 All right, everybody, welcome to Maine Audubon's Climate Spotlight. This is the fourth in the Climate Spotlight series where we feature some of Maine's most innovative thinkers, businesses and conservationists, and where we aim to help Maine people understand how climate change is impacting Maine. Like I said, if you'd like to watch the past presentations or register for upcoming presentations, which includes one we just announced for early October with representatives from the Maine Climate Council, go to, make sure my chat here, that's a website right there in the chat, you can see what we've done so far. Today our presentation is called Maine Forests as Natural Climate Solutions, and we are honored to be joined by two towering redwoods in the field of forestry conservation and science in Maine, Dr. Adam Dagno and Dr. Sally Stockwell. Dr. Dagno is an assistant professor of forest conservation and recreation policy in the School of Forestry Resources at the University of Maine. He received his PhD in environmental and natural resource economics from Ohio State University, and has lived and worked in Ohio, Oregon, Washington, D.C., India, I'm sorry, and New Zealand before returning back to Maine in 2016. Dr. Stockwell is Maine Audubon's director of conservation, where she oversees all of our conservation initiatives, including Streamspart, Forestry for Maine Birds, Brooktrout Survey, and many others. Sally holds a PhD in wildlife ecology and a master's in wildlife management from the University of Maine, and serves on numerous boards and committees, perhaps most relevant to this presentation is that she sits on the Science and Technical Subcommittee for the Maine Climate Council. So before we begin, I have a few housekeeping items, and I'll paste some additional links in the chat, so keep an eye out there. First, part of the reason we are hosting these presentations is to raise awareness of the work that of the Maine Climate Council, which is deliberating now on a new climate action plan set for release in December, which will guide Maine to meet our climate goals. We here at the end of August are nearing the deadline for public comments for this plan. And the best way to submit those comments now is through some surveys that are on the Climate Council website. So I'm posting that link in the chat. Please, if you have not taken these surveys, please click on that link and do so. It takes a little bit of time, but this is really important input for the Climate Council here before they sort of close the door and start deliberating. Secondly, a bit of Maine Audubon housekeeping. You know, we are in the middle of our native plant sale. And the best thing you can do for native pollinators and birds is to plant native plants. And so here's a link to our native plant sale going on right now at our gills and farm headquarters in Falmouth. Everything from blueberries to asters to black cherries that support wildlife in your backyard grown there at Audubon and for sale to you. Okay, a couple pieces of the technical nature right now. We're going to start with Dr. Dagno and then Sally and we're going to hope to wrap everything up by about 1145 for questions. If you have questions at any time we're going to save them all until the end, but please type them if you look down at the bottom of your screen there's a little thing that says q amp a with two speech bubbles type them in there. That brings them to us and we can sort through them to answer them at the end of the presentation. If you have other comments or things put them in the chat on the right side where all the other links have been. And if you want to say hello and tell us where you're coming from. That would be great. Of course, this is a zoom webinar so everyone is on mute and your videos are off. That's just a little safety thing. So, without further ado, let's get started. I'm going to turn it over to Dr. Dagno. Thank you very much. Alright, thanks Nick and hello everybody out there. See if we can get this thing going. Share my screen, get that right here. All right, can I get a thumbs up from somebody that they can actually see what's hopefully a presentation. All right, perfect. And here we go. So what I'm going to talk about today is basically sort of focus on natural climate solutions, particularly for mains managed force. And this is built off of a project that colleagues and I are doing at the University of Maine we've just finished up an interim report that I'll give you a link to at the end of the presentation. The motivation here is really again driven by sort of mains climate council and sort of this push to be carbon for the state to be net zero or carbon neutral by 2045 and sort of meet these climate commitments of reducing fossil fuel emissions or essentially grow screen gas emissions by 80% by 2050 and the idea we had behind this as well how much can mains for us actually contribute to achieving something. So what exactly are natural climate solutions. They're essentially any action. Figure that because we're talking about that today let's start with the definition and so essentially they're defined as any action that conserves restores or improves the use of management of forest wetlands grasslands and agricultural lands. While simultaneously either increasing carbon storage, or avoiding greenhouse gas emissions. So what's behind this is you can do things like protect forest or you can manage Timberlands better or you can restore forest back to you know thinking about a more historic times when when when land use was slightly different. And this project that we've done sort of looks at different aspects across all three of these. This is a study by Joe Fergione and others at nature conservancy have basically estimated that nature has the potential remove about 21% of all the US carbon pollution, which is the equivalent to removing emissions from all cars and trucks on the road, and then some. And of that of that study about they estimated that forest had the greatest contribution potential about 56% of the total mitigation that could be produced on a year on your basis from all the natural climate solutions that they evaluated. So here is that there's different starting points that that that we need to be aware of agriculture force and other land use greenhouse gases their emissions really vary depending on where and what you're measuring. So, you know you might hear a lot, you know across at the global level about issues with deforestation livestock emissions things like that. And so 24% of all greenhouse gas emissions globally are expected to come from agriculture and forestry. They're somewhat different in the US and dramatically different in Maine. In the US total greenhouse gas emissions agriculture make up about 10%. But on the flip side US forests and the harvest of what products they produce are growing at such a rate that the amount of carbon that's produced year on year from forests are larger than the amount that's being basically cut down or eliminated. So in Maine forest to offset or remove 11% of those greenhouse gas emissions from the other sectors of the economy. In Maine. Forest actually particularly over the last 10 years are growing at such a rate relative to relative to being removed that they can actually offset or reduce mains. And the greenhouse gas emissions by about 70%. So that means in context. If you look here, the green line is the gross greenhouse gas emissions they're emitted in Maine they peaked sort of in the mid 2000s and are now down to somewhere along the lines of 17 