The landscapes of North America, including eastern forests, have been shaped by humans for millennia, through fire, agriculture, hunting, and other means. But the arrival of Europeans on America’s eastern shores several centuries ago ushered in the rapid conversion of forests and woodlands to other land uses. By the twentieth century, it appeared that old-growth forests in the eastern United States were gone, replaced by cities, farms, transportation networks, and second-growth forests. Since that time, however, numerous remnants of eastern old growth have been discovered, meticulously mapped, and studied. Many of these ancient stands retain surprisingly robust complexity and vigor, and forest ecologists are eager to develop strategies for their restoration and for nurturing additional stands of old growth that will foster biological diversity, reduce impacts of climate change, and serve as benchmarks for how natural systems operate. Forest ecologists William Keeton and Andrew Barton bring together a volume that breaks new ground in our understanding of ecological systems and their importance for forest resilience in an age of rapid environmental change. This edited volume covers a broad geographic canvas, from eastern Canada and the Upper Great Lakes states to the deep South. It looks at a wide diversity of ecosystems, including spruce-fir, northern deciduous, southern Appalachian deciduous, southern swamp hardwoods, and longleaf pine. Chapters authored by leading old-growth experts examine topics of contemporary forest ecology including forest structure and dynamics, below-ground soil processes, biological diversity, differences between historical and modern forests, carbon and climate change mitigation, management of old growth, and more. This thoughtful treatise broadly communicates important new discoveries to scientists, land managers, and students and breathes fresh life into the hope for sensible, effective management of old-growth stands in eastern forests.

The third edition of The Ecology and Silviculture of Oaks is an updated and expanded edition that explores oak forests as responsive ecosystems. New chapters emphasize the importance of fire in sustaining and managing oak forests, the effects of a changing climate, and advanced artificial regeneration techniques. This new edition expands on silvicultural methods for restoring and sustaining oak woodlands and savannahs, and on management of ecosystem services, including wildlife habitat. It also incorporates new material on evaluating landscape-scale, and cumulative effects of management action compared with inaction. Nine of the fifteen chapters cover updated information on the geographic distribution of US oaks, oak regeneration dynamics, site productivity, stocking and stand development, even- and uneven-aged silvicultural methods, and growth and yield. This edition includes a new section with colour illustrations for improved visualization of complex relationships. This book is intended for forest and wildlife managers, ecologists, silviculturists, environmentalists, and students of those fields.

The first book to look at wilderness in the northeastern US, Wilderness Comes Home features a new approach based on ecological reserve design to protect biological diversity, rewilding and restoring lands to wilderness, and embedding wilderness in a landscape of sustainably managed farmland and forestland. It addresses major theoretical and practical aspects of this important issue -- whether, why, and how to reestablish wilderness areas in the Northeast. Although Western wilderness models already exist for undeveloped areas, Eastern models are still evolving. Protection and social management are being urged not for the "forest primeval" but for recovering areas, in which returning species such as moose and peregrine falcons roam over new growth softwoods and hardwoods, interspersed with the stone walls that once marked field boundaries.