ESFPA E-News

 Constable Chronicles- Into the Adirondack Wilderness

The Constable Hall Association and the Tug Hill Commission are pleased to present a fifth installment in the Constable Chronicles webinar series. We hope you’ll join us! 

Join Constable Hall Association members Peter Hayes and Martha “Marty” Constable Murray to learn more about how the children who grew up in Constable Hall in the early 1800s experienced the Adirondack wilderness bordering the Tug Hill Region.  

The fifth installment of the Constable Chronicles takes us from Constableville into the Adirondack wilderness. The five children who grew up at Constable Hall in the early 1800s were all outdoor-oriented. By the 1830s they were ranging through the western Adirondacks from Big Moose to Blue Mountain Lake- some of the very first non-Native people to see the area. Come and learn how these Tug Hill people experienced the pristine wilderness and then saw it change rapidly with the arrival of a newer generation of nature seekers.

“Constable Chronicles: Into the Adirondack Wilderness” will take place on Wednesday, November 30, 2022, at 7:00 pm. Pre-register below. 

New to the Constable Chronicles series? Click here for the playlist on the Tug Hill Commission’s YouTube channel. 

Important Update on the Working Forest Initiative

This week, the Working Forests Initiative (WFI) will launch their first targeted nationwide advertisement campaign.  Through the campaign, the WFI aims to improve understanding of our industry, our commitment to sustainability, and our contributions to the environment and communities where we operate.

The WFI is supported by several NAFO members and forest product manufacturers, and it is guided by communications experts from across the sector including NAFO staff. The first phase of the campaign is focused on building awareness – messages are high-level and intentionally designed to lean into the sector’s deeply rooted culture of long-term stewardship.  A link to the advertisements can be found here.  The WFI has also created this one-page overview, and this FAQ document with additional background information.  

NAFO applauds the WFI team on the smart, high-quality content and the data-driven approach to targeting the right stakeholders.  This work aligns well with NAFO’s strategic narrative and provides valuable content that we can use to advance our education and advocacy objectives.  Importantly, real-time insights on what resonates with key audience segments will inform NAFO’s work to reach and influence policymakers and other key stakeholders. 

Major Carbon Market Purchase

Oak Hill Advisors has bout 17 million acres of eastern hardwood forests, including 80,000 acres known as Chateaugay Woodlands (former Domtar property) in New York.  The properties will be overseen by Anew Climate LLC and managed for carbon markets.  Oak Hill joined with Anew’s subsidiary Bluesource Sustainable Forest Co. to acquire the timberlands.  Bluesource also owns the 34,000-acre Tug Hill Property (formerly owned by Molpus Woodlands Group as well as 15,000 acres in Forestport.  The following was published Wednesday in the Wall Street Journal:

PISGAH, Md.—A major player in credit markets has made one of the largest U.S. timberland purchases in years, laying Wall Street’s biggest wager yet on forest carbon markets. Oak Hill Advisors LP, a subsidiary of T. Rowe Price Group Inc. that manages $56 billion and is best known as a corporate-debt investor, said that it led a consortium to pay about $1.8 billion for 1.7 million acres of forest. The properties spread over 17 eastern states and will be overseen by a unit of environmental markets firm Anew Climate LLC. Oak Hill last year joined with Anew’s subsidiary Bluesource Sustainable Forests Co. to acquire and manage timberland to maximize how much carbon is stored in the standing trees rather than how much wood is produced from cutting them down. Anew says that, between the 1.7 million acres acquired from the Forestland Group, a liquidating investment firm, and earlier purchases of about 100,000 acres, it is one of the 10 largest U.S. timberland owners. It is the only one among them focused on carbon markets instead of feeding lumber and pulp mills.

Anew plans to throttle back logging. It expects just 10% to 20% of revenue from the properties will come from harvesting wood, compared with 80% to 90% of the top line under the previous owner, said Jamie Houston, who leads the Anew unit. “We’re really going to be focused on forest health,” he said. “We’re thinking about this in decades, not years.” The market for forest-carbon offsets has boomed in recent years as companies sought ways to make up for their greenhouse-gas emissions. The idea behind forest offsets is to pay timberland owners to log less so that the trees keep growing and accumulating carbon. Polluters can use offsets to cover some of their tab under California’s regulated cap-and-trade system if the landowners follow guidelines that can encumber properties for more than a century.

Increasingly, offsets are sold in so-called voluntary markets in unregulated transactions. Companies use voluntary offsets to scrub carbon from the environmental balance sheets they maintain for investors, and for public relations. Prices for voluntary offsets vary widely and terms range from a year to decades.

