 Hello everyone out there. This is Nick Lund from Maine Audubon welcoming you to this presentation. I'm going to, it's Pima County, Arizona, my bad. I'm going to just say a few quick words and then turn it over to Bert and Nancy Knapp from Western Maine Audubon. Welcome to this webinar. This is a webinar format, which means that just the panelists here have their video and their audio options. The rest of the folks are listening at home, so we can't hear you. But if you do want to get in touch or reach out, there's a couple ways to that. One is the chat, which I hope you are typing in now to say hello and tell us where you're coming in from. The other important one is the Q&A box. So if you sort of hover your cursor down over the bottom zoom bar, you'll see a little speech bubble thing. Q&A box. That's where, if you have questions for Dr. Barton, you want to put them down there in the Q&A box below. This generally works best if we save all the questions for the end and so keep them in that Q&A box. We are recording this now and we will post it on the Western Maine Audubon website soon. No visible Q&A box. Hopefully if you hover your cursor down there, you should see it right down at the bottom. So hopefully that'll work. If not, if you can't find it, you can type questions in the chat and we'll make it work that way. So that's all I think you need to know. Without further ado, I'm going to drop out here and turn it over to Nancy Knapp. Thank you, Nick. Welcome everyone to our third and final fall talk for this year. We are working on bringing you three webinars in the spring, starting in March. Our first one will be done by Chawanky. It's going to be on predators and initially it was going to be a show and tell, but that's a little hard through the computer. They still are going to do something for us and we're working on two talks after that. Tonight we're very fortunate to have with us Drew Barton. He's professor of biology at UMF and he is going to do our second historically themed talk discussing changes in our forest. Dr. Barton has spent a lot of time studying forests and different aspects and I'm very much looking forward to hearing what he has to say. So without further ado, welcome, Drew, and take it away. Well, thank you very much. It's a strange power to have everybody's attention for 45 minutes or so. Usually I wear this. My field hat, even though it's winter to like get myself in the mood, but I thought we thought maybe I'll wear these headsets so you can hear me clearly tonight. So let me go ahead and get started here. So my talk kind of falls into three parts tonight. I'm going to talk about main forest and I'm really interested in telling you a little bit about what I know about what we know about the past and changes in the past. And I want to take you kind of bring you up to date and talk about what is it that's valuable about main forest. And now I want to look to the future and if we have time. I would like to talk a little bit about some possible kind of potential solutions for some of the challenges that face us, and some of those kind of weave together pretty well with what's happening with the main climate council right now. To help further ado, let me start you on a little bit of a journey back into the past. I want to go back 25,000 years and talk about past changes. I'm going to give away the punchline right now, and then I'll reiterate that at the end, because it's an important punchline and that is that main forest or dynamic. What I mean by that is that main forests are not static that they're always changing that things about the climate, natural disturbances humans, when those things push for us change, as you will see. So 25,000 years ago, some of you probably are aware that where I'm standing here at the University of Maine at Farmington there was a mile and a half thick covering of ice, where I would be giving my talk from. Well, I probably wouldn't be giving my talk but you get the idea. So this was part of this giant ice sheet that went from Canada, all the way to New York. Now about that time astronomical cycles shifted enough to begin warming the earth and as the earth warmed began to melt the glacier and the glacier began to retreat. And this is a wonderful map by Hal Borns and others at the Climate Change Institute at the University of Maine that shows the chronology of that glacial retreat. So those are thousands of years. So this shows how far north the glacier had the ice sheet had retreated at different points. You can see that around 15,000 years ago, the first land in the area that we now call Maine was first exposed from under the glacier. And that by about 13,000 years ago all of Maine was liberated from the ice. And what happened then of course is that the forest slowly began to return over decades and over centuries and over millennia and it was a slow process, especially because the trees that eventually we're going to make up the forest of Maine were far to the south, where it was warmer. What happened though is that these tree species made a remarkable continental scale migration from those climate refugia areas in the south, all the way up to to Maine, and this tracks their trajectories over thousands of years. On the left side, I've just picked out a few species here. There's there, the three spruces over there on the left, and then there's white pine on the right. There's thousands of years again, and this shows how far north these species had traveled or migrated at different points in time. Now what you can see is that the spruces and white pine arrived in Maine at very different times. The spruces arrived in Maine around 14,000 years, give or take a few hundred years, and white pine didn't come for several thousand more years. It's kind of remarkable that I'm showing you an ecological map from thousands of years ago, and I could show you maps of all the tree species in Maine, similar maps to this. I'm still, I've been doing this a long time and I'm still amazed at that, which raises the question, how do we actually know this how can we put this together. One of the reasons we know this. So one line of evidence is plant pollen. In the spring and in the summer that plants release at least flowering plants and conifers release pollen up into the air. Some of that pollen falls on lakes and falls in wetlands sinks down and gets combined into a new layer in the sediments either at the bottom of the lake or the very top of wetlands such as bogs. And