MOFGA and a team of forestry experts are offering two upcoming workshops on assisted migration efforts. Assisted migration is a climate adaptation tool where people plant trees beyond their historical ranges to keep pace with climate change’s effects on local ecosystems. The workshops include Nursery Beds and Forest Planting on May 18, and Insights from Experimental Planting Studies in Maine on May 21. Both events will take place at MOFGA’s Common Ground Education Center in Unity, Maine.
In the Nursery Beds and Forest Planting workshop on May 18, participants will learn about assisted migration efforts in the MOFGA woodlot, planting trees for assisted migration, managing nursery beds to grow trees for assisted migration, and other forest climate adaptation efforts. This interactive workshop will be led by Aleta McKeage, project partner; Maren Granstrom, consulting forester at Silver Maple Forestry; and Jack Kertesz, MOFGA’s landscape coordinator. A catered lunch will be included.
At the Insights from Experimental Planting Studies in Maine presentation on May 21, participants will hear from a team of researchers at the University of Maine about how their recent and ongoing research efforts are helping us understand how forest tree regeneration responds to extreme climate conditions and how that relates to assisted migration in Maine. The speakers for this workshop will be: Dr. Jay Wason, Laura Pinover, and Emily MacDonald from the Wason Lab of Forest Ecosystem Physiology at the University of Maine.
“Despite a rapidly changing climate, the forest shifts slowly,” says Maddie Eberly, MOFGA’s low-impact forestry specialist. “Migration for trees — range shifting — takes longer than the human-induced rate at which our world is warming, causing concern that we may lose tree species diversity from our landscape. So, to help our forests migrate to places they will more likely prosper, and perhaps to give ourselves a bit of hope as well, scientists and community members are planting warm-adapted (southern) trees further north through a practice called assisted migration.”
To learn more about MOFGA’s low-impact forestry (LIF) program, and assisted migration and climate change adaptation in forests, click here. For event details and registration, visit our event calendar.