and a half million metric tons of carbon dioxide per year. The green line is the amount of additional sequestration that's coming from forest year on year as a result of forest growing. All right, and so as that red line goes farther and farther below the x axis that means that forests are sequestering more and more carbon year after year. All right, and so if you take the green line and subtract the red line then you get the blue line, which is essentially the net carbon emissions in the US. And so we're right now we're right around that about 5 million metric tons per year, which suggests that essentially looking at this dotted black line for us are currently removing about 70% of the gross greenhouse gas emissions in the state. This is of interest because if you go to essentially looking at what some of the goals are for the state of Maine, they're looking to reduce gross greenhouse gas emissions by 45% below 1990 by 2030 and then 80% below 1990 by 2050. All right, this darker green line is basically the emissions trajectory that was shown in the previous slide. Another key thing to note though, is that by 2045 there's also through the executive order issued by Governor Mills last year there's a goal to be have net emissions by 2045. So right now for context, roughly our net emissions are somewhere along the lines of 5 million metric tons so there's still a ways to go both on the net side and definitely on the gross side. So the question then is what exactly can Maine do to sort of help achieve those goals, and how can we estimate what the mitigation potential could come from through these natural climate solutions and today we're focusing primarily on the forestry side of things. So the first thing what you really need to do is you need to define a base to estimate this you need to know a baseline or business as usual pathway. So what remains for us expected to do absent of any additional policy or incentives to change landowner behavior to maybe change the management up there for us. The second is to establish a list of acceptable mitigation practices so what can we maybe model monitor and verify that would be allow us to get credit towards reducing those emissions and enhancing the question. And the third then is that what you need to do is look at the cost and effectiveness of implementing those practices established in number two, relative to number one so we always want to look at the change. In trajectory of emissions relative to the cost of doing so, compared to a baseline or business as usual where there's no essentially, you know, no, no sort of policy in place, and you want to measure the impact across those two projects. Good to do this we'd have a number of costs and benefits that we can measure so on the cost side there's things like if you're if you're trying to put in new new new programs essentially maybe enhance rotations or plant different species that are maybe increasing their their rate of growth and carbon uptake faster. There's things like opportunity costs which could be the amount of area that you're harvesting, and then the revenues associated with that there could be yield reductions, depending on what exactly you're trying to plan, or how you're looking to manage your force. Then there's also sort of standard financial costs like the capital equipment maybe required to do some of this the labor and maintenance. There could also be other environmental costs so I'm going to talk in a little bit about sort of some of the scenarios we're looking at are the notion that maybe you could basically change civil cultural practices that are pluses and minuses and depending on sort of habitat other environmental beyond just carbon and timber. On the different side of things there's aspects of obviously you're looking to enhance carbon sequestration. You also could potentially get yield improvements. If you plant different species that maybe are growing faster or heartier. You can have a diversified income stream because now maybe you're receiving money on your land, not just for the timber that you produce, but also for the carbon as well. So savings associated with not having to harvest as often and other environmental co-benefits that Sally is going to touch upon more than I will. So some forestry practices that we've considered in our study are things like avoided deforestation or conversion to other land types. So deforestation or reforestation of land that was previously maybe enforced doing extended rotation so basically enhancing the amount of stock on the on the stand as a result of not cutting us frequently. Improved plantations so this is idea of converting some land to plantation based forestry and then doing conservation or permanent set of sides that are essentially removing all harvest from a particular parcel of land. The primary method is to use a forest landscape model called Landis and when we started this project we already had it parameterized for the study area of approximately 9.1 million acres in the northern half of Maine. This is the land that's been primarily managed for by timber companies for sort of production of timber. So that's the sort of start with that because that's that's sort of the more managed side of Maine's forest because really interested in this aspect and looking at the management side and how that can influence carbon stock. The time stamp we're looking to measure this over is starting in 2020 and measuring all the way out to 2100. Although I won't talk about it too much today we've also looked at sort of different climate trajectories so the idea of low and high climate change might how that might affect both species growth but also species. Basically, species spread over over the area right because as climate is expected to change that could affect sort of the sort of zones or ranges of where different species could grow. And we're looking at a number of mitigation practices of which I essentially discussed above and we'll touch on shortly. So first thing what we want to do is define a baseline or business as usual scenario so the what we did is for basically start with the forest in 2000. Based on a range of data that we had and really emulated the average rate of harvesting in that area from 2000 to 2010 to calibrate what it's expected to look like in the future if you sort of followed a similar. Our harvest practices roughly matched what's happening in the landscape today where it's 90% of the harvest are based on partial removals and 10% are based more on clear cutting. For the timber removal if we're looking at partial removal you're really looking at removing roughly 50% of the biomass from a combination of either doing actual harvest trails that you need to go in and get the wood, as well as group select. In addition, we've set a minimum mean standage eligible for harvest is 50 years so what that's doing is restricting from someone going in and cutting too many immature trees. And we really want to also have this supply target which is to maintain 2010 harvest levels over the duration of the analysis. And so the key aspect here is trying to look at well what happens if you're sort of cutting similar amounts year on year what is the forest going to look like sort of if you just follow that imperfect. So to get an idea of sort of what the model looks like we measure everything at 30 meter pixels. And as a result, on the left hand side is looking at sort of the density of carbon. And sort of as the bluer it gets shows sort of the more dense that the areas you can sort of see the areas of like backster