The New Forest Stewardship Bill

As land stewards and land managers, we should support the new Forest Stewardship bill, S1954/A4538. If passed, this bill would be a huge step to better management of our state-owned lands. It dovetails well with both the recommendations of the Pinelands Forestry Advisory Committee, which I helped to draft, and the new Forest Stewardship Assessment Law for private lands.

For over 10 years, I have been trying to demonstrate how the science of Forestry can help us address our land management challenges in New Jersey. In the early 2000s, when I was working for New Jersey Conservation Foundation (NJCF), we did one of the first ecological forestry demonstration projects in New Jersey at the Dorothy Preserve in Estell Manor. We created open woodland habitat for state threatened red-headed woodpeckers and restored an Atlantic white cedar swamp We thinned (logged) about 40 acres of forest to actually create the woodpecker habitat and then used the proceeds from the woodships produced by the thinning to help pay for this habitat creation. Logging (or more correctly, the practice of Siviculture) is an essential tool in the land stewardship toolbox, especially where the landscape is too fragmented for natural disturbance, such as hot wildfires, to be safely utilized.

For several years after the thinning at Dorothy Preserve, we planned to conduct a series of prescribed burns to reduce the woody shrub layer – essentially converting it from a woody shrub layer to more of a herbaceous layer ideal for rare Pine Barrens Plants. The final part of this innovative plan was to selectively herbicide about 10 acres of what had been a degraded Atlantic white cedar swamp and enclose it with an electric deer fence to promote Atlantic white cedar regeneration. Atlantic white cedar is a critical habitat type that has been declining throughout its range for decades.

All of this activity was part of scientifically-based Forest Stewardship Plan developed by NJCF and a forestry consultant, so I was excited to learn that the state was going to try to do the same exact thing – write Forest Stewardship Plans that would create habitat and pay for themselves through the proceeds of implementing the plan. This was the exact model we were promoting at NJCF and the very definition of ecological forestry – being able to create critical habitat and produce a sustainable forest product. By the way, the pine chips that we harvested went into making high-quality paper for self-adhesive postage stamps.

Ecological Forestry in the Pine Barrens

Since that time, demonstration projects have been done by other conservation organizations, notably NJ Audubon at their Hovnaniain Sanctuary in the Pine Barrens. Among other goals, New Jersey Audubon’s Forest Stewardship Plan focuses on using Silvculture to create habitat for rare snakes. Another example, this time in the Highlands, was an excellent Forest Stewardship Plan developed for a large portion of the Newark Watershed lands. One of the main recommendations in the Newark plan was to create additional golden winged warbler habitat through Silvicultural treatments. Golden winged warbler populations have seriously declined in New Jersey and throughout their range. The plan was developed by a forestry consultant in partnership with NJ Audubon and Conservation Resources. It involved significant community and scientific input. Flowing from all of these forest stewardship initiatives, The Forest Guild held a workshop in 2010 in New Jersey for land managers promoting the concept and science behind ecological forestry.

As you know, my on-the-ground land management activities now take place on a smaller scale in the Highlands at Schiff Nature Preserve. Forest Stewardship Plans are a great way to determine conservation threats and opportunities and present best practices as to how to address these.

For example, using our Forest Stewardship Plan as a guide, Schiff Natural Lands Trust is actively addressing the issues of overabundant deer through an aggressive deer management program; we have one of the most active prescribed burning programs on non-profit properties in the state; and we are addressing the threat of emerging non-native invasive species through work with the New Jersey Invasive Species Strike Team. Our Forest Stewardship Plan also focuses on maintenance of critical habitat we have for a state threatened plant (S1) and animal species and as well as species of special concern.

I believe our state lands should have Forest Stewardship Plans. These plans would help us to determine what natural resources we actually have, what the conservation threats are to these resources, and help us to figure out creative ways to address these threats. S1954 / A4538 would create some of the first Forest Stewardship Plans on state land.

However, there are several things about the bill that some environmental groups are finding problematic. After reading the bill, I very respectfully disagree with them on several key points. You can read the bill here if you are interested in having a look yourself.

