What are old growth forests like? Here is video 1 (of many) from my visit to the Big Reed Preserve — the largest old growth forest in New England. For me, what is so impactful about visiting Big Reed is that it gave me a chance to see what forests have looked like on our landscape for thousands of years, and thus the conditions that so much of our biodiversity is adapted to. However, this is also not a video about how we should leave all forests alone — our modern day forests are missing so many of the attributes that we find in old growth forests, which are also the conditions that are vital habitat for our native biodiversity (as well as supporting many critical ecosystem functions and natural processes). I believe that old growth forests are a call to action — by doing things like cutting trees, we can create these attributes and the habitats that come with them in decades rather than centuries. I believe that we should be managing forests to help recover these attributes today.

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