A Climate-Smart Timber Harvest at Prouty Woods Community Forest

New England Forestry Foundation (NEFF) recently completed a sustainable, climate-smart timber harvest at our Prouty Woods Community Forest, located behind NEFF headquarters in Littleton, Massachusetts. A licensed forester who has worked with NEFF for many years carefully selected individual trees for harvesting, and equipment was brought on site to carry out the work.

The harvest took place over the course of approximately two months, during which time the property and trails were temporarily closed to the public as a precautionary safety measure. NEFF also took steps throughout the project to minimize soil disturbance and reduce impacts to trails.

NEFF staff worked in advance with Littleton town officials, nearby community members, and partner organizations to share information about the harvest and its timeline. Following the completion of the work, the property has since reopened to the public.

To share this work with the community, NEFF hosted a woods walk at Prouty Woods Community Forest on Saturday, April 26, 2025, at 10:00 a.m. NEFF Executive Director Ryan Owens led the group through the forest, showing how careful management can strengthen forest health, support wildlife, and advance climate goals. The walk offered a chance to ask questions and see Exemplary Forestry in action. Keep an eye on our events page for future woods walks.

NEFF’s Approach to the Harvest

NEFF’s top priority throughout the harvest was Prouty Woods’ wellbeing. The harvest was conducted in keeping with NEFF’s own Exemplary Forestry management approach, which prioritizes forests’ long-term health and outlines high standards of sustainability for three key goals: mitigating climate change, improving wildlife habitat and biodiversity, and growing and harvesting more sustainable wood.

NEFF also identified goals specific to the summer 2024 Prouty harvest that our foresters worked to accomplish. In addition to demonstrating Exemplary Forestry in action, these goals included:

• Removing about 20 percent of Prouty’s sawtimber-sized trees, meaning trees that are 12+ inches in diameter at chest height and big enough to produce lumber, as well as some poorly formed and low-quality trees of various sizes
• Giving the remaining high-quality trees more room to grow
• Encouraging growth of younger trees
• Providing habitat for native wildlife, which benefits from forests with trees and tree stands of a wide range of ages
• Increase tree stocking — or the amount of wood growing on a given area of land — and the amount of carbon pulled from the atmosphere and stored in Prouty Woods over the next 30 years
• Protecting recreational opportunities and waterways
• Minimizing soil disruption
• Selling lumber-quality wood for use in long-lived products, which lock away carbon, while directing poorly formed and low-quality material to firewood and pulp or paper products

Prouty was last harvested in 2007, and that harvest has been unnoticeable to trail users for years. NEFF expects this harvest to produce the same results. This speaks to forests’ resiliency and to NEFF’s well-crafted harvest plans.

Great Crested Flycatcher in an area of NEFF’s Prouty Woods that won’t be harvested, Twolined Studio

The Big Picture

Harvests, like those that typically happen every 15–20 years on NEFF forestlands, produce the wood-based materials we all use. From paper-derived products like cardboard packaging, to high-quality wood furniture and building materials for homes and offices, we all rely on and benefit from wood in its various forms. In order to fight climate change, it is important we move from highly polluting products like plastic, concrete and steel to bio-based, highly recyclable products like wood whenever possible. We encourage website visitors who have questions about climate-smart harvests’ ability to impact global carbon to explore the signs posted at Prouty, as well as the following webpages: Exemplary Forestry | 30 Percent Solution | Bioeconomy Initiative | Build It With Wood.

The Prouty harvest came along at an exciting and highly relevant time for NEFF; NEFF and partners have received $30 million from the USDA’s Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities program to help forest landowners implement climate-smart forestry on 66,000 acres across New England, and to build markets for climate-smart forest products like mass timber. And as the landowner-specific programs in NEFF’s Climate-Smart Commodities project were coming online, the Prouty Woods harvest offered a timely opportunity to demonstrate Exemplary Forestry in action.

Prouty Over Time

While sections of Prouty will look different after the harvest, this is a recurring transition we go through every 15 or 20 years. In the days, months, and years that follow, we hope visitors take the opportunity to carefully observe the regeneration of the forest and the accelerated growth of the remaining trees: Closely note the changes in the ecological landscape, watch for the formation of new habitats, look for visiting wildlife, and more. In short, we invite you to learn how Exemplary managed forests are healthy, thriving forests.