forestry

The following guest blog is part of a series featuring the Forest Service’s work with partners on restoration across the country.

By Scott Bissette, Assistant Commissioner of the North Carolina Forest Service and chair of the National Association of State Foresters Forest Markets Committee 

Our forests are renewable and vital resources when sustainably managed. From paper products such as food packaging and tissue paper, to lumber used for our homes and furniture, trees in our forests provide items we use every day.

Strong markets for these forest products are needed to restore many of our forests and ensure they continue to be managed and are healthy for future generations. That’s why all Americans should support National Forest Products Week from October 18-24, 2015.

A small but enthusiastic group of volunteers joined a famous bear and well-known owl to support an international competition attended by more than 100,000 people from all over the world. The U.S. Forest Service was a proud partner of the 2015 World Special Olympics in Los Angeles recently.

Employees of the Angeles National Forest/San Gabriel Mountains National Monument were joined by employees and volunteers from national forests all over California to staff an informational booth on the University of Southern California campus, July 23 – Aug. 2. The booth helped inform athletes and spectators about the accessibility of national forests and monuments, while helping spread the message of wildfire prevention.

As the fall season slowly matriculates and the autumn equinox makes its debut, volunteers are encouraged to give back by participating in the annual National Public Lands Day.

National Public Lands Day, in its 22^nd year, is the nation’s largest, single-day volunteer effort in support of public lands. Last year, more than 175,000 volunteers served at over 2,000 sites in every state, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. Since it’s inception in 1994, with only three sites and 700 volunteers, the event has garnered community support year-after-year.

One of the greatest natural events in the world is starting to change — change colors that is. The brilliant colors on the leaves of millions of trees are about to make you look up in awe and the U.S. Forest Service wants folks to get outside and experience it this Fall.

This year the Forest Service’s 2015 Fall Colors webpage has something unique to help those wanting to visit our national forests and grasslands experience the grace and glory of autumn just about everywhere in America. It’s a downloadable app called Yonder and it’s designed for sharing outdoors experiences on your smart phone for all the world to see.

Throughout his life, Chris Fields-Johnson has been keenly aware of the need to preserve the natural landscapes, which provide us with clean air to breathe, water to drink and food to eat. As a graduate student of soil science at Virginia State and Polytechnic University, a forestry undergraduate, a student of Tom Brown, Jr.’s Tracker School and a former employee of the Virginia Department of Forestry, he also knows much of the science behind soil restoration and forestry. These experiences have given him a strong desire to turn his knowledge into action by managing land in the most beneficial way possible.

To make this dream a reality, he began converting a 250-acre loblolly pine plantation in Scottsville, Virginia., into a goat and sheep silvopasture system that resembles a pine savanna landscape. Silvopasture combines trees with forage and livestock production. The trees are managed for high-value sawlogs and, at the same time, provide shade and shelter for livestock and forage, reducing livestock stress and sometimes improving forage quality. Fields-Johnson and friends have spent many weekends thinning and pruning trees by hand, conducting controlled burns, fighting invasive plants and experimenting with forage establishment while they also learn how to raise goats and sheep.

Living memorials serve as a reminder of fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, neighbors and friends—but also of the power of community to reflect, rebuild and renew. Our research suggests that living memorials demonstrate the role of nature in contemporary times not only as a symbol, but as an innate and purposeful response to loss that calls forth a common humanity and compassion for others.

In other words, they demonstrate how people use nature to be resilient to loss.

We’ve all seen the heart-wrenching images on TV: lives and property destroyed by wildland fire.  And, this fire season, with over eight million acres burned, we are seeing these images more frequently.

Most of us think nothing can be done to protect a home from the onslaught of a raging wildland fire. Don’t be fooled, there is a way to protect your home.  The U.S. Forest Service calls it Fire Wise.

Since the 1800s, heirs of the San Joaquin del Rio de Chama Land Grant in northern New Mexico have been tending to graves and religious sites in a small cemetery at the top of a mesa in the Chama River Canyon. For at least three decades, they had to travel by foot up the hill to reach the cemetery, which was assumed to lie within the boundaries of the Chama River Canyon Wilderness Area. 

Under that Wilderness designation, motorized access to the site was prohibited. As the trail disintegrated, elderly members of the community were no longer able to make the journey.  Through a unique effort, the Forest Service found a way to provide easier access to the cemetery.

It started with a call from a concerned landowner living on Pine Country Lane, nestled in the foothills just west of Denver. The landscape spread out before them was scarred from previous high-severity fires, the homeowners told their local Conservation District.

Their home was sitting at the top of a hill in a tinderbox surrounded by dense forests dying from bark beetle and tussock moth invasions. Decades of fire suppression has altered forests on the Front Range. These forests were historically adapted to frequent low-severity fire and, with suppression, have become fuel-dense and are now comprised of a different species mix.

The drive to Fort Gadsden’s Historic Site on the Apalachicola National Forest is something reminiscent of a nature documentary. Towering pines line the highway while vibrant wildflowers bloom throughout the fields. Local volunteers and Apalachicola National Forest employees are busily working in the stifling heat on a restoration project at this National Historic Landmark, the only one located in the southeast on National Forest Service land. The volunteers include: a team of workers from Colorado called ‘HistoriCorps,’ and a cadre from the Texas Conservation Corps at American Youthworks.

“Without volunteers like us, a lot of these things just go to waste and rot away because nobody has the money, the time, or the work force to do it,” said Amanda Tulley, a HistoriCorps partner from Denver.