Vision Emerges for Future of State Forest
By THOMAS DUNLOP
State forestry officials will meet May 24 with key scientists to try
to unify the environmental vision for how to manage and restore the
Manuel F. Correllus State Forest, the chief forester for the
commonwealth told the Gazette last week.
The state will then convene at least one public hearing this summer
to explain what the ecologists have agreed to, and find out what
Vineyarders want to see happen in the forest from both an environmental
and recreational point of view.
The state forest spreads across more than 5,100 acres in the
heartland of Martha's Vineyard, protecting its main aquifer from
development and serving as an entirely undisturbed habitat for a host of
insects and plants found nowhere else in New England and, in several
instances, the rest of the eastern third of the country, scientists say.
For decades, the forest suffered from a lack of funding for even the
most basic management. Vast plantations of red and white pine trees,
planted starting in the 1920s and intended to establish an Island timber
industry, were never thinned properly; others, planted outside their
range, eventually suffered from a fatal blight. Forestry officials and
ecologists agree that the neglect increased the risk of an
uncontrollable wildfire and still threatens vital parts of the
environment in the forest itself.
SRC="http://www.mvgazette.com/news/2005/03/25/content/state_forest_timber_sm.jpg" Earlier this month, a delegation of state officials reviewed the
work accomplished in the forest since February 2004, when the state
department of conservation and recreation, which owns the forest,
secured a $240,000 grant from the U.S. Forest Service to manage and
revitalize state forests in southeastern Massachusetts. A substantial
share of this money went to the state forest on the Vineyard, state
officials say.
"I was very, very impressed by the type of work they
performed," said Jim DiMaio, chief forester of the state Bureau of
Forestry.
John Varkonda, superintendent of the state forest, led seven state
officials on a day-long tour of the forest, which fire experts say is
sited on the third most flammable landscape in the nation, after the
Oakland Hills of California and the pine barrens of New Jersey.
Historically, wildfires have roared through the scrub oak and pitch pine
at ferocious rates, crossing from West Tisbury to the edge of Edgartown
in as few as five hours.
In this first year of funding, scrub oak was mowed near the northern
border to reduce the risk that wildfire might escape the forest on a
strong southwest breeze, Mr. Varkonda said. Fire lanes were widened in
the western half of the forest to give crews better access to the
interior.
"The fire lanes in West Tisbury were a lot narrower, so we did
a lot more tree removal, a lot more grinding," Mr. Varkonda said.
"A couple of the fire lanes might have been 15 or 20 feet wide;
they are now 80 feet wide."
In agreement with the state natural heritage and endangered species
program, foresters also removed a 70-acre stand of highly flammable
spruce trees that endangered the ecological balance in one of the
western frost bottoms, a vestige of the glacial melt from thousands of
years ago.
"The trees were actually starting to change the physical
characteristics of the frost bottom - the frosts lasting well into
spring, the exceedingly high temperatures during the summertime,"
Mr. Varkonda said. "Those are the characteristics in which the
rare moths that they are all concerned about - and rightly so
- thrive."
SRC="http://www.mvgazette.com/news/2005/03/25/content/tom_turner_sm.jpg" Next year, the state plans to thin stands of combustible pitch pines
near the perimeter. It will use prescribed burns to reduce the low-lying
scrub deeper in the forest along the rest of the northern and eastern
borders. Also slated for removal are the dead, red pine along the bike
path near the Edgartown-West Tisbury Road.
The state forest is believed to support the most concentrated
collection of rare insects in the northeast, as well as plants found
almost nowhere else in the country. Harvard Forest, the research center
of Harvard University, described in a 1999 study how factors of
geography, soil and climate have conspired to create an oak woodland
like no other in the world - all the more valuable because it has
never been tilled for agriculture or disturbed in any other ecologically
debilitating way.
David R. Foster, the head of Harvard Forest, said recently that the
complete removal of the old alien red and white pine plantations,
planted up to 80 years ago, would be considered the largest single
ecological restoration project in New England history. The only thing
preventing this, all parties say, is the prohibitive expense of shipping
more than a million board-feet of timber to the mainland and finding a
market for it.
Beyond that, one subject of debate concerns fire: What role did it
play in the forest before the arrival of Europeans? Some scientists say
there is no direct evidence for extensive prehistoric fires in what is
now the forest; other scientists infer that Native Americans must have
burned the forest landscape regularly from the time of their arrival
because many rare plants and insects in the forest could not have
established themselves or survived without frequent burns. Scientists
believe Indians used fire to create open areas in which to live, hunt
and grow berries on the arid, sandy soils.
The May 24 meeting will focus on the fate of the remaining
plantations, which encompass about 350 acres of the forest, and how much
fire and mowing ought to occur in the forest as part of the restoration
work, Mr. DiMaio said.
SRC="http://www.mvgazette.com/news/2005/03/25/content/cut_boards_sm.jpg" "Maybe it's through incremental implementation and
careful monitoring and review that we can move forward, instead of
looking at something very large and very dramatic," he said.
Once scientists have reached a consensus, he added, the state will
hold at least one public hearing this summer to hear on what should and
should not happen as forest restoration and management evolves.
A central question is how to guarantee money for the work over the
long term. Well into the 1990s, the management budget for the state
forest was more than $2,000 a year.
"I'm reasonably confident," Mr. DiMaio said.
"We gained another forest service grant of $324,000 for southeast
Massachusetts [this year], but the main emphasis is Martha's
Vineyard at this time. I really believe we need to pay attention to the
fuels and ecosystem restoration in southeast Massachusetts. It's a
priority with me, that's all I can say."
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