The 87,000 acre Michaux State Forest in South Central Pennsylvania supports over 300,000 visitors a year and is a popular venue for entrepreneurs tapping into the market demand for large event opportunities for various trail user groups. Traces left from past extractive activities, informal trail creation by local trail users, accommodating trail use policies, and minimal budget and personnel resources allocated to forest trail management create significant challenges to incorporating trail system stewardship into overall forest management goals.
Results/Conclusions
Michaux managers have spatially inventoried and qualitatively monitored informal trail use through a variety of methods to gain a better understanding of both “ephemeral” and static components of the existing forest trail use on the forest. A trail assessment was conducted by Applied Trails Research in 2016 to identify priority areas for future work on trail system redesign to better serve existing user expectations, enhance user and manager trail management capacity and stewardship engagement, and mitigate negative ecological and social impacts of existing unsustainable trail segments. In the process, Michaux managers have shifted paradigms from one which viewed trails as inevitably problematic to forest ecological resilience to an understanding that forest trails are network features of terrestrial ecosystems that link organisms and habitats and interact with ecological change at the sub-system and system levels, reflective of many of the same network system properties inherent in mycelial networks and food webs. Understanding anthropocentric use of both formal and informal forest trail networks provides critical opportunities to reshape public and land manager perceptions of forests and forest habitats as living and interacting systems that are intrinsically inclusive of and responsive to all inhabitants.