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The goal of the reforestation plan is to create \u201ca roadmap to achieve that statewide reforestation goal,\u201d said Hassett, who is a supervising forester in the DEC\u2019s climate forestry and carbon unit. She was speaking at a forestry roundtable hosted by the Adirondack Research Consortium and Empire State Forest Products Association at SUNY Adirondack in Queensbury.<\/p>\n
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The draft plan will include feedback from 200 natural resource professionals from 110 local and regional organizations and more than 13 state agencies, she said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cA big concern was balancing reforestation and other types of land use,\u201d Hassett said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Other land uses include grasslands, agriculture, renewable energy and housing.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The plan also outlines ways to scale up the reforestation supply chain, which includes increasing seed collection and reproduction, and building up the demand for reforestation by engaging communities, landowners and other interested parties.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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The state is also supporting reforestation through grant programs and upgrading the state\u2019s tree nursery in Saratoga County.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Opportunities for reforestation<\/p>\n
The biggest opportunities for reforestation exist on agricultural lands that are no longer in use, according to a study done by The Nature Conservancy.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s potentially about 1.6 million acres of these post-agricultural lands that are potentially available,\u201d Hassett said.<\/p>\n
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She said \u201cpotentially\u201d because whether these lands can be converted is dependent on the willingness of the landowners.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019d have to go to each of these sites and see if a landowner would be willing to convert those lands,\u201d Hassett said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
There are about 173,831 acres of post-agricultural land in the North Country, much of it outside the Adirondack Park in places like Jefferson County.\u00a0<\/p>\n
New York has about 18.6 million acres of forest land, which makes up about 62% of the state. About 73%, or 13.7 million acres, are owned by private landowners. In the 6-million-acre Adirondack Park, about 80% of the land is forested.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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New York forests hold an estimated 1,911 million metric tons of carbon, which is equivalent to the CO2 that would be produced to power all the houses in New York for the next 100 years, according to the Climate Act. \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
This isn\u2019t the first time the state has undertaken a big reforestation effort. In the late 1800s, only about 25% of the land in the state was forested due to logging and conversion of the land to agriculture.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The 20th century saw the recovery of more than 9 million acres of forests through planting and preservation efforts.<\/p>\n
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This story originally appeared in the Adirondack Explorer, <\/a>a nonprofit news organization covering people and policy inside the forest preserve.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Forest Ranger Chuck Kabrehl prepares students to plant trees to help New York\u00a0reach its climate goals. So far,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":63439,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39],"tags":[33392,844,610,9,24,63,31841,134,136,135,33391],"class_list":{"0":"post-63438","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-staten-island","8":"tag-adk","9":"tag-latestnews","10":"tag-local","11":"tag-new-york","12":"tag-new-york-city","13":"tag-nyc","14":"tag-sarco","15":"tag-staten-island","16":"tag-staten-island-headlines","17":"tag-staten-island-news","18":"tag-warco"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63438","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=63438"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63438\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/63439"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=63438"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=63438"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=63438"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}