Report on Virginia forests not a rosy picture

By Ted Strong
Daily Progress


A report released Wednesday by the Virginia Department of Forestry depicts a shrinking and changing forest facing new threats.

Forestry has a $27.5 billion impact on the commonwealth annually, according to the report. The state is behind only North Carolina in volume of hardwood production and sixth nationally for overall production, behind five other Southern states.

The annual State of the Forest report details the last year’s goings on at the department — they dealt with roughly half the normal number of wildfires thanks to a wet winter and spring — and sketches the state of forests statewide, both public and private.

The picture this year is not rosy. While trees are increasingly older and more trees are growing than are being logged, there are a variety of threats facing the states’ tree-filled spaces.

Loss of ownership

Virginia loses one acre of forest, on average, every 20 minutes, according to the report. That’s the net loss, said John Campbell, the Department of Forestry’s director of public information. More forest than that is actually lost, but other land, often agricultural, is also reverting to forest.

The land is going to both residential and commercial development, and includes the loss of more hardwoods than many people assume, Campbell said..
“It’s going away permanently from forest land,” he said.

The losses are occurring all over the state, but especially in the area between the District of Columbia and Hampton Roads, he said.

About 80 percent of Virginia’s forests — more than 12.9 million acres — are privately owned. At the same time, forest-products firms (such as companies making lumber and paper) have largely gotten out of forest ownership. By 2007, they owned less than 4 percent of the state’s forestland, down from 11 percent in 1992.

Most people who own land are older than 55, Campbell said. Officials report an increase in the number of investors as landowners.

And the average tenure of land owners is dropping, said Bud Watson, executive director of Virginia Forest Watch, a grassroots group that aims to boost the natural ecology and biodiversity of the state’s forests.

“There’s a tendency to cash out, take everything that you can get,” he said.

The shift away from a vertically integrated forest-products industry — where one company owned the land, the trees and the factories — has been matched by a decline in the number of nursery and tree-improvement programs. In Virginia, the only remaining active tree-breeding program is the state’s, according to the report.

Invasive pests

There are a pair of big new threats facing Virginia foresters.

Emerald ash borers — beetles that kill ash trees — are in the northern part of the state and threaten to spread southward. At the same time, the thousand cankers disease of the black walnut has been spotted in Tennessee, within striking distance of the Virginia border.

The ash borer got its start in the Midwest. The insect has so far been spotted in Arlington, Fairfax, Frederick and Prince William counties in Virginia.

“It’s pretty much wiped out already virtually every ash tree in Michigan,” Campbell said.

The prospect for this state is much the same, according to officials.

“Virginia and the nation face the prospect of losing all ash species from natural and urban landscapes in the forthcoming decades,” the report reads.

Those trees tend to be in towns and back yards, where they cost a lot of money to cut down, Campbell said. Ash trees make up about 4 percent of the trees in Shenandoah National Park, said park spokeswoman Karen Beck-Herzog.

The borer is, in particular, spread by firewood. Shenandoah National Park banned all outside firewood on March 1 in an effort to block the spread. Campbell said that the more local firewood there is, the better for slowing the disease’s spread.

Firewood is currently being brought into Virginia from 15 states and three countries, according to the report. Kiln-drying is the best way to ensure there are no live pests in firewood, the report states.
The thousand cankers disease was spotted in the East within the last six months, Campbell said. Before that, it had been a West Coast problem, he said.

The southern pine beetle has also attacked the table-mountain pine, pitch pine and shortleaf pine, the report states.

The report notes that overstocked pine stands contribute to the disease’s spread, and the state is paying logging companies to thin them.

And the hemlocks continue to suffer from the hemlock wooly adelgid.

“It’s pretty much just eating its way through there and working its way farther and farther to the southwest,” Campbell said.

He added, “It’s pretty much going to be wiping them out pretty soon.”

The perennial menace of the gypsy moth has been reduced by wet spring conditions, which allow the gypsy moth fungus to flourish, slaying larval populations. Gypsy moth populations were at a 10-year low, producing no new visible damage in the last year. The decline is expected to continue through at least 2011.

The report states that resources for fighting pests are dwindling, while pests remain numerous. For some species, like the emerald ash borer, the state’s solution is to delay its spread, not to fight it directly, in the hope that new science will eventually lead to a better method.