The bill protects ecologically sensitive areas: The bill states:
…that forest harvesting activities are not conducted in Natural Heritage Priority Sites, natural areas, or sensitive ecological areas unless the department determines that the site would benefit from forest harvesting activities. Furthermore, the bill requires that forest harvesting activities be conducted in accordance with the New Jersey Forestry Wetlands Best Management Practices.
Forest Stewardship Plans address rare species: The bill also references the Forest Stewardship Assessment Law as to specifically what should be contained in a Forest Stewardship Plan. Those of us who have written Forest Stewardship Plans understand that the fine details are where many additional ecological issues are considered including the presence of rare plants or wildlife and how management activities will affect these species. The point of a Forest Stewardship Plan is to identify and address prevalent conservation threats including non native invasive species and white tailed deer. The plans aren’t about harvesting timber, although that could be a by-product of Siviculture. Like at the Dorothy Preserve, Hovnanian Sanctuary, and the Newark Watershed, Forest Stewardship Plans can apply the practice of Siviculutre to actually enhance habitat for rare species.

The program would fund itself, not the operations of the State Park Service: Money generated through this program won’t be used to generally fund the State Park Service, but rather would be used to write and implement Forest Stewardship Plans. Any additional revenues would be given to the State Natural Lands Trust, to be used for restoration projects “to increase biodiversity, or to enhance habitat for rare, threatened or endangered flora on lands” held or managed by the state. There is even a “poison pill” provision that ensures that revenue generated from the program is used only for this purpose, thereby helping to prevent the focus of the program to generating significant amounts of revenue for State Parks operations.

Forest Stewardship Plans would require Public Input: The bill also requires public input into the actual Forest Stewardship Plans. Forest Stewardship Plans are necessarily site specific, so conservation threats and opportunities are going to be unique. It is impossible to say that a particular management activity, including Silviculture, is appropriate until a plan is developed. The bill is explicit that plans be developed through a public process including public notice, public hearing, and comment period.

Current state of land management on state lands: The state has the authority to conduct land management activities already, including logging, but they are not required to use Forest Stewardship Plans to guide these activities. As we know, the DEP doesn’t have the resources to write Forest Stewardship Plans themselves. Critically, this bill address this funding issue by calling for a project manager to write and implement the Forest Stewardship Plans with DEP and use the revenue from Silviculture to pay for them. In an ideal world, the DEP would have the funding and staff to write plans themselves, but given the current fiscal climate in Trenton it is doubtful we will see an increase in DEP staffing anytime soon. Other state agencies, such as the Department of Transportation, hire outside consultants to do planning and implementation work. DEP should also be able to hire outside consultants to do this work with proper controls.

A Project Manager would work with DEP: It should also be noted that the bill doesn’t explicitly state that the project manager be a for-profit entity, so non-profit conservation groups with adequate qualifications could conceivably become the project manager. I am also certain that there are a set of land management professionals at DEP that would be involved in both writing the administrative rules related to this bill and overseeing the Forest Stewardship Program. Even given the limited budgets and staffing cutbacks, many of these land management professionals have been quietly doing extremely impressive land management projects on a small scale and I trust them to look out for the public interest.

I believe that this is our best chance yet to begin to responsibly manage our preserved landscape. The alternative to this bill is to continue to do nothing to address conservation threats on preserved lands and watch many of the living natural resources we paid to permanently protect from development continue to disappear.

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Jon, I appreciate your thoughts. “In an ideal world” everything you have said here is true. I think we agree on all the major goals but I fear that your confidence that the scientists concerns will somehow be addressed is ill founded. Both the DEP and the New Jersey Forestry Association have been very resistant to addressing the severity of the deer browse problem and have repeatedly claimed that deer are adequately controlled. Even now, private forestry operations are currently supposed to provide invasives management and ensure regeneration but this is far from true. Why then should I have confidence that there will be follow-up on public lands? The Natural Heritage Committee of the Highlands Coalition has worked for over a year, visiting and discussing sites to develop some consensus about forestry on public lands. On these visits we saw not one site with adequate regeneration and no natural area that was not heavily over-browsed. Yet the Statewide Forest Resource Assessment and Strategies 2010 has not one word to say about deer management for central and northern New Jersey. The New Jersey Forestry and Wetlands Best Management Practices Manual notes the requirement for adequate regeneration but then makes absolutely no mention of deer or invasives and has not one BMP that addresses deer management or invasives control. The proposed plan for the oak forests in Hunterdon County also did not provide any specific deer management or invasives control and missed the presence of several State listed plants that had been found but not yet entered on the State’s database. Rare plants were never even proposed for monitoring.

Despite all the claims that the woods need to be thinned, I would note that I see ever growing amounts of downed wood in the forests of New Jersey, often dozens per acre yet no regeneration due to deer. Lack of gaps is not the problem. The only sites that had even close to adequate regrowth that we saw in the Highlands were those that had been clear-cut and offered up a great surge of sprouts. This is not enough to ensure sustainable forestry. Despite all the talk of using low-quality wood and developing new markets, every single project we saw outside of the Pinelands, depended on cutting the highest quality mast oaks. The forests that were selected for cutting were typically already high quality for New Jersey and then were reduced to poor quality sprout growth.

