A disproportionate amount of the trees on state game lands are old.
Bob Frye/Everybody Adventures
Pennsylvania’s public forests are old, mightly old, and they figure to stay that way for a while.
That doesn’t mean there’s not an effort underway to change things.
Dave Gustafson, chief forester for the Pennsylvania Game Commission, said the agency now has GIS, or geographic information system, data on 90 percent of the 1.5 million acres of state game lands it owns. Almost 1.4 million of those acres are in woods.
They are almost uniformly old.
“Over the last 50, 60 years, our forests have been changing. And we haven’t been keeping up with it,” Gustafson said.
More than 30 percent of the trees on game lands are 81 to 100 years old, Gustafson said. Another 25 percent are older than 100.
By comparison, a small fraction are younger than 20. That’s the stage – called early sucessional habitat – so important for many species of wildlife.
The disparity isn’t good, Gustafson said.
The problem
Ideally, trees older than 101 should be closer to 15 percent of the total, he said, with 20 percent in younger than 20-year-old age class.
The reason is wildlife, said Ben Jones, habitat division chief for the commission. A patch of trees ages zero to 5-years-old will support much more wildlife than one 6- to 20-years-old, he said.
“Habitat in Penn’s Woods is really driven by successional stage forests,” he said. “As habitat managers, we’re really trying to influence succession.”
But it’s going to take time. A long time, Gustafson said.
Between 2002 and 2011, the commission offered for sale, on average, 5,725 acres of timber, he said. It’s increased that as of late.
More than 9,000 acres of timber were put up for sale in 2015.
But to get to where it wants to go, the commission needs to be cutting 13,000 to 14,000 acres annually. And even then, Gustafson said, seeing real change in the forest composition is “going to take decades.”
And that’s if habitat manipulation begins on a larger scale right now, Jones said.
“We need to get ahead of this because the train’s not stopping,” he added.
The challenge
Dealing with that will be partly a manpower issue, apparently. Gustafson said the commission has a limited number of foresters on staff.
That’s unlikely to change any time soon, said Bryan Burhans, deputy executive director of administration for the agency. Some reprioritizing what the existing staff works on may have to occur, he said.
Gustafson said that’s possible.
“I think there’s a way to get there without an infusion of new money,” he said.
The use of controlled fire will probably have to supplement cutting, though.
A lot of the forests on game lands are either not commercially viable from a timber standpoint or are not accessible, Jones said. That’s where the use of fire can help, he added.
It’s cheaper, too. Jones said it costs the commission $300 to $400 an acre to cut trees. It costs $23 an acre to burn them.
The commission is developing a comprehensive management plan for each of its game lands, Jones said. That work, nearing completion, will help guide decisions on how and where to alter habitats.
The commission needs to pursue all avenues to create good quality habitat, and is trying, said board president Brian Hoover of Delaware County.
“We do know we need to do more. And we’re heading there,” he said.