“We’re trying to hope that we can stave it off as long as possible, because we don’t know what to do if it gets here,” Beck-Herzog said.

In Shenandoah National Park, officials are using special injections into the roots of hemlock trees to save some — but by no means all — of the park’s specimens. The goal, said Beck-Herzog, is to maintain seed stock for the day the park can begin trying to engineer their comeback.

The park is also concerned about the Asian longhorned beetle. Found mostly in the north, park officials worry it could hopscotch south, Beck-Herzog said.
“It’s not like you see this major progression [with all invasive pests],” she said. “It just shows up in places.”

There are also invasive plant species, including tree of heaven, that compete against native tree species.

Shift in forest types

According to the report, Virginia is continuing its decades-long shift toward hardwoods, with pine forests either replaced outright or mixed with the deciduous trees. Currently, the commonwealth has about 3 million acres of pine trees, down from more than 6 million in 1940. Today, more than half of all pine acreage is on plantations, or commercial plantings of the trees.

When people cut down pines, if they don’t replant, the forest very often grows back up hardwood, Campbell said.

Today, the commonwealth has 300 to 400 longleaf pine trees, down from a million acres before European settlement, Campbell said. The decline of the longleaf has been tied to a variety of factors, including its heavily fire-dependent life cycle.

“Most of the actual replanting that’s going on is actually loblolly,” Campbell said, referencing one of the most populous types of pine in the state.

The loblolly is, in many ways, a very resilient tree, he said, but officials are pushing for landowners to plant more varied pines to reduce the risk of a blight or other silviculture calamity.

At the same time, officials are worried about the regeneration of oak trees. Oak trees produce desirable wood and also produce important food for wildlife, with acorns making up a major portion of several woodland species’ diets.

The various species of oak are being replaced by shade-loving species, such as black gum and red maple, the report concludes, in part because of the exclusion of fire from many areas and in part because of high-grading. High-grading is a process wherein loggers cut only the best trees — from a commercial standpoint — on a tract, leaving everything else. The practice has a tendency to degrade a forest over time, Watson said.

“Basically, when you leave a lot of shade, you’re going to have less luck with regenerating oak, and species like red maple come in that are very opportunistic and can grow in that sort of environment,” said Jason Woodfin of Charlottesville, a forester with Virginia Forest Watch.

Conservation

Forests also offer the possibility of carbon sequestration credits (a new forest will pull carbon out of the atmosphere and lock it into the trees), though the market is still emerging, according to the report.

The department is piloting a project in the Charlottesville area to demonstrate that forest management can reduce sediment and nutrient loads in the South Fork Rivanna River Reservoir. Sediment refers to particles in the water, often from erosion. Nutrients refers to substances such as nitrogen and phosphates, which often come from runoff from manure and both home and agricultural fertilizer.

The question of watersheds and water quality is of special importance, according to the report, because of impending water quality standards being developed for the Chesapeake Bay.

In 2009, the department conserved 15,806 acres through easements and purchases. The spurt is the largest push toward conservation since the 1950s, when the federal government gave Virginia what became large state forests, according to the report. Among the lands the state acquired in 2009 was 1,200 acres near Charlottesville, called the Biscuit Run tract. The land was purchased from developers for $9.8 million. The developer also intended to apply for tax credits.

The report states that tax benefits at the federal level are still in limbo in Congress.

In 2010, the cap for credits at the state level had been met by August, meaning many applicants will be put on the list for 2011.

“While, for most landowners, the production of their land is their ultimate goal, few landowners are immune from the need to receive compensation for the land, which is often the most valuable asset,” the report states.

The department is focusing on conserving those forests that are most at risk or provide the greatest benefit.

“The cost of land ownership has climbed considerably,” Campbell said. “It’s hard to own forest land now unless you have some kind of a favorable tax situation.”

Watson, of Virginia Forest Watch, said that his group tries to emphasize the importance of sustainable forestry to tools such as easements, certifications and selective, low-impact logging.
Woodfin said that individual landowners looking to help conserve the state’s forests, should work with a forester to develop a long-term management plan for their property.

The state Department of Forestry can put landowners in touch with foresters.


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