You cite, in part to justify this bill, a number of restoration projects already underway. None of them needed this bill to proceed. All can still be undertaken without this bill. None of them generated enough cash to pay for the restoration effort, much less a profit. Imagine how much these plans would have been skewed toward logging if they also had to contribute to the support for almost $3 million dollars in administration. We should have learned from these efforts what is required to effect real stewardship plans such as multi-disciplinary participation, public involvement, baseline monitoring and effective protection of regeneration. The project in the Pinelands, for example, utilized deer fencing. Site visits to some of the other locations you have noted, such as the golden-winged warbler habitats, failed to include much-needed deer fencing. My greater concern is that this bill will actually stifle the kinds of efforts you describe and will function as preemptive legislation by setting a standard that is too low.

The bill’s proponents state that the use of the New Jersey Forestry and Wetlands Best Management Practices Manual will provide environmental safeguards. It should be noted that the manual dates from 1995 and is far out of date given the rate of change in NJ forests. This lack underscores the need for setting standards for the Forest Stewardship Plans on private land, which the State has yet to do. There are currently no BMP’s for monitoring non-timber plants, deer management or invasives control and the State has been resistant to adding these BMP’s, including as rare plant monitoring or protecting regeneration from deer and invasives to the Forest Stewardship Plans. The way the bill is set up I believe it will force the standards on State land to be no higher than those on private land, which is absurd. State land must meet a much higher standard. There is, for example, no excuse for omitting a requirement that baseline monitoring be part of every project on State land, but optional on private land, especially as it is absent from most forestry plans at this time. During the stakeholder meetings the position was consistently held that wood harvesting is a necessary part of any restoration plan, which is not true all the time. The Forestry Association’s statements noted by Emile are so incorrect that they raise further concerns about the management of the proposed program. Turning restoration over to foresters is not the way to produce any level of agreement with ecologists and biologists. Until the State and the foresters acknowledge the need to address the almost complete lack of a native understory, I am unwilling to support this bill.

You might be interested to know that it was this very argument that led to the formation of the Society for Ecological Restoration 23 years ago. As interest grew in restoration in California and monies became available through transportation funds for native landscape restoration, the State put forward a bill to require a forester as the lead on all restoration projects. The ecologists, biologists, landscape architects and amateurs and professionals of every kind who had been working on these fledgling projects objected strongly and defeated the proposed bill and formed their own multi-disciplinary, professional society for restoration. SERI now is a global organization.

Despite all the apparent disagreement over this bill, many people from both sides of this argument are able to agree in the field when doing site reviews. After visiting sites in Sparta Mountain, additional monitoring was undertaken with the cooperation of NJCF. Among this group of foresters, scientists and activists etc., there is strong support for creating high-quality successional habitats on existing poor quality young woodlands and old fields. There is also strong support for generating a trash wood industry that would aid in the management of exotic species and a growing recognition that more monitoring and deer management are necessary. But I fear that by approving this bill without revision and with less than adequate protections, these efforts will be stymied.

The Berkeley Triangle Project in the Pinelands showed that inter-disciplinary efforts can produce consensus about forest stewardship. Although it was canceled, it is still illustrative of multi-disciplinary project planning. I am currently working with Emile DeVito of NJCF and Ron Farr, forester for the NJWSD, on a landscape-scale forest stewardship plan for the Wanaque watershed. The Natural Heritage Committee is producing its position paper on forestry on public lands. We need a new bill, one that reflects this growing consensus and better fosters the kind of projects you have described. See you next week. Leslie Sauer
____________________________
Here are some additional letters from scientists raising additional concerns:
_______________________________________
Dear Senators Smith, Bateman, Greenstein, Beck, and Whelan:

I oppose S1085 and will gladly match my credentials, experience, and expertise with anyone supporting this bill. I have a Ph.D. in plant ecology and an M.S. in forestry and natural resources, but more significantly, taught plant ecology and general ecology courses at Rutgers for 35 years. Early in my career I worked for the Natural Resources Conservation Service (then named the Soil Conservation Service) and during my Rutgers tenure spent two years working with the CSIRO Division of Land Resources Management in Australia.

