The U.S. government’s tally of mature and old-growth forests has drawn a divided response.
Last spring, President Joe Biden surprised forest scientists when he ordered the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management to inventory their holdings of mature and old-growth forests by Earth Day 2023. The order triggered a scramble for the United States to, for the first time, formally define what constitutes “mature” and “old-growth” forests and to apply those definitions across millions of hectares of land.
But Greg Aplet, a senior forest scientist with the Wilderness Society, says “the methods [the agencies] used are not transparent.” In January, Aplet co-authored a paper finding. The new federal report classified as mature many forests that most researchers would consider young, Aplet says, a result that “strains credulity.”
Federal scientists had never previously attempted to define “mature forests.” The team settled on a definition that included forests exceeding a set threshold of the structural characteristics that are associated with old-growth forests. The goal was to identify “a stage of development prior to old growth,” saysUnder their definitions, mature and old-growth forests collectively cover some 46 million hectares of USFS and BLM land, an area larger than California, the team found.
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