In the new Worcester Range plan, the state attempts to balance deforestation and conservation

The Agency of Natural Resources has finalized a new plan for managing the Worcester Range, an 18,772-acre state land in central Vermont that includes popular landmarks such as Elmore State Park, Mount Hunger, Perry Hill Trails and Stowe Pinnacle.

More than 1,350 comments from members of the public on the plan illustrate the increased interest and tensions that have emerged in recent years surrounding the management of Vermont’s forests, particularly those related to timber harvesting.

The 394-page document outlines the state’s intention to support a number of different causes for the country over the next 20 years. These include expanding recreation and hunting opportunities, improving wildlife habitat, maintaining and expanding carbon storage and sequestration processes, and protecting land from flooding and timber harvesting.

The management draft has elicited a range of reactions from advocates, experts and members of the public involved in the planning process. While people who advocate for preserving more forests say too much deforestation is planned on the land, timber harvesters want more of it earmarked for logging.

The plan calls for 9,961 acres, or 54% of the administrative unit’s total area, to allow “natural processes to shape the landscape.”

But state officials have also designated 1,928 acres of the area, about 10.3%, for potential logging work over the next two decades, a part of the plan that has become a central point of discussion.

Tony D’Amato, director of the forestry program at the University of Vermont’s Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources, argues that both forms of management are “necessary.”

He thinks about how to reconcile “all these different goals and values” related to forests “from carbon to biodiversity to resilience.”

Doing this on public land, with a lot of oversight, he said, is a “great opportunity, although I know it certainly makes individuals think and say, ‘Wow, we’re going to cut off public land?'”

A wildlife highway

The Worcester Range is one of Vermont’s largest contiguous blocks of habitat, according to the Agency of Natural Resources, spanning the towns of Elmore, Worcester, Middlesex, Waterbury and Stowe.

Acting as a bridge between the northern Green Mountains and the Northeast Kingdom, the mountains are an important part of a larger landscape that allows wildlife to “reach between the Adirondacks and western Massachusetts all the way north and east to Maine, New Brunswick, etc.” hike the Gaspé Peninsula,” says the plan.

The landscape’s varying elevations allow for “relatively unhindered movement of species,” the document says, which “facilitates climate resilience by allowing species to move and adapt their ranges in response to climate change.”

The Worcester Range borders thousands of acres of land protected by easements, including the privately owned Worcester Woods and Woodbury Mountain Wilderness Preserve, both of which are more than 6,000 acres in size.

State officials have not updated the area’s management plan since the late 1980s, according to Brad Greenough, a forester with the Vermont Department of Forests, Parks and Recreation who worked on the Worcester plan. Still, some wood has been harvested there in recent years, he said.

From 1980 to 2013, loggers conducted a total of 15 timber harvests covering 720 acres, in addition to a seven-acre harvest that occurred in 1961, the plan states.

The proposed increase in logging activity is possible in part because the state of Vermont has previously acquired private land. The new state ownership made this land accessible for crops as well as land that already belonged to the state but was inaccessible under the management plan due to surrounding private land.

Overall, Greenough expects the changes outlined in the plan will not be noticeable to many residents. He noted that the state is placing a new emphasis on managing forests to better adapt to increasingly extreme weather and absorb more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, helping to curb climate change.

A difficult balance

Environmentalists, foresters and scientists often debate whether forests can benefit from sustainable timber harvesting. Some practices are specifically designed to increase the rate at which the forest absorbs carbon from the atmosphere and to create more diversity in different parts of the forest.

Many forests in Vermont were logged in the 19th century when European settlers cleared the land for agriculture. Scientists estimate that less than 0.1% of the land in New England and New York is covered by old-growth forests.

With such a large area deforested around the same time, the current goal of sustainable harvesting practices is to “diversify forest conditions and, in many cases, restore some of that complexity to forests that would have been under this influence in the past. “of natural disturbances,” said UVM’s D’Amato.

D’Amato is working with the state and the Northern Institute of Applied Climate Science to conduct research on land in the Worcester Range. First, they will assess how climate change and other stressors such as disease and invasive species threaten forests. They then develop strategies to manage these stressors and monitor the results.

For example, loggers could create gaps in the canopy to make room for new, younger trees, which could respond to an event like a storm “differently than a mature tree,” D’Amato said. Creating space could also promote the growth of different types of species that “have different responses to drought or may not be susceptible to a particular insect or disease,” he said.

D’Amato sees the need to find a balance between actively managing the land and leaving nature alone.

One of the “beauties of public lands,” he said, is that the planning process allows officials to balance various priorities, “unlike perhaps commercial forest land, where the primary goal may be more focused on economics, or perhaps a national park.” , where the focus may be on conservation,” he said.

In this case, D’Amato believes the state did everything right.

Others, including members of the advocacy group Standing Trees, argue that forests are healthiest when left alone and that forests on federal lands serve taxpayers best if they are not cut down.

Zack Porter, executive director of Standing Trees, pointed to a map of the area included in the plan that shows nearby private properties, much of which is included in the state’s Current Use program. The program gives landowners who own forests a cheaper property tax rate if they leave the land undeveloped, and unless they are enrolled in a new, selective current use category, most of them are required to regularly harvest timber.

“The vast majority of what we see here is regularly managed for timber,” Porter said. “There is simply no reason why we should introduce roads and logging trails and undertake deforestation in this landscape. It makes no sense. We do ongoing forestry in the landscape around the Worcester Range.”