Some local advocates and scientists are criticizing the closure of the Bartlett Experimental Forest in New Hampshire's White Mountains, part of a broader nationwide restructuring of the U.S. Forest Service announced last week. The agency is shuttering about three-fourths of its 77 research stations and will move its headquarters to Salt Lake City, Utah.
Research wildlife biologist Mariko Yamasaki, who retired from Bartlett in 2023, said the center offers invaluable insight on forest management practices that bolster timber harvesting, wildlife conservation and fire suppression.
“We have a 90-year record of how vegetation has changed at Bartlett,” she said. “We can speak to things in ways that nobody else can do because nobody else does long-term ecological research and management research the way Forest Service research does.”
The Forest Service said in a press release it was consolidating “to unify research priorities, accelerate the application of science to management decisions, and reduce administrative duplication.” Employees will be moved to new research sites, and the agency will now have a single research organization headquartered in Fort Collins, Colorado.
“The transition will occur in phases. Employees will receive clear information about relocation timelines, available options, and resources to support their decisions,” a spokesperson for the Forest Service wrote in an email to NHPR.
New Hampshire’s other experimental forest, Hubbard Brook, is not currently slated to close, though all research and development sites are “under evaluation,” according to the agency’s website.
The restructuring will also close regional offices across the country and transition to a “state-based organizational model.” For New Hampshire, this means there will be a central office for the Northeast in Pennsylvania.
The agency said the move is designed to “simplify the chain of command, strengthen local partnerships, and give field leaders greater ability to respond to conditions on the ground.”
But Northern Forest Center Vice President Joe Short said his organization has a lot of “uncertainty” about how this new plan will work in practice.
“In theory, the concept of moving management decisions closer to the ground is a good one,” he said. “But this is a pretty significant consolidation of regional offices into a much smaller set of offices with politically appointed leadership.”
Short also raised concerns about potential budget cuts for state programs, which he said would contradict the supposed aim to make more decisions more locally-minded.
This plan follows “concerning actions,” Short said, already taken over the past year and a half by the Forest Service, such as large-scale layoffs and proposed budget cuts.
“Taken in aggregate, the effect here seems to be a substantial reduction of, in many cases, the irreplaceable capacity . . . in resources that these agencies have, which seems really contrary to the stated objectives of actually strengthening our national ability to manage forests,” he said.
