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SFI Project Volunteers Build Two Playhouses for 2017 Make-A-Wish Foundation Recipients

The Maine forest industry’s Sustainable Forestry Initiative has helped out on a lot of community projects over the past decade or so. They’ve provided materials to build Habitat for Humanity homes, provided materials for buildings at Pine Tree Camp for people with disabilities, built fish-friendly ice shacks to raise money to improve fish passage on…

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Students and Others Prepare for the Next Spruce Budworm Outbreak

By Joe RankinForests for Maine’s Future Writer It’s not every educator who sees a teaching opportunity in a forest-munching nondescript brownish-gray moth. But Susan Linscott does. And not just an opportunity to inform her students, but her community as well about the spruce budworm, a cyclical pest of spruce and fir trees that is now…

Forestry for the birds
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Forestry for the birds

By JOE RANKIN, Forests for Maine’s Future Writer In 1962 Rachel Carson’s classic enviro-expose Silent Spring was published, laying out how indiscriminate pesticide use was decimating nature, particularly bird populations. The book helped shape the environmental movement and led to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and some of the United States’ most enduring…

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The white pine, enduring symbol of the Maine woods

By JOE RANKIN Forests for Maine’s Future Writer What’s not to like about the eastern white pine? A majestic tree. Long-lived. Producer of clear, easily-worked, durable lumber that takes stain well, glues up nicely, is moderately priced, readily available. And, it is one of those trees that responds predictably and readily to a handful of…

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Aliens in the Maine woods

Terrestrial invasive plants can wreak havoc with forests By Joe Rankin Forests for Maine’s Future writer Licensed forester Jeff Williams does the usual things foresters do:  writes management plans, runs boundary lines, oversees harvests, lays out logging roads, marks trees. But more and more these days he’s having to deal with invasive forest plants. Pulling…

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The Long View: Three studies of the Maine forest

By Joe Rankin Forests for Maine’s Future writer In a spruce-fir forest north of Bangor tall towers rise above the treetops, studded with instruments measuring everything from wind to carbon dioxide and methane. Another forest to the southeast gets regular doses of fertilizer while a patch nearby does not. In another chunk of forest on…

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University Forests: Research, education and income

By Joe Rankin Forests for Maine’s Future writer With not quite 14,000 acres, the University Forests aren’t in the big leagues of Maine forestland owners. No Irving Woodlands or Plum Creek Timber Co, certainly. But with dozens of parcels scattered the length and breadth of Maine, it’s not exactly small time either.  Some of the…