The late autumn and winter wet season in the Pacific Northwest is an ideal time to plant young trees and native shrubs! Planting native trees and shrubs enhances forest biodiversity by providing habitat for wildlife and forage for pollinators. Find a native plant sale near you for a diverse array of seedlings and shrubs suited to your region. Make sure you pre-order as soon as possible to get the plants you want!
FSC®-Certified Wood Products Database Launched!
Even as the area of Forest Stewardship Council®-certified forestland in Washington and Oregon has grown, it hasn’t become any easier to find certified building materials in the Pacific Northwest. That difficulty was undermining one of certification’s main goals: to enable wood buyers to send a market signal to forest owners and foresters that says, “We […]
Member Spotlight: Smelling the Forest for the Trees
Brothers Jim and Ed Merzenich, along with Jim’s wife, Karen Wilson, steward Oak Basin Tree Farm: nearly 1,000 acres in the Coburg Hills outside of Brownsville, Oregon at the south end of the Willamette Valley. Oak Basin Tree Farm is Forest Stewardship Council® certified through NNRG’s group certificate.
Snapshots from Stossel Creek Reforestation Project
NNRG is working with Mountains to Sound Greenway Trust and Seattle City Light to return these 150 acres of previously logged land to healthy forest using climate-adapted practices.
Forestry Tips for Autumn
Each season presents the best time to conduct different stewardship activities. Timing your forest management for the ideal season will help you achieve success and avoid setbacks. This page provides tips to help you make the most of autumn out in your woods.
Resources for Funding Forest Stewardship
Many public agencies offer funding to help forest owners pay for stewardship activities and realize their woodland goals. Whether you envision a habitat-rich stand bursting with forage shrubs and large snags; a business plan for timber harvest on your land; or an aesthetic retreat replete with meandering trails, there’s funding available to help you get there.
Workshop: Energy Opportunities for Woody Biomass
Wildfire risk across San Juan County is at an all-time high – largely due to increasingly overstocked forests. Thinning excess woody biomass from densely stocked forests can reduce wildfire risk while presenting an opportunity for local, sustainable energy production.
Where Certified Logs Come From … and Where They Are Sold
Across Oregon and Washington, more than 600,000 acres of forestland are certified as “well managed” by the standards of the Forest Stewardship Council® (FSC®). And yet, much of the wood harvested from these forests doesn’t make it to the consumer with its certification intact. In many cases, these logs are sold into the generic wood […]
Great Peninsula Conservancy
Great Peninsula Conservancy (GPC) just completed the Forest Stewardship Council® (FSC®) certification process for Grovers Creek Preserve! Acquired by the Conservancy in 2015, the 197-acre preserve near Poulsbo boasts 60 acres of rare older growth forest including stands of western hemlock, Sitka spruce, western redcedar, and Douglas-fir. There are even 11.5 acres of late successional […]
Using the SuperACE Tool for the Skokomish Tribe
Much of NNRG’s effort this spring has focused on our work for the Skokomish Tribe on the Tribe’s forestland located at the south end of Hood Canal. To help the Tribe achieve its management goals, we’ve completed a timber appraisal and are planning the first commercial thinning on tribal lands in a couple decades. NNRG is applying […]
Cedar Row Farm
Eve Lonnquist can often be found working in the woods, just like her grandmother, who bought Cedar Row Farm in 1919 for $2000 and planted its namesake row of cedars. Nestled in the Nehalem River foothills, the 160-acre forest is stewarded by Eve, her two brothers and her partner Lynn Baker. The family enjoys taking […]
Learning Inventory Skills
We had a great time out in the woods last month sharing inventory techniques with forest owners on Lopez Island! Check out some more photos from the event.
Central Cascades Forest
The 46,000 acres of forestland spanning Snoqualmie Pass to Cle Elum known as the Central Cascades Forest (CCF) is now Forest Stewardship Council®-certified, through NNRG’s group certificate. It’s the Northwest’s largest jump in certified forestland since the City of Seattle’s Cedar River watershed earned FSC certification in 2011. The CCF is managed by The Nature Conservancy […]
Our New Strategic Plan
Three years, five targets, and seventeen measures of success: we invite you to read our Strategic Plan for 2018-2020, released this spring.
Top 5 Reasons to support NNRG:
Our dedicated, knowledgeable staff. If you own a small- to medium-sized forest and want to manage your land for more than just the almighty dollar, it helps to have someone in your corner with the wisdom and experience to help achieve your ecological, economic, aesthetic, and even spiritual goals for the forest. That’s the staff of […]
Oregon Native Bee Atlas
Bees need our help. Just five years ago Oregon saw a major bee die off, and pollinator populations continue to decline around the world. “We have more species of bees in the Pacific Northwest than all the states in east of the Mississippi,” says Andony Melathopoulos, a pollinator ecotoxicologist with OSU. “We really want to protect […]
How to Manufacture Biochar from Woody Biomass
Converting excess woody biomass to a valuable soil amendment Saturday, June 30, 2018 | San Juan Island Biochar, a soil amendment made from woody biomass like branches and small-diameter trees, presents an opportunity for landowners to convert forest thinnings to a high-value product. Removing excess biomass from dense, crowded San Juan forests is an important […]
FSC-Certified Northwest Forests
NNRG’s group certificate for forests meeting the Forest Stewardship Council® standards covers more than 190,000 acres in 86 different ownerships across Oregon and Washington. The forests certified by NNRG are depicted as dark blue circles in the map above. In addition, another 420,000 acres in the two states are certified under other auspices, including the South […]
Not Your Father’s Lumberjacks
Remember the Super-Axe-Hacker from The Lorax? The machine that could whack off four truffula trees with one smacker? Advances in logging technology have made this fantasy contraption a reality, with equipment like feller-bunchers, forwarders, skidders, and processors changing how we harvest. These machines can make ecological forestry better, efficiently and safely removing some trees while leaving others […]
Measuring Timber and Woody Biomass in San Juan Forests
Techniques to estimate the volume of timber and woody biomass in your forest Saturday, April 28, 2018 10:30am-5pm Lopez Island Understanding which trees and how many to remove from your forest is critical to a successful thinning project. This workshop will introduce participants to strategies for installing forest inventory plots and collecting the right data to calculate timber […]