Tag: Climate Change

As Minnesota’s climate changes, forests will face pressures from tree diseases and pests, heavier and more frequent rainfalls, warmer temperatures, and prolonged drought. You can foster a healthy, resilient woodland by adding species that are predicted to adapt well to these changes.

To ensure a healthy and productive forest, we’ll need to use strategies for climate adaptation. These will likely include a combination of management actions to help forests stay resilient to climate stress, such as: 

• Adding species that are new to the forest to increase diversity.
• Prioritizing native trees and plants that are predicted to do well.
• Nurturing targeted areas to persist much as they are today.
• Removing invasive plants and thinning forests to reduce competition.

Would you like to know more? Watch Anna Stockstand explain how to make your woodlands climate-ready and visit the climate-ready woodlands website to see what to plant in your Minnesota woods.

Lilli Kaarakka, Meredith Cornett, Grant Domke, Todd Ont, and Laura Dee published a paper reviewing forest management as a natural climate solution. The paper looks at the evidence for the potential of specific forestry practices to sequester carbon and gives guidance for practitioners in the Great Lakes region of the United States.

You can download the paper here: https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/2688-8319.12090

From the paper:

In the United States, timber harvesting is the most extensive disturbance across forestlands both in terms of area and C impacts, and 89%of the timber harvested annually comes from private lands. Thus, decisions around forest and land management alter the role of forests as a C sink. Forest management, defined as applying appropriate, sustainable practices to a forest to achieve certain outcomes (i.e., timber, recreational opportunities, etc.), can influence C sequestration by (1)increasing forest cover (reforestation or afforestation), (2) maintaining existing forest cover (avoided deforestation) and (3) managing existing forests. Although US forests at present are C sinks, large uncertainty remains about the future persistence and magnitude of this sink under rotational, single-species forest management.