here right so on areas that are tend to be more protected have more older growth late successional forest are going to have the darker areas. So on the right hand side of just showing the sort of distribution of some of the key species that we're tracking in the model. We actually track 13 different species, and have that information available that very, very high resolution. So the practices that we're modeling. The first thing is an extended rotation so here you increase the minimum standage eligible for harvest from 50 years to either 7085 or 100 years. The second one is to change the clear cut and partial harvest distribution so if you recall on the baseline this was a 1090 split with the majority being partial harvest. In this case, we're extending it from either 30% or 40 to 50% of the amount of a total area being harvested going into clear cut so that's similar to what was done sort of traditionally back in the 1980s. What we did here also is we attempted to hold would supply constant as much as we could to 2010 levels, which so what that did is reduce the overall harvest footprint required to get that. Third case is doing planting so after you do a clear cut you actually plant or artificially regenerate the stands with mix of red and white spruce. The fourth case is the focus more on forest conservation and you reserve 10 to 20% of the land in our area, which is essentially permanently removed from harvest. In the last case is a triad which is doing a mix essentially of numbers. Basically, two three and four to some degree so you're doing some clear cutting and planting. Set of sides or conservation area that's not harvested and then the having the rest be a business issues will harvest like rotation that we had in the base. The other cases that I'm not going to talk about too much here today but we have in our full report is also looking at avoided forest conversion. So looking at holding 2010 forest area constant, but looking at projections of area that could be lost and converted to a little bit to agriculture but primarily to development. As well as looking at areas that could be eligible for a forestation primarily sort of grasslands hayfields non non sort of primary cropland that that could have trees grown on them. So how do we estimate this essentially we're first want to look at the forest carbon sequestration components, and that's a combination of the annual change in the above ground growing stock. That's the forest carbon, as well as the harvest carbon, which is the removed timber that's stored sort of permanently or in harvested wood products or landfills. And this is roughly about 20% of the carbon that actually comes. That is that is actually harvested so if you look at sort of the decay and proliferation of and distribution of wood to final products roughly 20% can still be found sort of in wood products or landfills after sort of 80 to 100 year time. And you get total carbon we just add them. The second case is looking at actually estimating the economic costs and benefit components so this is sort of where our study sort of goes above and beyond what a lot of other studies do that are more focused just on the ecological physiological aspects. Because we want to look at sort of what's the trade off of enhancing carbon. If you have to either put more money into planting and maintenance, or you're going to have to reduce the amount of timber that you're harvesting. Alright, so here we have the harvest value is basically the harvest times the state mean stumpage prices by different products that that you know and in law grades. The second is look at the opportunity cost which is essentially this trade and harvest revenue relative to the business as usual. And this can be both positive and negative. It all depends on how much you're harvesting from your stand relative to that business as usual case. And the third aspect is planning costs so I suggest I said that in some of the scenarios we're looking at doing aspects where after you clear cut you actually plant as opposed to let it sort of naturally regenerate. And the last aspect is looking at land cost or rental cost particularly this comes into the place if you're looking to either minimize conversion to other land uses right you're going to need to come up with ways to increase the value of the land so it's not converted and or if you're looking to a forest land you have to account for the land cost that if it's coming out of particularly agricultural land. And the total cost is basically the opportunity plus planting plus land cost. All right so now I'm going to touch up on some of the some of the results. As you can see on the bottom so what we're doing here is we're looking at the total increase year on year in mean carbon sequestration for 20 years which is in the blue and and 50 years which is in the red so the larger the bar means the more average sequestration you're going to get year on year. Another thing here is that for extended rotations you get a lot of carbon sort of in the first 20 years, but then as those stands mature, they become eligible to harvest and the amount of carbon that you get. Once those stands mature kind of goes down because harvest supplies are sort of sort of come back to normal level, increasing clear cut but not planting doesn't have a large effect on on overall carbon both in the cases less than a million and often sort of even less than 500,000 tons. So, and for context current forest sequester about 12 million metric tons per year of carbon dioxide. So we're looking at even in the highest cases where you do increase clear cutting and plant in this sort of northern forest. You're going to get upwards of two and a half to three and a half million that's still sort of less than what the business as usual case so you could add that up on top of that 12 million. This establishing set of sides again doesn't do a lot in relative to the clear cutting and planting but it still can get you upwards of a million plus per year. All right, particularly when you go to the 20% because that's what that's doing is permanently extending rotations of a certain amount of porous. And finally the tryout approach is where you're doing a mix of clear cutting and planting set of sides and business as usual, we're expecting by some kind of doing that sort of mixed forestry approach you're going to get two plus million tons per year. So this sort of looks like it's a happy medium seems to be a way that you can at least from a carbon perspective, definitely enhance your your sequestration. But some of these come at a cost in terms of reduced harvest so on the left hand side as the baseline as you go left to right we're again looking at changes in harvest. In other cases, except for extended rotations and maybe the 20% tryout approach, you can you're sort of within 10% of average harvest rates under the business as usual case. And so this is important because opportunity costs are low but it's also saying that you're trying to do something to maintain the sort of current forest products industry, as well as another issue that aligns with, you know, this forest carbon approach is that if you reduce harvest in the state of Maine, there could be this aspect of leakage which says that what's what's not, you know, what's to prevent, you know, the market for going and buying logs from another part of the US, or Brazil, or Malaysia or something like that and so what that essentially is is that, you know, you almost want to need to do what you can to maintain harvest levels because if the