“ A campaign is underway to clear established forests and expand early-successional habitats … with the intention of benefiting specific species.” So begins a 2023 report published in Frontiers in Forests and Global Change. The authors of that report analyze this forest-management trend with a focus on the Northeast and Upper Great Lakes regions. As these scientists make clear, efforts to cut established forests in favor of early-successional, or “pre-forest,” ecosystems are “coordinated by federal and state wildlife agencies and funded with public money.” The public land managers at these agencies work with well-funded special-interest groups — hunting and forestry lobbyists, land trusts, private landowners — toward this goal.
The authors of the report discuss successional habitat programs and policies in the context of “historical baselines, with respect to species’ ranges and abundance, and as they relate to carbon accumulation and ecosystem integrity.” They conclude that “public land forest and wildlife management programs must be reevaluated to balance the prioritization and funding of early-successional habitat with strong and lasting protection for old-growth and mature forests.”
They also call for “far more robust, unbiased, and ongoing monitoring and evaluation.”
In their report the authors review historical research, the conservation rationale for forest-clearing campaigns, and the contrasts between natural old-growth forests and intensively managed forests. They note that the “ecological trajectory … in the absence of intensive human activity is toward ‘old-growth’ forests: a resilient, diverse, carbon-dense, and self-sustaining ‘shifting mosaic’ of tree ages, microhabitats, and native species above and below ground.”
The authors find that forest-clearing projects to support early-successional habitat in these regions “are proceeding without well-founded consideration of conditions before European settlement, long-term plans for experimental controls and monitoring, or baseline ecological inventories.”
This agency-promoted junk science ignores “quantifiable negative impacts—such as the spread of invasive species, elevated temperatures, increased fire and flood risk, destabilized and decreased climate mitigation and adaptation, degradation of healthy public green spaces, and ongoing expenditures of time and resources.”
Noting that forest-clearing campaigns create immediate negative impacts, the authors issue an “urgent” call to reassess this harmful forest-clearing campaign. The report cites two main rationales for ongoing forest-clearing efforts, both of which are “open to serious questions and alternative hypotheses.”
The primary rationale cites the decline of a number of early-successional plant and animal species as “a pervasive and potentially existential threat.” The baseline for measuring this decline “almost invariably begins in the late 1960s, when populations had begun to decrease from abnormally high levels as forests recovered from past clearing.”
A second rationale is that early-successional habitats have dwindled, falling below levels that existed before European settlement. However, there is ample evidence that these habitats “are considerably more abundant than pre-settlement, and continue to expand.”
Given the findings of legitimate scientific studies, the authors conclude, “The campaign for early-successional forest clearing was formulated by a small number of agency, academic, and special interest professionals, with little comprehensive research…. This organized and aggressive campaign has confused the public and made it challenging for a range of scientists to engage in an open dialogue about an optimal and balanced approach that prioritizes climate stability, ecosystem integrity and public health.”
Photo: An example of early-successional habitat promoted by federal and state wildlife agencies at the expense of mature and old-growth forests (U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service photo).
