BANGOR DAILY NEWS • March 17, 2026
Challenges to understanding and managing the Maine woods have grown in recent years amid climate change, which has brought destructive new pests, fast-moving diseases, invasive plants that take over, and warmer winters that change growing, harvesting and wildlife conditions. It will take decades to see the extent of how these forces will shape Maine’s key timber industry and its characteristic forests which, unlike in most other states, are largely owned and managed privately. According to woodlot owners, current understanding of how to manage forests will have to evolve, and there’s no precedent in human memory for how to do it. “This ecological memory we have about how things are supposed to work is becoming unreliable,” said Bob Seymour, a retired UMaine silviculture professor..