what happens in is that that happens year after year after year. And if you go deeper into those sediments you're going back in time. So essentially, the sediments are a time capsule past vegetation. Now, if we can pull out a core, which we have done right here with this what is called a Russian core, it's a hollow metal core, and you can pull out a core. You can see that horizontally here. We can free take that back to the lab. We can freeze it. We can take slices. We can take a little bit of organic matter from each slice. We can take a sample from each slice and then look at it under the microscope and count the relative abundance of pollen from different plant species, and we can reconstruct what the vegetation was like at different times in the past for one side from multiple times, etc. And we get something like this. This is a generalized pollen chronology for central Maine. What it shows is at the top is contemporary times, and the top of the sediment layers, whether they're bottom of the lake sediments or whether they're bog sediments. That's the top of them and it's contemporary times. And as we go down this graph, we're going deeper and deeper into the sediments and farther and farther back in time. And one of these little blobs as you can see is for an individual group of species or for an individual species. So the first thing you can see is if you look down here, you can see the first establishment of a forest after Maine land had been liberated from the ice for a thousand or so, a couple thousand years, something like that. You can see that there was a lot of spruce, there were shrubs, there was also things like balsam poplar, etc. We can get a little glance, a little glimpse at that forest right there. Really interestingly, when they were doing the excavation for the Mercy Hospital in Portland, when they were excavating, they unearthed all of these preserved logs of spruce and balsam poplar that had been preserved in the sediments and they radiocarbon dated them to 13,500 years. So here is a little bit of that boreal type spruce and balsam poplar forest that was around about 13,500 years ago. Now, apparently what happened is that Bram Hall Hill, which is part of the West End of Portland, apparently that collapsed, taking with it spruce and balsam poplar, and it became embedded into the sediments, the logs became preserved until they were unearthed just a few years ago. So really interesting. If you go up on top of Bram Hall Hill today, you won't see a boreal forest, you won't find spruce, you won't find balsam poplar instead, you'll find red oak and white oak and red maple and white pine, etc. Which is very much a temperate deciduous forest, much more of a temperate sort of southern kind of forest. So in other words, the forest in the Portland area has changed dramatically. You won't find boreal forest within 200 miles, 200 miles north of Portland. So the forest changed dramatically. And we can see that right here, we can see that that the forest established here, but it did not sit still it continued to change. You can see that by about 11,000 years spruce had largely disappeared replaced by white pine and birch and oaks. And then after a few more thousand years white pine declined and the hemlock came in, there was more birch and finally beach came in, etc. What is it that drove these changes? Well, of course, it's climate change. So what happened is that things warmed up but it was still sort of cool during this 13,000, 12,000 year period. Then it warmed up a lot. It got very dry. There were more fires and white pine and oaks and birches are really well adapted to those conditions spruce is not. And then eventually it cooled down again and it got a little more moist and incomes hemlock and beach, etc. and white pine declines. Now, one thing that you might notice here, take a look at the arrow. Notice that this is for interior main. So for interior main, after spruce largely disappeared around 11,000 10,000 years, it did not return in any appreciable numbers till about 1500 to 1000 years ago, which is a little, a little odd and sort of violates I think some of the sort of mythology about main forest that have this idea of spruce is a quintessential kind of part of the ancient forest of Maine, the forest primeval in Maine, but what this suggests is that cat forest is really only been around for about 1000 1500 years. Interesting. So let's continue going up to the present now so we're about 1000 years about 500 years before the present so the question. The next question is, how have forest change since Euro American settlement. Now, by the way, you're going to hear me use this very cumbersome phrase a lot, which is pre Euro American settlement times, and I use that specifically to acknowledge that the land that I'm calling Maine here is Wabanaki land. So there obviously was settlement, there were settlements in Maine already so again I'll be using this pre Euro American settlement times, a few times so sorry about the cumbersome nature of that phrase. So how can we kind of get a feel for an understanding of how the forest has changed over the past 300 years 400 years. There's several lines of evidence. And I want to just rely on two for tonight. One of them is remnant old growth forest, there's not much in Maine at all. But what we would expect is that these are places that have never been cleared. They've never been harvested. They should give us an indication of what for us used to be like in Maine, before they were cleared, and before they were cleared. Another line of evidence are early land surveys. So when Euro American settlers came into Maine, and they purchased the land in Maine, they divided it up with the help of a land surveyor the land surveyor would walk east and west and north and cross the lines across the landscape for weeks and for months, and they would demarcate plots, and they would mark off the corners of the plots with witness trees, and they would put a special mark on those witness trees, and they would actually record the species identity of those witness trees. So let's record other ecological information. So this is a treasure trove of ecological information about what the forest were like 300 years ago 200 years ago, 400 years ago, etc. So let's put those two lines of evidence together and see what the forest were like back back then, and how they have changed from a few hundred years ago to today. One way they've changed is species composition. I don't want