A forest is less a collection of trees than a single, slow-moving system — one that stores water, steadies soil, and buffers everything from flooding to heat. Here's what we pay closest attention to.
The stands we return to most are temperate mixed forest — oak, beech, birch and pine sharing the same slope. These systems are resilient by design: when one species struggles in a dry year, another picks up the slack in canopy cover.
What we track here is composition drift — which species are regenerating in the understory, and whether that matches what's currently in the canopy. A mismatch today is a very different forest in forty years.
Further north, the forests we log are thinner, slower-growing, and far less forgiving of disturbance. A boreal stand that burns or is cleared can take a century to return to something resembling its former structure.
These are also the forests most visibly responding to warmer, drier summers — insect outbreaks arriving earlier, fire seasons stretching longer at both ends.
One of the more counterintuitive things we've had to unlearn: a "tidy" forest floor, cleared of fallen and standing dead wood, is usually a forest in worse ecological health, not better.
It's one of the easiest things to explain to a landowner and one of the hardest habits to actually change — the instinct to "clean up" a woodlot runs deep.
The healthiest stand we survey this year has more dead wood on the ground than any other site on our list.