market still demands would then they're going to grab it from somewhere and the amount of carbon that you additional carbon that you're getting here could be leaked out to another area where that where their carbon stocks are going. The third case then is to look at the relative change the baseline this is a combination like I said of primarily of opportunity costs or lost revenues plus the planting costs. All right, and so we can see here the costs are quite high in the first few years of extended rotations because you're not harvesting nearly as much as you were before. That gets diminished over time as those stands mature and become eligible for harvest. All right, increase in clear cutting and planting costs are high there. Basically because you're having to plant and manage all those seedlings. All right, so collectively we can take these three graphs and basically use that to estimate sort of what is the average dollar per ton break even price that a landowner might need to receive. All right, to offset essential the increase in costs on relative to also increasing the carbon stocks understand. All right, and so in on almost every case you're getting roughly that it's somewhere along the line of $10 to $20 per ton carbon dioxide equivalent, which is in sort of the grand scheme of things is is very, very cheap, compared to a lot of other particularly non natural climate solutions. These these answers basically suggest that that doing things like establishing set of sides and maybe doing more planting and more intensive managed stands within the state of Maine. And even kind of doing that in combined form could be a very cheap source of mitigation or for the state. And these these numbers are, you know, relatively low but in line with a lot of other studies who have looked at sort of natural climate solutions relative non natural climate. But with all that you're probably thinking I'm saying the word clear cut a lot. Right. And with that we do have to acknowledge that there's biodiversity and trade offs and Sally's going to touch upon this a little bit more coming up next. And one of the things that you sort of have to weigh these sort of timber benefits, along with habitat benefits. And so we do note that basically in many of the cases total harvest is going down a little bit. But particularly when you're doing the types of planting and maybe potentially some set aside you're actually getting more spruce fur. All right. Which which which could get more carbon. But if you look at sort of late sectional forest. In a lot of cases that spruce fur might go down except for if you're doing maybe some cases where you're primarily doing planting, which is allowing some of those forest not to be cut because again you're not having to harvest as much area, while some of those other forest mature. And with that that can sort of change the species distribution. But the key case. Interesting enough is that links habitat do like those sort of wide open spaces. And so as a result you could see this case and with more clear cuts you're going to get a lot more links But Sally will talk about more that it's not necessarily win one for every, every sort of iconic. This is just to summarize take those same sort of figures that I showed before and what you want to read here is basically as the line goes farther left to right those are the scenarios that produce the most carbon per year. And it's so these mix of these triad cases where you're doing plant and set asides, plus just high clear cutting and plant is going to get you the most carbon. All right, acknowledging that there are some trade offs, but sort of timber harvest not being necessarily one of them. And just to summarize, basically the sort of top options by mitigation total are getting you between two and three and a half million metric funds per year and this is either taking the tryout approach, which is number two or three, or the sort of clear cut and planting approach which are getting you one in four. So all those are going to get you noticeable change in terms of amount of carbon over the sort of medium to long run. But you potentially could also just focusing on getting more set aside area that's permanently conserved getting that up from sort of right now in that area it's around 6 to 7% up to 20% could also get you more than a million. Noting that most practices still allow harvest to continue and follow business as usual so this is a big deal because one it's sort of you can maintain forest products industry, as well as minimize this risk of leakage that I talked about. But as I noted there could be potential habitat trade offs with clear cutting and planning versus natural regeneration and sort of the distribution of the forest types in that position of course. And finally costs are relatively cheap compared to typical carbon prices in sort of other studies and other aspects of other sectors of the economy which are often estimated to be $40 per ton or more. In this case we found it to be between. I just want to thank all my collaborators and funders on the forestry side, three other great collaborators at the University of Maine Dr Aaron, Aaron, Simons Ligard, Ivan Fernandez and Aaron Weiss Kettle, as well as a number of funders and partners. And sort of just more if you want to find more there's the link to the to the full report about Maine's natural climate solutions that's on our Center for Sustainable Forest website. And I'll leave it at that happy to take more questions at the end but pass over to you Sally. Thank you so much, Dr. Dagnow that was fantastic it's great to see some real science at work here as we try to meet the challenges of climate change coming up thank you so much. And without further ado, well I should say to think I see some two great questions down in the Q&A box if you have additional questions for Dr. Dagnow. Please put them there and we will get to them after Sally's presentation. So, Sally, take it away. You're on mute now but you're ready to go. All right, I'm on mute now. I'm muted and can you now see my screen. Nope. Okay, let me. I'm going to go back and share screen. There it is. There it is. Okay. As Adam said, I'm going to, I'm going to be talking a little bit more about some of the other benefits of using forest as natural climate solutions and Adam talked a lot about carbon storage and different, different harvesting practices but I'm going to be focusing a little bit more on the biodiversity benefits soil health water quality and flooding issues and so that's some of those co benefits. So first of all, I just want to set the stage for folks who may not be familiar with where things stand in terms of biodiversity here in Maine. So we have this really incredible situation where from the coast to the mountains from southern Maine to northern Maine, we have the equivalent ecological gradient of all of Europe in a very condensed setting. And so as a result of that we have many different fish and wildlife species that live here. We have a wide variety of species that take advantage of all these different biogeographical settings. And according to scientists from around the world, we are in a situation where climate change impacts from climate change are already affecting our biodiversity at all levels and some folks estimate that we might be seeing as many as 34 to 58% of all species becoming extinct if we don't do something to address this soon. If we are able to particularly if species are unable to disperse which is the case in many parts of the world now but in Maine we still have an opportunity for animals and plants to move across the landscape if we do certain things to help that along. So you may have heard last year there was a lot of publication, a lot of press around the studies that had looked at data from the breeding bird surveys that the US Fish and Wildlife Service has organized over the last 50 years. And we now know that based on data from the 1970s to 2017, we have lost nearly a quarter of all of our bird populations. So numbers are really declining dramatically. At the same time we're seeing certain species shift their ranges from the southern part of the state to the northern part of the state or southern part of New England into northern New England. But we need to do something to address these declines. Similarly, there have been very dramatic insect declines that have been discovered in other parts of the world. The interesting study that I really took note of was one over in Germany that looked at the decline of insects in protected areas. So in protected areas they still lost 75% of all insects and of course insects provide the foundation for many food webs, the food webs for many species in the world, including here in Maine. So this is a bit alarming as well. And as an example, you know, brick trout are one of the species that lives here in Maine that where we really mean is the last stronghold for this species. We have 50% of the nation's remaining wild population, over 97% of all the lake and pond populations. But all of those green areas are intact stream systems and we have, again, one of the few places left in the eastern US where we still have good habitat. And the reason behind that is because we still have pretty good water quality and pretty good insect life. So, we also know based on some predictions on the vulnerability of different habitats and species in the state that around a third of all species that were assessed during this study that was done in 2013. About a third of these species are likely to be highly vulnerable to changes from climate. 37% highly vulnerable 38% moderately vulnerable. And so, natural climate solutions as Adam noted can play a really important role, not only in storing carbon but in providing habitat and water quality drinking water whatever it might be for both people and other animals throughout implants throughout our systems. If you look at this study from the National Academy of Sciences. If we, if we follow historic emissions and continue on business as usual, then we're going to be in pretty dire straits but if we are able to use natural climate solutions to mitigate that we can get to the point where we are able to keep carbon emissions below a two degree temperature rise and natural climate solutions can provide about 37% of that necessary storage of carbon or carbon mitigation between now and 2030 and then a longer time horizon it gets a little smaller but 20% between now and 2050. So climate solutions are really important piece of the puzzle of how to address this dilemma. And this is a complicated graph and you don't need to look at all of it but there, there are a number of different natural pathways that were reviewed in the same article for their contribution towards meeting that decrease in. And that in meeting our goals of keeping below that two degree climate temperature increase. And as you can see at the top under for us which is our emphasis here today. Reforestation is really beneficial but that's not something that we tend to do or have done a lot in Maine in the past it's something as Adam noted that we could do a little bit more of going forward. But if you look at avoiding conversion of forest to non forest is second one and using natural forest management to both of those can enhance our carbon storage and other benefits as well so they increase air quality biodiversity, water quality and soil health. And then if you look down at wetlands agricultural and grasslands are not as great options but if you look down at wetlands, you also see that they can contribute towards this natural climate solution as well. And that's important for Maine because in Maine, about 25% of our landscape is dominated by wetlands of some sort. In our forests where is the carbon currently being stored. We tend to think of it as being in the tree that we see above ground but in fact, the live tree above ground storage is only about 35% of current storage in our forest across the state. Over 50% of it is in the soil, and then there's also carbon stored in the standing deadwood understory the down deadwood and in the forest floor. So all of those parts of the forest are important to what's happening with carbon in our systems. And there was a recent study done by Martin Grandston at the University of Maine looking at 60 years of data from the Pomscott experimental forest which is outside of the Bangor area. And they were able to calculate based on the regular surveys that were done in different, there are a bunch of different forest stands that were plots that were harvested over these 60 years and and they were able to see at 125 year rotation time period, you're able to significantly grow the amount of carbon that is stored in the live the live overstory and in the live understory. So older trees definitely are storing more carbon over time. And one of the things that we've been seeing happening in some parts of Maine over the recent decades is that that time horizon has shortened for our harvesting. And there are very few trees that are allowed to grow to that 125 year age anymore. If you look at this again from a little bit different perspective looking at the on the left side of reference plot or a control plot that where there's no harvesting, compared to three different styles of harvesting selection harvesting clear cut harvesting, you'll see again that all that under the uncut control species. I mean option actually ends up storing more carbon over time than either any of the managed forest systems. And this includes harvested wood that is in long term products that were stored carbon is stored in furniture or buildings or whatever it might be. So, one of the things that we need to look at in as Adam has talked about is what what type of forest management is going to both increase carbon storage but also provide other kinds of benefits. And in this case, what we're seeing is that forest with more structural diversity and lengthened to harvesting rotations are storing the greatest amount of carbon. And this is really important for biodiversity issues. If we look at the two photos on the right one northern hardwood forest and a northern softwood forest you'll see that there's a lot of structural diversity in those forests. These are older forests where you have pretty good understory pretty good mid story pretty good over story there are dead trees on the ground dead standing trees, big trees smaller trees diversity of species. And that structural diversity over time if allowed to develop over time provides not only great habitat for different species but also stores more carbon over time. So what are some things that we can do to combine what Adam's talking about with these biological interests and the nature conservancy some years ago looked at has done quite a bit of work looking at where the climate strongholds where the climate resilient landscapes. And all you need to pay attention to in this graphic is where the dark green areas, and you'll see that main pops out as a dark green area that has the potential to be very great climate stronghold meaning that we can, over