New Hampshire Forest Resources Plan Revision -- Assessment 2010

Area of Focus

General Assessments

This Assessment Report is essentially a background paper designed to provide the best information available about the status of New Hampshire’s forests to facilitate a revision to the Plan with input from many stake holder groups. With assistance from the USDA Forest Service, the Division of Forests and Lands has decided to use the framework of the Montreal Process Criteria and Indicators as the basis for the Assessment report. The Criteria and Indicators used for this assessment are a series of 7 Criteria and 18 Indicators and associated data sources that the USDA Forest Service, Northeastern Area (NA) and the 20 State forestry agencies in the Northeastern Area Association of State Foresters (NAASF) developed for use in ongoing monitoring efforts in this region. In this way, subsequent use of the framework will yield comparable results within districts (geographic areas like the State of New Hampshire) or among districts. The report is structured directly around these 7 Criterion and 18 Indicators.

Indicators

Maintenance of Forest Contribution to Global Carbon Cycles: Forest ecosystem carbon pools by forest type
Forest carbon is cycled through and stored in soil and above-ground vegetation. Different forest types will have different carbon sizes and locations of storage (e.g., soil vs. aboveground).
Maintenance of Forest Ecosystem Health and Vitality: Biotic stressors: insects, diseases, plants, and animals
There are many sources of stress on forests, including climatic, human, and biotic. Naturally occurring and introduced insect pests and diseases can kill large numbers of trees in contiguous areas of forest until natural limits curtail the insects or diseases. Introduced (weeds) or naturally-occurring plants can stress trees, for example, mistletoe is a parasitic plant that can create structural and nutritional pressure on individual trees. Over-browsing or grazing by animals can reduce succession or seedling recruitment rates in forests (e.g., cattle consumption of seedling oak trees).
Maintenance of Forest Ecosystem Health and Vitality: Forest land clearance
Clear-cutting forests is an efficient way to extract wood from a forested area. There are a variety of impacts of this type of logging that may or may not be mitigated by clearcut size and tree re-planting. These impacts include geomorphic effects (e.g., landslides), change in soil flora and thus nutrient cycling, loss or change in faunal species diversity, and the creation of habitat edges.
Maintenance of Forest Ecosystem Health and Vitality: Tree mortality
Trees die for a variety of reasons, creating habitat, contributing to soil carbon and nutrients, and creating openings. Rates of mortality can indicate natural die-off of old or sick/damaged trees or forest and trees that are overly-stressed because of climatic, artificial, and pest sources of stress.
Maintenance of Forest Ecosystem Health and Vitality: Weather phenomena: drought, storm, flood
Forests are adapted to natural cycles of drought, flooding, and storms (wind, ice). Natural ranges of weather severity may result in changes in forest structure and composition. When events fall outside natural ranges of severity and frequency, the result may be large-scale die-offs of forest areas.
Maintenance of Forest Ecosystem Health and Vitality: Wildfire
Fires naturally occur in most forests. Wildfires are fires that were not intentionally set to manage vegetation and are usually un-controlled. Naturally-occurring wildfires are good for most forest ecosystems, reducing crowding of small trees and under-growth, encouraging nutrient cycling, and in some cases stimulating seed germination.
Maintenance of Productive Capacity of Forest Ecosystems: Net growth of growing stock on timberland
Net growth is the rate of total tree growth minus losses to mortality, extraction, fire, and other causes.
Maintenance of Productive Capacity of Forest Ecosystems: Net growth to removals ratio
Sustainable forests and forestry generally implies that the rate of removal of forest material does not exceed the rate of growth, within and across age classes and tree types. This could be expressed as tons or volume of tree stems, or other metrics.
Maintenance of Productive Capacity of Forest Ecosystems: Removals of growing stock on timberland
This indicator refers to the loss/removal of trees from commercially-used forests. This could be measured in volume, # trees, or other metrics.
Maintenance of Productive Capacity of Forest Ecosystems: Timberland area
The total area of timberland (forest used for extraction) can be expressed as units of area, fraction of total forest area, or fraction of the total landscape.
Maintenance of Productive Capacity of Forest Ecosystems: Total forest area
The total forest are could be expressed as total area, or as a proportion of a region or watershed.
Maintenance of Productive Capacity of Forest Ecosystems: Type of removals: harvest, land clearing
Artificial loss of forest can occur in order to develop the land for other purposes (e.g., agriculture, residential), or to remove wood where the intent is for the trees to naturally re-grow, or be re-planted. Partial removal is also possible, where forest is thinned to remove some of the trees and leave the remainder for increased growth and possible later removal.
Participation in outdoor recreation
Outdoor recreation includes a wide range of activities that are enjoyed by many of the public. The most common recreation activities are wildlife-viewing, walking/hiking, fishing, camping, and various water sports. Measuring participation rates can contribute to understand who is benefiting from and impacted most by different recreation management approaches.
Private land with public conservation easements
Conservation easements on private lands are one important tool for protecting forested areas. The idea is that cash payments will compensate forest land owners for not logging the land and that these lands will keep providing valued ecosystem services.
Program type (e.g., voluntary, regulatory)
Forest programs vary in their level of requirement. Voluntary programs depend on landowners compliance with guidelines and have low levels of requirement. Regulatory programs require certain activities or prohibit certain activities by landowners. There is little evidence that one approach is generally more effective than the other and it is likely that both are important in protecting forest lands and ecosystems.
Protected public forest land
Public forests are often put to multiple disturbing uses (e.g., recreation, logging, mining). Protecting these forests from certain or all extractive activities is more likely to result in provision of ecosystem services.
Recreational areas
Recreational areas include campgrounds, hiking/bicycling trails, wildlife-viewing areas, motorized recreation areas, and swimming areas. These are all important types of areas for outdoor recreational enjoyment of natural areas.
Reserved forest land
Reserved forest land is land that is protected from logging or other development activities in order to protect ecosystem services that the forest provides. Forest reserves are set up through land purchase by public entities, protective conservation easements, and voluntary set asides by landowners.
State forestry employee salaries
State forestry agencies hire employees from the same pool as private logging and consultant firms. To stay competitive, salaries and other compensations must be commensurate with the employment, or state employees will be hard to recruit and retain.
State forestry employees
Recruiting and retaining employees in state forestry agencies is likely to contribute to sustainable forestry practice, assuming that regulations are present and enforced and the employees have training and expertise appropriate to understanding dynamic forest ecosystems and impacts of disturbance.