Forest Resilience Report: Restoration Priorities for the Central Appalachians

Abstract

This report highlights significant opportunities to improve forest climate resilience through strategic management and restoration approaches across 20 million acres of The Nature Conservancy’s Focal Landscapes in the central Appalachians. Our Focal Landscapes were informed by the terrestrial Resilient and Connected Network (RCN), which represents places with greater potential for climate resilience as they have maintained biodiversity, productivity and ecosystem functions in the face of past climate changes. The RCN can guide how we prioritize places with greater resilience potential. As a next step we assessed current ecosystem resilience of our Focal Landscapes to help land managers plan strategic actions to build resilient forests now. We assessed and ranked the key ecological attributes of resilient ecosystems (KEAs—biodiversity, climate adaptive capacity and ecosystem function) across the major forest community types of the central Appalachian Focal Landscapes (see results on p. 8). We found a wide range in the current condition of these attributes, with each community type possessing strengths and weaknesses. Based on these findings, we suggest a set of priorities to build ecosystem resilience and provide examples of using the assessment to guide local action mapping. Overall, this assessment delivers a broad picture of how the attributes of ecosystem resilience varies across this region and illustrates the need for forest community-specific management and restoration approaches to achieve improved climate resilience outcomes. We believe it also provides a common language and framework for consistently assessing forest condition for climate resilience across the Appalachians and can serve as a guide to develop regional and local priorities for resilience building forest management.

Citation

Lober, J., Shallows, K., Beaty, B., Galgamuwe, P., Watland, A. (2025). Forest Resilience Report: Restoration Priorities for the central Appalachians. The Nature Conservancy, Appalachians Global Focal Place.