But…let’s go beyond credentials and scientific research and remember that you and your constituents have voted time after time to protect our forests and increase our park and forest open space. Bill S1085 would lead to major disturbance of our public parks and forests, simply to create revenue for vested interests, and will ultimately lead to a high cost to the taxpayer to mitigate the damage caused to our forests. The argument that we need to create additional successional habitat is ludicrous! NJ has more early to late successional habitats than at any time in its recent history, resulting from extensive abandonment of croplands beginning in the 40s and 50s and continuing to the present.

For more than 40 years, I have been leading forest tours for the public in central NJ and over the last few decades have noted the lack of regeneration of native woody species. However, this is NOT due to the presence of mature trees in the canopy that are required to produce the propagules and the forest floor conditions for regeneration. It has been due to an overabundance of deer eating their seedlings in preference to the less palatable invasive weedy species. In leading my tours over the last 20-30 years, I have noticed that the demise (windthrow, etc.) of a large tree no longer leads to recruitment of native shrub or tree seedlings due to deer herbivory. These tree-falls and gaps are comparable to that which would be produced by the selective harvest of larger trees in our parks and forests. Such removal (and the loss of propagules) would not lead to enhanced recruitment of our native plants but open these sites to invasion and dominance by weedy non-native plants UNLESS these areas are fenced and deer are excluded. The expenses of fencing and mitigating the disturbance of logging would dwarf any financial returns from these harvests and would ultimately fall on the backs of our taxpayers.

Respectfully, James A.Quinn
______________________________________________

Dear Senators

I wish to add my opposition to the recently stalled though newly re-introduced forestry bill (now S1085) to allow commercial timber harvesting on state lands in NJ. Although the bill is initially intentioned to allow selective tree harvesting, due to economic incentives and practicalities I can see this will rapidly escalate to much larger logging operations.

Modern tree harvesting is unlike that of older times. It is highly mechanized, requiring larger tracts of ingress and egress into the forest and causes greater soil disturbance. As a forest soil ecologist this is one of my primary concerns, especially in the low nutrient status pine barrens soils. My objections are:

Small scale tree removal will quickly escalate from single trees harvests to larger scale thinning and clear felling operations. Hence the area of disturbance will grow.
Given the value of non-timber products (mulch chippings), it is likely that few post harvest residues will be left on site as bark and small diameter wood (branches and twigs) will be chipped and removed. Valuable nutrients and organic matter (carbon) will not be returned to the soil to provide nutrients for subsequent tree growth and stability of soil structure. This is part of a current study we have with the University of Helsinki, Finland where political and economic pressures are dictating the increased use of post harvest residues for biofuel production. We are showing that this rapidly leads to unsustainable forests.
Soil disturbance during mechanical harvesting can be considerable. Mixing forest floor residues with the underlying soil increases mineralization of nutrients that leach out of the soil in rainfall if there are no tree roots to intercept them. Obviously a problem in clear felling situations. This is especially alarming in nutrient poor and highly leachable porous sandy soils as found in the NJ pine barrens. As far as we know my research group is the first and only to establish long-term experimental forest manipulations to study these effects. Although our experiment is still very young, the first two years of expected enhanced tree growth in thinned and soil disturbed plots (as predicted by forest thinning models) has not occurred ad is likely to the increased loss of nutrients by leaching. Taken on a large scale this could be devastating for long-term forest sustainability in the pine barrens.

I strongly oppose this bill as presented in the guise of good ecological practice from the position of having had 10 years of international experience in advising major forest companies on forest soil nutrients and best management practices, including post harvest residue management. I have advised in over 7 countries in four continents. I am currently a Professor and Director of the Pinelands Field Station for Rutgers University and President of The Soil Ecology Society.

Sincerely

John Dighton M. Sc. Ph. D.

Director: Rutgers Pinelands Field Station
PO Box 206, New Lisbon, NJ 08064 USA
Tel: 609-894-8849
http://marine.rutgers.edu/pinelands/

8 comments

chuck pollak said: December 29, 201111:53 am

You say “I helped to draft, and the new Forest Stewardship Assessment Law for private lands.”
How bout we get the ball rolling on the above first!
Ron Farr said: December 29, 20113:16 pm

Jon,

I quasi agree with you on the “plan”. I agree that it is long over due and woud require DEP review and input. My only fear is that the “contractor” may be an out of state firm depending on how the project was bid. If it was bid piece meal (by park or region) I think an NJ firm could handle the project but if it is a whole state deal at once not so sure that would work.

This would have happened if RGGI funding did not disappear and the fact that the $$ are going to the Natural Land Trust is huge as well so it won’t get gobbled up in Trenton to fill a gap somewhere else. This type of management is conducted and encourgared by all the state surrounding us and is often times funded by the NYC watershed folks in the Catskills.

