Another Key Part of Your Forest Management Plan

Maine Woodland Owners is committed to helping small woodland owners develop succession plans so they can know their life’s work will be passed on to someone who will continue their stewardship efforts. Here’s another topic to stimulate landowner efforts to develop and improve their plans.

If you care enough about your woodlands that you have developed a management plan, then I suggest that you should have a succession plan and it should be part of your management plan. In Maine, we know it can take 80 to 120 years to grow a good tree to a commercial sawlog so it can be harvested. That length of time suggests that there will be at least three different owners of the land while the trees are growing from their infancy to their maturity.

If those three different owners have no continuity of goals, or understanding of the efforts that have been or need to be made to nurture the trees to maturity, then there may be little chance the trees will actually reach their best market and species maturity.

However, if there is a component of the management plan that says who is to manage the land, and how, into the future, and if the current owners have put a structure in place to limit the land’s future uses, there’s a greater chance the trees will reach maturity.  There’s also a greater chance the woodland will not be subdivided and lose its ability to be woodland with complete ecosystems, habitats, high quality water and air, and all the other benefits we care about.

Also, if the owners have developed the next managers during the current owner’s stewardship there is an even greater chance the long-term goals will be met.