These acres are Wayne National Forest
- Leah Conway
- 3 minutes ago
- 8 min read
In southeastern Ohio, between one and two hours from Columbus, sit three tracts of non-contiguous land comprising 244,000 acres. With 300+ miles of trails, these acres are used annually by an estimated 240,000 hikers, hunters, mountain bikers, fisherman, rock climbers and other outdoor recreationists alike. They’re enjoyed by region locals, college students at nearby Hocking College and Ohio University, and non-locals engaging in tourism, a major revenue source for this part of the state. They contain countless plant and animal species, including the federally endangered Indiana bat; the state endangered timber rattlesnake; Ohio’s state amphibian, the spotted salamander; and the once extirpated but now recovering black bear and bobcat. These acres are Wayne National Forest.
In March 2025, President Trump announced a plan to increase domestic timber production, and under this directive and the National Forest Service’s management plan, 80% of WNF is considered suitable for logging. To understand why large-scale logging would be problematic, the Wayne’s history first needs to be consulted. Ohio’s only national forest was established in 1934 after decades of mining had left the land barren and polluted. To this day, the watershed still suffers from acid mine drainage (AMD) in headwater streams like Sunday and Monday Creek, where the extremely low and highly acidic pH presents as a vivid orange color saturating the water. The iron hydroxide creating this shocking visual display and subsequent pH make the water inhospitable for fish, amphibians, and aquatic macroinvertebrates. Local effort Sunday Creek Watershed Group, sponsored by nonprofit Rural Action, has been working for years to combat the damage done in the 19th and 20th centuries. But the lasting effects from coal and gas mining don’t only occur in aquatic habitats; the soil surrounding the hundreds of abandoned mine sites in southeast Ohio still contains contaminants held in place by tree roots. To log these areas would be to risk releasing this toxic coal waste, likely to be washed with rainwater into more streams with the potential to contaminate drinking water sources in some areas.
The Wayne is seen by economic interests as a potential source of revenue, but ecologists and natural resources professionals acknowledge that a more accurate assessment of the nationalforest is to see it as a land still recovering. In the 1800s, Ohio’s total forest cover had dropped to just 12% as a result of mining, logging, and development. As of 2012, that percentage rose to 30.7, and this increase was reflected in the gradual but steady return of black bear and bobcat after unregulated hunting and habitat loss saw both species disappear from the buckeye state by 1850. Wildlife cannot exist where their habitat does not, and forests are largely where both black bear and bobcat spend most of their time. Bats, too, use forests, and notably across the globe are suffering the devastating effects of white nose syndrome, a fungal infection with an extremely high mortality rate. Timbering 195,000 acres of the Wayne would remove a huge chunk of available habitat for species already just on the rebound or currently declining, in particular for bats, which often roost in large colonies when hibernating; living in close quarters allows the infection to spread much more easily, and more individuals will be forced to roost in fewer places in higher densities if portions of their habitat are lost to logging. In the case of the timber rattlesnake, a highly vulnerable species in Ohio, males prefer old growth forests that generally offer better access to larger rodents. If forced into a space where there are only small rodents, male snakes must spend more time hunting to survive and less time searching for females to mate with. Spotted salamanders, though nowhere near endangered, are amphibians – the most imperiled group of vertebrates on the planet – and also make their homes in forests. Their porous skin, through which some of them breathe, is extremely sensitive to water pollutants, but equally as important to consider are their breeding locals. Vernal pools are temporary, fishless pools in wooded areas where frogs, toads, and salamanders convene to mate and lay their eggs in during spring, before returning to their woodland burrows for the rest of the year. Site fidelity is high, meaning most individuals return to the same pool where they hatched to breed. If faced with the loss of their breeding site, they may not breed or may be forced to search for a new location, exposing them to the dangers of travel. Again, spotted salamanders numbers are stable, but loss of habitat never spells well for any species.
It's worth noting that logging is already taking place in the national forest, and has been, just on a smaller scale. When performed properly and under the correct permits, logging can be used as a forest management tool. Since European settlement, natural phenomena like wildfires that would periodically scathe portions of the landscape, effectively “managing” the affected environment, have been suppressed. This can result in an overstocked forest, hence why some kind of management needs to be applied. The presidential executive order “Immediate Expansion of American Timber Production” uses this principle to claim that the desired 25% increase in logging nation-wide is in part in service of protecting our forests and people by reducing the risk of wildfires. But data from fires elsewhere, particularly in California where wildfire season grows longer and more intense each year as a result of our warming climate, shows that clearcutting and large-scale operations are more likely to increase the severity of wildfires for a number of reasons.
The most valuable timber in a forest is often the oldest and largest, but it’s the oldest trees that are most resistant to fire. Further, when a large tract of forest is logged, heavy machinery and massive equipment crush saplings and brush and leave behind non-merchantable material such as woodchips or stripped bark, which are collectively known as slash. The equipment also has a history of tracking in invasive grasses – and the Wayne’s already got plenty of Japanese stiltgrass – that, aside from their own damage to the ecology of the area they invade, are dry and highly combustible. Then, the forest canopy is opened up, allowing more sun to reach the forest floor, and this both enables the invasive grasses to grow and also dries the forest floor and whatever material, such as slash, that is present on it. In a healthy, unlogged forest, the overhead canopy is thick from old, mature trees, keeping the ground below shaded and moist. There, downed trees and the soil retain moisture, too, creating an environment less conducive to the spread of fire. Generally, a thicker forest also slows wind, which would fuel fire and spread embers, as well.