I also think it will be a death nell for the NJ Forest Service as the Farmland Inspections are going to consultants and an outside agency will be doing the planning then what will they do, except manage the contractor.

I look forward to others thoughts on this and an open debate at a future meeting.

Ron Farr
Julia Allen said: December 30, 20116:44 am

The problem … is money.!!… The money generated from selling wood is not enough to pay for meaningful oversight or stewardship! The money received for standing timber will just about break even after paying for the services of the “project manager” and some DEP oversight!

The trees will be cut and sold, but there will be no money left to plant new ones or control deer, or other invasives, or repair damage to natural systems damaged by the process itself. (I wonder if the Dorothy Preserve in Estell Manor project ever got to the deer esclosure part!)

There is a reason the why private landowners aren’t enthusiastic about commercial loggers plying their trade on their land. They cause real damage, they ruin your property value, they give you an amazingly small amount of money for what they take, and they leave you with the mess. No recourse… they pull out and that is it! Does anybody think the State will do better?
- Jon Wagar said: December 30, 201110:33 am
  
  Hi Julia,
  
  Thanks for your comment.
  
  I think it is very hard to generalize land stewardship without creating a plan. Each piece of land is different, and depending on your goals, will have different management strategies. The great thing about this bill is that it provides an incentive to do Forest Stewardship Plans, whether it is done by the DEP or DEP could hire outside consultants. It is only after a comprehensive view of a landscape, which a good Forest Stewardship Plan can provide, when one can make responsible recommendations as to how to manage a particular property.
  
  Right now, that comprehensive view doesn’t exist on state lands. Although there are some really nice example projects and very talented land managers at DEP, for the majority of our state lands management means no management which to me is very problematic given the ecological issues we face.
  
  From climate change, to air pollution, to non-native invasive species, we are going to have to mitigate these threats if we want to keep and sustain our living natural resources which we paid to protect. As one of my friends said, our chosen management strategy is to do nothing to address this issues, which to me is unacceptable.
  
  I read this bill very differently than you do and don’t see siviculture and money driving the management, rather comprehensive Forest Stewardship Planning and DEP professionals driving the land management process. I know several of these DEP land managers and I trust them to look out for the public interest and our living natural resources. I worked closely with them and have seen the results of their land management projects. There are safeguards in the bill (and hopefully in the rules) that would prevent land management activities happening in environmentally sensitive areas unless it made sense, which sometimes it will.
  
  I agree with you that sometimes landowners who are enrolled in Farmland Assessment/Woodland Assessment have had issues related to forest management, however their parcels tend to be orders of magnitude smaller than state lands. Smaller forests in New Jersey are much harder to manage for timber production, although there are people who do it well. This issue was hopefully fixed by the Forest Stewardship Law for private landowners. You can check out my take on this law here.
  
  And by the way, a solar powered electric deer fence was installed at Dorothy Preserve. I remember stringing it up in the dead of winter with a bunch of other NJCF staff and almost getting hypothermia.
  
  Have a wonderful New Year!
julia allen said: December 31, 20118:13 am

Jon, You need to address several isssues here:
First: The Pinelands are excluded, from this bill, which only effects the Hardwood Forests of central and Northern New Jersey. Even in the pinelands, where getting rid of trees was a good thing, the sale of wood did not pay for the exclosure.
Second: we are using the term “Forestry Stewardship Plan” without properly defining the term. This is dangerous. In the real world, anybody can say any “plan” is “stewardship”. I am too old to be so trusting. You can’t leave something this important to a blind trust of a few employees within DEP. If they are truely smart and well intensioned they will be the first to tell you not to trust DEP to steer this ship in the right direction.
Third: just like with the Dorothy Preserve Project, the money received for getting the timber out of the forest, just pays for …. getting the timber out….nothing else. No one promoting this mentions that standing timber does not bring in enough money to cover anything more than the true cost of timber harvests on State Lands. There will be no money left to do deer exclosures, invasive controls or any kind of stewardship.
Fourth: You should take into account how angry Park users will be when they watch healthy 100 year old oaks, poplar and hickory cut and sold for an average of $60 each. This money then goes to pay the program manager and no young trees will be planted and/or protected and no invasies will be controlled. The State Lands belong to the people and they have a say. I’ve been to enough public hearings in my life to know that 98% of the time they are just a formality, and things move foward as planned, irrespective of input. It puts the public in the position of having to chain themselves to the 100 year old oaks and going viral on u-tube! Not something we want to plan for!
- Jon Wagar said: December 31, 20111:44 pm
  
  Thank you for the additional comments.
  
