Post originally printed in Covers magazine – Winter 2021
The refuge manager paid hundreds of dollars per acre for a crew to thin 6-8” pine trees by hand. And then the thinned pine, scattered as it was on the ground, made it harder to get prescribed fire back into the stand.
But the procurement forester from a nearby pellet mill determined there was enough volume of pine pulpwood for a logger to do the thinning commercially. A commercial harvest meant the logger could make money from the delivered wood chips, the thinned pine was turned into a useful product, and the refuge could put their limited funds to better uses and get more habitat work done.
In a nutshell, this is the potential of working with the forest-product industry – creating habitat as part of commercially-viable forest management costs much less to implement on the ground. If we have good, mutually beneficial partnerships with the forest-product industry, it creates a revenue stream for the landowner or land manager, logger, mill and RGS & AWS.
The example also illustrates the roles for a conservation organization like RGS & AWS – even though the refuge was only about 20 miles from the pellet plant, someone needed to “connect” the land manager with the pellet company’s procurement foresters. And then, to ensure that the logging and habitat improvements get done, these kinds of innovative partnerships require ongoing management, which is also a role for an organization like RGS & AWS.
Since I started with RGS & AWS in March, I’m delighted to serve in two capacities as we scale our impacts by implementing our working forests model. In addition to serving as the Mid-Atlantic Forest Conservation Director (FCD,) I’m also serving as Director of Forest Market Strategies.
I can probably best explain my “forest markets” role by describing what I did in my previous job with Enviva, a pellet manufacturing company with nine pellet manufacturing plants located from Virginia to Mississippi. At Enviva, I established partnerships with conservation organizations and supported habitat creation at scale by using our purchasing of low-grade hardwood and pine to support commercially viable forest habitat restoration on public and private lands, especially in longleaf pine savanna forests, but also in hardwood bottomland forests. In effect, I connected public land managers, private land managers, their foresters and others in the conservation community with our procurement foresters, using our commercial procurement to support habitat restoration wherever possible.
At RGS & AWS, I’ll apply what I learned at Enviva to establish partnerships with forest-product companies and then collaborate with land managers, landowners and consulting foresters to achieve greater habitat benefits through strategic, targeted and commercially viable forest management.
Forest-Product Manufacturers
Over the years, RGS & AWS has appreciated working with many forest-product companies, including UPM Blandin around the National Hunt, Louisianna Pacific for collaborations in the Lakes states, MeadWestvaco in the Mid-Atlantic, International Paper for funding our work in the Southern Appalachians through the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, Evergreen and doubtless others that I’m unaware of.
As leading purchasers of forest products, large forest-product manufacturers will play two critical roles in implementing our working forests model. First, their wood purchasing makes possible the commercially viable management – that’s the basis of working forestland. And secondly, the partnerships we aim to establish with them will involve critical new funding for RGS & AWS to perform our roles around getting even more habitat benefits, especially early successional and young forest habitats, from ongoing commercial forest management.
Let’s dig into the respective roles forest-product companies and RGS & AWS will have in these partnerships, starting with the companies’ forest-product demand. While all forest manufacturing plants support forest management that helps create young forest habitats, the best fit for us and our conservation mission are paper, packaging, pellet, pallet and other manufacturers that use large volumes of low-grade hardwood and perhaps some pine. Markets for low-value hardwood and pine are especially helpful in improving stands, which may have had the higher-value sawtimber selectively removed from them in “high-grading” harvests that reduced the stand’s long-term economic and ecological value.
The paper industry has contracted over the last few decades, but we are lucky to have paper plants remaining in all RGS & AWS regions with FCDs. Thankfully, packaging, pallet and pellet production are growing, though most large-scale pellet plants are located outside of current RGS & AWS regions with FCDs.
Though it’s too early to discuss any potential partners, I am glad to say that we are discussing possible partnerships with numerous companies that are sincerely interested. We look forward to announcing partnerships in the next few months.
