Forest Stewards Guild

Changing climate may drive large shifts in vegetation zones of Oregon
2026-01-13 15:00 - 16:00 (America/New_York)
Register
January 13, 2026
3:00 – 4:00 p.m. Eastern Time
Please join a webinar presented by Dr. Yegorova on large changes possible for Oregon’s future forests. Dr. Yegorova and the research team used climate analog-based impact models and a co-production process with land managers to project future vegetation changes for Oregon (2041–2070, RCP 8.5) at a management-relevant spatial resolution (270-m). They found that analog-based models performed well at reproducing landscape-level vegetation composition, and moderately well at reproducing vegetation at the pixel level. Their results suggest that 64% of the study area will experience future climate conditions that support different potential natural vegetation types and 59% will experience climates corresponding with different potential plant physiognomic types, compared to reference-period conditions. The research team projects a 60% reduction of mesic conifer-dominated forests with transitions to mixed evergreen forest types. They also project losses to dry forests, cold forests and parklands, with commensurate expansions of shrublands, grasslands, and geographic redistribution of dry forest types.
The webinar will also provide guidance for using future vegetation projections and uncertainty outputs in management decisions using the Resist-Accept-Direct (RAD) adaptation framework. Read the paper at: https://doi.org/10.3389/ffgc.2025.1637821

BF 235: Silvopasture course
2026-01-14 18:30 - 2026-02-18 20:00
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Wednesdays, from from January 14 – February 18
6:30 – 8:00 p.m. Eastern Time
Full event details
Join Guild member Eli Roberts to learn to Integrate Trees, Livestock, and Forage for Multiple Wins on Your Farm.
There are many ways of combining trees, forage, and animals in useful, efficient, practical, and profitable arrangements. But none of these outcomes is guaranteed, and there are a lot of decisions required! When you take this course, you’ll be able to describe, plan for, and evaluate particular silvopasture practices and understand their place in the broader categories of Silvopasture and Agroforestry. You’ll also understand the potential pitfalls that differentiate good silvopasture from poor land management. You’ll leave with the tools to create silvopasture plans for your farm, and to engage with the topic of silvopasture as a practitioner and experimenter.
Course Objectives
By the end of this course, you will be able to:

Plan a silvopasture project of your own, and understand how your plan relates to other silvopastures, and how it fits into the larger category of practices that involve trees on farms.
Articulate goals, clarify functions, plan layout and species, and choose implementation methods.
Understand the guardrails of silvopasture practice, and have the tools to avoid unmanaged forest grazing.
Have the tools to evaluate and make the decisions that will get you to a functional silvopasture.

This course is hosted by the Cornell Small Farms Program.

Guardians and gardeners: Managing wilderness for the twenty-first century
2026-01-22 14:00 - 15:00
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January 22, 2026
2:00 – 3:00 p.m. Eastern Time
Please join us for a presentation and discussion on wilderness in the 21st century. The 1964 Wilderness Act provides robust protections to landscapes designated as federal wilderness. The National Wilderness Preservation System, which includes 806 wilderness areas and 111 million acres, represents the world’s largest highly protected conservation network. However, a long-standing ethos of nonmanagement—exemplified by the philosophy that managers should be guardians but not gardeners—obscures long legacies of Indigenous stewardship and may not sustain essential wilderness values in a time of unprecedented ecological stressors. Many wildernesses are increasingly subject to complex and compounding unintentional (as well as intentional) human influences.
In this webinar, Dr. Boerigter will present how a guardians and gardeners approach would acknowledge Indigenous influence, recognize contemporary and future environmental challenges, and provide managers the necessary rationale to respond to these complex realities. In the twenty-first century, it may be necessary to carefully, thoughtfully, and compassionately reimagine the dominant wilderness philosophy. Read the full paper: https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biaf141
