Tending Your Forest - by Paul Catanzaro & Anthony D'Amato (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"A much-needed resource for ecologically minded family forest owners, showing that forestry based on ecological principles provides a solid foundation for responsible management."--BRIAN PALIK, forest ecologist, American Nature Solutions, and retired senior scientist, USDA Forest Service

"Catanzaro and D'Amato have a gift for presenting complex biological information in an engaging and easy-to-read way that deepens our understanding of forests as complex, everchanging ecosystems. With a focus on ecological forestry, Tending Your Forest shows us a path toward active stewardship that can both meet our material needs and help our forests adapt and thrive into the future."--ELI SAGOR, PhD, Cloquet Forestry Center, University of Minnesota

"Catanzaro and D'Amato illustrate how management can synchronize with ecological processes, bringing insight and solutions for healthy and resilient forests."--PETER J. SMALLIDGE, New York State Extension Forester and director of the Arnot Teaching and Research Forest, Cornell University

"If landowners, land managers, or students of forestry and natural resources were to read only one book on ecological forestry, this should be it." --BARRIE BRUSILA, consultant forester, Mid-Maine Forestry

"Paul Catanzaro and Anthony D'Amato have done an enormous service to foresters, landowners, and the land itself. By not simply defining ecological forestry but showing what it looks like in practice, Paul and Tony are connecting knowledge and wisdom to manage multiple challenges and truly practice ecological forestry. We cannot think of a greater need or a better pair to address it."--RAD HUTNIK & GREG EDGE, Wisconsin forest ecologists/silviculturists, hosts of the SilviCast podcast

"Tending Your Forest presents an innovative approach to stewarding the woods--one built on reciprocity between people and forests. As a forest ecologist, I'm thrilled to read a book that captures the nuances of ecological forestry in a format accessible to every landowner." --ZANDER EVANS, executive director, Forest Stewards Guild

"The definitive owner's manual for forest stewardship. D'Amato and Catanzaro offer a wealth of information and guidance relevant to the interests, challenges, and opportunities of the day. It deserves a space on the bookshelf of anyone who cares about forests."--STEVE HAGENBUCH, senior forest program manager, National Audubon Society

"This indispensable, crystal-clear primer will empower the region's millions of private forest landowners to make vital choices for our forests' futures while also deepening their relationship to the land. In writing this guide, leading authorities Catanzaro and D'Amato have given a gift to generations of stewards."--ACKSON SAUL, executive director of the Center for Northern Woodlands Education

"This thoughtful guidebook will give landowners a new framework for understanding forest dynamics and how to better care for their land."--LES BENEDICT, assistant director, Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe

"With chapters dedicated to climate, old growth, wildlife, resilience, economics, and more, this book serves as a guide to help get woodland owners more deeply connected to and engaged with caring well for their woods."--ALLYSON MUTH, EdD, director of the James C. Finley Center for Private Forests at Penn State

About the Author

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.