to surprise it all. Almost all of Maine has been harvested and large parts of Maine have been cleared, and there have been other human disturbances as well. So what we find is that climax species that is species that live a long time, they grow slowly, they thrive in an intact forest that these species have declined in numbers. Not that they've become rare or anything, but they've declined in numbers so fewer spruces fewer yellow burnt sugar maple hemlock beach. By the way beach is actually increased on the last few decades but that's a story for another time. Whereas other species that we might call pioneers early successional species that are light demanding. They are they thrive after disturbances whether they're human or natural. Those species have increased tremendously. So those are popl and paper birch and cherries and red maple and white pine as well have increased tremendously over the last two 300 years. Now, another big change in addition to species composition is the age of the forest. So what I want to do here is I want to start by giving you an idea of what the ages of the forest were like in pre Euro American settlement times on the left, and then essentially I'll show you a graph on in on the right to compare that with. So our best estimate is this. And that is that about three quarters of main forest shown right here, we're in what we might call old growth condition during pre Euro American settlement times. That is, they had not been disturbed for at least 150 years. They were dominated by climax species intact, dense, shady, big old trees in them, and only about a quarter of main forest had been naturally disturbed in the previous 150 years or so. And this is by fires and ice storms and floods and other things such as that. So in other words, main forest were largely intact old growth forest in pre Euro American settlement times. That's what they're like today. So on the down on the bottom on the horizontal axis you see age classes, and then on the y axis again, those are percentages again, and I have the 150 year cut off for old growth. And what you can see here is that main forest or young. And something like about almost a third of them are less than 40 years old, and half of them or even more than half of them are less than 60 years old, and there are scant forest that are more than 100 years old and especially more than 150 years old. So main forest used to be old today they are young for us primarily. I so much talk about older forests. Why am I emphasizing this so much, and that's because we understand better than ever now that older forests are really really important in many different ways. By the way, I'll return to this a little bit later in the talk, but I do want to go through right now a few of the reasons why I'm spent a little bit of time on showing you the lack of old forest. One of the things we understand is that some species are dependent on old growth, even more species find that old growth is superior habitat for them. Recent research is showing that old growth, those kind of cool shady moist conditions that are an old growth, provide refuges for species that are vulnerable to climate change that are vulnerable to drying conditions, or to real hot temperatures is really, that's a really good example of this. The other thing, no surprise here, old growth forest store tremendous amounts of carbon in their trunks and their branches and roots, and in the soil as well. The other thing that's really new is that the dogma used to be that old growth forest used to be described as decadent forest in the sense that they weren't very productive. And it turns out that old growth forest continue to take up more carbon dioxide from the air, then they release back to the air, no matter how old they are. So in other words, they don't begin to fall apart. They continue to thrive and to take up and they continue to store carbon. Again, no matter how old they are. So this is a main Audubon talk. I want to just give just a little side here about how important older forest ours bird habitat. By the way, all of this is from this terrific publication put out by main Audubon called forestry for birds. It's really made for foresters and land managers and others makes great reading. So the map on the left shows the average number of forest species per migration route and the red areas are the hotspots in the US so you can see that that main is a hotspot in terms of the density of migrating birds per area, a really special area. Main forest during the summer during the breeding season support 90 bird species. They support so many birds and so many bird species that in this publication. I love this phrase that it's termed that main forest or baby bird factories. It's really kind of neat way to think about it. I'll short quote I want to just read to you from this. In light of all these threats and challenges the answer for forest management from a bird's perspective is the same. Managing over space and time to create patches of young forest interspersed with large blocks, within large groups of structurally complex or messy older for us. Okay, so what have we learned from the past. We've learned that nature is not static that it is transient and dynamic and changeable, and that climate when the climate changes or when disturbance patterns change, the forest change. We've learned that older for us are ecologically valuable. We've learned that for us are so complex so interconnected, and that there's a lot we really don't know. I think maybe one of the things we've learned is that it probably makes sense to have a lot of humility as we're trying to understand these forests, and as we're trying to manage these forests and plan for the future. Okay, so let's come up to the present times. And what I'd like to do is, is kind of do a review of what is so important about main forest. I mean, I'm sure most of you who have tuned in here, know a lot about this but let me give you some numbers on this. Here's the punchline. Main forest provide abundant ecosystem and economic services. Let's start with the economic services. Actually, before that, let's just talk about the forest itself and how much there is. So 89% of the state is actually covered by force. That's the most for any state in the United States, 17.6 million acres of forest. And that actually has not changed much over the last 60 years, which is promising. The most recent estimate is that there are 3.2 billion trees, greater than five inches in diameter in Maine. I actually went out last week and did a recount I actually came up with 3.3 billion but you know I mean what's point one billion. So let's first go over kind of the role of forests in the main economy. I don't have to tell you that forests are a really important part of the main economy. Let's start with the amount of harvesting. There's a lot of harvesting in Maine. 