The details of the partnerships will vary depending on the companies’ procurement systems, sourcing policies and certifications, and their corporate sustainability commitments and goals. Ideally, RGS & AWS can help companies accomplish some of their procurement needs, certification and/or corporate sustainability goals, which will make the partnerships even more valuable to the companies.
In general, RGS & AWS will have a few roles in these partnerships to ensure greater habitat benefits from ongoing forest management. First, we work with companies to identify where the partnership and forest management will focus geographically, which will ensure that the habitat created is part of a priority, landscape-scale effort and not just randomly occurring in a broad region. This will involve learning about the companies’ sourcing practices, including their desired hauling ranges, whether they’re sourcing hardwood or pine, which loggers they are buying from, whether they’re buying woods chips or just “roundwood,” how they buy from and work with private landowners and other company-specific considerations.
RGS & AWS FCDs will then identify the best geographic overlap between the company’s sourcing strategies and our conservation priorities based on several factors. For example, we might want to expand on prior habitat work by supporting forest management on nearby private or public lands. We might want to support forest management in a new project area. Or we may work with partners in an area identified as a conservation priority by a state or federal agency.
Then we and our partners will coordinate with agencies and recruit private landowners in the priority area(s). I discuss how we’ll work with private landowners and consulting foresters below, but our work will ensure that good, sound forest management is implemented as part of our collaborations.
With our partner American Bird Conservancy and others, our forest-product company collaborations will often involve monitoring the habitat created to assess wildlife response.
And finally, we will report progress on our forest-product company partnerships in terms of acres of habitat created and other critical measures of success.
In addition to partnering with forest-product companies, we will also be collaborating with other parts or segments of the forest-product industry. Segments of the forest-product industry can be thought of as the links of the wood-product supply chain (see diagram), with each segment having different roles or functions.
Landowners
Forest owners are the first link or segment of the forest-product supply chain, particularly family forest landowners, who own over 50% of the forest lands in most states with RGS & AWS chapters (see map). Luckily for us and our mission to improve habitat, most family forest owners rate wildlife habitat as one of their most important reasons for owning forest land. However, most family forest owners aren’t actively engaged in managing their forestland and aren’t aware of how they can improve habitat. This creates an opportunity for RGS & AWS and our partners to conduct outreach to landowners in key areas where we are working to implement landscape-scale habitat improvements.
Industrial-scale forest owners such as Timber Investment Management Organizations (TIMOs) are essential in some areas, such as northwestern Pennsylvania and parts of the Adirondacks. RGS & AWS is exploring partnering with a few TIMOs to modify their ongoing forest management to improve their habitat benefits at scale.
Consulting foresters
Consulting Foresters advise their landowner clients, particularly by writing forest management plans and overseeing logging operations. My FCD colleagues and I will collaborate with many Consulting Foresters in our respective regions, who each have many landowner clients, expanding our landowner networks. In 2020, RGS & AWS formed a partnership agreement with the Association of Consulting Foresters (ACF) to formalize our collaboration on shared goals around forest management and wildlife habitat. In my work with ACF foresters in North West Pennsylvania, we’ve been expanding on the landscape-scale habitat work that’s been implemented on State Game Lands by working with family forest owner-clients of ACF foresters as well as of family forest owners that Pennsylvania Game Commission Foresters work with.
Large-scale strategic planning
The Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies’ Eastern Grouse Working Group’s 2020 report identified that:
“Large scale strategic planning and prioritized implementation of management actions by a diverse cohort of conservation partners will be needed to accomplish the goal of sustaining ruffed grouse populations in the Eastern U.S.” As RGS & AWS implements our model of working forests, partnering with forest-product companies will be a critical component of scaling our impacts and achieving more landscape-scale habitat benefits. I think it’ll only be through partnering with forest-product companies and other segments of the forest-product industry that we’ll be able to accomplish the scale of habitat improvements needed.
