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As a cadre of Maine foresters and ecologists shuffled down the sun-baked roads of Surry Forest on Wednesday they were faced with the same sweltering heat they are trying to prepare Maine’s coastal forests for in the face of climate change.
Like much of Maine’s coast, this 2,100-acre tract of land likely hosted shady, lichen-covered stands of red spruce forests before it was heavily harvested and succeeded by sun-tolerant species like oak and aspen.
But since the tract was purchased by the Blue Hill Heritage Trust in 2017, ecologists with the University of Maine have been working with the Blue Hill group, state foresters and others to try and restore red spruce to Surry Forest. The effort is part of a regional research project studying how best to manage coastal spruce forests under intensifying heat and drought.
“A lot of the places that had red spruce along the coast of Maine don’t have it anymore for a variety of land use and management reasons,” Jay Wason, the UMaine professor spearheading the project, said during Wednesday’s workshop. “We want to better understand where red spruce is along the coast of Maine and what its current condition is.”
The breadth of challenges that climate change and land use pose to red spruce are laid bare in a forest management guide by Rose Gellman, a UMaine master of forestry student, that was published as part of the project.
The coastal spruce forests where Wabanaki people have lived for millennia shifted from seeing low-intensity fire and cultivation to heavy harvesting with the arrival of European settlers, Gellman writes. Since then, most Maine forests have been cut at least twice over.
Despite a transition to more precise harvesting techniques in recent years, coastal spruce forests have not recovered, and climate change models show their habitat range will shrink significantly by 2060.
These downward trends haven’t robbed Gellman and other spruce proponents of hope, however. The guide and accompanying research serve as resources for foresters like John Harriman of Blue Hill Heritage Trust to consult as they push restoration efforts forward.
In Surry Forest, Harriman has been experimenting with a management technique to open up the forest and plant sun-tolerant species of oak to leverage their broad leaves and create layered, shady habitat that spruce thrive in.
The initiative has been set back by deer and caterpillars that have nipped away the oak leaves, yet Harriman and forester Nicole Rogers with the Maine Forest Service say it has been helpful in determining what works for spruce restoration and how to strengthen Maine forests more broadly.
“I might want this to be a full blown red spruce forest, and that just may not happen in my lifetime anyway,” Rogers said. “If we as a community … can communicate with each other about what worked and what didn’t work, that would be huge.”
Rogers added that preparing Maine for climate change means looking to species beyond red spruce to build forest resilience to heat, storms and other threats.
Elsewhere in Surry Forest, Kathy Pollard is practicing that ethos by planting white oak, black walnut and other fruit-bearing trees that have historic ranges in lower Maine and further south as part of her ecology work with Know Your Land Consulting.
Pollard, who is of mixed European and Cherokee descent, leads the organization with her daughter Ann Pollard-Ranco, a Penobscot Nation citizen, to bring Indigenous sustainability practices to the Blue Hill Peninsula and cultivate trees for food production.
“With climate warming, a lot of those trees are … going to be marching northward,” Pollard said, while other Maine trees like beech that feed wildlife are under threat. “So if you put out American chestnut and black walnut in some places where [beech] thrive, those will be producing food and kind of substituting … what’s being lost.”
The workshop ended a few miles away at Penny’s Preserve, under the cool canopy of a red spruce stand. A smattering of light green mosses and lichens covered the forest floor, illuminated by soft beams of sunlight filtering through dense spruce branches.
The stand is emblematic of the broader aims of the Coastal Spruce Project. It’s among several that UMaine Ph.D. student Colby Bosley-Smith is plotting, measuring and monitoring along Maine’s coast.
She and Wason, the project coordinator, said this vibrant, century-old stand and others that Bosley-Smith has identified can inform foresters about the conditions where spruce flourish and how spruce respond to ongoing challenges posed by climate change.
“’I’m hoping that this is the start of a lot more renewed research and interest in better managing and conserving these forests,” Wason said.
