Collaborative Oak Management in Southeast Ohio
The Ohio Interagency Forestry Team (Forestry Team) consists of agencies with a forest management mission in Ohio, including the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Natural Resources Conservation Service, USDA Forest Service, Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR) Division of Forestry, ODNR Division of Wildlife, Ohio State University Extension, and Central State University Extension.
The Forestry Team is working to restore oak-dominated forests across a 17-county project area in southeastern Ohio. The project area contains 46 percent of Ohio’s forests, 17 out of 22 state forests, 34 state wildlife management areas, and the only national forest, the Wayne National Forest.
For thousands of years, oaks have been the dominant trees in the landscape of Appalachian Ohio, part of one of the most biodiverse temperate forests on earth. Many species of animals, plants and fungi depend on the presence of oaks for food and habitat. Oaks still dominate the canopy, but there are not enough young oaks to sustain oak forests into the future. The Forestry Team is developing a model to work across public land boundaries and with private landowners to develop and maintain healthy oak forests in the region.
In 2015, the Forestry Team was chosen as one of the National Landscape Restoration Partnerships by the Chiefs of both the Forest Service and Natural Resources Conservation Service. From 2015 to 2017, Ohio received $3.4M to achieve collaborative oak management in southeast Ohio. The team hoped this initiative would push interagency collaboration to the next level and catalyze a permanent new way to do business beyond the life of the project.
As a result of the funding, the Forestry Team completed a variety of projects aimed at maintaining oak-dominated forests, improved interagency coordination, and outreached to private woodland owners. In 2019, the Forestry Team developed and signed a business plan that directs work over the next five years to create shared visions for forest landscapes across the region, increase awareness of the loss of oaks in Southeast Ohio forests, and collectively manage oak-dominated forests across public lands and with private landowners.