ASHLAND – Officials from the Ohio Division of Forestry and Division of Wildlife braved cold, damp weather Wednesday to give a tour highlighting the effects they believe their new management plan for Mohican-Memorial State Forest can make to improve the health of the forest.
The plan, unveiled in August, modifies a strategy that was hammered out in the 1990s through an ad-hoc committee. Chad Sanders, forestry manager at Mohican, said the new plan is intended to bring a more natural balance to Mohican.
“Managing our forests is not an arbitrary thing,” Sanders said. “It’s guided by goals and objectives of the entire forests of the State of Ohio.”
According to Sanders, the 4,500-acre Mohican forest is made up of 40 percent pine plantations, 36 percent maples and beeches and 24 percent oaks and hickories.
An analysis completed by the United States Department of Agriculture completed between 2011 and 2016 found that pine plantations account for just 2 percent of other forests in Ohio, while oak and hickory account for 63 percent and maple and birch make up 20 percent of Ohio’s other forests.
“The composition here is a lot different than the rest of Ohio,” Sanders said. “About half of this forest used to be farm fields.”
Originally, the land that now makes up Mohican was a native Ohio hardwood forest. Sometime around the turn of the century, the trees were removed to create farmland. The land continued to serve as farmland until erosion became an issue. The more than 1,800 acres of white pine were planted by the ODNR beginning during the Depression to prevent soil erosion from the marginal and degraded farm land. At the time, the hope was that these plantations would conserve the soil long enough for a future native hardwood forest that would be created through the management and eventual removal of the pine trees.
Managed pine tree plantations create understory vegetation of hardwood trees and shrubs. However, the unmanaged pine plantations are dense with little or no sunlight reaching the forest floor. This has created an understory devoid of plants or animals.
The first stop on Wednesday’s tour was in a section of Mohican’s white pine plantations in the northern part of the forest that was planted in 1960 and has only been thinned once. Sanders said that stretch of land illustrated this point, with little vegetation and few wildlife species.
“What can we do to make this forest better?” Sanders asked, before again pointing out the imbalance in Mohican’s tree composition.
“By reducing that a little bit, those acres will fold into the other forest. There is an Ohio hardwood native forest around these pine plantations and allowing that to take back over some of these sites we think would be a net benefit,” Sanders said. “Over time, decades, this hardwood forest is here. It just needs to grow and it will take over this site.”
Sanders said the new plan calls for small-scale, periodic thinning, not large clear cuts.
“It’s a pretty small-scale approach, I think,” Sanders said. “Just thin. No clear-cutting … When you come back after this is done, it’s still a pine forest here. It’s just a little more opened up and stuff starts to grow.”
“It’s a balancing act,” he said. “On one side of the equation we have supporters that say we should do more. On the other side we have people who say you shouldn’t do anything. So we’re kind of in the middle there.”
Bob Boyles, chief of the ODN, said the new plan calls for this thinning to be done on 20 to 40 acres of land and would only include select trees, specifically the smaller trees.
“We’re going to try to leave, larger, healthy trees that will survive,” Sanders said.
The Mohican manager said the complaint that the State is just making the changes to the plan for financial reasons, but he said that argument doesn’t hold water.
“Two-thirds of the money goes back to the local community. It goes to the county, to the township and to the schools where the work is done. So there’s not a lot of financial incentive for the division to clear these trees,” Sanders said.
The second stop on the tour was in a plot of land just to the west called the Discovery Forest. Sanders said the pines at that location have been thinned twice. Sanders pointed out how the trees were responding to the increased sunlight allowed by thinning the pine trees.
In advance of the tour, Sanders marked off a one-fiftieth acre plot of land and placed blue ribbons on each of the 60 hardwood trees that had grown within that area.
“There are 13 different species here, not just junk, brush and weeds,” Sanders said.
The final stop was an area just north of Ohio 97 where the pines had been thinned three times, in 1964, 1970 and 1992.
“I like to take people here because this is just the next stage in the whole process,” Sanders said.
He explained that what they look at to see progress is not the pine trees, but the hardwood response underneath.
“Some of them (hardwoods) are 40 or 50 feet tall. They’ve started to thin themselves. They’re expressing their dominance. The bigger ones are growing and taking off. This is a real success story,” Sanders said.
Jeff Harrick, a wildlife biologist with the Lower Great Lakes Young Forest Initiative for Wildlife, believes the plan to thin the white pines will help create new opportunities for a variety of wildlife because a new, young forest will grow up in place of the pines.
“You’re missing a lot of wildlife opportunities here because the habitat isn’t here anymore,” Harrick said. “The public is being cheated out of an opportunity to see 50 other species that they can’t find here. If there was some development, through opening up the forest floor to sunlight, within two to three years you would see young forest species occupying this area.”
The biologist said it takes a lot of work to maintain a healthy forest because the habitat is constantly changing.
“The whole idea is to have a balance and to have a mosaic of different-aged forest classes that are constantly changing,” Harrick said. “That’s the ultimate value for wildlife habitat because you’ve got a buffet; you’ve got every food source out there and it’s all intertwined.”
The plan, known as the Restoring Hardwoods Initiative, was released in August and has prompted opponents to speak out against the proposed changes. More than 100 people attended an open house at the Mohican Lodge and Conference Center in August to hear officials explain the new plan. In the months since, opponents have held a forum in Mansfield and led tours in the forest to show what previous logging has done to Mohican.
Another forum is scheduled for Thursday from 6 to 7:30 p.m. at the Loudonville Public Library. The forum, planned and sponsored by the North Central Ohio Land Conservancy, will feature three panelists: Annette McCormick, Mohican Ad-Hoc Council member; Eric Miller, NCO Land Conservancy trustee, and andi Pokladnik, Ph.D. in environmental studies. The forum is free and open to the public.
