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Forests and woodlands cover two-thirds of New York State’s landscape. These forests are home to dozens of bird species and myriad other wildlife and plants, including many bird species considered to be at-risk and others for which New York has a special stewardship responsibility (see Birds of Conservation Concern in New York). Audubon New York’s goal is to see that the forests of the state are protected and properly managed so that the populations of these species remain healthy and the entire forest ecosystem remains diverse and resilient.

For the past decade the main emphasis of Audubon's forest program in New York State has been to press for state purchase of crucial parcels to add to the Forest Preserve in the Adirondack and Catskill parks, as well as other smaller but equally critical parcels across the state. Toward that end, we have supported the state open space conservation plan and the process to revise this plan regularly. While we will continue to press for additional state land acquisitions as the opportunities arise and where the situation warrants, our forest program efforts have broaden substantially in scope.

More recently, we have supported efforts to purchase conservation easements to protect working forests in the Adirondacks and Tug Hill. This option helps to prevent development of forests and permanent conversion to non-forest uses (e.g., building residences or for commercial uses), which are the most significant threats to forests in the state. Also, however, active forest management helps provide forests with different structural characteristics that support different groups of birds.

Audubon New York has been active in reviewing state management of the public forest lands -- the Forest Preserve in the Adirondack and Catskill parks and the State Forest units scattered across the state from the Catskills and Hudson Valley to Tug Hill and across the Southern Tier and Finger Lakes counties. We have commented on the unit management plans as they have been prepared, with special emphasis on those that include all or parts of Important Bird Areas.

Audubon New York has also taken a leadership role in the broader Northern Forest, 26 million acres of northern hardwoods and coniferous forest extending from Tug Hill in the west to Down-East Maine in the east and to and beyond the U.S.-Canadian border. Audubon New York, with the Northern Forest Alliance and Northern Forest Center, has promoted a three-pronged approach: conserving wilderness core areas; encouraging sustainable forest management on the extensive buffer or working forests which cover much of the region; and revitalizing rural hamlets as the economic and social hubs across the four states.

Furthermore, Audubon New York has provided active leadership in the National Sustainable Forest Roundtable as a member of the steering committee or Core group and co-chairs the communications and outreach efforts that will promote the use of internationally agreed to indicators -- social, economic and environmental – for sustainable forests. The second report on the results of these indicators is due for publication in draft form in 2008 and completed with public comment in 2010.

Although more than one fifth of the state is protected in two big state parks, the Adirondack and Catskill Parks, most of this forested landscape, some 14 million acres, is in the hands of almost half a million private and industrial forest owners. In 1999, Audubon New York launched a program to address the private forests of the state, it’s Forest Biodiversity Stewardship Program. The goals of this program are to disseminate science-based information to private forest owners about how forest management impacts birds and other wildlife and to promote sustainable forest management as a viable land use in forested regions of the state. The program began with three years of research and then transitioned into an outreach phase consisting mostly of workshops for private forest owners and forest managers. At these workshops, participants were educated about the ways in which logging affects non-game wildlife and encouraged to work with a professional trained in sustainable forestry if they chose to manage their forests.

The results of our research showed how different logging practices result in stands with different structural characteristics (e.g. overstory cover, midstory cover, and course woody debris), which in turn affect the faunal communities found there. Many species of conservation concern are affected by forest management, with different management levels benefiting different species. For example, forest management practices that result in post-harvest northern hardwood forest conditions resembling more mature forests are associated with significantly higher densities of breeding Black-throated Green and Blackburnian Warblers compared forests that are managed more intensively. Similarly, Chestnut-sided Warblers benefit from intensive forest management, such as clearcutting.

Audubon New York is working to promote ecologically sustainable forest management and timber practices to protect forest landscapes, promote better planning to prevent forest fragmentation, and provide habitat for the full diversity of forest wildlife in New York State. From the Adirondacks to the Pine Barrens and the Allegheny Plateau to the Catskills, New York is endowed with rich and robust forest ecosystems. It is up to both public and private forest owners to see that they remain that way.

Major areas of our forest campaign include:

• Identifying those forest tracts that are particularly important to birds through our Important Bird Areas Program;
• Working collaboratively with Audubon programs in Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine to address conservation of intact forests in the Northern Forest Region;
• Securing Open Space funding for forest habitats in New York;
• Conducting research regarding the effects of logging on birds and other wildlife (86 kb PDF);
• Educating the public, private forest owners, and forest managers about how logging affects birds via our landowners’ guide; and
• Promoting ecologically sustainable forest management.