97% of the state, or the forest are open for harvesting 2% are reserved that is you can't harvest in them. 5.4 million tons harvested per year, about three quarters of the amount of growth new wood that's put on in the forest is harvested in the northern part of the state actually all that's grown is actually harvested. This might surprise you 1990 to 2010 was the most harvesting in the state's history. It was also a time when the amount of growth and the amount of harvest were just about the same not really very very different. So just barely sustainable. And not in all parts of the state. So let me give you a little bit more information on that. I think this is important because I think we have kind of a little bit of a mythology that we harvest a lot of forest in Maine in the late 1800s and early 1900s. And that maybe it's kind of leveled off or declined since then. But so here is a, here's a chart from the changing nature of the main woods that tracks it from 1700 to 2009. And so you can see the late 1800s and early 1900s, it actually the amount of harvesting in recent times is at least twice as much as that, and that it's increased a lot since the end of the Great Depression. Here is a wonderful graph from John Gunn, he's a professor at the University of New Hampshire for a forest scientist. It's a great site to visit. Just pay attention to the red line up there, because that gives us more detailed information for the last couple of last 25 years. So you can see from about 1988 up to the early 2000s that the total harvest in Maine increased and sort of level off and that and then it's kind of gone down a little bit since then. Let me just point out that this is completely market driven. What I mean by that is that there haven't been any appreciable changes in regulations or laws or anything like that, or any incentives for, or not like widespread incentives for people not to harvest etc. So this is largely a function of the demand from the international market for wood products from Maine. So, again, a lot of harvesting in Maine, and then not surprisingly, all of that adds up to a lot of dollars and a lot of jobs, so $8 billion total impact direct and indirect $318 million in local taxes, almost 40,000 jobs are associated directly or indirectly. And that doesn't include the forest ecotourism industry, which is a little harder to quantify than the forest products industry is. Okay, let's take a look at the ecological value now. I've already mentioned wildlife habitat. And what I want to do is generalize that a little bit. So I kind of focused on older forest. The truth is that any forest in Maine is important wildlife habitat, whether it's early successional or late successional. And here are a few examples right here. The reason I emphasize places like Big Read Pond, which is the largest old growth area in Maine is because sometimes they're underappreciated, and we don't have much of them. So we have a lot of young forests as you could see earlier. And what we understand now is that older forests are really vital. But again, all of these forests play an important role as wildlife habitat. Now here's something that's really kind of new as well. And that is a carbon perspective on Maine forests. And this is a recent analysis by a group at the University of Maine Climate Change Institute and a few other folks. And this is a publication of the state of Maine's carbon budget, just published in 2020. The left side is primarily the carbon dioxide emissions from Maine, from factories, from vehicles, from agriculture, etc. And on the right is the amount of carbon dioxide that's actually taken up by Maine forest. Let everybody get that idea. On the left are emissions. On the right is the remarkable job that Maine forests are doing and taking back up and sequestering some of that carbon dioxide. Maine forests take up so much carbon dioxide that it adds up to 60% of the amount of carbon that the state emits. And there's research suggesting that we could, that forest could take up even more with some changes. So, what we've looked at so far is that Maine has a lot of forests, there's a lot of harvesting Maine forests are economically very important that Maine forests are ecologically extremely important. So let's look to the future. What do we see happening in the future, and in particular where the future future challenges, I want to approach this from what I know which is ecology, and I want to focus on three things I want to focus on pests. I want to focus on harvesting a little bit more, and I want to focus on climate change. So let's start with pests. So you're probably aware that there is a suite of non native insect pests, and a fungal pathogens that are threatening Maine forests. There are three of them. There are more, but these are poster children, if you will, poster pests in Maine. So on the upper left hand side is emerald ash borer. It's this spectacular small metallic green beetle from Asia that was accidentally taken to Michigan, and then has spread to the east. As you can see in the map over here in the last couple of years is it has entered northern Maine and southern Maine, it will eventually spread across the entire state. Perhaps there'll be a few places spared, but generally all populations of ash will be subject to the emerald ash borer. The emerald ash borer decimates ash populations within just a few years. So any place that has a lot of ash, there'll be a big impact of the emerald ash borer. In Maine, ash is not one of the top five or six species in terms of abundance, but it certainly is common. And of course we know that the black or brown ash is sometimes called, is an extremely important species for indigenous people in Maine, spiritually, and in terms of culture, and economics, because that is the tree from which pack baskets are made, both those that are utilitarian and those that are an art form as well. So the tribes have been working for quite a while on kind of trying to figure out how to kind of deal with this issue in the future. Now, in the upper right hand side is the hemlock willy adelgid. This is another insect, not a scale insect, but it's a little insect that has a little stylet. It sticks inside the hemlock and sucks the juices out of the hemlock. And it's kind of hidden by this sort of fluffy white stuff. And it also decimates hemlock populations. It's largely confined to the coast right now because it's just too cold in the interior, but as main warms, it's very likely to enter the interior and become a problem where hemlock populations are very abundant in interior areas, such as around Farmington as an example. And then in the lower part is Beach Bark disease. So this is actually a fungal pathogen that gets transported by an insect. When the insect sticks its stylet into the bark, the fungal spores are able to enter and then germinate and grow and infest the bark. And what it does, I'm sure all of you have seen this is it creates those sort of 40 contusions on the bark, it weakens the trees and makes them more vulnerable to other stresses that lead to early demise. Actually, beaches are more abundant now than they were 30 or 40 years ago, but what you don't find are older beaches or larger beaches, because by the time they start getting older and larger. They're so damaged by this that they're very vulnerable to windstorms, insect pests and other things as well. So these three pests as well as a whole suite of others as well, certainly are going to change main forests. Now, this is a little complicated but I think really important. And this is about harvesting. So I was lucky enough to attend a webinar a few weeks ago, attended also by a bunch of other foresters and forest ecologists in Maine and it was a presentation by John Gunn about a paper he published a couple of years ago with a couple of other people. The title of the paper is evaluating degradation in North American forests. So what they did is they had data from thousands and thousands of plots across New England, including Maine. What they did is they evaluated the quantitative data from each plot and put them into one of five, what's called stocking categories. And essentially, these stocking categories are an evaluation of the potential of that plot and the trees in that plot to actually produce a full fledged forest with economically valuable wood products eventually. Now, part of this is, are there enough trees that have been left after harvesting to actually lead to regrowth that's going to produce a real forest. And are the individuals that are that are left the individual trees and the, and the types of species that are of high enough quality to actually lead to a valuable stand or not. They used standard forestry cutoffs as definitions for these. So anything that is in the three, four and five categories, that is, that's the yellow and the red are considered by foresters as degraded forest. Anything in the green is high quality forest. We can just focus on Maine over on the left. And what you can see is that a large number of the plots in Maine are degraded forest. Let me read to you the conclusion of their paper. Almost half of northern New England forests are in a degraded condition as evaluated using conservative sea line stocking level based on mixed species relative density measure sorry about the jargon and a definition of tree desirability based on species and form. Our results show that private forest lands have a disproportionate area that is reduced in quality and desirable species. And the stocking levels across the region do show a slight increase, nearly all that increase comes from poorly formed shade tolerant hardwoods, as well as balsam fur, which is likely to experience reduction and coming years due to an expected increased bruce but warm outbreak. A continuation of recent harvest practices as identified by Blair and do see would likely exacerbate these trends. And this is really important here, which have consequences, not only for the regional forest products economy but also for wildlife habitat and greenhouse gas objectives policy alternatives to address financial and technical barriers to restoration will be needed to effect wide spread change. So on to the last and major biggest, most important, scariest threat to Maine forest and I'm sure that you were waiting for this. And that is that Maine is warming. Maine is subject to climate change will be subject to more climate change. If you look in the middle. So this tracks mean temperature in Maine from the late 1800s to the year 2020, and you can see that Maine has gone up 3.2 degrees on average. That's a lot. This increase has been especially in the winter. So Maine has increased by 5.1 degrees on average in the winter. So those old timers that say that winter is just not what it used to be are telling the truth. So five degrees is a really big change over a century. The future suggests that things are only going to get warmer. Here are three potential trajectories for the future. So the red line, these are for Maine by the way. So the end this is Fahrenheit. So the red line projects an increase of 12 degrees for Maine by the year 2100 the green and the blue are more around five and a little bit under four as well. Where do these projections come from. These are based on different socioeconomic projections. So the red line is for business as usual. So not much effort to actually reduce emissions and the other two on actually getting our act together and figuring out ways to reduce emissions to increase the uptake of carbon dioxide from the air, etc. This is especially important because it's possible that Maine will be very vulnerable to these kinds of climate changes, not just temperature but the other changes that are shown there as well. But the reason for the potential vulnerability is Maine of Maine is that Maine is an ecological transition zone. So to the north is the boreal forest to the south is the temperate deciduous forest and Maine has elements of both of those. The northern part of the state of course is more northern and the southern part your county is for sure much more temperate much more deciduous more southern in its character, and this makes the state that the state more vulnerable to flipping more to that more sort of temperate character rather than the northern character. Let me explore that a little bit with you by showing you two sets of specific projections. The first is for two key tree species on the left side is red spruce, which is a quintessential northern species in Maine. And on the right is wide