Publication Details

Year Published

2020

Publication

In: Pile, Lauren S.; Deal, Robert L.; Dey, Daniel C.; Gwaze, David; Kabrick, John M.; Palik, Brian J.; Schuler, Thomas M., comps. The 2019 National Silviculture Workshop: a focus on forest management-research partnerships. Gen. Tech. Rep. NRS-P-193. Madison, WI: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Northern Research Station: 102-104.

Abstract

The Interagency Forestry Team of Ohio (Team) was established in 2008 to combine efforts and facilitate a common vision toward promoting healthy forests, especially oak-dominated forests, among federal and state agencies via a shared stewardship approach. The focus area is a 17-county region of southeastern Ohio that was selected for a Joint Chiefs’ Landscape Restoration Partnership Project for 2015–2017 (Fig. 1). The 2016 National Land Cover Database (Yang et al. 2018) estimates Ohio at 34.0 percent forested, and 41.8 percent of this forest resides within the 17-county area. Within this zone are three units of the Wayne National Forest, 17 Ohio State Forests, and multiple Ohio Wildlife Management Areas, State Parks, State Natural Areas and Preserves, and other publicly protected or managed areas that together account for 12 percent of the focus area. Therefore, the vast majority of these forests are privately owned in these dissected, unglaciated landscapes of the Allegheny Plateau (Iverson et al. 2019). These forests, with 77 known species of trees, are among the most diverse in the nation, but adequate regeneration of the oak-dominated forest types has been lacking in the last decades due to a reduction of light to the forest floor in the absence of adequate management and fire (Iverson et al. 2008, Johnson et al. 2009, Nowacki and Abrams 2008). However, research by the USDA Forest Service Northern Research Station since 1995 has shown that a combination of canopy reduction and repeated fire, especially on ridges and southern exposures, can improve advanced regeneration in oak and hickory in southern Ohio (Hutchinson et al. 2012, Iverson et al. 2017).

Keywords

Citation

Bartig, Jarel L.; Iverson, Louis R.; Peters, Matthew P. 2020. Building a regional science framework to support shared stewardship for landscape-scale conservation in southeast Ohio. In: Pile, Lauren S.; Deal, Robert L.; Dey, Daniel C.; Gwaze, David; Kabrick, John M.; Palik, Brian J.; Schuler, Thomas M., comps. The 2019 National Silviculture Workshop: a focus on forest management-research partnerships. Gen. Tech. Rep. NRS-P-193. Madison, WI: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Northern Research Station: 102-104. https://doi.org/10.2737/NRS-GTR-P-193-paper14.