time, keep the diversity of habitats and systems in place to support wildlife and plant and animal habitat going forward in addition to providing other benefits. Why is that well because we have the opportunity to first of all protect diverse landscapes that's one of the best ways we can provide for movement of plants and animals over time. As long as we have mountains river valleys, low line wetlands and any combination of this then we know that as plants and animals are moving across the landscape, they will be able to find the conditions that they need to survive and thrive over time they may be different than what we have here today, but they will be able to find the conditions they need. On top of that, wetlands are a really key piece of the landscape that we need to be thinking about if we can protect and connect these wetland habitats. A lot of species that use wetlands move from one wetland to into the forest or from one wetland to another wetland over the course of their year and so it's really important not only to protect the wetland itself, but connected areas between wetlands. And if we can protect these forests as carbon storage areas and other benefits, one of the things that we know that it provides really great water quality and drinking water for example in the Sabago Lake Watershed, the Portland Water District provides water supply for over 200,000 people in May almost a quarter or fifth of the people in May. This is one of only 50 public water supplies in the US that doesn't have to filter the water before providing it to the public. They treat it with chlorine, but they don't have to filter it. And why is that? Because the watershed that provides the water into Sabago Lake where they draw the water from is pretty intact forest habitat. So there's a big push right now to protect forests and riparian areas within that watershed so that they don't have to move to a filter system, which is extraordinarily expensive. And so the Portland Water District is actively working with landowners and others to in the region to protect those forests. We can practice exemplary forestry. So one of the options is of course to protect land, but another as Adam said is to improve forest management. The Forestry Foundation has come up with a series of recommendations for what does exemplary forestry management look like and it combines both climate adaptation and resilience with these other best practices that can improve forest products but also improve habitat for plants and animals. And some of those are providing a balance of young and old forests. So as Adam mentioned, if we increase our acreage of clear cuts, then over time those will develop into great habitat for lynx. Canada lynx are one of what we might call an umbrella species that represents those species that benefit from those younger forests. And up to 40% of main invertebrates will use that, excuse me, will use those younger forests. But there's really not that many species that are tied specifically to early successional habitats. And then, in contrast, American Martin, our representative of those species that need older, more structurally complex forests, and over 70% of our main invertebrates use that similar type of habitat. So there's a number of different folks, including the New England Forestry Foundation in Audubon through our Forestry for Main Birds program, who are suggesting that long term we might want a goal of around 10 to 20% of the landscape in these younger forests and 40 to 50% of the landscape in older forests that include very large trees that we saw timber. So one of the things we've been trying to promote here at main Audubon through our Forestry for Main Birds program, for example, is the importance of mature forest stands. As I've already mentioned, these stands can hold a lot of carbon, but they also are structurally diverse. They have large trees along with smaller trees coming up underneath them. They might have gap openings that are from a tenth of an acre to two acres that are representative of natural disturbance regimes from long ago they include large dead standing trees and down trees that are used by things like Piliated Woodpeckers and other animals that use cavities and then things like Martin and Fisher that need those down logs to actually move through the forest. If we provide more of that mature forest breeding habitat, then we're also going to be doing a good job of protecting Maine's baby bird factory. So Maine is really critical to the future of many of our bird species. This is a graphic that shows how different species use different types of forest and also different features within the forest. And they're very specific about what they like. And the more structurally complex the forest is, the more species you can pack in, the more individuals of each species you can pack in. Another really important thing is to conserve our waterways and riparian habitat. There are many of our current commercial landowners focus on doing a little bit different harvesting in these riparian areas, riparian areas being those areas along streams and other waterways. They may let those trees grow a little bit older, they may not cut as heavily, but we could be doing more. These are one of the places where those mature forests could really come into play and by doing that you also then protect the water temperature. We have cold water full of oxygen for things like brook trout and Atlantic salmon and we have trees that are growing old enough they can fall into the water and create the pools that are necessary to keep the climate refuges for when the water temperatures get really warm in the summer. So riparian habitats are really important. These are also places where a lot of animals including things like mink but even deer will move along from, they will use the corridor adjacent to the stream to move from one part of the forest to another part of the forest. And then finally we can reconnect streams using StreamSmart crossing standards which are really designed to both provide the opportunity for fish to move up and down the streams to get to these different habitats and other animals that also move up and down the streams, but also keep the land from flooding and keep our infrastructure secure so that the culverts aren't washing out, bridges aren't washing out, and this is another program that Maynardamon has been very involved with working with lots of other partners on. So I'll leave it at that, that's a quick introduction but if you are interested in learning more about what we're doing on this front, I encourage you to go to our website and we have a section in there on climate change and renewable energy and another section on other conservation projects we're working on. You can get in touch with either Nick or me, if you have specific questions we can't answer right now. Turn it back over to you Nick. Thank you very much Sally, that was fantastic. And what a great transition because we do have lots of questions. So in the interest of time, and we can go over a little bit if folks want to hang on, but in the interest of time let's get to those questions now I'm going to try to start with maybe some of the quicker ones. For Dr. Dagno, could you just run through what clear cutting is and what role it plays in carbon sequestration. Yeah, sure. So for the late term clear cut is essentially, you know, taking a plot of land and removing basically, you know, high high high proportion of all the trees that are on there sometimes you might leave some residual trees or whatever