The Resilient Forests Initiative for Eastern National Parks

Forest health monitoring. NPS.

National Park Service scientists in the Northeast launched the Resilient Forests Initiative to raise awareness of threats to forest health and build collaboration across parks in the Northeast and National Capital regions. It has four parts.

1. Describe forest condition

With the Schoodic Institute, scientists of the NPS Inventory & Monitoring (I&M) program assessed forests in eastern parks, using 12 years of canopy and understory data from more than 1,400 plots in some 40 parks and historic sites. Each park's regeneration was rated secure, insecure, probable failure or imminent failure.

• Finding: most park forests fell in the imminent or probable failure categories.
• Causes: browsing by overabundant white-tailed deer, and crowding by invasive plants.
• The results were published in Ecological Applications in 2023, with recommendations for each park.

2. Connect park managers

The initiative links parks facing similar threats to share the most practical forest management.

• November 2022: a three-day training brought together 120 park biologists, Invasive Plant Management Teams, regional leaders, I&M staff and partners, to tackle climate change, deer, new pests and pathogens, invasive plants and altered disturbance regimes.
• February 2024: two virtual workshops for staff and partners from four regions to trade management options.

3. Recommend resources and tools

Management actions the initiative supports include deer management, invasive species control, prescribed fire, silvicultural treatments, tree planting and fencing. Through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act, it has leveraged more than $10 million for over 35 eastern parks, improving more than 10,000 acres of forest of high ecological and cultural value at the greatest risk of loss — making them more resilient to climate change and disturbance.

4. Support adaptive management

The initiative helps parks and I&M networks feed monitoring data into decisions. Long-term monitoring tracks forest status and trends and frames an adaptive management approach, steering management toward goals in collaboration among parks, I&M, regional biologists and Invasive Plant Management Teams.

Download the resource brief · ← Forest complexity

Sources

Based on "I&M Networks Support Resilient Forest Management," part of the series Managing Resilient Forests Initiative for Eastern National Parks, National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain.