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Sustaining Forests in a Changing Environment

Our mission is to provide basic ecological understanding, management guidelines, and management unit indicators to sustain forest ecosystems in a changing environment.  Our focus is on sustaining biological diversity, economic and ecological productivity, forest health and vitality, and contributions to carbon cycles. At the same time, we seek to understand how climate change, air quality, fire regimes, deer, invasive species, and human values and demands on forests interact with forests’ basic ecology. Much of our research is conducted in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and adjacent states in mixed oak, Allegheny hardwood, and northern hardwood forests, but our work has national and global implications.

More Information

This site is under development as the Forest Service brings together the Northeastern and North Central Research Stations to form the Northern Research Station, serving the Northeast and Midwest. The links below will take you to pages of the old sites for the Guidelines and indicators for sustaining forest ecosystems of Pennsylvania and the adjacent Allegheny Plateau Region; Quantitative Methods for Modeling Forest Ecosystems; and Multiple Stress Interactions and their Effects on Forest Health and Sustainability units that combined to form the Sustaining Forests in a Changing Environment research work unit. Check back often as we expand our site to reflect our combined commitment to supporting the natural resources and people of the Northeastern and Midwestern United States.

 

Research Areas

Our research approach is “understand and manage: We develop basic ecological understanding through observational and manipulative studies, then develop guidelines that help policy makers and managers sustain these forests. We focus our research on sustaining forests in a changing environment on five broad problem areas:

Sustaining Mixed Oak, Northern, and Allegheny Hardwood Forests
These problems share many areas of focus, including forest understory communities and regeneration processes, impacts of white-tailed deer, forest diversity and productivity, rehabilitation of degraded stands, productivity for high-value wood products, effects of forest management on biomass and forest floor and soil carbon stocks and sequestration rates, and development of the concept of a conservation value index for habitats for plant and animal species of conservation concern. We also expect this research to link to our research in the invasives and climate change problems to understand and manage the interactions among forests, invasive species, and climate change

In addition, our research on mixed oak forests includes research to understand and model forest fire in eastern forests, and to understand and develop guidelines for its use to sustain or restore the oak component of mixed oak forests, and research to illuminate the trade-offs among costs and benefits (conservation and financial) of sustaining oaks on sites of different qualities.

Our research on northern and Allegheny hardwood forests also includes research to understand and manage sugar maple decline and its relationship to air and soil quality, the response of other eastern hardwood tree species to soil nutrients and fertilizers, to understand and manage the role of forest harvest removals in nutrient cycles, and to understand and manage the impact of wind disturbances on northern hardwood forests

Management of forests influenced by invasive species
This research will focus on the exotic species emerald ash borer (Agrilus planipennis), tree of heaven (Ailanthus altissima), Japanese stiltgrass (Microstegium vimineum), honeysuckle species (Lonicera spp.), and the native species mountain laurel (Kalmia latifolia), hay-scented (Dennsteadtia punctilobula)and New York fern (Thelypteris noveboracensis).  We will develop ecologically-based management guidelines by improving risk prediction, studying abundance thresholds, assessing treatment methods, and understanding interactions of these invasive species with forest ecosystems, including relationships among invasive species, fire, wildlife, conservation values, regeneration processes, and carbon stocks and sequestration rates.

Understanding, predicting, and managing the impact of climate change on forests This research will focus on understanding and predicting the impact of global change on forests, including predictions made in shorter time steps and/or finer spatial scales than are presently available, on the potential of forests to mitigate climate change through carbon sequestration or biomass substitution for nonrenewable energy, on developing guidelines for adaptation or mitigation of climate change through identification of potential species refugia or techniques for facilitated migration, and to seek and report evidence of tree species movements as predicted by climate change models.

Long-term research and Experimental Forests
Maintain the Kane and Vinton Furnace Experimental Forests and selected long-term studies there as they contribute to our other research problems, and as nodes in international, national, and regional networks of long-term research, sites for long-term and collaborative research, science delivery, demonstration, and environmental literacy activities, and increase the synthesis of long-term research data from these and other experimental forests.