Critics of offsets say that many promised harvest reductions are merely theoretical, either because the forests are too remote or rugged to be logged economically or the owners aren’t generally in the business of clear-cutting. And that even when there are fewer harvests, demand from mills means more intense logging elsewhere. An overarching criticism is that offsets allow companies to pay a relatively small price to avoid reducing emissions. Carbon markets have been jammed up lately by companies demanding offsets that represent actual harvest reductions, according to participants in the opaque markets. Landowners have created offsets at a rapid clip, but they have held out for higher prices to justify less logging. Oak Hill and Anew say they are in no hurry to sell offsets and are content to let carbon amass on the properties while markets mature. “Ultimately, creating a balance sheet of these assets should be valuable because everyone else has it on the liability side,” said Adam Kertzner, Oak Hill senior partner.

This winter, when leaves have fallen and trees are easier to measure, Anew will dispatch foresters to establish baseline volumes of biomass from which the accrual of carbon will be measured, said Cakey Worthington, vice president of carbon operations. The 56 properties are mainly hardwood forest and range from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula down to Louisiana’s Atchafalaya Basin, over to the Apalachicola River in Florida, up through Appalachia and to New York’s Adirondack Mountains.

The Forestland Group raised funds from endowments, wealthy individuals and other big investors starting in the mid-1990s and bought the timberland from families and small mills. The strategy was to stand apart from rival timberland investors by focusing on naturally regenerating forests instead of the South’s monoculture pine plantations or the Pacific Northwest’s planted slopes of spruce and fir. For one, there was less competition to buy slow-growing deciduous forests that supply wood for furniture, flooring and cabinetry than for the stands of softwood, such as pine, that are harvested to make lumber and mashed into pulp for delivery boxes and coffee cups, said Blake Stansell, who was president of the Forestland Group and is among about 15 employees joining the timberlands’ acquirer. Prized species were promoted by sculpting the canopy to control where sunlight hit the forest floor, leaving the best specimens to reproduce after harvests and then taking them out once the little ones were ready to really grow. The funds had reached their lifespan and were being liquidated, putting the biggest assemblage of U.S. hardwood forests on block.

Oak Hill, which had been aiming to buy $500 million of timberland, rounded up more investors to buy all of the Forestland Group’s holdings. More than 150 foresters fanned out to size up each property. One property, 10,400 acres outside Washington, D.C., on the Maryland side of the Potomac River, features American beech, black cherry and yellow poplar interspersed with loblolly and Virginia pine. Anew is reducing harvests and will manage it to promote the growth of the woods, not just the trees with the most value at mills, Ms. Worthington said. In a small plot where the trees were measured to serve as a sample for how much carbon is held in ecologically similar parts of the property, she pointed out what would be wasted in a typical harvest but has value in carbon markets: holly bushes and sweet gum that fall under equipment treads, a towering yet hollowed beech, and a black cherry bent like a lightning bolt and unsuitable for a sawmill.

Bats Protect Young Trees from Insect Damage, with 3x Fewer Bugs

-by University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 

Bats help keep forests growing. Without bats to hold their populations in check, insects that munch on tree seedlings go wild, doing three to nine times more damage than when bats are on the scene. That's according to a new study from the University of Illinois. The article, "Bats reduce insect density and defoliation in temperate forests: an exclusion experiment," is published inEcology.

"A lot of folks associate bats with caves. But as it turns out, the habitat you could really associate with almost every bat species in North America is forest. And this is true globally. Forests are just really important to bats," says Joy O'Keefe, study co-author and assistant professor and wildlife extension specialist in the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences at Illinois. "We wanted to ask the question: Are bats important to forests? And in this study, we've demonstrated they are."

Other researchers have demonstrated bats' insect-control services in crop fields and tropical forest systems, but no one has shown their benefits in temperate forests until now.

"It's especially important for us to learn how bats affect forests, given that bats are declining due to diseases like white-nose syndrome or collisions with wind turbines. This type of work can reveal the long-term consequences of bat declines," says Elizabeth Beilke, postdoctoral researcher and lead author on the study.

The research team built giant mesh-enclosed structures in an Indiana forest to exclude the eight bat species that frequent the area, including two federally threatened or endangered species. The mesh openings were large enough to allow insects free movement in and out, but not flying bats. Every morning and evening for three summers, Beilke opened and closed the mesh sides and tops of the structures to ensure birds had daytime access to the plots. That way, she could be sure she was isolating the impacts of bats.

Beilke then measured the number of insects on oak and hickory seedlings in the forest understory, as well as the amount of defoliation per seedling. Because she erected an equal number of box frames without mesh, Beilke was able to compare insect density and defoliation with and without bats.

Overall, the researchers found three times as many insects and five times more defoliation on the seedlings when bats were excluded than in control plots that allowed bats in each night. When analyzed separately, oaks experienced nine times more defoliation and hickories three times more without bats.

"We know from other research that oaks and hickories are ecologically important, with acorns and hickory nuts providing food sources for wildlife and the trees acting as hosts to native insects. Bats use both oaks and hickories as roosts, and now we see they may be using them as sources of prey insects, as well. Our data suggest bats and oaks have a mutually beneficial relationship," Beilke says.

