“Ultimately, is there a
difference between
managing a forest solely
for timber and managing it solely for
a single wildlife species? Maybe not,”
says Greg Corace, a forester at Seney
National Wildlife Refuge in Michigan’s
Upper Peninsula. “In either case, our
contemporary understanding of
forests suggests we tend to simplify
complex systems when we focus on
individual products.”
It’s a bold assertion coming from someone
who helps oversee the refuge’s Kirtland’s
Warbler Wildlife Management Area, 6,684
acres of jack pine stands scattered across
125 parcels in eight counties of Michigan’s
Lower Peninsula that are collectively
administered to help reverse the decline
of its endangered namesake. To be clear,
Corace isn’t dismissing the validity of
recovery efforts. Rather, he’s suggesting
species conservation objectives, among
others, be synthesized into a more
natural and holistic approach to forest
management, a concept that has emerged
in the scientific literature over the past
two decades.
“Our plantations for the Kirtland’s
warbler have been extremely successful,”
he says. “But we have an opportunity to
make them less artificial.”
If Corace’s suggestion seems like
an affront to the mind-set of his
conservationist predecessors, it is in
keeping with the National Wildlife Refuge
System’s emphasis on coordinated
research across a number of academic
disciplines to help address complex
challenges of the 21st century.
Upon taking charge of Seney’s biological
program in 2009, Corace renamed it
the “applied sciences program,” which
currently integrates research, land
management for wildlife benefit, and
academia. The final component is proving
especially essential to the others. With
leverage from his status at several
universities in the
region, Corace has
been partnering
with academic
colleagues, among
others, to secure
applied research
grants involving
graduate students
and many refuges
in the Upper
Midwest.
“They’re
getting valuable
experience,” Seney
Refuge manager
Mark Vaniman
says of the students.
“We’re getting
excellent research
and information.”
The information is
being incorporated
into planning documents that assist
managers in making decisions. For
instance, recent graduate projects
at Seney Refuge have quantified the
efficacy of using earthen plugs in ditches
to restore wetlands, and using logging
treatments and prescribed fire to produce
more natural landscape patterns.
Indeed, research findings underscore
Corace’s assertion and suggest
that management strategies, when
practicable, should emulate natural
phenomena to promote patterns of forest
composition and structure that might not
otherwise occur.
“Rather than focusing from the bird’s
perspective, with the population doing
so well we’re now trying to focus from
the perspective of the powers that
shaped the forest in the first place,”
says Corace. “We’re backing up some
to see what forests and wetlands here
looked like before the white man arrived
and get a better understanding of how
natural forces have played defining roles
in these ecosystems.”
Of course, after European settlement,
many of those forces were stifled, and
the consequences remain problematic.
This summer’s spate of “megafires”
in the West, for instance, is widely
considered the result of longstanding fire
suppression policies.
“When we simplify forests, we create the
conditions for catastrophe—whether from
fire, invasive species, insect infestation or
disease,” says Corace.
The concept of managing public lands in
a way that more approximates nature,
with all its intricate nuances, is not new.
The U.S. Forest Service has been
studying it for decades. But if this holistic
idea is novel to the Refuge System, as
Corace suggests, it is also timely given
the specter of climate change. Any global
warming could exacerbate the dangers
associated with landscapes that have
been simplified, even those simplified for
the well-intentioned purpose of species
recovery.
Ben Ikenson is a New Mexico-based
freelance writer.
