Dear Friends of Robinson State Park:

These are my comments about management of Robinson State Park.

Robinson State Park could serve as a high conservation value forest (HCVF) 
and a representative ecosystem for Massachussetts. HCVF are supposed to 
take into account things such as landscape context, historical and social 
uses, and ecological features, and representative ecosystems are supposed 
to do just that--represent all the forest ecosystem types present within 
the certified agency's land holdings. It seems to me that use of Robinson 
as a neighborhood park, place to walk the dog, for kids to play, for a 
scenic backdrop to several neighborhoods, etc., in a long, narrow park 
surrounded by houses, pretty much precludes commercial timber operations 
and makes a reserve the park's best use, with any harvests done exclusively 
for ecological restoration. If there are not any other reserves that 
represent riverine systems and the transition to upland, and upland scarlet 
oak forests in that part of the state, then that would automatically put 
Robinson in the reserve category to represent those forest types. Please 
note that reserves don't have to have all successional diversity in each 
reserve, they only have to represent it among all reserves. Reserves of 
this size have been an extremely commonly used strategy for conservation by 
many public and private conservation agencies in the U.S., from Nature 
Conservancy, to state natural areas in most states, and research natural 
areas within national forests.

Eight hundred-fifty acres is large enough to show dynamics of small to 
medium scale wind. Whether it is large enough to show all successional and 
developmental stages after large scale wind is irrelevant. No reserve is 
that large (except perhaps Adirondack State Park). Different stages 
resulting from large scale wind should be represented among different 
reserves. Thus the argument that either the whole thing will blow down or 
that it will all be late-successional is spurious. If the whole thing blows 
down at once, or all succeeds to late-successional forest, that's fine. 
That's why you have a number of reserves representing each forest type 
scattered around the landscape, so that hopefully large-scale disturbance 
will occur at different times and you will end up with reserves in all 
stages of succession and development. The biodiversity of Robinson is in 
large part the result of the different ecosystem types (areas with 
different soil types and topography). For example, there are areas that 
support mesic forest and areas that support dry forests of scarlet oak, 
river edge and upland, etc. The diversity is also partly due to past 
disturbance, both human and natural.

Overall, the needed management is to remove exotic tree species. Some 
sites, in cases where there is not adequate seed source nearby, and that 
may be reinvaded by exotic species, may require some replanting of native 
species appropriate for the site. Maintenance of dry forest types such as 
scarlet oak may eventually require some small carefully designed prescribed 
burns.

Within each ecosystem type, large gaps >1000 square feet caused by removal 
of several trees in a group would allow persistence of a few early 
successional species, and mid successional species like ash, red oak, white 
pine and tulip tree. These mid scale disturbances are important for 
maintaining that group of species, and they could be small selection cuts, 
or natural wind perhaps supplemented by prescribed fire if the area was a 
reserve.

Lee E. Frelich
Director, The University of Minnesota Center for Hardwood Ecology