Forest Restoration (ForRest) Decision Tool: A habitat decision tool for restoring the ecological values to working forests.

The Nature Conservancy has developed the Forest Restoration (ForRest) Decision Tool to assist landowners and land managers to better manage their working forestlands for biodiversity conservation by explicitly correlating forest attributes to biodiversity values. The three components of the ForRest Tool include: 1) the Vegetation Prediction Index (VPI) & Community Prediction Index (CPI) - spatial datasets that predict and map potential of occurrence of upland forest community types in two ecoregions, the High Allegheny Plateau and the Central Appalachian Forests, 2) Silvicultural Modeling- we developed forest community definitions by successional stage (emphasis on structural attributes for mid-, late- successional and old growth stages) and then modeled this data in the US Forest Service’s Forest Vegetation Simulator (FVS) to identify appropriate silvicultural treatments to assist landowners/managers to better balance biodiversity and economic goals, 3) the Multi-species Habitat Profiles for bird and mammal species of conservation concern are profiles that indicate the habitat preference for 200 bird and mammal species in six matrix forest community types and four successional stage combinations.

The ForRest Tool was developed for two ecoregions, the High Allegheny Plateau and the Central Appalachian Forest.