The Green Mountain National Forest continues to employ diverse and effective silviculture practices. This year, we increased the amount of selective cutting and decreased or amount of even-aged management. This required intensive and complex marking guides with diligent work from our sale preparation and layout crews and close coordination with resource specialists. Overall, the Forest provided 7,363 hundred cubic feet, or 4.54 million board feet of timber.

We completed 102 acres of thinning and we identified a backlog of close to 900 acres we are positioned to complete next year. We also completed the 29 acre Patterson Brook tree planting project; restoring an area in the Upper White River Valley impacted by a non-native invasive pest, the balsam wooly adelgid. We are posed to help fund local seed and cone collection so trees can be grown to meet future needs.

We continue to support the search for Butternut trees that appear to be resistant to the Butternut Canker. Work this year consisted of searching and facilitating studies of areas where remnant populations exist. Regional geneticists will use this data to see if we can collect scions from these trees which can be planted along with scions collected by a concurrent State of Vermont effort. This "clone bank" may be used to grow resistant trees so we do not lose this important tree from our ecosystem.

In 2007, we eagerly launched into stewardship contracting. Stewardship contracting blends the needs of the community with the needs of forest management by trading forest products, or goods, for resource restoration and enhancement, or services. With partners like the Wild Turkey Federation, we laid out a framework for implementing stewardship contracts, a tool the Green Mountain had not used before.

Training forest associates, partners and interested bidders and finally awarding the Beattie Road stewardship contract, 268 acres, marked the first step toward promoting closer working relationships with local communities in a broad range of activities that improve land conditions. The Beattie Road stewardship contract will improve forest health by thinning overgrown areas and offering remaining trees more nutrients. The project will restore wildlife habitat by making areas more open and improve old apple orchard conditions for wildlife forage in this once abandoned farm.