oak, which is a quintessential temperate sort of species that is in Maine. If you look at the top two maps. If you look on the left, you can see the distribution and abundance of spruce, the darker the area, the more of that species there is. So you can see that spruce occurs across the state, a little less abundant in the southwest, very abundant in the north. Wide oak, the temperate species occurs only in the southwest part of the state today. So there are two sets of projections, the ones in the middle are optimistic projections. The bottom two are pessimistic projections. You can see that both of those project a decline in the abundance of spruce and a tremendous increase in the distribution and the abundance of white oak. Now, here is the parallel for bird species. On the left is a northern species, Magnolia warbler, and on the right is a more temperate species. If you look at the top two maps, you see that Magnolia warbler, abundant in Maine, especially in the northern part of Maine, tefted titmouse, occurs in the warmer parts of the state, but really largely absent in the colder northern parts of the state. And in the middle are the optimistic projections, the bottom are the pessimistic projections, and you can see a decline in Magnolia warbler and a remarkable projected increase in the abundance and distribution of tefted titmouse. So we don't know how much warming there's going to be. We don't know what the impact will be on the state. What we do know is that Maine will become less northern. And it's likely that the species changes that we'll see by the year 2100 are going to look something like this at least on the left or species that we expect to decrease on the right or species that we expect to increase. Now, I can't really emphasize this enough and I know that that you all are probably as aware of these things as I am, but climate change is, it's time is now. It is indeed a climate emergency. So you probably may be aware that a couple of years ago that the intergovernmental panel on climate change, which is part of the UN and is the leading climate scientists around the world that they issued a statement saying that if we did not want to follow the red line potentially and go beyond some sort of safety margin that we needed to reduce emissions by 50% by the year 2030. That's a tall challenge, but a really important challenge that we need to take on as soon as possible, like today or tomorrow. You'll see why I'm saying tomorrow in just a little while. So the future. Here's what the challenges are. How can we, number one, and maybe this is number one priority. How can we keep forest as forest. I would say that there's largely consensus about this throughout the state that we want to keep forest as forest. How can we improve forest management. So we have a lot of slides on some of the problems, some of the degradation of forest because of harvesting practices today, we can improve a lot. How can we prepare for the coming transition and the kinds of species that are in our state, how can we increase older forest and increase carbon sequestration. How can we do these things and still maintain a vibrant forest economy. Now, I think we have a little bit of time and I'd like to just take about five minutes now. And I'd like to not leave you with that sort of on a limb and instead, I'd like to just put forth one possible strategy that we might follow. There are others as well. But this is one I think that bears some examination. And this is forest carbon offsets. And I'm going to try to weave this into some of the proposals of the main climate council as well. In just a moment, but I have a feeling that not everybody knows what we mean by carbon offset. So just in case, let me just start with defining, what do we mean by carbon offsets. So a carbon offset is this carbon offset is avoided emission or newly stored greenhouse gases that are purchased to compensate for emissions occurring elsewhere. So in other words, a corporation or a country or a state can or a university can purchase carbon offsets from some entity that's either avoiding emissions or is taking up additional greenhouse gases. And that country or university or corporation can credit themselves for some of their greenhouse gas emissions. So that's what carbon offsets are. Now there are two really important criteria that some activity has to meet in order to ethically and also in terms of the market that they actually have to meet. One is what is called additionality. So additionality is that the proposed action would not have happened in the absence of the carbon offset. So you can't count something that you were going to do anyway, as an offset has to be something that that would not have happened without someone paying for that carbon offset. And then the second is that can't be leakage by leakage what we mean is that you can't as an example, say, we're not going to harvest these 1000 acres, we're going to let them just take up carbon dioxide. It's not fair if what that means is that 1000 additional acres get harvested somewhere else. So that's what we mean by leakage. But as long as these two criteria are met, then it counts as a carbon offset. What do we mean by a forest carbon offset. So forest carbon offsets can be done in here's sort of three categories of what we mean by that. So it could be a forest station or reforestation. Tree planting, for example, and creating a forest where there never has been a forest so that that forest takes up carbon from the air, or it could be the reestablishment of a forest where there used to be a forest. But now there hasn't been for a while like pasture land or something like that. A second category is the avoided conversion of a forest that has a high likelihood of being turned into agriculture or development. So for example, if there's a giant development that's going to be shopping mall and something like that. And then there is a carbon offset that is floated to avoid that and keep it is forest, that would be an avoided conversion. And then the last is improved forest management that increases carbon in the forest, or in durable harvested wood products like dimensional lumber that goes into housing, for example. It's a little complicated but happy to talk about that, if you'd like to in just a few minutes. And so what we mean though by improving forest management is, is don't cut as often. Let the forest get older, increase productivity by thinning, improve harvest practices. For