Recipient Organization
UNIVERSITY OF RHODE ISLAND
19 WOODWARD HALL 9 EAST ALUMNI AVENUE
KINGSTON,RI 02881
Performing Department
Natural Resources Science
Non Technical Summary
At the global level, forests are widely recognized for their critical importance in helping mitigate and buffer climate change while providing many other values. By storing carbon and keeping it out of the atmosphere, forests play a critical role among different types of land uses in combatting climate change. In Rhode Island, the 2018 Statewide Climate Resilience Action Strategy identified forests as a natural system that provides crucial services to communities and recommended that Rhode Island protect remaining forest cover and support the development of forest management plans to guide landowners in healthy forest management practices (RI State Government 2018).For all their beneficial contributions, evidence shows that climate change is affecting natural ecosystems including forests throughout New England, generally, and in Rhode Island, in particular. Temperatures have increased more than 3 degrees since the beginning of the 20th century and spring is arriving sooner in southern New England. The region has experienced a significant increase in the frequency of floods and intense precipitation events. Meanwhile, projections show temperatures continuing to increase and hydrological patterns shifting further. Climate models predict additional changes in the future. The 2020 Rhode Island Forest Action Plan explains how climate change is increasing stress on the state's forests and playing a role in more complex, compounding factors (RIDEM 2020).One particularly notable result of these impacts is that as the climate changes, forest composition will also change as conditions become less favorable to species that are adapted to cold climates and promote historically southern species at the northern edge of their range. Wildlife species that depend on forests are affected as well: changes in the timing of leaf-out, flowering, and fruiting in plants can be very disruptive to plant pollinators, seed dispersers, and migratory species. These increasing threats and the rapid rate of change have the potential to exceed an ecosystem's resilience or capacity to adapt (RIDEM 2020).Facing these observed and projected climate and weather shifts, forest managers and landowners in Rhode Island need to develop and implement management strategies to help forests adapt to changing climate conditions. Unfortunately, there is a lack of regional on-the-ground forest adaptation research to indicate what adaptation measures or tactics may be effective in helping forest ecosystems cope with climate change. In addition, only a limited amount of information on potential forest impacts is available to managers and landowners (Nagel et al. 2017).Responding to these barriers and needs at the national level, the Adaptive Silviculture for Climate Change (ASCC) project is a collaborative effort to establish a series of experimental forest management trials across a network of different forest ecosystem types throughout the United States. This expansive, long-term project seeks to catalyze the development of forest climate adaptation strategies by testing a range of approaches and ecosystem-specific treatments, and to provide conceptual tools and processes for integrating climate change considerations into forest management decision-making and silvicultural methods (Nagel et al. 2017). The project presents an opportunity for URI to participate in cutting-edge forestry and climate adaptation research by joining a recently established regional project that is part of a research network extending across the United States and Canada.The experimental design directly addresses pressing current needs identified by U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to determine promising practices for climate-smart forestry that deliver diverse environmental benefits, including wood products, carbon sequestration, wildlife habitat, and other ecosystem services (USDA 2021). Furthermore, the Rhode Island Forest Action Plan (FAP) identifies climate change as a priority issue for forest management, and this project directly contributes toward several strategies outlined in the FAP (RIDEM 2020).
Animal Health Component
100%
Research Effort Categories
Basic
(N/A)
Applied
100%
Developmental
(N/A)
Goals / Objectives
Improve our understanding of the impacts of climate change on southern New England oak-hickory forests via research on (a) how these forests are affected by changing climate and weather conditions, and (b) what types of forest management strategies and silvicultural methods should be employed when planning forest management activities to create climate-adaptive forests and wildlife habitats.Develop, implement, and monitor forest management treatments for three different forest climate adaptation strategies (resistance, resilience, and transition approaches) while also monitoring an unmanaged control area. Vegetation monitoring will assess the early effectiveness of the treatments in addition to other outcomes.Strengthen outreach programs that encourage both (a) foresters and allied natural resource professionals and (b) landowners and land trusts to manage forests in ways that promote and improve climate resiliency for both forests and wildlife. We will develop training materials and participate in outreach activities to ensure that the outputs of the first two components are extended to natural resource professionals and landowners and land trusts.
Project Methods
To create on-the-ground examples of climate-adaptive silviculture the investigators will locate and delineate suitable treatment sites at RI Dept Enviornmental Management's (DEM)DeCoppet Preserve in Richmond, RI. Site selection will be according to site level standards and protocols in use with the Adaptive Silviculture for Climate Change (ASCC) project. ASCC project design will guide site selection and treatment design activities and experimental design will replicate ASCC established methodology.Each of the three adaptive treatments will be implemented to address the goals of resistance, resilience, and transition, along with no action. While details of the treatments will be site-specific, they will follow general silvicultural prescriptions collaboratively developed by forest managers, scientists, and silvicultural experts during a Fall 2020 workshop hosted by UConn. URI will be responsible for short-term monitoring of the sites, while relationships established with UConn and other ASCC institutions and participants will help ensure continued long-term monitoring.Implementation of the silvicultural treatments will be administered by DEM staff and carried out by a Woods Operator (timber harvesting contractor) registered with DEM. The treated sites will then be available for outreach activities such as workshops for professionals and allied natural resource professionals and tours for landowners and interested members of the public.Data associated with silvicultural treatments will include pre- and post-treatment detailed forest inventories (numbers of trees per unit area, species mix, size distribution, relative density, spatial arrangement, canopy depth and density, descriptions of ground vegetation, soil and topographic conditions, habitat features), logistical and operational information, and economic data where appropriate. Reliability of forest inventory will be tested for accuracy within a 95% confidence interval. Additional data analysis will adhere to the ASCC study design, to be determined as this project engages more fully with the team of researchers involved with the Connecticut project.