The Domain Demonstration Forest Initiative

By Nate Wilson, Domain Manager
The Sewanee Domain has the distinction of being one of the oldest managed forests in the southeast. The Domain forests seen today, in many areas, have been shaped by more than 150 years of active management, timber harvests, grazing and fire suppression. During the past 100 years, the University has harvested more than 36 million board feet of lumber from the Domain. For perspective, that is enough lumber to build approximately 2,200 average American homes. At the same time the University also built 40 miles of fire lanes, constructed 16 lakes and quarried stone in at least 10 locations. Despite this intensity of use, these forests have been resilient to the many changes, and today contain more than five times the amount of biomass that was here 100 years ago.
Throughout the years, the use and values of the Domain forests have been captured in at least eight plans, each articulating the guiding principles and values of the Sewanee community over time. In the coming weeks, there will be a small timber harvest off of Breakfield Road as part of the University’s latest planning effort on a portion of the Domain—the Demonstration Forest Initiative.
At the University’s creation, there was little thought given to the vast woodlands surrounding the campus.
By 1900 the Domain was so decimated by unregulated cutting that in 1896 a timber company offered the trustees only $2,000 to clear-cut the forest remaining on the Domain. This paltry offer prompted Vice Chancellor Benjamin Wiggins to seek professional guidance from the newly formed U.S. Bureau of Forestry (now the U.S. Forest Service). Gifford Pinchot, only one month after being named the first head of the Bureau of Forestry, visited the Domain to provide advice to Wiggins. Pinchot and the University began one of the earliest examples of public-private cooperative management, culminating in “Forestry Bulletin No. 39, Conservative Lumbering at Sewanee, Tennessee.”
During the last 100 years, the societal value of forests changed dramatically, both at Sewanee and across the country. Domain plans evolved away from their purely utilitarian ethic toward recreation, research, water conservation and ecology. By 2003, 100 years after conservative lumbering was released, the top focus of domain planning was research and teaching, along with the recreational resources of the Domain.
The Demonstration Forest Initiative builds on this idea of a teaching laboratory and also tackles the challenges facing managers today in balancing many competing goals and objectives. While it is recognized that much of the Domain is most suitable for non-consumptive uses, there is an opportunity for a portion of the property to be managed in a way that balances the objectives of aesthetics, timber investments, biodiversity and restoration of lost habitats. This could eventually be replicated outside the Domain on private lands.
The Demonstration Forest Initiative establishes a structured program to experientially teach basic concepts in land management while maintaining and enhancing a suite of specific ecological forestry goals. The Demonstration Forest combines activities such as carbon sequestration, ecosystem restoration, fire management and timber harvesting focused on a roughly 2,500-acre portion of the landscape. This area will have a distinct forest plan and discrete set of management goals to effectively showcase exemplary land management to classes and visitors. Management will occur on a scale similar to private landowners in the region, making it an ideal outreach platform to promote sustainable forestry practices on the Cumberland Plateau. The organizing themes of the Demonstration Forest are carbon sequestration, biodiversity conservation and non-timber forest products, all within a context of revenue generation. These organizing themes will necessarily translate into a diversity of actions that will vary by location and land use history, but will be unified by a single goal: to demonstrate how financial revenues can accrue in a forest managed for ecological function.