• Doty, Jon
  Graduate School, University of Maine
  

Outcome-based Forestry (OBF) was approved by the Maine State Legislature in 2001 as

an alternative policy to Maine’s 1989 Forest Practices Act (FPA). In 2012, Irving Woodlands

(IW) became the first private forest landowner to sign an agreement with the Maine Forest

Service to implement OBF on its 1.25 million-acre land base in northern Maine. Given the

experimental nature of OBF, it is important to understand how this policy is being implemented

and its effects on forest management, the landscape, the company, and forest managers

implementing the policy. The objectives of this study were to: (1) document how IW is

implementing OBF and meeting each of the sustainability goals under the OBF agreement; (2)

explore the perceptions of IW foresters about implementing OBF at the corporate, social, and

individual level; and (3) investigate the likely landscape-level impacts of OBF policy relative to

the FPA. To accomplish these objectives, we documented how IW has incorporated OBF into

their forest management planning and operations, and how they are specifically meeting each of

the nine sustainability outcomes under their OBF agreement. We interviewed two IW foresters

about their perceptions of the advantages and disadvantages of OBF to their corporation, to

society, and to their personal responsibilities as professional foresters. To quantify the relative

effects of OBF and FPA policies on forest fragmentation and other landscape attributes, we used

a 6,000-acre area of IW ownership that had been harvested under the FPA over a 16-year period,

and compared how IW foresters would have harvested the same landscape under OBF and FPA

policies over the same time period.