From GivingTuesday and Conference News to Some of the Latest Resources for Woodland Owners

What a whirlwind 2024 was! I hope your New Year is off to a good start. Welcome, 2025!

At the James C. Finley Center for Private Forests at Penn State, we are in the midst of compiling our 2024 Annual Report and highlighting the accomplishments of the past year in research, engagement, and training. We’ll be sharing more about the report and its availability in the next issue of Forest Leaves (don’t want to give away any content), so more to come.

In our last issue, we shared the Finley Center's participation in the University's GivingTuesday campaign. With 47 donors and over $11,000 raised toward supporting undergraduate and graduate student experiences, we are incredibly grateful to all who participated in the campaign. These funds are earmarked for undergraduate internship experiences working with the Finley Center to learn more about private woodlands management and landowner education and engagement. Additionally, funds will be used to provide graduate student fellowships as matching support for grants working on ecosystem services on private lands and grants working on forest resilience. In 2025, we’ll be welcoming a new master’s student to join the Finley Center team and work in this space.

2025 Forest Landowners Conference: As you'll read elsewhere in Forest Leaves, we are working hard to get things ready to welcome everyone to the 2025 Forest Landowners Conference in State College, March 7 and 8. For those who've attended in the past, the schedule looks a little different for the 6th edition of this statewide—and beyond—conference. We are encouraging woodland owners to join us on March 6 for Penn State Extension's Forest Health Briefing and learn about the forest health threats facing Penn's Woods. The conference itself runs on Friday, March 7, and includes 66 presentations and two amazing keynote speakers. Saturday, March 8, is reserved for participants to take a deep dive into topics of interest through half-day tours and workshops—there are no general presentations on Saturday. Our goal in the restructuring was to make it easier and more affordable for people to access discrete parts of the conference, based on interest, as well as to welcome the synergy and adjacency of the Forest Health Briefing as an expanded learning opportunity. We hope you will join us for all or part!

In 2025, several resources the Finley Center and partners have been working on will be available to support woodland owners, especially new or novice owners, as they navigate the opportunities and challenges of owning and caring for woodlands. We are excited to share those materials soon. But if you are looking—for yourself or people you know—for resources to help landowners get started with land stewardship, there are several options available. Check them out and share them with others:

• Woodland Stewardship: Management Practices for Landowners is a self-paced online course landowners can take at their convenience. It contains eight modules that walk through various aspects of forest ecology and management, tree identification, wildlife, water, and more. Offered through Penn State Extension, it is available for viewing at any time (course fee is $99) and gives the basics that will support landowners’ knowledge of their woods.
• In the fall of each year, the Forestry and Wildlife Extension Team and members of the Finley Center collaborate to host Woodland Stewardship: Guided Engagement with Your Land. This hybrid course mentors landowners and others interested over an eight-week period through the eight modules of the above Management Practices for Landowners course, but with opportunities for expanded learning from and engagement with the team to ask questions and gain access to additional resources (course fee is $135).
• The Hardwoods Development Council, the three Hardwood Utilization Groups, and numerous partners have come out with a brand new publication that shows forest landowners before and after examples of various forest management practices utilized in Pennsylvania. What Will My Woods Look Like? is a pictorial and descriptive guide with images taken before, during, and after management activities, modeled after a publication of the same name created by the Maine Forest Service. While available in hard copy, the quick way to find the publication is via a web search on the name, "what will my woods look like + Pennsylvania."

The winter season can be a time of respite and calm (we hope!). Perhaps these resources will be useful to you, or those you know, in expanding learning when the weather may not be conducive to being out in the woods... Enjoy, and stay safe!