Natural forests are beautiful, valuable, and critical for the health and resilience of our landscapes and our communities. Well-managed forests create value of many kinds: conservation value, financial value, and social value. Over the long term and across the landscape—at forest-relevant scales of time and geography—all of these values are best served by managing for three things: diversity, complexity, and longevity.
Diversity and Complexity
Diversity and complexity are essential for maintaining ecological integrity. They create habitats for a wide range of wildlife, allow forests to store large amounts of carbon, and strengthen resilience against disturbance. They also enrich communities by making forests more inviting for exploration, hiking, and recreation. And they drive financial returns in subtle but powerful ways.
Conventional, uniform management treats every acre the same, simplifying forests and compromising value growth. In contrast, an acre-by-acre—or even tree-by-tree—approach makes the most of each unique site, fostering structural complexity while maximizing yields. In diverse, mixed-species forests, different trees occupy different niches, using resources more efficiently than monocultures where competition is direct and uniform. Diversity allows more trees to thrive together.
Longevity
Longevity is equally crucial. Timber markets reward quality and size disproportionately: as trees cross key thresholds, they leap to higher grades and can command prices many times greater than lower-grade logs. For hardwoods like maple, cherry, oak, and birch, top-grade logs can be worth a hundred times more than the lowest grades. Achieving those premiums requires attentive management, patient landowners, and healthy, long-lived forests.
Embracing Complexity
Forest management is inherently complex. It demands a nuanced understanding of ecology and growth dynamics, an awareness of landowner goals and constraints, knowledge of financial parameters like risk and cost of capital, and sensitivity to the cultural and economic context of each property. At Pekin Branch Forestry, we embrace that complexity because excellent forestry requires nothing less.