WVFA Mountain State Forestry Fall 2020

I N D U S T R Y N E W S 8 West Virginia Forestry Association Mountain State Forestry  | Fall 2020 www.wvfa.org support from the philanthropic community and state and federal agencies. We then develop a sustainable harvest plan along with wildlife and habitat restoration plans, protecting the forest while also maintaining local forestry jobs. These include West Virginia- based contractors and vendors, appraisers, logging operations, timber inventories and forest management. Our management plans are based on standards by the independent Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI) which are comprehensive and widely adapted throughout the U.S. and Canada. Simultaneously, the WFF team secures a permanent conservation easement that blocks fragmentation, provides for public access and recreation along with continued timber harvesting according to SFI best practices. Once the easement is secured, WFF resells the permanently protected forest to a private or public buyer, recovering all its invested capital for redeployment in another forest acquisition. In fact, a 16,000+ acre block of our working forest in Mingo and Logan counties—known as Wapiti Woods—is currently on the market for a new owner to manage it for timber and other forest products. An additional financial benefit from the property is a forest carbon project opportunity which has been initiated and verified by a third party. This business model reduces carrying costs for the private sector side and offers critical bridge financing for public agency conservation goals. The revolving nature of our funds—directly from one project into the next—keeps that capital away from the uncertainties of market swings and invested in forest protection. It enables landowners and timber companies to better manage their financial future, as well as the logger working the landscape. Again, our commitment to certification from SFI nationally helps ensure all forest products from our conservation timberlands have added value in the marketplace and satisfy increasing demand from consumers about the sources of their wood purchases. The Conservation Fund is also putting other sources of funding to work for land and water conservation in West Virginia. In 2018 The Fund acquired 31,318 acres of at-risk timberland in Wirt, Wood, Jackson, Calhoun, Pleasants, Ritchie and Doddridge Counties. Those forestlands were purchased and held by the Fund and then permanently protected for public recreation and wildlife habitat by phased transfer and sale to WVDNR though an innovative blend of protective public agency conservation funding. To complete these large purchases, The Conservation Fund and the WVDNR assembled purchase capital using traditional wildlife sources of state license dollars and applications for federal support through the Pittman-Robertson Act, in which excise taxes paid on firearms, ammunition, and archery equipment are dedicated toward the purchase of hunting lands across the country. To complete the ©Jerry Monkman/Courtesy of The Conservation Fund (Hughes River WMA)