to help with with receding or but generally it's you know take an acre and cut off almost every tree possible. Right so that's very traditionally different than at least what's happening on the landscape here in Maine, right it's very much more what you'd see in the south or out west if you drive out see the mountainside with with half the trees. Okay, the key the key with that is that and this is comes to a thing where I want to sort of I saw some questions popping up about sort of Sally put up some slides and look a little bit different than mine when we're sort of showing what carbon storage is versus carbon sequestration so these terms can get used interchangeably but they're quite quite different I want to sort of point that storage is like if you go out and you just you know started measuring trees and measuring the soil it's how much carbon is currently there right now. Well, sequestration is essentially the change in storage year on year. So if you went, you know, this year and measured the stand and said well this much is in the soil and this much is in the tree and this much is in dead debris. And then next year you went and measured the storage again. The sequestration is actually how much more increased carbon increased on that stand from one year to the other. So the clear cutting aspect that we're getting out is that particularly if you plant, you're taking sort of a mature stand, right or semi mature that maybe isn't growing as fast. You're cutting it down and then you're maybe if particularly if you're putting it into a plantation style your plant you're basically putting in trees that are growing faster. Over time and so that rate of change in storage or sequestration might be going up relative to whatever was planted there. Excellent. I'm going to try to combine some questions here about soil and how soil it works in part of the process. Does Sally pointed out a lot of the carbon is down underground does it does it stay there and how does it. Does it come out or is it locked and then do different forest practices including road building or ground disturbance impacts on the soil can lock carbon. Yeah, so so this is good this is if my colleague Ivan Fernandez the soil scientist guru we're here he'd he'd take that on but I'll do my best. So again if you looked at Sally's storage in the PF case there was sort of a block that was really flat big but flat on the bottom that's the soil that's in the forest. Alright and it's traditionally are generally quite flat. There can be things like harvest practices that basically do affect some of the upper layers upper horizons of the soil but but generally that's why I'm focusing more on above ground generally there's you know you'd have to make a big disturbance to change that even transitioning to a different land use, most of the soil is still is still sequestered or stored from that perspective. An interesting aspect of that you build roads or even converted development, technically you can just pave over the, you know, you could put a shopping mall on top of, you know, forest soil, right and it would be stored there forever. The key is that you wouldn't be able to increase it anymore right because you don't have any actual biomass roots things like that going into the soil to enhance it as well. But that's generally why it's pretty flat over time and why I didn't really focus on that in my study because I'm thinking more about the rate of change in storage over time or sequestration. Gotcha. A question for Sally from Roger Zimmerman. How will a shortened warming winter season effects complex forest habitat. A shortened season. So as the winters get warmer as the climate. Yep. How will that affect forests. I don't really have the good I don't know the answer to that question. I don't know if you have anything to add to that Adam, it's, you know, we're good, we're definitely going to be seeing some changes but I don't know what those are going. Yeah, it's sort of a it's sort of an it depends right so you you are going to see basically the general forest composition continue to shift northwards. Right so those are those species of trees that aren't in southern end will basically keep going into Quebec. Right so that could affect again some composition of forest structure. Maybe it's more I think more hardwoods are going to basically continue to shift northwards right so it's a sort of it depends type case but traditionally it again it comes down to which, and I think Sally we did this sort of in our main climate council talk we talked about the aspect of with that space change in species you're going to. It's not good or bad overall per se it's just going to have you're going to have different, different birds and things like that coming to main as as a result sort of depends on which, what your sort of species of choice whether you think it's going to be a good thing or bad. The issue with that on top of that is there will be probably more you know trees are more prone to test and disease and things like that which which could increase the sort of the vulnerability of our forest. Maybe I didn't wasn't thinking right about the question but certainly the species composition will change the interesting thing is we don't necessarily know whether the same species that are typically seen together now will be seen together in the future or whether we'll have entirely new mixes of species. And so that could change, you know, as I said the makeup of the forest and who's there, but as long as you, you allow those forests to grow over time they will still be structurally complex. Right, lots of different features for different species. A question from Ernie Johnson about forest fires. To what extent to forest fires currently present a threat to manage versus manage forests in Maine, and how will anticipated climate scenarios changes. Yeah, so you know we, we do have a number of active forest fires in Maine but they tend to be quite small. The sort of the projections that we've done don't indicate that that risk is going to get dramatically higher so I don't imagine that we're going to see anything like you see on TV out west or anything even under more extreme climate conditions. Just because of the rate of precipitation and things like that that that happened in Maine so even regardless of sort of the management approach, I wouldn't expect fires to be the primary threat, I think the pest and disease aspect. That could be driven or exacerbated by climate is going to have a greater impact on on Maine's forest than fire itself. Yes, and I would just add to that that historically fires were not a big natural disturbance in Maine for us historically and as I said because all predictions that we're going to have even more precipitation than we have now it may come in different than what we're seeing. So the distribution of that precipitation may be different as we're already seen some of the middle of the summer is getting hotter and drier, but there's so much moisture in our forest compared with those out west it's not not likely to be a huge concern. I do want to pause and just say that we're approaching the 12 o'clock time so we do still have a bunch of questions so if panelists can hang on for a few minutes. That would be great for folks who need to jump off. Thanks so much for joining us the full presentation with anything you might miss after this will be up on our website. As soon as I can. So question from David about wood stones. I think this is a sort of biomass energy question. Better or worse than oil for kerosene