Department of Environmental Protection

New Jersey Forest Service

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Atlantic White Cedar Restoration

Atlantic white cedar forests provide many ecological services including tremendous benefits to the hydrology and water quality of the Pinelands, a region specifically protected for its ground and surface water resources. Underlying much of the Pinelands is the Kirkwood-Cohansey Aquifer, a vast reservoir estimated to contain over 17 trillion gallons of some of the purest water in the country. Adjacent counties and municipalities rely on this aquifer for its clean and plentiful drinking water.

However, these ecological services are threatened because of the decline of Atlantic white cedar forests. While they once occupied approximately 500,000 acres in its range along the East Coast, less than 125,000 acres remain. In New Jersey, Atlantic white cedar occupied over 125,000 acres historically. That acreage is now down to less than 25,000. The New Jersey Forest Service has launched the Atlantic White Cedar Restoration Project in order to combat the continual forest decline. Through this project, the New Jersey Forest Service seeks to restore, reinforce, and enhance 1,000 acres of cedar forest per year for 10 years, for a total of 10,000 acres. Restoring such a large area of Atlantic white cedar will go a long way in offsetting the impacts of ground and surface water pollution and will ensure that these valuable ecosystem services are not lost.

How will this project be funded?
The New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection has a robust natural resource damage program that requires responsible parties to compensate for injuries to natural resources due to hazardous discharges. Compensation is typically done on site or nearby through land preservation or ecological restoration. When direct in-kind or in-place restoration is not possible, monetary compensation is paid to the Department to be put towards restoration projects in the future. The funding for the Atlantic white cedar project comes from settlements with responsible parties who have injured the public's ground and surface water resources.

Video: Atlantic White Cedar Restoration

Strategy:

Why cedar?
Why Cedar?

Atlantic white cedar swamps provide numerous benefits to plants, animals, carbon storage capacity, water quality, and people of New Jersey.

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How we got here
How We Got Here

Since early colonial times, cedar wood has been highly prized for its durability, quality, and light weight.

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What we are doing
What We Are Doing

Today, our cedar resource is at a tipping point.

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Double Trouble State Park - Restoration Timeline
What We've Done

We've been busy restoring cedar.

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Why Cedar?

Atlantic white cedar swamps provide a unique habitat for rare and endangered species in New Jersey. Swamp pink (Helonias bullata) is a federally threatened and state endangered flowering plant of the lily family. The saturated soils and canopy cover found within cedar swamps provide favorable conditions for the plant. In addition to flora, cedar swamps are a valuable habitat for the fauna of the Pinelands. At least one member of the butterfly and moth family, Hessel’s hairstreak (Mitoura hesseli), is exclusively dependent on Atlantic white cedar swamps, and is a species of special concern in New Jersey. Furthermore, cedar swamps provide winter hibernation habitat for the state-endangered Timber Rattlesnake (Crotalus horridus).

Ecosystem services provided by cedar swamps, like temperature moderation and water filtration, are valuable to wildlife and humans alike. Cedar swamps are a type of freshwater wetland, meaning their soils are saturated at least seasonally throughout the year. These ecosystems have a more moderate environment than the lands that surround them. Cedar swamps provide continuous cover throughout the year, creating a cool, shaded environment in the summer, and radiative cover in the winter.

Cedar swamps are vital to the character of the Pinelands and its water. Streams in the Pinelands are almost exclusively supplied by groundwater; the cedar helps to moderate base flow and acts as a filter for nutrients in water. Peat formed in the muck soils of cedar swamps removes and stores nutrients and pollutants from the water including significant quantities of carbon, providing a stable long-term carbon sink. The natural organic compounds, called tannins, are found in the muck soils of cedar swamps and contribute largely to the characteristic red-brown water color of the Pinelands region.

Atlantic white cedar has experienced severe decline across its range, with New Jersey being the last stronghold of the resource. However, New Jersey’s resource is extremely vulnerable with less than 25,000 acres across the state. Much of this acreage is imperiled by coastal saltwater inundation directly resulting from increasing rates of sea-level rise due to global climate change.

How We Got Here

Since early colonial times, cedar wood has been highly prized for its durability, quality, and light weight. For centuries this caused it to be harvested without a thought towards regrowing the cedar that was extracted.

For hundreds of years, swamps with cedar were picked over, so that only the cedar was cut. The undesirable wood of gnarled swamp hardwoods (like red maple and blackgum) meant that those trees were left behind, allowing them to rain seeds on cut areas. In the places where maple and blackgum were cut, their ability to sprout from stumps allowed them to grow faster than and overtop tiny cedar seedlings.

Cedar also suffered because it is sought-after by hungry deer of the Pinelands. During the latter half of the 20th century, excessive deer browsing led to cedar forests failing to regrow.

While Atlantic white cedar trees thrive in moist, sandy soils, they cannot tolerate prolonged waterlogging or salty conditions. Ongoing sea-level rise, ditching and wetland drainage, impoundment due to roads, flooding for agricultural water storage, and flooding from rebounding beaver populations all contribute to forest declines.

Today, our cedar resource is at a tipping point. The natural ecological processes that led to its formation have been interrupted for hundreds of years, threatening its existence. Rather than let this unique and valuable ecosystem be lost, we can achieve ecosystem restoration through thoughtful forest management. We must allow the ecological processes that sustained cedar through the millennia back on the landscape – a cycle of natural regeneration and disturbance.

What We Are Doing

The New Jersey Forest Service led a rigorous stakeholder process to identify and prioritize suitable areas for Atlantic white cedar restoration on State-owned property. Restoration techniques such as fencing, supplemental planting, and several harvesting methods (for more details on harvesting methods see, Silviculture: A NJ Forest Service Pocket Presentation) will be utilized to facilitate recruitment of new age classes of cedar within lowlands whose cedar stands have been fragmented from centuries of exploitive land use. The goal of this project is to expand and reinforce the integrity of existing Atlantic white cedar forests in the New Jersey Pinelands. In order to reach the 10,000-acre goal, it is vital to restore the continuity and connectivity of cedar forests through forest management.

Funding for the Atlantic white cedar restoration project comes from the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection’s Office of Natural Resource Restoration using settlement funds from polluters who have impacted the public’s ground and surface waters. For more information about the Office of Natural Resource Restoration click here.

If you are a property owner in New Jersey with five acres of forest who wants to manage your property to restore Atlantic white cedar, please click here for more information.

Young Atlantic white cedar

To learn more about what Atlantic white cedar restoration work has already taken place in the state click here.