Early Adopters of Adaptation Planting and Assisted Migration in the Northeast: Perspectives and Applications

Natural resource managers are tasked with stewarding ecosystems in the context of the complex challenges posed by global climate change. Given their key role, it is important to understand how or why management decisions are made and to understand the barriers and opportunities for management. Among various tactics used by foresters, tree planting—also known as adaptation planting—has increasingly been proposed as a tool to address the challenges of global change. Historically, foresters in the Northeast have rarely relied on tree planting because, unlike other regions in North America, northeastern forests have a propensity to naturally regenerate. Yet, adaptation planting has been proposed to restore culturally and ecologically important keystone species or ecosystems, diversify composition to promote resilience, mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, and adapt forests to a warming climate via assisted migration.  

Partially due to the novelty of this practice, information regarding the extent to which foresters in the Northeast are engaged with adaptation planting is lacking. To better understand the context surrounding adaptation planting, a team of researchers led by NE CASC investigators Peter Clark and Anthony D’Amato surveyed managers in the region to assess perspectives, applications, and barriers intertwined with it. The team specifically focused on a population of “early adopters” with regards to adaptation planting because, as has been demonstrated in other fields, early adopter perspectives can serve as an important litmus test both for gauging how subsequent users will respond to the practice and for understanding how the practice itself can be refined. Results of this study have recently been published in Frontiers in Forests and Global Change. 

Findings from this work illustrate that motivations for adaptation plantings are varied, although early adopters are generally seeking to achieve adaptability to future conditions in the trees they plant. Furthermore, respondents show a growing interest in and use of adaptation planting, most notably in the deployment of forested assisted migration among a suite of species. Many respondents attribute these trends to increased awareness, acceptance, and interest in the practice.  

Despite this momentum, however, respondents also report many key barriers to implementing adaptation planting. These include biotic and abiotic information and material (such as vegetative competition and lack of seedling availability in nurseries), existing policy, and social and economic factors (such as funding). Taken together, this work points to a growing enthusiasm for and application of adaptation planting among early adopters in the region, a context that may facilitate the refinement of this practice—assuming that it becomes more widely used among natural resource managers.