Fostering Old Forest Conditions through Structural Complexity Enhancement

The vast majority of Pennsylvania's forests are middle-aged, with most trees in a stand or forest community being of the same age, often around 100 years old.  However, efforts to foster resiliency and favorable habitat conditions across the landscape, statewide, and regionally focus on the need to diversify forest succession at a large scale, creating more early-successional (young forest) and late-successional/old growth (older forest) conditions.  With good management, creating young forest habitat is relatively straightforward, setting back succession through monitored disturbance (as with a timber harvest).  But working toward older forest conditions can be a less straightforward process for landowners who want to foster those conditions through active management.  However, landowners and managers who understand how succession advances naturally in our forests can work with the system to speed up the formation of or enhance key features, resulting in forests that host some of the same structural and functional elements we value in older forests.  Management for old growth conditions should also consider long-term forest health implications and mortality events as both sometimes-disappointing realities in longer rotations as well as good opportunities to act when older forest conditions are desired. 

Presented by: Sarah Wurzbacher, Forestry Extension Educator, Penn State Extension