Young Forest Habitats

How to Make Healthy Young Forest Habitats

Wildlife need young forest for food, shelter, and raising their young. It's great to be able to create large, interconnected tracts of young forest and shrubland: 10, 20, or even 50 acres.

It's not always possible to work on such a large scale. Another way is to divide a woodland into blocks 5 acres and larger and make young forest on some of those blocks every 5 years, so that young forest habitat constantly cycles across the land. For a healthy, wildlife-friendly mix of different-aged forest, keep at least 5 percent of the woods in a young stage (up to 15 to 20 years, maximum).

Check out this Young Forest Guide, a 28-page introductory publication from the Wildlife Management Institute.

A timber harvest can be an excellent, cost-effective way to create young forest habitat for wildlife and promote a diverse and healthy forest. Penn State’s Forestry with Confidence: A Guide for Woodland Owners publication offers guidance for landowners considering a timber harvest. Although focused on Pennsylvania, the guide includes good basic information that applies throughout the Northeast and Upper Midwest. Another excellent guide you may find helpful, also by Penn State Extension, is entitled Timber Harvesting: An Essential Management Tool.

Conservationists also use tracked mulching machines and controlled fire to regenerate shrubland and woods, removing middle-aged or older trees and letting young trees sprout to provide new young-forest habitat. Get a front-seat view of a "brontosaurus" machine clearing trees to renew habitat.

Because some management actions such as brush-hogging a field or clearcutting a forest stand temporarily eliminate some habitat, good land-stewards make sure enough other habitat remains close at hand. A thoughtful plan keeps ample good habitat over time and space so that all wildlife will thrive.

Qualified natural resources specialists, including state private-lands habitat biologists, employees of the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), and foresters with wildlife training, can help landowners and property managers decide what works best on a given property – plus guide them toward funding that may pay for habitat enhancement.

Most young forest and shrubland will grow out of a usable condition after about 20 years. For this reason, renewing young forest should be a long-term commitment, with management activities planned into the future. Landowners can cooperate with their neighbors to put together large projects taking in several properties.

That's thinking about wildlife in a responsible, sustainable way – and it's what the Young Forest Project is all about.

Revised from The Young Forest Project: Growing Wildlife Habitat Together

Opening Day in Pennsylvania

Realtree recently published a video, spotlighting deer hunting in Pennsylvania. It is worth watching.  Hunting is a true tradition in this state.  Some notable York County places featured in the video are Clay Godfrey Meats, Three Sons Meat Market in Seven Valleys, and Dallastown High School.

The video notes that more than 500,000 hunters hit the woods on the opening day of Pennsylvania's deer season, schools close and businesses shut down.

The Deer Rifle season in Pennsylvania kicked off on Monday, Nov. 26 and concluded on Saturday, Dec. 8th.  I hope many of you were successful in harvesting a deer.

New Research Publication: Management Implications of Large-Ungulate Herbivory

moderate/high ungulate herbivory risk

I wanted to share a recently released Forest Service Northern Research Station publication.  The publication entitled, Subcontinental-scale patters of large-ungulate herbivory and synoptic review of restoration management implications for midwestern and northeastern forests provides an in-depth overview of browsing impacts by deer and other large ungulates across a wide range, from the NE to the mid-west. Researchers concluded that 59 percent of the 182.4 million acres of forest land inventoried across that area was estimated to have moderate or high browse impacts.  All of this relates to greater challenges in the successful regeneration and management of these forests.

The study findings confirm the following for forest regeneration management within areas stressed by high herbivory:
1.) Browse impacts have extensive and long-term implications. Large ungulates still impede regeneration management in problem areas identified by Leopold and colleagues 70 years ago. Leopold did not predict that control or reduction of large ungulates would become a perennial challenge, but he did correctly anticipate that problem areas would expand.
2.) Less palatable tree species will continue to have a competitive advantage during the regeneration stage, potentially resulting in a future canopy composition that is different from the existing canopy-dominant species.
3.) Monitoring composition, structure, and browse will be critically important for success. Planning for regeneration management is made difficult by the interactions of multiple factors, such as the size and condition of the forest tract, dominant tree species, degree of alien plant or pest intrusion, and the population dynamics of the browsers, as influenced by birth rate and losses from predation, disease, and starvation.

Here is the full abstract:
Browse of forest understory vegetation by deer and other large ungulates alters ecosystem processes, making it difficult to regenerate forest land in herbivory-stressed areas. Seventy years ago, Aldo Leopold identified problem areas in the United States where overpopulation of white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) was likely to lead to overbrowsing of nutritive plants. Species of plants with little or no nutritive value would thereby gain a competitive advantage. Recent measurements of browse impacts on regionwide forest inventory plots in the midwestern and northeastern United States provide the opportunity to review the work of Leopold and others. A visualization of the probability of browse impact levels that warrant consideration during regeneration planning is presented for comparison to historical maps. Currently, 59 percent of the 182.4 million acres of forest land inventoried in the Midwest and Northeast was estimated to have moderate or high browse impacts. The Mid-Atlantic region had the highest proportion of forest land with moderate or high browse impacts (79 percent). The oak/hickory (Quercus/Carya) and maple/beech/birch (Acer/Fagus/Betula) forest-type groups each had percentages of forest land with moderate or high impacts above the regional average, 69 percent and 65 percent, respectively. The problem areas described by Leopold and others persist and new areas have emerged in the Central/Plains, Mid-Atlantic, and New England States. The study findings confirm three realities of forest regeneration management for forests under herbivory stress in the Midwest and Northeast: 1) The scope and persistence of large-ungulate herbivory has long-term wide-ranging implications for regeneration management; 2) less palatable tree species will continue to have a competitive advantage during the regeneration phase and are likely to be different species from the current canopy dominants; and 3) successful regeneration management of these forests requires more emphasis on ungulate-compatible prescriptions, novel approaches, and adaptive science.

You can view the full PDF of the publication by clicking here. (3.0 MB)