Six commercial woodland owners have been selected to pilot climate smart forestry that advocates hope could help store millions more tons of fossil fuel emissions in the north Maine woods.
The New England Forestry Foundation on Thursday said the landowners would incorporate methods that would eventually result in healthier, stronger forests and more valuable products.
The foundation will use some of a $30 million grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to reimburse landowners for using approved methods, said foundation senior forester Brian Milakovsky.
The techniques aren't "rocket science" Milakovsky said. On some Maine acreage timber companies already cut down overgrown young woodlots to encourage more valuable trees, called pre-commercial thinning, and use similar climate smart methods.
But a high up-front cost means those practices aren't widespread, Milakovsky said.
"They later on pay back in excellent growth in high quality trees, but that’s the thing about forest management, payoff is really far out in the future," he said.
If the pilot works, there could be an opportunity to greatly expand the practices across Maine's vast woodlands.
The idea is to grow trees that can store more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, either by staying alive in the forest or as durable building materials and other products, according to the foundation.
The Maine woods already store a huge amount of carbon, enough to offset about 60 percent of the state's annual greenhouse gas emissions, according to a report from a forest carbon taskforce at the Governor's Office of Policy Innovation and the Future.
But foundation executive director Robert Perschel said broad adoption of climate smart forestry across New England could trap hundreds of millions more tons of carbon for decades.
"The entire New England region has a goal of reducing carbon emissions over 30 years and this amounts to 30% of that goal. So we are talking about a really big climate opportunity here," Perschel said.
The six landowners selected for this phase of the program are Robbins Lumber Company in Searsport, the Maine Bureau of Parks and Lands, the Baskahegan Company in Brookton, Fallen Timber LLC, Clayton Lake Woodlands and the Seven Islands Company.
The foundation intends to open the program to applicants from medium and small-acreage woodlot owners as the five-year pilot matures.
