Old-growth forests are among the rarest habitat types in eastern North America, comprising less than 0.5% of eastern U.S. forests. Recent LiDAR mapping identified more than 400,000 acres of mature forest across northern and western Maine, including forests with exceptional biodiversity, carbon storage, and ecological resilience. However, most of these forests are privately owned, rendering their future uncertain.
A report released this week, led by Jonathan Thompson, Director of the Harvard Forest, and supported by Research Assistant and co-author Joshua Plisinski, provides a roadmap for leveraging market-based strategies to conserve habitat on ecologically rare private timberland — an important challenge for conservation biology globally.
“Maine has a rare opportunity to conserve some of the East’s last mature forests,” says Thompson. “What makes these forests ecologically valuable is the same thing that makes them economically valuable. Because these forests exist largely within private working landscapes, successful conservation will depend on approaches that work for landowners as well as conservation goals.”
More broadly, researchers in the Thompson Lab have been studying Maine’s forests to understand how a recent, large-scale transition to investment-based forestland owners has affected forest ecosystems. Thompson was able to further develop these ideas during a recent Lone Mountain fellowship at the Property and Environment Research Center (PERC) in Bozeman, Montana.
