Speaker: Jamie Barbour

Executive Order 14072, Strengthening the Nation’s Forests, Communities, and Local Economies, among other things, instructs the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management to define mature and old growth forests, inventory them, conduct an analysis of threats to them, and develop a policy to conserve them. With considerable input from external stakeholders, a group of agency scientists accomplished the first three tasks, and each agency has proposed policy solutions to promote conservation.  Key findings from the inventory were that about two-thirds of the forested land managed by each agency contain forests with mature or old growth conditions (MOG) with more than half located on non-reserved land.  The threat analysis showed that over the past two decades, by far fire, insects, and disease are the major reasons why MOG forests were reset to a younger condition.  Tree cutting was a minor threat. Projections of changes in climate raised concerns that threats to MOG will increase greatly over the rest of the century although the vast amount of mature is expected to fuel an increase in old growth for at least the next 50 years.  The Forest Service’s proposed National Old Growth Amendment (NOGA) has four main elements: 1) increase consistency among the 128 planning units, 2) recognition that past management practices have changed the distribution of old growth in ways that make it difficult to achieve ecological integrity as envisioned by the 2012 planning rule (36 CFR part 219; 3) a clear intention by the Forest Service to proactively (includes ecologically appropriate active or passive techniques) manage old growth to support ecological integrity; and 4) to use collaborative processes to establish Adaptive Strategies for old growth conservation covering each national forest either individually or in logical groups.

Conserving Mature and Old-Growth Forests in a Changing Climate Speaker Series

There is broad agreement that protecting and managing forests is critical for meeting global climate mitigation and sustainable development goals. However, there is less agreement on how to determine what is ‘best’ management to reach these goals in the context of mature and old-growth forests (MOG). This webinar series invites a variety of speakers representing the United States Forest Service, Tribal nations, private forest owners, forest industry, academia, and forest advocacy organizations to share how they are responding to and shaping the discussion on mature and old-growth forests, including as mandated by Executive Order 140752 and the National Old-Growth Amendment.

 Join us every Thursday from August 29 to December 5 from 12:00 -12:55 pm U.S. ET. Note that there will not be webinars on September 19 and November 28.

The series is free and open to the public. Each session will be recorded. We will offer CEUs for foresters in attendance. Please email yff@yale.edu(link sends e-mail) for further information.

Series Hosts

This series is co-developed and co-hosted by The Forest School at the Yale School of the Environment, the Yale Applied Science Synthesis Program, the Yale Center for Natural Carbon Capture, and the Society of American Foresters.

Series Facilitators

The series is facilitated by Mark Ashton (The Forest School at YSE), Gary Dunning (The Forest School at YSE), Sara Kuebbing (Yale Applied Science Synthesis Program and Yale Center for Natural Carbon Capture), and Terry Baker (Society of American Foresters).

To learn more and register, visit: https://yff.yale.edu/speaker-series/conserving-mature-and-old-growth-forests-changing-climate