example, over that sea line that I mentioned earlier, rather than below the sea line, maintain high levels of stocking those two things are obviously closely connected to each other. So let me now kind of, that's a good segue into one of the strategies of the main climate council. There are a lot of them that address all kinds of things as you can imagine. This is particular to protect humane's environment and working lands to increase carbon sequestration. So I just want to go over a couple of them. So one is to protect natural and working lands and waters. So the idea is that by 2030 to increase acreage of concern of conserved lands in the state by 32 30% to voluntary purchase of land and conservation easements. Another part of this is to focus conservation on high biodiversity areas to support land and water connectivity and ecosystem health. I like that. And then the third is to revise scoring criteria for state conservation funding to incorporate climate mitigation and resilience goal, rather than criteria that have nothing to do with this that clearly is an improvement. So this is number one, and that is, let's try to keep forest as forest and increase the amount of conserved lands. Number two has to do with carbon carbon storage specifically on the areas that are already forest land. So the idea is by 2023 conduct a statewide inventory of carbon stocks to establish a baseline. And here is the kernel by 2022 establish a voluntary incentive based forest carbon program for owners. Small woodland owners, like myself, of 10 to 10,000 acres and forest practitioners as well to increase carbon storage and encourage good management. This is interesting while maintaining current timber harvest levels. So interesting, but this is something that people have been searching for for a while and that is, how can we provide incentives for people to not cut their land so hard because the reason people often cut their land because they need the money. So how can we provide financial and other incentives so that they won't cut their, their forest is often as hard, or maybe at all, so that they will continue to absorb more carbon, pull carbon dioxide out of the air. So this is a good place to end and that is tomorrow actually good coincidental timing here is the final meeting of the main climate council well where they will talk about these proposals and others as well and if you're interested in tuning in very, very interesting. I was lucky enough to be on one of the working groups, but there is the website to tune in. You have to register or just Google main climate council up will pop the page, look to the right, and there's the place to register for the meeting tomorrow. By the way, a plan is due to the governor and the legislature within just about two or three weeks, which will be the basis of deciding on legislation and rulemaking to begin addressing carbon net carbon emissions, and to increase the resiliency of the state to stop climate change. So that's a good place for me to stop. Thanks so much for attending this and I'll be happy to take any more questions. All right, awesome. Thank you, Dr. Barton that was fantastic. Oh, you're welcome. I'm hoping the NAPS can can jump on to folks if you have questions. Okay, so please put them if you could in the Q&A box down at the bottom of the screen we have a couple questions here and I see one in the chat to that I will do my best not to forget. And while we are waiting for the NAPS to get back on I'm just going to jump right into it. A question from Kenneth here where does balsam fir fall in the split between climax and pioneer trees. Yeah I think can can probably answer that question a lot better than I can actually. He's been on the forest for a very long time and and probably knows more about main forest trees and just about anywhere balsam fir is really, I find a really strange species because it's it's shade tolerant. For sure, but it doesn't really live that long it's very vulnerable to wind through and, and other things like that. If you get in touch with you can about sources for that. You can actually look in the, in the changing nature of the main woods if you look at the end notes for that chapter you will find the sources for 1700 up to 2009. And then of course if you look at john guns sources, you will find john guns sources and on his webpage and paper as well but happy to talk to you about that more. A question from john here. Which tree species absorb the most carbon. Well, I can't fully answer that question, except that in terms of taking up carbon, whatever species photos synthesizes the most is going to take up carbon faster. There are a couple of things so one of them is how fast is a tree take up carbon and the faster a tree grows the faster it will take up carbon. But in terms of storing carbon for long periods of time species that live longer have denser would, in other words can store more carbon in their trunk and in their branches etc. So those are going to store more carbon in the long run so there's no simple answer to that, but remember that carbon sequestration the uptake is nothing more than photosynthesis so that taking in a carbon dioxide at the same time absorbing light. So any species that photosynthesizes faster. I have a faster rate of uptake of carbon dioxide. Fantastic. A question from Joan in the chat that I want to make sure not to forget is in regards to the recommendations from the climate council she asked. What do you mean by conserved land 30% conserved land does are working woods considered conserved land. Yes, working woods are considered conserved land so these are areas that will not be turned into non forest lands. So they can either be not harvested, or they can be places that are open to harvest so either one of those can has a really good point and that is about the importance of reducing greenhouse gases in general. Of course, my focus here is on what can forest do. But the whole climate council main climate council effort is a lot of what they focus on is how can we reduce those emissions that I showed you that were summarized as emissions from vehicles as emissions from factories as emissions from agriculture so there's a lot of focus in the the draft strategies of the main climate council on reducing emissions. So, again, my focus here is what can forest actually offer to that whole equation. Right. And just to follow up a little bit with your comments about the climate council so the meeting is from nine to