Project Listing

• Research
• Silviculture
• Growth and Yield Modeling
• Protecting Wildlife Habitat
• Preserving Water Quality
• Biodiversity

Science Spotlights

For the latest on current CFRU projects, go to the Science Spotlights listed below.

New		Cool and Clear: CFRU Studies Water Quality in the Maine Woods
		CFRU: Understanding Tomorrow's Forests Today

Current Projects

Biodiversity

Improving our understanding of how forest practices affect wildlife habitat and biodiversity

Indicators for Maintaining Biodiversity in Managed Forests

Manomet Center for Conservation Sciences

Maintaining biodiversity is a fundamental goal of sustainable forestry. However, maintaining "life in all its forms" can be a seemingly impossible task. Biodiversity, as commonly defined by ecologists, is simply too complex to fully measure or monitor. The only real solution is to use indicators. Indicators are practical measures that provide insight into the condition of many other unmeasured parts of a complex system. Read more.

Effective indicators will: (1) have a sound scientific basis (i.e., the correlation between the indicator and biodiversity will be well established), (2) be practical and affordable to implement, (3) be instructive to forest decision makers, (4) have broad ecological breadth (i.e., linked to as many different biodiversity values as possible), and (5) be responsive to stressors that affect forest biodiversity.

Selecting indicators that meet all these criteria requires a thoughtful, logical, and transparent process. Lack of a process to identify indicators with these traits can lead (and has) to a mixed bag of ineffective and frustrating indicators.

Patch Retention as a Tool to Maintain Biodiversity in the Northern Forest

One of the key challenges in industrial forestry concerns the desire to maintain a critical range of ecological values in forests that are being managed primarily for wood supply. Removing the majority of trees in a specific forest stand also means removing much of the habitat for a wide variety of plant and animal species. Minimizing the impact of that removal, then, is the key to maintaining adequate biodiversity.

In recent years, CFRU, in association with researchers from the Manomet Center for Conservation Sciences, has been studying the effectiveness of so-called "patch retention" as a means of maintaining biodiversity in industrial forests. Patch retention involves retaining clumps of trees (patches) that have been identified as holding key populations of species that are found throughout the surrounding forest. The theory is that if these patches are protected, the species living in them will be able to repopulate the young forests around them as harvested areas grow back.

With that goal in mind, researchers have been testing the ability of patch retention on harvested sites to support several biodiversity components, including herbaceous plants, lichens, mosses, salamanders, and ground beetles. Three questions are being addressed:

1. Do patches retain as many species and biodiversity features as uncut forest?
2. Do patches retain more species and biodiversity features than logged forest?
3. Does a logged forest lose species compared to an uncut forest?

Read more.