Any large-scale logging operation also requires roads to be built, and studying past fires has shown that in every instance where there are more people, there are more fires – whether they’re started from campfires, tossed cigarette butts, or even sparks thrown from vehicles. So, if wildfire prevention is the goal, as U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins has stated, greatly increasing timbering in the Wayne is counterintuitive. Another potential concern aside from fire when looking at logging impacts is flooding. Just as the old coal contaminants are held in place by tree roots, so is excess water from heavy storm events absorbed by tree roots, decreasing the risk of flooding.
As an aside, the roads required to be built for machinery and logging trucks to pass through also require tax-payer funding, and they’re not cheap. The local community can end up in the negative when the timber logged doesn’t pay for the roads that had to be built.
In a broader sense, there’s the idea that trees are a renewable resource, and it’s not entirely wrong, but classifying wood products as environmentally friendly isn’t entirely right, either. In addition to the aforementioned impacts logging can have, we also have to acknowledge that forests are a huge carbon sink, something our planet is in desperate need of as more and more greenhouse gases accumulate in the atmosphere as a result of human activity.
Additionally, forests in the eastern United States are experiencing a transition giving foresters concern. Our traditionally oak-hickory forests are being replaced by beech-maple, and this change in forest composition has the potential for a number of far-reaching effects. Oak and hickory trees produce great quantities of hard mast (acorns, hickory nuts) that serve as an important food source for white-tailed deer, turkeys, squirrels, chipmunks, and other wildlife. When oaks and hickories, which grow at a slower rate than beeches and maples, are cut down, their offspring cannot compete with the faster-growing beeches and maples – or invasive species that may be present in the soil bank and ready to take advantage of extra sunlight – and are shaded out. Beech and maple trees do produce mast, but beech nuts and maple fruits, known as samaras, have far fewer calories and protein to provide. In this aspect, too, logging changes the species make-up of a forest and thus affects its inhabitants beyond habitat loss, fire, or flooding.
Again, logging can occur in a limited fashion and be a part of forest management, as it has been in the Wayne for a long time, as David Swanson of Hocking College mentions when questioned about the future of the Wayne. Swanson, who received his PhD in Forest Resources Science at West Virginia University, was an Ohio Department of Natural Resources Division of Wildlife employee for 14 years and worked on the Wayne’s 2006 forest management plan. His duties concerning the plan involved providing materials in support of limited clearcutting (i.e. benefits to certain species such as ruffed grouse that use the early successional habitat resulting from logging). “I did an annotated literature review on the benefits of clearcutting as well as the negative effects. For example, you won’t have forest salamanders there for 20 years until you get a canopy again.” On the large-scale clearcutting, he says, “You don’t want wide-scale because you want a mix of early, late, and mid-successional stages all at the same time. You never want to skew it to all one [type].” Essentially, by cutting in small patches of 10 acres on a rotation say every 5-10 years, you avoid creating a monotypic habitat that can only support a few species and instead create a diverse habitat with something to offer a host of different species.
Swanson also notes that in Ohio, foresters have retention guidelines around endangered species such as Indiana bats, where they cannot harvest shagbark hickories or standing dead trees – where bats may tuck themselves under the loose bark or in old woodpecker holes to roost – to minimize damage done to the species present in the area. However, USDA Secretary Rollins shared a memo in April 2025 instructing the U.S. Forest Service, the body that would be managing any logging activity in the Wayne and other national forests, to operate under a new streamlined permitting process, expediting work and ignoring guidelines set forth years ago under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), including the requirements for public notice and input. This is after NEPA was already altered earlier this year to better suit Trump’s timber expansion plan. To ignore NEPA would be to allow contractors to operate without consideration for the environmental impact of their projects because NEPA requires federal agencies to determine if their proposed actions will have significant negative environmental impacts. Following this direction, in the memo, Rollins states, “Authorized emergency actions to respond to emergency situations include the: salvage of dead or dying trees…” meaning, the standing dead trees used by wildlife such as the endangered Indiana bat are open to harvest.
It’s clear small-scale timber harvesting with consideration for and the benefit of wildlife is not what the current administration has planned for American forests. In the president’s own words, “We are freeing up our forests so we are allowed to take down trees and make a lot of money.” But when 86% of Ohio’s forested land is privately owned, should the remaining 14% that’s public and so ecologically valuable be used and permanently altered for temporary profit?
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Leah Conway is an Ohio naturalist and wildlife photographer. She has been photographing local Ohio flora and fauna for the past ten years, with an emphasis on salamanders, wildflowers, and lepidoptera – butterflies and moths. During this time, she also acquired a Bachelor of Fine Art in Photography from Columbus College of Art & Design and, mostly recently, a natural resources management degree from Hocking College. She hopes to advocate and facilitate positive change for the natural world via education, inspiration, and direct participation in conservation causes.
Instagram: leahconwayphotography