Maine is set to receive about $15 million to conserve woodlands and encourage climate friendly forestry, including money to preserve old growth forest in the north woods.
Grants from the U.S. Forest Service include funding for the state's department of agriculture conservation and forestry to help management on private woodlands.
A $5 million package will incentivize about 400 landowners to adopt forest stewardship practices with an aim at storing increasing amounts of climate-warming carbon dioxide. Maine's forests are a huge carbon sink, and offset the vast majority of the state's greenhouse gas pollution.
Climate-smart forestry can be cost-prohibitive especially in currently tough market conditions, according to the grant announcement.
Another $4 million grant will help fund removing invasive species, improve woodlot growth and regrowing forests across private, non-industrial forests, according to the announcement.
The Penobscot Nation will get $1.7 million to train professionals and build the tribe's capacity to engage in carbon markets that polluters use to offset their own greenhouse gas emissions.
Meanwhile, the New England Forestry Foundation received $4.3 million to pay timberland owners in the state's unorganized townships to defer harvesting trees that are at least 150 years old.
Scarce late successional and old growth forests are important carbon banks and add unique biodiversity.
However, after generations of timber harvesting, less than 4% of the forest across 10 million acres in the unorganized townships are considered in old conditions, according to recent research.
Guided by a digital mapping project from nonprofit Our Climate Common, the foundation can specifically target surviving stands and negotiate with landowners to hold off cutting them down, said foundation’s senior forester Brian Milakovsky.
"We’re laser focusing on these exceptionally carbon rich and rich for biodiversity forests," he said.
The foundation hopes that landowners might consider payments to leave those woods undisturbed. Holding off for 10 years could give conservation groups a chance to permanently preserve some rare forests, according to Milakovsky.
It could also give landowners time to determine if they could get the same or better profits by putting forests in carbon storage markets instead of cutting them for timber, Milakovsky added.
"For the forests that we’ll enroll in this program we see this as a bridge to a long-term solution," he said.
The federal funding is enough to experiment with the concept, but Milakovsky thinks it can impact thousands of acres.
