Tending Your Forest: A Guide to Ecological Forest Stewardship in the Eastern and Central United States

How do you care for the health of your forest? This comprehensive guide empowers landowners with the knowledge of how to manage a family forest to capture more carbon, encourage wildlife and biodiversity, and build a more resilient future.

Tending Your Forest brings a fresh, ecological perspective to forest management, providing landowners with the information they need to understand their forests and their options for stewarding them in the face of new challenges, such as climate change and invasive species. With the help of key professionals, landowners from Maine to Maryland and Missouri to Minnesota can practice ecological forestry to achieve goals such as restoring old-growth characteristics, protecting wildlife and biodiversity, sequestering and storing carbon to mitigate climate change, preserving tree species at risk of extinction, and sustainably harvesting trees for local wood products. Finally, landowners will learn how to ensure their legacy by passing land on to their heirs and making use of conservation easements and other tools for protecting the land long into the future. 

Paul Catanzaro is a professor in the Forest Ecology and Conservation program at University of Massachusetts, where he teaches forest ecology, forest management, silviculture, and land protection. He is co-director of the Family Forest Research Center, a partnership of the USDA Forest Service and UMass. Catanzaro also serves as the state extension forester. For nearly 20 years, he has studied family forest owners to understand their goals and challenges, turning this knowledge into practical and effective outreach resources.  
Anthony D’Amato is a professor of Silviculture and Applied Forest Ecology and director of the Forestry Program at the University of Vermont. Prior to that, D'Amato was a tenured faculty member at the University of Minnesota and Bullard Fellow at Harvard University’s Harvard Forest. His research focuses on long-term forest dynamics, disturbance effects on ecosystems, and silviculture within the context of global change, such as introduced insects or diseases. He has published over 190 peer-reviewed papers on these topics as well as authored Ecological Silvicultural Systems.