The Berks County Conservation District manages a new program designed to connect private and public landowners with the resources necessary to best manage their forestlands. The program goal is to expand contiguous areas of healthy forests for the protection of aquatic and upland wildlife habitat and drinking water source locations. Examples of targeted habitat management include wild trout waters and Golden-winged Warbler breeding areas. Landowners with forest habitat (target parcels) adjacent to existing, managed, large parcels of forest (core parcels with > 500 acres of forest) are prioritized for outreach.

Core forested parcels include State Game Lands, Water Authority Lands, and State or Municipal Parks. The program is working with land managers of core forested parcels and is targeting various groups of landowners including private forested land, municipal-owned forest, and commercial forestland. Forestry professionals will also be provided with the latest information on best management practices and available programs to implement conservation on forestland (e.g. the PA Game Commission Private Landowner Program and the USDA/NRCS Conservation Technical Assistance Program).

Funding for the program is provided by a National Fish & Wildlife Foundation Delaware River Conservation Fund Grant. Our partners include the Dept of Conservation and Natural Resources, State Game Commission, USDA/NRCS, Appalachian Trail Conservancy, Berks Nature, The Trust for Public Land, The Kittatinny Ridge Conservation and Sentinel Landscape, and Natural Lands Trust.

Results to date: A Geographic Information Systems (GIS) model has been employed to identify and prioritize landowner forested parcels adjacent to contiguous forestlands. The model ranked parcels on a scale of 0-1 with higher scoring parcels occurring within Drinking Water Source Water Protection zones, parcels with large forest acreage protecting a high-quality waterway, parcels occurring within Important Bird Areas, etc. The model identified 7 clusters of parcels surrounding contiguous forestland throughout Berks County (Figure 1) where darker green parcels scored higher in the model. A total of 646 forest parcels has been identified for potential outreach with ~70% as non-agricultural parcels. Agricultural parcels, although ~30% of the total number of parcels hold ~44% of the total acreage of targeted forest. ~20% of parcels occur within a drinking water source water protection zone and ~30% of parcels have a stream directly protected by the forests of the property. Core parcel forest area totals 26,761 acres. Target parcels total 13,087 acres of forest providing the potential to increase the area of protected forest throughout the county by ~50%. Refer to Table 1 for more details on parcel priority results. Outreach to landowners begins later in 2026 and the program will run until the end of 2027.

For more information please contact David Osgood, Watershed Specialist, Berks County Conservation District, 1238 County Welfare Road, Leesport, PA 19533, david.osgood@berkscd.com, 610 372-4657 ext 204.