fuel heat devices in the winter from a point of view of carbon release. So there's actually been a study conducted in northern New England by colleague john gun who's down now down at University of New Hampshire formerly a manament. A lot of people have asked this question particularly circling around this, you know the idea of biomass bio and wood pellets and going to Europe and all that. He's estimated that roughly it's about about 50% better than oil based heat in terms from a carbon emissions perspective, primarily because we have an abundant source of forest here. You know, cutting down some trees to service firewood could basically allow more space for other trees to grow there's other aspects like that but generally, generally in this in this part of the country would would based heating and wood stoves is better than using oil, which is essentially that you know the primary source. Great. And a couple questions for you about when your reports might be finalized and available for folks to look at. Yep, so in the chat I put the the link to the report in the fact sheets so that sort of what we say is an interim report was published last last week. We're going to continue to do so to more layers of modeling on top of that more we're going to diversify our what we're looking into more intermediate treatments maybe as talking about these aspects of set aside and sort of primary key areas to conserve more touching areas. So exactly on what Sally talked about probably there's a bigger push to think about preserving riparian zones and things like that. So, some of the numbers might change slightly, or we might have more scenarios but what we have up on the website is pretty going to be held the same final report is due in January but what we want to do is get as much information out as possible. While the main climate council were sort of in their consultation deliberations, leading into into their sort of decisions in December. Great. I just want to try to get to a couple more question from Jeff reared and for both panelists. There are multiple recommendations for quote no harvest buffers in riparian areas. Is there a strategy to increase set aside by focusing on riparian areas where wildlife and fisheries benefits are higher. Yeah, no, well I guess that's sort of what I was just saying is there has been emphasis both from we we're at University main we've been asked by numerous people to think about that and what are the implications of doing that from a policy perspective. So that's what I say is that definitely one of the next scenarios we're going to evaluate is what is the effect if we focus on set aside and really focus on those more sort of designated sort of high habitat areas, I'll pass on to you Sally that provides more. Well, I think the only other thing I would add is that I believe that the natural and working lands, some committee of the working group of the main climate council has put that in as one of the recommendations as well, but that should be that you know there should be more attention paid to those riparian areas. If not, then I encourage members of the public to emphasize the importance of that. Take those. The link is in the chat. Two final questions I want to make sure to get to if folks have other questions that we don't get to please, I folks to put their emails in the chat or other ways that people can reach out to you that would be helpful Sally had prison ago. Jackson, is any entity developing incentives for landowners not harvest trees. So while there's, there's programs out there, you know, carbon sequestration programs through like the state of California and stuff that basically do provide incentives to do basically forest management above and beyond what sort of a business as usual case is it's sort of up to the landlord to decide what that may be. So in theory you can get compensated for not cutting it all. Often when it comes down to bottom line that's not basically the most efficient option to take. And a lot of people want to manage force not just for carbon but also for the sort of timber resources well, but in theory you could you could enroll in the California program and get paid not to not to harvest it all. And I would add to that that the New England Forestry Foundation is working on a project in Western Maine, it's funded through the natural resources conservation service to try to get landowners to think about growing trees for growing bigger trees over a longer period of time, and I might call legacy trees and trying to commit to at least 30 to keep those trees, growing through the biological life of those trees, as opposed to the economic life of those trees. Northeast Wilderness Trust is another organization that's very much involved in promoting the importance of protecting areas that are no cut areas. So I think there is an in your main also has a ecological reserves program. And those ecological reserves do not allow any harvesting they're primarily being used as sort of research baseline places but also as places to protect our current natural variety of natural communities, but they could the program could could potentially be expanded to add to the as part of that triad approach that Adam mentioned that involves at least some more uncut areas, I think there's I think there's a real role to explore the extent to which that might be beneficial. I just want to end on a question about Adam's work with the timber industry in Maine. How closely do you work with them and and maybe if you want to say a few words about the relationship there. So, you know, at the University of Maine, I'm in school for forest resources so we kind of take a very broad approach to forest management. You know I know of most of the people in the industry, I, you know my role in policies to understand all the different angles but I don't have any specific contracts or anything like that with them. I think the key is basically to try to capture all sides from that perspective. Um, you know, we did float a lot of these scenarios through both industry and nonprofits environmental NGOs to actually understand are these reasonable and and are these something that you would consider and sort of on both sides of the spectrum we got to like this would be very useful to to understand that sort of implications from that perspective. My view that might seem I don't want to say pro industry but but but from that perspective is I'm very much sort of rural, you know, I'm an economist and I think about rural economies and so we have to acknowledge that that there's a number of rural economies in Maine that either have been or still dependent on sort of natural resource and extraction to some degree so that the best is how do we find that happy medium where we can have win-win situations across sort of the spectrum. Great. Thank you so much. So, before we the zoom boots us off. I'm going to cut it off there. There are some still questions left to be answered. Make sure those get to the appropriate panelists and we can also feel free to email folks. I want to thank everyone for joining. We had a ton of people on today for Maine's Climate Spotlight. I want to thank Dr. Adam Dagnow from the University of Maine and Dr. Sally Stockwell from Maine Audubon for joining us. Again, for those who missed it, this will be linked to the recording will be online soon and have a great week. Thanks so much and thanks to the panelists. Thank you, Nick. Appreciate the opportunity. Thanks Nick and thank everybody for joining us really appreciate it. Bye everyone have a great day.