Print PageOver the past 300 years New England, and most of the Eastern U.S., has undergone a remarkable transformation. Following an early history of deforestation and agriculture, the region reforested naturally in the late 1800s when broad-scale agriculture shifted westward and New England industrialized. Today, forest covers more than 80% of the region making it one of the most heavily forested and most thickly settled parts of the US. This remarkable history presents New Englanders with an unprecedented opportunity – a second chance to determine the fate of its forests and landscape in the face of new challenges of deforestation, perforation and fragmentation. Due to these threats, in all six New England states, forest cover is now declining for the first time in more than a century and a half.
In response to this remarkable opportunity and challenge, a group of scientists is pursuing two tracks of activism and research: (i) publishing, communicating and advancing the Wildlands and Woodlands Vision, a recent report that draws on history, ecology and forests’ societal values to argue that 70% of the region be conserved in forest, permanently free from development and (ii) developing the Future Scenarios of Forest Change project, a national initiative in concert with LTER colleagues to assess the potential consequences of land use, climate change, global markets, and landowner decisions on forests and their ecosystem services and to provide resources to guide forest policy, conservation, and management promoting long-term resilience and adaptability.
Results/Conclusions
The Wildlands and Woodlands effort is being advanced by a growing group of more than 75 groups, agencies and organizations in the regional W&W Partnership through major activities that include: the development of new approaches to increase the rate of land protection; application of effective means of conservation finance; outreach to policymakers and decision makers; engagement with landowners and stakeholders; and ecological research. The Americas Future effort, part of the larger LTER Future Scenarios project, engages scientists and stakeholders to define a set of narrative scenarios with contrasting assumptions related to climate mitigation, biomass energy, global markets, and landscape-scale conservation. The scenarios are coupled with a forest landscape model (LANDIS-II) to forecast the consequences for important ecosystems services across forested regions of the U.S. – New England, Lake States, Pacific Northwest, Alaska and Southeast. The scenarios will be linked to conservation, policy, and management goals defined by stakeholders and will coordinate with many national broader scale assessments.
