I don't know that we have much,
I mean, we just don't have much sand plain
and clay plain forests, period,
represented in conserved lands.
And I don't know how much of that is wildland.
I can dig into that. That would be really cool to look at.
But I think those are just so rare, so valuable, so cool,
that being able to wave a wand
and protect some of those might be one of my first steps,
if I had that power.
Do you know how I can do that?
(audience laughs)
Thanks.
[Moderator] One more question.
Okay. Yeah, Matt?
Yeah, thanks.
Just to summarize that real quickly, like,
is there a role for existing conserved lands
or lands in the Use Value Program?
I mean, it's not just about finding new lands, I think.
And yeah, I agree with that,
that there are opportunities in our existing portfolio
of land conservation, both permanent and,
I don't know, not quite permanent, like UVA,
to get at meeting these targets.
And I think part of this is,
I don't have spatial data yet for this,
but I'm hoping to be able to look at that
and think about forest block, patch size,
specific locations, and to actually start narrowing in
on not maybe parcel by parcel,
but like, in this forest block there's this mix of habitats,
and it seems like a reasonable place
to be focusing on expanding conservation,
whether that's new conservation,
or thinking about the lands that are already there.
But I think that really has to be very specific
and parcel by parcel,
and then weighed against all the other values
that are going into, or that are coming from those lands.
Sorry, I think I was told that we're out of time
for more questions.
(audience applauds)