Current management in national and state forests has important but limited impacts on sustaining oaks in temperate forests of the eastern U.S

Abstract

Active management for promoting oaks (Quercus spp.) and restraining maples (Acer spp.) is mostly conducted in public forests (e.g., national forests [NF] and state forests [SF]) because of oaks' ecological and economic importance. Studies have shown that current management efforts have limited success, meanwhile, oak-dominant forests continue to shift in composition and structure to shade-tolerant, fire-sensitive mesophytic species (e.g., red maple A. rubrum). It remains to be evaluated whether current management can achieve its objectives in public forests and at regional scales. In this study, we investigated the long-term outcomes of business-as-usual (BAU) and alternative management (AltMgt) scenarios in a large, temperate hardwood forest landscape in southern Ohio, US. The BAU approach simulates contemporary management, informed by harvest records across public lands and a geospatial disturbance database (i.e., LANDFIRE) to infer private land management. Whereas the AltMgt scenario increases the pace and scale of forest management on public lands through two-stage oak shelterwood harvests, treated every ten years across 10% of the land area with private land remaining as BAU. We used a spatially explicit and dynamic forest landscape model to project species compositional and structural changes under these two scenarios. Our results demonstrate that BAU management in public forests may not successfully sustain oak but instead favors the colonization of maples. Further, management objectives to promote oaks could be achieved on public forests under the AltMgt scenario, but such alternative management had limited impacts at the regional scale when including private lands. The management of NF and SF has a crucial role in driving regional changes in oak and maple abundance, particularly when private lands continued their BAU management. Starting conditions by landownership are also important considerations for oak-maple dynamics through time, implying the need to have a range of priorities and objectives, under different time frames, when developing long-term conservation plans for oak forests at regional-scales.