Pilot Projects

The Center is supporting and connecting several pilot projects in the Northern Forest to develop and demonstrate ways for landowners to receive payments for the ecosystem services their lands provide.

Assessing Forest Carbon Values

With funding from the Northern Forest Investment Zone, The Center’s partners at the Manomet Center for Conservation Sciences are building a tool to help forest landowners understand the potential income they could receive from the sale of carbon offsets from their land. We expect to begin testing this new tool at workshops in spring of 2011.

With support from USDA Rural Development in Vermont, the Center and partners are exploring opportunities to sell carbon offsets from forest landowners in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom to voluntary Vermont buyers. The project includes technical assistance to landowners to help them assess if they have economically viable opportunities to develop carbon offset projects, as well as marketing to potential buyers of these offsets.
 

Northern Forest Watershed Services Project

The Northern Forest Watershed Services Project is testing techniques to help landowners realize income from the watershed protection services that their land provides the public. The project is focused in two Northern Forest watersheds—the Crooked River in Maine and the upper Connecticut River in New Hampshire and Vermont.

The project is coordinated by the American Forest Foundation and led by core groups of partners in each watershed, including the Manomet Center for Conservation Sciences and the Western Foothills Land Trust in the Crooked River watershed, and the Hubbard Brook Research Foundation and White River Partnership in the upper Connecticut River watershed.

Through the Northern Forest Investment Zone, the Center is providing funding to the Crooked River pilot project, and technical assistance and facilitation to support a technical advisory network for the Upper Connecticut River project.