noon tomorrow. The council is expected to accept the draft plan and vote to accept it. The governor is actually going to finalize and release the plan on December 1. So, we're not quite sure what may happen between now and December 1, but in theory it's, or it's not quite done I guess until the till the first button should happen tomorrow. It looks like the Napster. Back. Can you turn your video on, Bert and Nancy? Why, when I hit that, it tells me that you have to okay that. The host has stopped it. Okay, that's odd. Sorry about that. That's never happened before. So I see a good question here, which is the migration of trees that you mentioned. Will that happen naturally? Will some assisted migration be needed? So that is a, that's a great question. You can imagine that this is a very, very important question that we need to answer. And the answers are controversial. What I mean by that is there is concern that the climate is shifting so fast that some species, not just trees, but other species as well, won't be able to keep up with it. There's also concern that species that can't fly, that can't send their seeds long distances, will be blocked because of human development as they attempt to migrate, as they attempt to migrate to the north. So, there are concerns on both sides there. And so some people have suggested that, or at least some species that we might have to do some assisted migration. And then that creates a pretty big and really important argument. And that is, on the one hand, some species might really need this, then other people argue, haven't we already messed around with nature enough? Haven't we learned our lesson? So this is controversial. And I think, you know, I would say that we're beginning to get to the point where more people are beginning to come down on the side of doing some very careful assisted migration. There's already some that's happening. I won't go into detail, but it seems to be leaning that way. I think because of how fast climate change is happening today. Great answer. A question here from Cynthia. For avoided conversion, how long does development have to be avoided? That's a really good question. I don't actually have the answer to that. That is a good question. A question from, and I'm kind of mispronounced this, but Ilze, Elise? Ilza. Ilza. I'm so sorry. She asked, do I understand correctly that Maine is cutting the same pounds, quote, of wood as grows each year? Well, right now, about three quarters. The three quarters of the amount that's grown is harvested in the state altogether. I think that's about right. Ken could chime in on that if I'm off a little bit on that. Great. Interesting question here from Lucas. Is there any evidence of anthropogenic changes to forest in Maine before European contact? Or was the population density just too low for any appreciable changes? Well, the population density in Maine of indigenous peoples of the tribes was definitely lower than to the south. There were settlements. There had to be some, especially local impact. So probably my best guess is that local impact, but not statewide impact. Great. Just a technical question from Judy. Will this talk be available somewhere? Yes, we will post this within the next day or so on to. The Western Maine Audubon website. And what that URL again is something I forget off the top of my head. Western.mainaudubon.org slash videos. There you go. Question from Joshua. Interesting that there hasn't been a net increase in forest in Maine in recent decades. In many areas, for example, Franklin County, much agricultural land has been reverted to forest. Is the compensatory loss? I'm sorry, I'm mispronouncing that coming from development or bad forestry practices or something else? It's not bad forestry practices for sure. But I think you're right that it's coming from development. Especially in the southern part of the state, there's more development, some coastal areas more development, and there is still some reversion of old farms back to forest. So I think you're right that there's some balance between those two things. Compensatory is the word I was looking for there. This is why I'm not a television host. Cynthia asks, does the planting of urban trees have a significant impact on carbon sequestration? It actually can. There have been some studies recently showing that urban and suburban trees can really actually play an important role in sequestering carbon. So I would say yes, probably less important in a state that's 89% forested already. That's all the questions we have right now. Does anybody have some last questions or questions from the NAP? I'm going to get the website and put that in to the chat. So here is the website where you'll be able to review this visitation in the next couple of days. At western.maynotabond.org. That should be right. So Drew, we are involved in agriculture ourselves and what solutions might agriculture hold if we change our practices? What type of practices are beneficial towards a carbon sequester? Yeah, that's actually, I'm no expert on that. So I probably shouldn't say a whole lot about it. But there is a whole section about agricultural practices that is in the Climate Council draft strategy. So I would encourage everybody to take a look at that. But again, I would suggest that you look in their cover crops, for example, reducing erosion, those kinds of things help a lot. You know, even things like mixed crops where you've got trees interspersed with areas where you have gardens, et cetera. Again, I'm not an expert on this, but just judging from what I know about plant physiology. Probably a really good way to increase uptake of carbon dioxide. So again, I would refer you to that. So I don't, oh, looks like there's one more question coming in. Hey, just a bunch of thank yous in the questions and in the chat for this great talk. And I see where we've exhausted the questions are right on time. So I'll turn it over the maps to wrap things up. Well, thank you, Drew. That was fascinating. Lots of things to think about. And plant trees, I guess, which is my final statement for the, for the night. Thank you, Nick for hosting. And thank you, Drew. One last point. If anybody is, would like to contact me, you're welcome to do that. I have a very easy email address to remember. My email address is Barton at main.edu. And that's main as in the state. There we go. It is at the bottom. Thanks everybody for joining and have a great evening. Thank you all. See you.