adaptationforest.org
A 200-acre experiment in tending what comes next.
Every forest is a record of change. Ice ages, fire, clearing, regrowth — the trees standing now are the ones that adapted to what came before. We're entering a period of change unlike any in the forest's memory, and the question isn't whether the forest will adapt. It will. The question is whether we will.
It starts with seeing differently — thinking the way a forest thinks, in relationships and cycles rather than straight lines. We call this forest thinking. It continues with doing differently — the patient, hands-on work of caring for what's alive around us. We call this tending. And it's urgent because the world is shifting under our feet and the old ways of living aren't working. We call this adaptation.
Forest thinking. Tending. Adaptation. Three practices for a world that needs all of them.
Two hundred acres of northeastern hardwood forest, rising from 1,200 to nearly 1,800 feet in elevation.
Red maple, sugar maple, white ash, red oak, birch, beech — the full cast of a northern hardwood forest, each species facing its own reckoning with a changing climate. Some of these trees are well-suited for what's coming. Others are not.
The emerald ash borer is already here. Beech bark disease is pervasive. The Norway spruce planted decades ago are falling to wind they weren't bred to withstand. This forest is not a wilderness — it's a working landscape shaped by centuries of human use, from Indigenous stewardship to colonial agriculture to industrial logging to, now, something new.
Adaptation Forest is an ongoing experiment in how to steward this land through the transition ahead — using the best available science, a willingness to intervene where necessary, and the humility to step back where the forest knows better than we do.
Tending a forest begins with understanding what lives there and what it needs.
Go DeeperThis forest is not only trees. It is the barred owl holding a territory of thirty acres, the brook trout holding the cold water, the red eft on the forest floor connecting two worlds.
Forty-three bird species breed here. Brook trout run in every accessible reach of the headwater streams. White-tailed deer, black bear, fisher, bobcat, river otter — the full cast of a healthy northeastern forest is present, and their presence is not incidental. Each animal is a measure of something the forest is doing right: the owls need old trees with cavities; the brook trout need cold, clean water; the wood thrush needs large unfragmented forest.
What lives here is contingent on what we do here. Managing this land for forest interior habitat, maintaining the stream buffers, leaving the dead trees standing — these are decisions with wildlife consequences. We are beginning to track those consequences systematically, through bird surveys, trail cameras, and stream macroinvertebrate sampling. What we find tells us what our tending is actually doing.
Go DeeperThe first structures are simple. Everything else is what they make possible.
A shed, a lean-to for shade and rain, tent platforms nested among the trees. Battery-powered chainsaws and brush cutters, a gas saw for the big trees, portable solar keeping everything charged. This is the starting vocabulary of a larger conversation.
What comes next is more ambitious: a barn and workshop, a portable sawmill turning the property's own timber into building material, a series of small off-grid cabins dispersed through the forest — non-permanent, built mostly from wood harvested on site, designed with large windows that make the canopy feel like it's in the room with you.
The practice is tending — applied not just to trees but to the systems that let us inhabit a landscape without degrading it.
Go DeeperArt made in a forest is art made with a collaborator that doesn't hold still.
Branches fall. Light shifts. Snow covers. Mushrooms colonize. The work here is created in dialogue with these forces — geometric installations that play with the forest's own patterns of light and shadow, ephemeral sculptures from gathered materials that document their own decay, and interventions that reveal what was already there. Forest thinking sees no boundary between the aesthetic and the ecological. A well-tended forest is already a work of art. The installations here just make that visible.
This is where the studio meets the stand. Where craft practice and forest stewardship share the same tools and the same attention to material, structure, and change over time.
Go DeeperA garden is taking root.
Somewhere between the wild forest and the cultivated row lies the food forest — a designed ecosystem that produces food, medicine, and habitat by mimicking the structure of a natural woodland. At Adaptation Forest, we're planning an intensive cultivation zone that draws on permaculture, agroforestry, and traditional ecological knowledge.
The garden will be small in footprint but deep in design — seven layers of productive planting, from canopy nut trees down to root crops, integrated with native medicinal species, seed-saving programs, and soil-building practices.
Every planting decision is also a climate adaptation decision — and an act of tending that looks decades into the future.
Go DeeperA forest this size can hold more than trees. It can hold a community.
We envision Adaptation Forest as a place where people come together — for guided walks that read the landscape like a text, for performances staged among the trees, for workshops on everything from chainsaw use to bird identification to mushroom cultivation.
The trail network connects a series of natural gathering spaces: stream crossings, rocky outcrops with seasonal views, the remnants of old stone walls that mark where pasture once met forest. These are places where a small audience can sit on the ground and listen — to a musician, a scientist, a poet, or just the forest itself.
This is tending in its most human form — showing up, paying attention, and sharing what you notice.
Go DeeperEverything happening at Adaptation Forest is grounded in peer-reviewed science and decades of forestry research.
We use the USDA Forest Service Climate Change Tree Atlas to assess species vulnerability. We measure carbon storage per acre and track it against regional benchmarks. We follow the resistance-resilience-transition framework for climate adaptation.
But we also believe that the best science is science you can see. This section translates the data — about tree species vulnerability, carbon sequestration, invasive species dynamics, and climate projections — into formats that any forest owner or curious person can understand and use.
Forest thinking means letting evidence shape the story. Here's what the evidence says.
Go Deeper