Florida Forest Service Report on Forest Sustainability Challenged

Flori­da For­est Ser­vice Report on For­est Sus­tain­abil­i­ty Challenged

- by Bruce Ritchie, Sep­tem­ber 6, 2013. Source: The Flori­da Current

A Flori­da For­est Ser­vice report required by 2012 leg­is­la­tion found that the state’s forests over­all are sus­tain­able but there are some coun­ties where some types of trees are being har­vest­ed faster than they are being grown.

The report was required by HB 7117, a com­pre­hen­sive ener­gy bill, amid con­cerns that pro­posed new bio­mass ener­gy plants could increase costs for exist­ing sawmills, pulp mills and oth­ers in the for­est prod­uct industry.

“The study indi­cates that most coun­ties in Flori­da have high­ly sus­tain­able forests that meet or exceed the demands of our for­est prod­ucts indus­try,” Agri­cul­ture Com­mis­sion­er Adam H. Put­nam said in a press release issued this week.

How­ev­er, some envi­ron­men­tal­ists and a Uni­ver­si­ty of Flori­da ecol­o­gy pro­fes­sor say the def­i­n­i­tion of sus­tain­able was too nar­row­ly focused on wood sup­plies and did­n’t con­sid­er a vari­ety of oth­er issues includ­ing effects on wildlife habi­tat, forests and wet­lands from cut­ting down trees or the effect on cli­mate change from wood burning.

Scot Quaran­da, cam­paign man­ag­er of the Dog­wood Alliance, an envi­ron­men­tal group based in Asheville, N.C., focused on South­ern for­est issues, said the report shows that there is too much har­vest­ing pres­sure on forests in some coun­ties in north­west and north­east Florida.

The study, he said, indi­cates there is “no room for expan­sion with indus­tri­al scale for­est bio­mass and pel­let industries.”

As called for in HB 7117, the study was to pro­vide a “com­pre­hen­sive statewide for­est inven­to­ry analy­sis and study, using a geo­graph­ic infor­ma­tion sys­tem, to iden­ti­fy where avail­able bio­mass is locat­ed, deter­mine the avail­able bio­mass resources, and ensure for­est sus­tain­abil­i­ty with­in the state.”

Fran­cis E. Putz, an applied ecol­o­gist at UF spe­cial­iz­ing in trop­i­cal for­est sil­va­cul­ture, said the study assumes that impor­tant cypress ponds habi­tat could be con­vert­ed into hard­wood swamps to pro­vide wood need­ed for industry.

The study, he said, is “based on a very nar­row and out­mod­ed def­i­n­i­tion of ‘sus­tain­abil­i­ty’ that con­sid­ers only tim­ber and not the many oth­er val­ues of forests.”

Putz was among 60 sci­en­tists who wrote a let­ter to the Euro­pean Union par­lia­ment last week rais­ing con­cerns about burn­ing wood from south­east­ern U.S. forests in Euro­pean bio­mass ener­gy plants.

Erin Gille­spie, press sec­re­tary of the Flori­da Depart­ment of Agri­cul­ture and Con­sumer Ser­vices, said the goal of the study as required by the leg­is­la­tion was accomplished.

Respond­ing to Quaran­da’s con­cerns, Gille­spie said pres­sure on pine forests was iden­ti­fied in the study and that there is no pres­sure on hard­wood forests any­where in the state.

And as far as wet­lands, “For the first time, the state now has an accu­rate map of man­groves, cypress and oth­er forest­ed wet­lands to be able to deter­mine trends in the future,” she said.