Ohio’s state forests need protection

Ohio’s state forests need protection
                        

The Ohio Department of Forestry is currently developing a 10-year forestry plan with a completion date scheduled for this June. Citizens can review the plan at forestry.ohiodnr.gov/forestactionplan.

There also is a survey you can complete to weigh in with your concerns. Surveys and comments must be completed by Feb. 29. When you complete the survey, write in comments and let the DOF know, in the words of a friend, “The protection of the forest against threats must be the primary focus of the management plan, not board feet.”

Ohio has 7.9 million acres of forest land; 88 percent of that forest land is privately owned with the remaining 12 percent owned by local, state and federal governments. The DOF plan addresses all of these forests. The 2020 DOF Resource Assessment, found on the DOF’s webpage, has several alarming pieces of data.

A chart shows that in the early 1800s Ohio had 25 million acres of forests. By 1940 we had cut down more than 85 percent of our forests and had less than 4 million acres of intact forests remaining.

By 1990 that amount of acreage had inched up to about 8 million acres, but sadly the amount has remained constant at this level for over 30 years. Most of these forested areas are in counties located in the southeastern portion of the state. A recent fact sheet from DOF said Ohio has spent “zero dollars on landscape scale restoration.”

The last time Ohio witnessed any real attempt at planting new trees was during the 1940s when the Civilian Conservation Corps helped restore forests with massive plantings around the state. This project was responsible for restoring a barren area we now know as the Wayne National Forest.

About 70 percent of our forests are owned by families. A survey showed the primary reasons for owning forest land are related to beauty, wildlife and nature. The most common activities on their land are personal recreation such as hunting and hiking and cutting trees for personal use such as firewood, and most family forest ownerships have not participated in traditional forestry management and assistance programs in the past five years.

The state owns less than 7 percent of Ohio’s forested land, and data shows, as the population of the state has grown, our forested acreages have not. There are about 0.68 acres of forests per person in the state, and only 3.6 percent of our forests are protected to preclude timber utilization.

Ohio has 220 million urban trees or about 38 percent urban tree cover. These trees are especially important in that they “moderate climate, reduce building energy use and atmospheric carbon dioxide, improve both air and water quality, mitigate rainfall runoff and flooding, enhance human health and social well-being, and lower noise impacts.”

The annual benefits from urban forests in the U.S. are estimated at $18.3 billion. Ohio’s forests sequester 1.2 million tons of carbon dioxide a year. Unfortunately invasive insect species like the emerald ash borer have severely impacted many of our urban forests. Ohio’s forests also are impacted by invasive tree species and other herbaceous plants that move into an area, especially when clear-cutting techniques are used.

The species of trees dominating the forests have changed with oaks declining and maples increasing. Anyone who lives in rural Ohio can tell you the deer population makes it nearly impossible to grow hardwoods without some type of protective fencing.

The DOF report claims we have enough mature trees to justify the opportunities for stand improvement activities to be funded by a removal of a portion of available sawtimber in fully and overstocked stands.

DOF refers to mature trees as those being between 60 and 100 years old, but in actuality many of Ohio’s oaks (white, black, burr) can live at least twice as long, 200 years, and in some cases up to 400 years. Why are we cutting trees down before they can reach their maximum carbon-storage ability?

These mature trees create the shaded canopy that nontimber forest products like ginseng, a long-lived perennial plant, require to grow. When I did my doctorate research, I found ginseng harvests netted more income in forested regions than logging operations.

We should be encouraging and assisting private forest owners to keep their forests intact and to cultivate valuable medicinal plants such as ginseng and goldenseal. We also need to protect second-growth forests so they might one day become old-growth forests.

Basically we need trees. We need them for carbon sequestration, for water and air quality, for habitat, for watershed protection, as riparian buffer zones, for their beauty, and for our future. We need to protect the symbiotic relationships between fungi and plant roots, which are the mycorrhizal fungal networks. These networks are especially sensitive to intensive harvesting. Scientific studies show harvesting disrupts soil carbon storage and causes significant carbon emissions.

What we don’t need are poorly conducted timber harvests by unregulated and unlicensed loggers. We don’t need prescribed burns, as fire is not a common natural occurrence in Ohio. These fires kill turtles, snakes, herbaceous plants, fungi and other micro-organisms.

We don’t need more oil and gas development, which leads to fragmentation, the spread of invasive species, radioactive contamination, light pollution, and air and water pollution.

We don’t need to use our forests for unsustainable biomass energy. We don’t need to open our forests to indiscriminate use by ATV enthusiasts. We don’t need to cut down old forests to provide areas for the development of young forests. This false narrative has been used to justify logging when in reality we can easily create young forests without sacrificing mature forests.

Ohio’s mixed mesophytic forests represent one of the most biologically diverse regions of the world. Sadly only a few small stands of undisturbed old-growth forest remain in the state and less than 0.4 percent of all forest stands in the state of Ohio are at least 140 years old. Research shows old-growth forests are superior to all forest-age classes for both carbon sequestration and carbon storage.

We have to make a commitment to the future to greatly expand forests in our state and to protect the forested areas that remain. Let Ohio’s Department of Forestry know by Feb. 29 that you stand with the trees by emailing comments to Tom Macy, coordinator, Forest Action Plan Update, at ForestActionPlan@dnr.state.oh.us and completing the survey.


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