  Yes, I believe you are correct, you must have been speaking with folks at NJCF. I believe we had federal grants from both NRCS and US Fish and Wildlife Service to help subsidize the cost of the Atlantic white cedar regeneration project at Dorothy Preserve. Specifically, I believe the grant helped to cover the pesticide permitting, the helicopter (aerial) herbicide application, and the fencing.
  
  A Forest Stewardship Plan does have a list of very specific criteria that are required to be addressed, which is why I think they provide a good framework for stewardship planning. However, there is a much deeper issue related to this bill that you get at that – whether or not one trusts the professionals at DEP to manage our state lands.
  
  As to your second point, I have seen a lot of exemplary work that DEP land managers have done over the past 12 years I have been working in the state. Like I think you can gather, I do trust the professionals at DEP to manage our state lands; practically every agency on the “green” side of DEP has quietly been doing great stewardship projects, albeit on a scale that is too small given the large scale conservation threats to our preserved land. For example, I could show you excellent stewardship projects that have been done by entities including the Office of Natural Resource Restoration, the Endangered and Nongame Species Program, the Division of Fish and Wildlife, the Natural Lands Trust, the Forestry Service, and the Forest Fire Service.
  
  I believe the DEP needs more resources to plan, coordinate, and implement their work and that this bill is a step in the right direction. I am not exactly sure what the alternative is to trusting the DEP and giving them adequate resources to work on our state lands other than the status quo, which I think we can all agree is not acceptable given the significant conservation threats we face.
  
  As for your third point, it would be impossible to address given no plans have been written and nothing is currently being proposed. The value derived from any silvicultural treatment (or even the value per tree harvested) is therefore impossible to determine and going to be highly variable depending on what species you are harvesting, where you are conducting the silvicultural treatment, and the market. Like we did at NJCF, the bill does requires the department to “investigate the availability of, and apply for, funds from the federal government, or any private or public source, to finance any costs of the program.”
  
  Finally, to your fourth point, I do think that when a Forest Stewardship Plan calls for trees to be cut it has the potential to be controversial. That is what the public process of this bill is meant to address.
  
  Thanks again for the comments, and have a Happy New Year!
  - Julia Allen said: January 1, 20121:38 am
    
    Jon, Maybe we are looking at two different bills. You call this bill a “Forestry Stewardship Bill”. S1954 sets up a “Forest Harvest Program.” It sets a process in motion whereby the government will be selling something belonging to the people of the State of New Jersey…. in this case trees!
    Whenever government sells something you have to be very careful of corruption. Government must clearly identify what is to be sold, it must advertise, and it must go to out to bid. The highest bidder takes the product…period. The DEP, has no control over who that is. if anyone attempts to control this process, then the process itself is corrupted.
    
    How would a commercial logger know where the ecologically sensitive areas are? Who’s going to stand in the woods and keep the heavy equipment out of the wet areas?
    Planning Boards make developers spend big bucks for the on the ground data and oversight necessary to identify and stay out of ecologically sensitive areas. Would the commercial loggers pay for this?
    The answer: No. Not enough money in standing timber to pay for this.
    What’s the State’s recourse if the loggers mess things up?
    The answer: There will be no recourse.
    Who will pay for replanting or protecting young trees from deer, and invasive control ?
    The answer: Nobody. There is not enough money in standing timber to pay for this.
leslie sauer said: January 3, 20127:39 am

Jon, I appreciate your thoughts. “In an ideal world” everything you have said here is true. I think we agree on all the major goals but I fear that your confidence that the scientists concerns will somehow be addressed is ill founded. Both the DEP and the New Jersey Forestry Association have been very resistant to addressing the severity of the deer browse problem and have repeatedly claimed that deer are adequately controlled. Even now, private forestry operations are currently supposed to provide invasives management and ensure regeneration but this is far from true. Why then should I have confidence that there will be follow-up on public lands? The Natural Heritage Committee of the Highlands Coalition has worked for over a year, visiting and discussing sites to develop some consensus about forestry on public lands. On these visits we saw not one site with adequate regeneration and no natural area that was not heavily over-browsed. Yet the Statewide Forest Resource Assessment and Strategies 2010 has not one word to say about deer management for central and northern New Jersey. The New Jersey Forestry and Wetlands Best Management Practices Manual notes the requirement for adequate regeneration but then makes absolutely no mention of deer or invasives and has not one BMP that addresses deer management or invasives control. The proposed plan for the oak forests in Hunterdon County also did not provide any specific deer management or invasives control and missed the presence of several State listed plants that had been found but not yet entered on the State’s database. Rare plants were never even proposed for monitoring.

