Mud Pond Forest

Mud Pond’s goals are to establish an experiment and demonstration area that use concepts of resistance, resilience, and transition strategies in managing forests for a changing climate. Building resistance includes treatments that tend the existing forest to give healthy trees more growing space and reduced stress from water and resource competition. Resilience strategies include diversity age structure, species composition, and forest complexity through additions of dead standing and down wood. Transition strategies include the planting of trees species expected to do well in our changing climate. The treatment included three separate treatment types: group selection, irregular shelterwood, and a control, where no harvesting took place. Mud Pond Forest is a demonstration site for Silviculture with Birds in Mind for the Foresters for the Bird project. This project was created as a partnership between Audubon Vermont and the Vermont Department Forests, Parks, and Recreation. The goal of this project is to increase quality forest bird habitat through forest management and to demonstrate how active forest management can facilitate positive stewardship outcomes. The three focus areas occurring on this site include: silviculture for climate change, managing for quality forest bird habitat, and management of ash in the pre-EAB infestation. As Vermont’s forests are impacted by the compound stresses of a changing climate, fragmentation, and non-native species, it becomes more important to maintain all our native species as a mechanism to enhance resiliency. Emerald ash borer threatens the long-term existence of all species of ash native to North America. According to the latest research, the preservation of ash requires a multi-pronged approach: leaving a range of ages and sizes, regenerating ash, biocontrol’s, and insecticide treatments of small groups of seed trees. It is estimated that EAB is likely to arrive at Mud Pond Forest within the next 10 years. In 2019, a harvest was completed to demonstrate a framework for considering ash management during active harvest projects. The goals of Mud Pond Forest are to leave healthy ash trees standing. Retaining trees mean retaining genetic diversity, with the hope that some trees will have genetic resistance to the insect. Harvest to create conditions that will help new ash regenerate. Because the insect doesn’t target very young trees, we hope the new ash trees that emerge from our efforts will survive the first onslaught of the beetle. After which, we hope there will be more knowledge about what to do. Use insecticide treatments to protect some ash trees from the beetle, especially female ash trees, as their seeds are the hope of the future.