With a degree in biology from Colgate University, Kelly French embarked on a career in clinical diagnostics and experimental medicinal research. After four years of working in a lab and daydreaming about being in the woods, she decided to shift gears and go to graduate school to study forest resources. She received her master’s degree from the University of Maine this summer. Five days later, she started a new job – and a new career – as the program and outreach coordinator for Maine TREE (Timber Research and Environmental Education). She and her fiancé live in Augusta, Maine, with a menagerie of pets that includes a dog, a pixie-bob cat, a singing parrot, a tortoise, and a blue-tongued skink.
Most of my fondest childhood memories involve being in the woods. I grew up in Canton, New York. It’s a very small, rural farm town in Upstate New York, about 20 minutes south of Canadian border. There aren’t a ton of trees there, it’s primarily farm land, lots of cows and corn. But my family lived out of town, and we had 3 acres of pine forest behind our house that I loved to explore. Three acres when you’re a small child seems like a lot of land.
My family – my grandparents and my uncles and us – own a tree farm in western Maine, which was certified with the Tree Farm System in the 1970s. It’s is about 450 acres of mixed-wood forest and in my opinion is the best place on earth. It’s about an 8-hour drive from Canton to the tree farm in Hartford, and we went on weekends, every school vacation, and we would spend over a month there every summer. My earliest memories are there. That’s always been a part of my life. We still manage the property and run a very small maple syrup operation, just big enough to provide our family members with syrup throughout the year.
By a very early age I learned to respect flora and fauna, to leave things as you found them whenever possible, and to always check for ticks! My Papa, David Kraske, always took the time to educate his grandchildren about the forest as we walked around our tree farm. He was my first forestry teacher, and was an example of how to be a good steward to Maine’s forests. The stories and lessons he would share in the woods were key in developing my relationship with the outdoors.
One childhood memory that will always stand out to me is when my brothers and my cousins and I filmed our own rendition of “The Lord of the Rings,” using the tree farm as our set. While the acting in our movie is questionable, the scenery rivals the actual blockbuster film, in my opinion. Obviously, those were filmed in New Zealand in crazy environments, but we found different places in our tree farm for every single shot, and they looked so good. That was a multiple-summer-long production, and it really made me start to appreciate how beautiful our forestland is. You think about forests and you think about trees, but there’s really so much more going on there – the water features and all the old stone fences from when it was farmland back in the early 1900s. We’d be out there doing that for hours a day as children. We still talk about it all the time.
I have been getting more involved in the management of the tree farm in the past few years. The decisions are made as a group – my uncle and me and my cousins. Timber and wildlife are our primary management objectives. We do small scale harvests. Right now we’re doing a small harvest of softwoods. We manage for the wildlife on the farm, and we do allow people to hunt our land. We’re very focused on the ecology and the overall environmental health of our forest. We try to emulate natural disturbances as much as possible in our management strategies. Having horizontal and vertical structural diversity is really important for wildlife. That’s something you can’t necessarily get when everything is the same size class, species, and age.
A lot of the work I did at U Maine was centered on climate change and climate change impacts, so I feel like I’m more vigilant now in looking for aspects of the forest that are being affected. Some that stick out to me are the abundance of forest pests and invasive species. Hemlock wooly adelgid and balsam woolly adelgid are spreading pretty fast now in a lot of areas they weren’t when I was a child. Our ash trees are also dying at great rates due to the emerald ash borer. Another major climate-related thing I’ve noticed is the increase in ticks. It seems impossible to go out into the woods without getting at least a few on you every time now.
Climate change isn’t just temperatures getting hotter, it’s increases in extreme weather events, including both heavy downpours and drought frequency. It also shifts in forest pests and diseases that did not use to be able to survive in this region when it was colder. It’s changes in atmospheric moisture levels. Overall, our regional mesic forest types are not well adapted to future projected climates. I did my thesis research centered around spruce-fir forest types, and there is projected to be little to no suitable habitat remaining for spruce-fir within the next century. So these are all things to consider and think about – and why I have such an interest in understanding how forest management can mitigate or exacerbate climate change effects.
One of the things I’m optimistic about here is that people in Maine care about forests. I want to get people to care more about the woods, and sometimes that means talking about more than just trees. I love trees, and I obviously want to study them for the rest of my life, but some people care more about the animals that live in the woods, or some other aspect of the forest. It’s about building up this multi-level reasoning behind why we should care. Maybe someone doesn’t really care about red spruce trees, specifically, but if there’s no red spruce, there aren’t going to be any spruce grouse, and there won’t be as many lynx in the area, or other animals that depend on that tree species for their habitat.
I appreciate the forest communities that are built here in Maine. One of these is the Tree Farm System, and our community of tree farmers. I am very fortunate to be coordinating the Maine Tree Farm system at this point, and I think that this organization is so important as it brings together like-minded people who want to go above and beyond in terms of being good stewards of their lands. We have a great system in place here in Maine and I think that tree farmers are vital in continuing to have healthy and sustainable forests here, as Maine forests are primarily privately owned.
There’s so much I love about spending time in the woods, but I think what I love best is being surrounded by something so much bigger than we are. Forest ecosystems are so intricate and complex, and the trees aren’t able to communicate and tell us their story, so it’s our responsibility to be able to talk for them.
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