Despite all the claims that the woods need to be thinned, I would note that I see ever growing amounts of downed wood in the forests of New Jersey, often dozens per acre yet no regeneration due to deer. Lack of gaps is not the problem. The only sites that had even close to adequate regrowth that we saw in the Highlands were those that had been clear-cut and offered up a great surge of sprouts. This is not enough to ensure sustainable forestry. Despite all the talk of using low-quality wood and developing new markets, every single project we saw outside of the Pinelands, depended on cutting the highest quality mast oaks. The forests that were selected for cutting were typically already high quality for New Jersey and then were reduced to poor quality sprout growth.

You cite, in part to justify this bill, a number of restoration projects already underway. None of them needed this bill to proceed. All can still be undertaken without this bill. None of them generated enough cash to pay for the restoration effort, much less a profit. Imagine how much these plans would have been skewed toward logging if they also had to contribute to the support for almost $3 million dollars in administration. We should have learned from these efforts what is required to effect real stewardship plans such as multi-disciplinary participation, public involvement, baseline monitoring and effective protection of regeneration. The project in the Pinelands, for example, utilized deer fencing. Site visits to some of the other locations you have noted, such as the golden-winged warbler habitats, failed to include much-needed deer fencing. My greater concern is that this bill will actually stifle the kinds of efforts you describe and will function as preemptive legislation by setting a standard that is too low.

The bill’s proponents state that the use of the New Jersey Forestry and Wetlands Best Management Practices Manual will provide environmental safeguards. It should be noted that the manual dates from 1995 and is far out of date given the rate of change in NJ forests. This lack underscores the need for setting standards for the Forest Stewardship Plans on private land, which the State has yet to do. There are currently no BMP’s for monitoring non-timber plants, deer management or invasives control and the State has been resistant to adding these BMP’s, including as rare plant monitoring or protecting regeneration from deer and invasives to the Forest Stewardship Plans. The way the bill is set up I believe it will force the standards on State land to be no higher than those on private land, which is absurd. State land must meet a much higher standard. There is, for example, no excuse for omitting a requirement that baseline monitoring be part of every project on State land, but optional on private land, especially as it is absent from most forestry plans at this time. During the stakeholder meetings the position was consistently held that wood harvesting is a necessary part of any restoration plan, which is not true all the time. The Forestry Association’s statements noted by Emile are so incorrect that they raise further concerns about the management of the proposed program. Turning restoration over to foresters is not the way to produce any level of agreement with ecologists and biologists. Until the State and the foresters acknowledge the need to address the almost complete lack of a native understory, I am unwilling to support this bill.

You might be interested to know that it was this very argument that led to the formation of the Society for Ecological Restoration 23 years ago. As interest grew in restoration in California and monies became available through transportation funds for native landscape restoration, the State put forward a bill to require a forester as the lead on all restoration projects. The ecologists, biologists, landscape architects and amateurs and professionals of every kind who had been working on these fledgling projects objected strongly and defeated the proposed bill and formed their own multi-disciplinary, professional society for restoration. SERI now is a global organization.

Despite all the apparent disagreement over this bill, many people from both sides of this argument are able to agree in the field when doing site reviews. After visiting sites in Sparta Mountain, additional monitoring was undertaken with the cooperation of NJCF. Among this group of foresters, scientists and activists etc., there is strong support for creating high-quality successional habitats on existing poor quality young woodlands and old fields. There is also strong support for generating a trash wood industry that would aid in the management of exotic species and a growing recognition that more monitoring and deer management are necessary. But I fear that by approving this bill without revision and with less than adequate protections, these efforts will be stymied.

The Berkeley Triangle Project in the Pinelands showed that inter-disciplinary efforts can produce consensus about forest stewardship. Although it was canceled, it is still illustrative of multi-disciplinary project planning. I am currently working with Emile DeVito of NJCF and Ron Farr, forester for the NJWSD, on a landscape-scale forest stewardship plan for the Wanaque watershed. The Natural Heritage Committee is producing its position paper on forestry on public lands. We need a new bill, one that reflects this growing consensus and better fosters the kind of projects you have described. See you next week. Leslie Sauer
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Here are some additional letters from scientists raising additional concerns:
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Dear Senators Smith, Bateman, Greenstein, Beck, and Whelan:

I oppose S1085 and will gladly match my credentials, experience, and expertise with anyone supporting this bill. I have a Ph.D. in plant ecology and an M.S. in forestry and natural resources, but more significantly, taught plant ecology and general ecology courses at Rutgers for 35 years. Early in my career I worked for the Natural Resources Conservation Service (then named the Soil Conservation Service) and during my Rutgers tenure spent two years working with the CSIRO Division of Land Resources Management in Australia.

