forestry

In honor of National Pollinator Week, the U.S. Forest Service joins organizations and individuals across the world to celebrate pollinators and share ways to help them survive and thrive.

Pollinators are vital to healthy ecosystems. Eighty percent of flowering plants require pollination by animals to successfully reproduce and produce seeds and fruits. Plants and pollinators together provide the basis for life by converting sunlight into food, materials for shelter, clean air, clean water, medicines, and other necessities of life.

Shadows start falling fast while you scurry to gather the last scraps of dead wood before it’s too dark – and too scary – to leave the relative security of the campsite on your favorite National Forest or Grassland. But, once the fire is safely lit, everyone gathers around to start roasting marshmallows and listen to…ghost stories!

No one really knows when or how the tradition of telling scary ghost stories around a campfire began. It just did, and we really like to do it. In fact, there are many books out there that provide those with less creative story telling talents to get a group of outdoors enthusiasts nervously shifting their eyes and jumping at the sound of what was certainly a twig being broken by the heavy foot of a monstrous creature in the night or, yes, even a clumsy ghost.

Did you know the Forest Legacy Program is the only federal grant program focused on the permanent protection of important private forestland, conserving over 2.5 million acres to date?

This incentive-based and voluntary program managed by the U.S. Forest Service conserves working forests and environmental benefits for communities. It does this through land acquisition and conveyance to state management as well as through the establishment of conservation easements that allow families to maintain ownership of their land.

In an era of social media mania, forests around the country are opening their doors to reacquaint kids and parents with good old fashion family fun—without the aid of modern technology.

On Saturday, June 11, the U.S. Forest Service invites families to join thousands of forest explorers for a free, fun-packed day of outdoor adventures in celebration of National Get Outdoors Day.

Trees do plenty of work to sequester carbon on their own, but many forests are not as healthy as they should be due to fire suppression and climate change. This can leave trees vulnerable to large scale insect damage, fire or drought, and much of the carbon stored by forests is lost to the atmosphere as trees die.

The U.S. Forest Service is committed to the storage of carbon using wood products through the green building and wood products strategy. This strategy involves putting people to work in rural communities, enhancing resiliency of our ecosystems, and sequestering carbon by promoting the use of wood products in large building construction.

You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to know that wildfires are more common during hot, dry summers. The area burned in the United States in 2015, over 10 million acres, according to the National Interagency Fire Center, occurred during a record temperature year for the Earth, plus record low snowpack and rainfall in some areas of the West.

The sizzling weather of 2015 was similar to what global climate models project for the year 2060. Last year’s weather and fire may become the new normal later in the 21st century.

Something we do every day for survival is something we often take for granted – breathing.  And a very important component of breathing is clean air. Air quality has a direct effect not only on the health of people, but also ecosystems.

The Air Program in the Eastern and Southern regions of the U.S. Forest Service oversees a resource that affects and integrates with other resources, from smoke management to watersheds and wilderness to recreation and vegetation.

Six months after being hired by the U.S. Forest Service, Angelica Perez-Delgado made a major impact, including international assistance to the country of Georgia, on her way to being named Rookie of the Year for the Pacific Southwest Region late in 2015.

When a major storm event triggered a landslide in the Black Sea facing nation of Georgia in early this past year, destroying roadways, the country turned to the U.S. Forest Service for assistance. Almost immediately, Perez-Delgado started assisting the Forest Service project team for Georgia with support in mapping and computerized drawings.

In December 2013 when Sarah Jovan and Geoffrey Donovan, two scientists with the U.S. Forest Service’s Pacific Northwest Research Station in Portland, Oregon, crisscrossed the northwest area of their city they had no idea they were onto something big. Armed with a ladder and collection equipment, the two spent most of that gray and rainy month carefully plucking hundreds of moss samples off the trunks of the city’s hardwood trees.

They were in relatively uncharted scientific territory, though their research focus seemed straightforward enough: determine if moss, in particular, the ubiquitous Lyell’s orthotrichum moss which grows abundantly across much of the city, could help measure urban air pollution.

It was my first prescribed burn. After weeks of training and months of anticipation, I was finally on the ground – drip torch in hand – ready to apply fire to restore the mixed pine-hardwood forests at the edge of the Blue Ridge Mountains on the Pisgah National Forest.

Joining the U.S Forest Service only two months earlier, my knowledge of fire’s effect on plant and wildlife communities was limited. But as the coordinator for the Grandfather Restoration Project, part of the Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration program, I had to quickly come up to speed with the on-the-ground reality of prescribed fire use.