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 It should be noted that the manual dates from 1995 and is far out of date given the rate of change in NJ forests.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/

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.

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!

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!