But…let’s go beyond credentials and scientific research and remember that you and your constituents have voted time after time to protect our forests and increase our park and forest open space. Bill S1085 would lead to major disturbance of our public parks and forests, simply to create revenue for vested interests, and will ultimately lead to a high cost to the taxpayer to mitigate the damage caused to our forests. The argument that we need to create additional successional habitat is ludicrous! NJ has more early to late successional habitats than at any time in its recent history, resulting from extensive abandonment of croplands beginning in the 40s and 50s and continuing to the present.

For more than 40 years, I have been leading forest tours for the public in central NJ and over the last few decades have noted the lack of regeneration of native woody species. However, this is NOT due to the presence of mature trees in the canopy that are required to produce the propagules and the forest floor conditions for regeneration. It has been due to an overabundance of deer eating their seedlings in preference to the less palatable invasive weedy species. In leading my tours over the last 20-30 years, I have noticed that the demise (windthrow, etc.) of a large tree no longer leads to recruitment of native shrub or tree seedlings due to deer herbivory. These tree-falls and gaps are comparable to that which would be produced by the selective harvest of larger trees in our parks and forests. Such removal (and the loss of propagules) would not lead to enhanced recruitment of our native plants but open these sites to invasion and dominance by weedy non-native plants UNLESS these areas are fenced and deer are excluded. The expenses of fencing and mitigating the disturbance of logging would dwarf any financial returns from these harvests and would ultimately fall on the backs of our taxpayers.

Respectfully, James A.Quinn
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Dear Senators

I wish to add my opposition to the recently stalled though newly re-introduced forestry bill (now S1085) to allow commercial timber harvesting on state lands in NJ. Although the bill is initially intentioned to allow selective tree harvesting, due to economic incentives and practicalities I can see this will rapidly escalate to much larger logging operations.

Modern tree harvesting is unlike that of older times. It is highly mechanized, requiring larger tracts of ingress and egress into the forest and causes greater soil disturbance. As a forest soil ecologist this is one of my primary concerns, especially in the low nutrient status pine barrens soils. My objections are:

Small scale tree removal will quickly escalate from single trees harvests to larger scale thinning and clear felling operations. Hence the area of disturbance will grow.
Given the value of non-timber products (mulch chippings), it is likely that few post harvest residues will be left on site as bark and small diameter wood (branches and twigs) will be chipped and removed. Valuable nutrients and organic matter (carbon) will not be returned to the soil to provide nutrients for subsequent tree growth and stability of soil structure. This is part of a current study we have with the University of Helsinki, Finland where political and economic pressures are dictating the increased use of post harvest residues for biofuel production. We are showing that this rapidly leads to unsustainable forests.
Soil disturbance during mechanical harvesting can be considerable. Mixing forest floor residues with the underlying soil increases mineralization of nutrients that leach out of the soil in rainfall if there are no tree roots to intercept them. Obviously a problem in clear felling situations. This is especially alarming in nutrient poor and highly leachable porous sandy soils as found in the NJ pine barrens. As far as we know my research group is the first and only to establish long-term experimental forest manipulations to study these effects. Although our experiment is still very young, the first two years of expected enhanced tree growth in thinned and soil disturbed plots (as predicted by forest thinning models) has not occurred ad is likely to the increased loss of nutrients by leaching. Taken on a large scale this could be devastating for long-term forest sustainability in the pine barrens.

I strongly oppose this bill as presented in the guise of good ecological practice from the position of having had 10 years of international experience in advising major forest companies on forest soil nutrients and best management practices, including post harvest residue management. I have advised in over 7 countries in four continents. I am currently a Professor and Director of the Pinelands Field Station for Rutgers University and President of The Soil Ecology Society.

Sincerely

John Dighton M. Sc. Ph. D.

Director: Rutgers Pinelands Field Station
PO Box 206, New Lisbon, NJ 08064 USA
Tel: 609-894-8849
http://marine.rutgers.edu/pinelands/

—Stewardship Roundtable

Land Stewardship and Conservation

The New Forest Stewardship Bill

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