Forest Stewards Guild

Watching Out for the Little Ones: Conserving Southern Salamanders Within Working Forests
2021-06-02 13:00 - 14:00 (America/Halifax)
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After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.
June 2, 2021
1:00 – 2:00 pm ET
Agenda for download
Pre-approved for 1 SAF Category 1 CFE credit.
This webinar aims to educate landowners, loggers, foresters, and other natural resource professionals about the conservation value of endemic salamanders, threats to them, and opportunities to promote management practices that positively contribute to amphibian habitat in general (e.g. leaving scattered down woody debris -not piles, limiting large canopy gaps, and following state BMPs). Two endemic species that will be discussed are the patch-nosed and Cheoah bald salamander.
Our speakers include Dr. Todd Pierson of Kennesaw State University as well as Dr. Daniel Greene and Dr. Jessica Homyack of Weyerhaeuser Company. Stay tuned for more details! Our agenda includes two 25-minute presentations with time for questions at the end.

Non-Timber Forest Products Workshop in Sandy Mush, NC
2021-06-05 09:30 - 13:30 (America/Halifax)
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View the Sandy Mush Collaborative Forest Stewardship website
Saturday, June 5, 2021
9:30 a.m. – 1:30 p.m. ET
Sandy Mush Community Center, 19 School Road Leicester, NC, 28748
Join us for a day of hands-on learning from local experts in non-timber forest product (NTFP) cultivation. We will learn about what NTFPs are, their general history, ecology, and economics and have conversations about the role we all play in their stewardship.
Safety and Covid-19: This event will follow all CDC recommendations. The indoor presentations will be held in the gymnasium where participants will be seated at appropriate distances and asked to wear masks. The hands-on small group sessions will be outdoors. Remember, we are all in this together to keep our communities safe!

Fire Breaks: Fire Suppression, the "Light-Burning" Controversy, and the Return of Indigenous Flames (webinar)
2021-06-10 13:00 - 14:00 (America/New_York)
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Thursday, June 10, 2021
1:00 – 2:00 p.m. ET
Historian Char Miller’s talk “Fire Breaks” probes the varied forces advocating the suppression of wildfire in the United States, with a focus on California’s 250-year-long experience with this controversial effort to snuff out blazes, both wild and managed. Using primary sources dating back to the Spanish settler-colonial initiatives to tamp down the Indigenous Nations’ longstanding use of fire to manage their lands, Miller’s talk will also draw on subsequent and controversial efforts by California and the U.S. Forest Service to eradicate fire from the state’s public lands. This so-called “light burning” controversy erupted in the first decades of the twentieth century and has had profound implications for Indigenous communities for whom fire was, and remains, an essential tool. It has also had a clear impact on the diverse ecosystems that fire had helped nurture and for the land-management agencies at the state and federal level. The talk concludes with a discussion of the slow return of indigenous flames to forests, woodlands, and grasslands.
Once feared, fire has been embraced, even if only partially, as a vital force in contemporary forest management. Of late, a reckoning has compelled agencies and communities to acknowledge historic and contemporary harms pressed upon Indigenous peoples and to develop social policies that amplify Indigenous knowledge in a way that hitherto settler-colonial society has failed to do.
Char Miller is the W. M. Keck Professor of Environmental Analysis and History at Pomona College. He is author most recently of Hetch Hetchy: A History in Documents and America’s Great National Forests, Wildernesses, and Grasslands, as well as coeditor of Theodore Roosevelt: Naturalist in the Arena. Forthcoming in August 2021 is West Side Rising: How San Antonio’s 1921 Flood Devastated a City and Sparked a Latino Environmental Justice Movement, a portion of which is previewed in “Reclamation Project: Rediscovering W. W. Ashe and the Origins of Watershed Stewardship,” Forest History Today, Spring/Fall 2020.
Funding for this lecture is provided by the Forest History Society’s Lynn W. Day Endowment.

Bat Responses to Silvicultural Treatments (webinar)
2021-06-29 13:00 - 14:00 (America/New_York)
Register (you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting)
June 29, 2021
1:00 – 2:00 pm ET
Approval pending for 1, Category 1 CFE from SAF.
Agenda includes one 45-minute presentation with time for questions at the end.
Researchers have been studying bat responses to silvicultural treatments since the mid-1980s, but research on the effects of silviculture on bats has increased greatly over the past decade. This webinar will present a synthesis of this research which includes the effects of regeneration harvests, thinning, gap formation, plantation forestry, and prescribed fire on bats. Dr. Loeb will also present the results of a recent review which compares the effects of prescribed fire and wildfire on bats. The talk will conclude with a discussion of the major gaps in our knowledge and where our research efforts need to be concentrated in the future.
