Western Maine Habitat Project Achieves Major Success

One of New England Forestry Foundation’s most impactful initiatives is tucked up in Maine’s Oxford, Franklin, Somerset, and Piscataquis counties. In partnership with the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), the Western Maine Habitat Project Team works with family and other private forest landowners to use New England Forestry Foundation’s Exemplary Forestry approach to foster forest management that improves and restores native fish and wildlife habitat across this ecologically crucial and beautiful landscape.

How Does It Work?

New England Forestry Foundation (NEFF) does a lot as team leader, including:

• Building out the project from start to finish and delivering on its goals.
• Recruiting landowners and working with their foresters.
• Collaborating on forest and habitat management planning for enrolled landowners.
• Ensuring each management plan makes its way through state and federal reviews.

Partners, including Maine Audubon and the Maine Department of Inland Fish and Wildlife, provide advisory assistance, while the NRCS provides project oversight, ensuring NEFF’s work aligns with federal requirements. They also handle all financial agreements with landowners.

In short, NEFF does most of the work, the NRCS pays most of the bills, and we all work together as a team to fill in the gaps when needed.

Western Maine Habitat Project Accomplishments

In 2025, NEFF’s Western Maine Habitat Team worked with 29 family and non-profit landowners who collectively own 25,318 acres. These landowners signed a commitment to long-term forest management as part of NEFF’s project and, with NEFF’s assistance, applied for NRCS funding to put that commitment into action.

Ultimately, eleven landowners were approved for NRCS funding for forest management plans, while another seven secured financial support for implementation. To navigate federal constraints related to last fall’s government shutdown, NEFF collaborated with the NRCS to redirect some landowners to other funding sources, thus allowing four more landowners to apply for funding in 2025.

Western Maine Habitat Project performance has exceeded expectations. The team has completed tasks ahead of schedule and under budget, and it exceeded acreage targets by a factor of three. Though NEFF initially aimed to have 3,000 acres actively managed by 2028, by mid-2026 we will be on track to have approximately 10,000 acres under active management.

This recent success doesn’t capture landowners or acres contracted under an earlier NEFF-NRCS Western Maine Partnership that ended in 2022. These landowners have already implemented forestry based on the NEFF model that supports wildlife habitat on an additional 10,000 acres in Western Maine.

In 2026, NEFF is turning toward analysis of the project to determine economic, social, ecological, and environmental lessons learned over the past seven years. We are particularly interested in the effectiveness of landowner outreach and retention. NEFF has an opportunity to investigate how and why outreach strategies we used — including those from business, community organizing, and social services fields — kept landowners engaged through a long planning and NRCS review process in an atmosphere of growing landowner uncertainty about the reliability of federal funding.

Additionally, NEFF staff and Maine Audubon are completing a two-year bird habitat assessment on three properties near Bethel that are managed under Western Maine Habitat Project Team guidance, with findings expected mid-year. This project, funded by the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, will provide baseline data for measuring bird habitat changes due to management practices. NEFF is also collaborating with Inland Woods + Trails to develop a demonstration trail of Exemplary Forestry practices.