InDepth NH: Forest Experts Meet With Goodlander Hoping To Save Imperiled Bartlett Experimental Forest
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While Democratic U.S. Senators Jeanne Shaheen and Maggie Hassan, along with Republican Gov. Kelly Ayotte announced several weeks ago they were able to reverse a proposal to close the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest in Thornton and Woodstock, this other experimental forest on the other side of the White Mountains is still imperiled. While the bipartisan delegation said they were successful in asking the federal government to keep Hubbard Brook open, they got the government to agree to revisit the closure at Bartlett. Hubbard Brook does world class ecosystem bio/geo chemistry work and Bartlett does applied forest research. After a field trip with Goodlander and her staff into the experimental forest to look at clear cuts and various soil types and learned about silvicultural experiments since 1932, they sat down with the first-term congresswoman who learned there simply isn’t the staffing to support the historic work right now, which is part of the 800,000-acre White Mountain National Forest. After the meeting, Goodlander said “just to be here with people who are in the forest industry, every stage of the supply chain, to hear from people who have been working in this forest since 1958, it’s incredible. You just can’t recreate this. As I was saying, it is hard from a distance to imagine how anyone would be orchestrating and executing a reorganization plan without actually coming here and talking to the people… You’ve got to see it. You’ve got to understand the relationships that are complex. “…in the case of Bartlett, we are going to have to be creative, but also relentless. Because you just can’t allow these forests, which can’t be recreated, to be put on the chopping block,” Goodlander said. “We have the Farm Bill and we have had a number of amendments that have gone to try to protect experimental forests – and there are several dozen across the country – obviously the two in New Hampshire are huge assets for the northeast, but we’ve got the Farm Bill, we’ve got the appropriations process that is coming up and a lot of questions raised today about where federal funding that has been promised to our experimental forests actually is right now, which has been a reoccurring question the last year and half. “One of my big takeaways is being quiet does not help anyone in New Hampshire. We’ve got to be really clear about what’s not happening and where we want things to go,” Goodlander said. The Bartlett Experimental Forest is located in the Saco Ranger District of the White Mountain National Forest. Much of it is along the side of Bear Notch Road and is administered by the Northern Research Station in Durham. This is part of a large network of forest and rangelands scattered across the United States. These sites were established to conduct long term research on the major vegetation types across the 195 million acres of public lands administered by the U.S. Forest Service,” a welcome sign off the Bear Notch Road states. The original 2,600-acre footprint was established in 1932 to study northern hardwood silviculture (the art and science of growing healthy quality forests). In 2005 the Bartlett forest was expanded to 5,789 acres to include the upper elevations of the Bartlett watershed. Upper elevations were left in an unmanaged condition to provide control areas to compare results of experimental areas where clearcuts or prescribed fires have been done to see impacts. Research over the last 30 years has also inclu
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