While insect pressure was intense in plots without bat predation, the seedlings didn't succumb to their injuries. But the researchers say long-term bat declines could prove fatal for the baby trees.

"We were observing sublethal levels of defoliation, but we know defoliation makes seedlings more vulnerable to death from other factors such as drought or fungal diseases. It would be hard to track the fate of these trees over 90 years, but I think a natural next step is to examine the impact of persistent low levels of defoliation on these seedlings," Beilke says. "To what extent does repeated defoliation reduce their competitive ability and contribute to oak declines?"

The researchers point out that birds, many of which share the same insect diets as bats, are also declining. While they specifically sought to isolate bats' impact on forest trees, the researchers are confident insect density and defoliation rates would have been higher if they had excluded both birds and bats in their study. In fact, similar exclusion studies focusing on birds failed to account for bats in their study designs, leaving mesh enclosures up all night.

"When we were initially working on the proposal for this research, we looked at 37 different bird exclusion studies, across agriculture and forest systems. We found nearly all of them had made this mistake. Most of them had not opened or removed their treatment plots to bats," Beilke says.

In other words, before Beilke's study, birds were getting at least partial credit for work bats were doing in the shadows.

Clearly, both types of winged predators are important for forest health in temperate systems. And, according to O'Keefe, that makes these studies even more critical to inform forest management.

"I think it's important to stress the value of this type of experimental work with bats, to really try to dig into what their ecosystem services are in a deliberate manner. While we can probably extrapolate out and say bats are important in other types of forest, I wouldn't discount the value of doing the same kind of work in other systems, especially if there are questions about certain insect or tree species and how bats affect them. So rather than extrapolating out across the board, let's do the work to try to figure out how bats are benefiting plants," she says. "And before they're gone, hopefully."

Wood Ash as a Soil Amendment

Forest products manufacturing facilities generate large amounts of boiler ash from burning woody biomass. Most of this ash ends up in landfills and wastewater lagoons. This situation represents a relatively untapped opportunity to recycle a mill residual into a valuable soil amendment, replace commercial fertilizers and lime, reduce landfill disposal costs and, in some cases, add a source of revenue for mills.

NCASI has prepared a new fact sheet that provides an overview of wood ash characteristics and the types of wood ash generated at forest products facilities, examining the benefits and challenges of application to agricultural lands and forest lands.

The fact sheet is now available for download on the NCASI website.

Glyphosate Reporting Requirement

Subdivision 12 of Section 33-1301 of the Environmental Conservation Law (ECL) prohibits the use of glyphosate by state agencies, state departments, public benefit corporations, or their contractors and subcontractors on state property. However, exemptions were written into the law to allow state agencies, state departments, public benefit corporations or their contractors and subcontractors to apply glyphosate on state properties under limited circumstances for critical uses.

State departments, state agencies, and public benefit corporations must report all applications of glyphosate products on state property to the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) by January 15^th for applications conducted during the previous calendar year. Glyphosate applications on state property made by contractors or subcontractors of state departments, state agencies, or public benefit corporations must also be captured in the report. Contractors and subcontractors may report their glyphosate applications on behalf of the state department, state agency, or public benefit corporation that has contracted with them, but it is the responsibility of the state department, state agency, or public benefit corporation to ensure that all glyphosate applications are reported to the DEC accurately and on time.

The following information must be reported using the Glyphosate Reporting Form developed by DEC:

• The official name of the state department, state agency, or public benefit corporation
• The pesticide agency or pesticide business registration number, if applicable*
• The pesticide product name
• The USEPA Registration Number of the pesticide product
• The amount of pesticide product applied
• The location of application (in cases where address is not standard, use mile marker or cross-roads).

*Reports submitted by contractors or subcontractors related to ECL Section 33-1301 Subdivision 12 must use the agency or business registration number (if applicable) of the state department, state agency, or public benefit corporation that has contracted with them.

The Glyphosate Reporting Form is also available for download on DEC’s Pesticide Webpage under “Hot Topics”. The form must be submitted electronically by email to glyphosateregs@dec.ny.gov no later than January 15^th every year.

The file name of the Glyphosate Reporting Form must include the official name of the state department, state agency, or public benefit corporation making pesticide applications or contracting pesticide applications. Contractors and subcontractors who submit reports must include their official name in the file name in addition to the official name of the state department, state agency, or public benefit corporation that has contracted with them.

Example: Name of State Agency_Name of Contractor – GlyphosateForm.xlsx

State departments, state agencies, and public benefit corporations are required to maintain copies of reports, even if the reports are submitted by a contractor or subcontractor. Copies must be maintained for a minimum of three years following the date(s) of the application(s) and must be available for inspection upon request by the department.

Questions can be directed to pesticidecompliance@dec.ny.gov or call 518-402-8727