“For the fourth time in their history, Pennsylvania’s state forests have a comprehensive document to chart their future,” said DCNR Secretary Michael DiBerardinis. “But this is unlike any document that has guided our forests in the past. We have changed our management approach and updated the inventory of our forest resources using sophisticated tools. And we have listened to the public like never before.

“In the more than 15 years since the last plan, the resources, values and uses of our state forest have changed dramatically. And we have reflected that change with a flexible, dynamic guidance document that will continue to evolve in order to protect the long-term sustainability of our forests.”

Secretary DiBerardinis noted that while the first resource management plan almost 50 years ago focused on timber management, the new plan takes an ecosystem approach, with a goal of forest sustainability in order to provide an array of resources, uses, and values for current and future generations. A key component of the plan is the expansion of the state’s wild and natural areas by more than 20,000 acres.

“This proposal further advances this administration’s views on protecting more areas in our state forests and parks,” Secretary DiBerardinis said.

According to State Forester Dr. James R. Grace, the state forest provides many benefits to the citizens of Pennsylvania. “The harvest of quality hardwood timber helps support the state’s $5 billion forest products industry that employs almost 100,000 people. These same forests provide habitat for a wide array of flora and fauna, including many rare, threatened, and endangered species. They also protect watersheds, which provide some of the cleanest water found in the Commonwealth for drinking and recreational opportunities. Our forests provide all this while facing dramatic increases in recreational activities that have become vital to Pennsylvania’s tourism industry,” he said.

The plan also identifies 27 percent of the forests as potential old growth; establishes a proposed bioreserve system; strengthens oil and gas lease guidelines; discontinues new “shallow gas” leasing; optimizes regeneration efforts; and maintains current timber production levels.

With its 12 core chapters, executive summary and overview, the 450-page document provides the most comprehensive view of the forests to date. This revised plan includes a number of significant changes, including:

the commitment to ecosystem management, which is based on ecological units, such as ecoregions, landscapes, and a newly developed plant community classification system; a revised and expanded forest inventory to include additional ecological parameters, an annualized five-year inventory cycle, and permanent crews to conduct the inventory; new technologies, such as Global Positioning Systems (GPS), Geographic Information Systems (GIS), web-based management and reporting systems, and computer-based modeling to aid in data and information management, resource planning, and management decisions

A new timber harvest planning system, which uses a sophisticated linear programming computer model to allow for an improved and more accurate allocation of resources than previous plans;
establishment of the regeneration fund, which designates a portion of the receipts from state timber sales to be used to implement management practices to address the over-browsing by deer in order to obtain successful forest regeneration;

mapping of proposed bio-reserve and old-growth management areas; and
the addition of several new sections to the plan, including Communications, Ecological Considerations, Soil Resources, Non-timber Forest Products, and Infrastructure.
Since 1955, state forest management has been guided by written management plans revised at 15-year intervals. The development of this plan has been a multi-step, multi-year process, beginning with data collection and inventory of the resources over the last five years. In 1998, DCNR’s Bureau of Forestry conducted 27 public meetings to understand the public’s desires about how state forestland should be used and managed. By far, the largest number of comments centered on recreation and user access to state forest lands.

Based on the feedback, the agency defined policies, goals, objectives and indicators to come up with a working draft of the plan. DCNR held a second series of public input meetings between March and June 2000, which elicited nearly 5,000 comments and ideas, one-third of which related to recreation and access to the lands. The public also commented on issues that included bureau public information and education efforts, law enforcement, sustainable forestry, ecosystem management, science-based management, water quality, volunteerism and land acquisition.

Over the past two years, the agency has incorporated the public and interest group feedback it received and developed the final plan to meet the state forest management goal: to manage state forests sustainability under sound ecosystem management, and to retain their wild character and maintain biological diversity while providing pure water, opportunities for low density recreation, habitats for forest plants and animals, sustained yields of quality timber and environmentally sound utilization of mineral resources.

“We asked the public what they wanted, developed a plan based on what we thought we heard, and then asked the public if we heard them correctly. Now, we are presenting the final plan and asking people if any fine tuning will make it better,” Dr. Grace said.