Resilience

The Massachusetts Dynamic Forest Restoration Initiative (MADFRI) is a collaboration on public and private lands in north central Massachusetts and the Berkshire Highlands region that enhances forest resiliency, restores fish and wildlife habitat diversity, mitigates invasive species, and creates a baseline model for long-term transboundary landscape-level planning throughout the region by through forest habitat restoration, forest habitat resilience, public engagement & outreach, and long-term landscape planning.

Forest Habitat Resilience

MADFRI’s goal in forest habitat resilience is to incorporate strategies and frameworks that address climate change vulnerabilities and promote the adaptive capacity of forests to thrive under future conditions. 

Resilience is the capacity of a forest to quickly respond to and recover from multiple environmental stressors. Resilience is a product of multiple factors including species diversity and abundance, age class (or structural) diversity, the extent of tree mortality, and the vulnerability of species present on a given site to multiple stressors.

One practice to improve resilience is to manage for a mix of some old trees, some young trees and some in-between, and to alter species variety to a more climate-adapted mix while maintaining keystone species that are critical to the system.

Magaging forests for greater resilience can mean making changes in species diversity and/or age structure to increase the forest’s adaptive capacity for response to multiple stressors. Some of the main stressors identified in our forests are invasive plants & insects, overbrowsing by deer & moose, and climate change.  

Invasive Plants

When invasive plants dominate a forest, they can inhibit the regeneration of native trees and plants. In addition, invasive plants have been shown to provide less valuable wildlife habitat and food sources.

Invasive Insects

Hemlock woolly adelgid, the Asian long-horned beetle, and beech bark disease - these organisms have no natural predators or controls and are significantly affecting our forests by changing species composition as trees susceptible to these agents are selectively killed.

Over-Browsing

Deer populations have increased dramatically due to a lack of natural predators, increased habitat from forest fragmentation, and a general decline in hunting across the region. can prevent certain tree species or areas of forest from regenerating. no young trees to take over as the older trees die.

Climate Change

Longer growing seasons help increase forest productivity but may make trees more susceptible to late spring frosts. Drought-like conditions. These changes are predicted to shift the habitat conditions for many plant species (and the animals that depend on them) north and to higher elevations. These conditions are also predicted to favor species that are more competitive in warmer, drier climates.

Stressor Interactions

Because these stressors interact with one another, it is important to address them as part of a larger whole. Thavors invasive plants and insects & weakens trees.

Minimizing the level of invasive plants, insects, and diseases; lowering deer populations; ensuring that soil is abundant in organic matter and not compacted or eroding; and ensuring that water resources have forested buffers minimize the amount of stressors a forest faces and increase its resiliency.

Forest Adaptation includes a wide variety of actions that complement the sustainable management, conservation, and restoration of forests and help to maintain ecosystem integrity and environmental benefits. The goal is to enhance the ability of forest ecosystems to adapt to the effects of climate change.

The Northern Institute of Applied Climate Science has compiled an excellent resource workbook that details the many actions that can be utilized for forest restoration. The most important big-picture thing to remember is that each site is different, and that means professionals must evaluate each site to decide which actions will be most beneficial. See the menu of actions here: Browse Menus of Adaptation Strategies and Approaches.