Why the future of Long Island’s woodlands is adaptation and mitigation in one, and what that means for your own land.
In March 2025, wildfires swept through more than 600 acres of the Central Pine Barrens near Westhampton. Ninety fire and ambulance companies responded. Helicopters pulled water from Wild Wood Lake. A stretch of Sunrise Highway closed while crews worked to keep the flames from jumping into neighborhoods.
For most Long Islanders, it was the first time a wildfire felt local. For field biologists, it was a visible symptom of something we have been watching for years: Long Island’s forests are changing, and the way we manage them has not kept up.
What We’re Seeing in the Field
Walk the same woodlands year after year and the pattern is hard to miss, and it is exactly what the research on our region describes. Much of Long Island’s forest is becoming more mesic, meaning moister, shadier, and more closed-canopy over time. Fewer pines, more oaks. Fewer open meadows, more forest edge filling in.
Ecologists call this mesophication. In the absence of fire, pitch pine loses its foothold and the barrens convert toward closed-canopy forest, replaced by longer-lived oaks and less fire-adapted species like red maple.¹ Studies of the Long Island Pine Barrens specifically show pitch pine succeeding to more mesophytic species such as red oak and red maple, holding on only in the driest, sandiest sites.² In other words, less pines, more oaks is not a hunch. It is the documented trajectory of this landscape.
At the same time, stress is accumulating. Southern pine beetle outbreaks have left stands of dead pitch pine across the Pine Barrens, and officials pointed to those dead trees as fuel that fed the March 2025 fires. Add drier springs, harder winds, and longer droughts, and you get woodlands that are simultaneously overgrown in some places and dying back in others.
None of this means Long Island’s forests are doomed. It means they are in transition. The question is whether that transition is managed or unmanaged.
The Half of the Climate Equation Nobody Talks About
Most climate conversations focus on sources: the emissions side of the ledger. That side matters. But there is a second half of the equation that is undervalued and poorly understood, and it happens to be the half growing in your backyard.
Forests are natural infrastructure. They process carbon, hold and filter water, cool the air around them, and buffer wind. When woodland is cleared or degraded, we do not just lose trees. We lose processing capacity, and every remaining acre has to work harder.
This is why our team keeps coming back to one idea: if we adaptively manage our natural infrastructure, we can tip the system back in the right direction, more easily than we might think. Restoring forest does two jobs at once. It helps the land adapt to local impacts like drought, heat, and storm runoff, while also rebuilding the processing capacity that pulls carbon out of the air. It is adaptation and mitigation in one.
Managed Transition, Not Wishful Planting
Here is where we differ from the plant-a-tree feel-good campaigns. The Pine Barrens evolved with fire. Pitch pine is fire-dependent, using heat-triggered cones and thick, heat-resistant bark to regenerate after burns.³ Simply packing more trees into a fire-adapted landscape, or planting the wrong species in the wrong structure, does not make anything safer or healthier.
Adaptive management means reading where each site is headed and working with that trajectory:
- Where the land is shifting toward oak-dominated forest, plant the drought-tolerant hardwood communities that shift favors: oaks, hickories, and their understory partners.
- Where dead and stressed trees have accumulated, restore structure so the woodland functions as a living system instead of standing fuel.
- Where soil, light, and moisture say meadow, keep meadow. Open habitat is part of a healthy mosaic, not a failure to plant trees.
- Everywhere, plant communities rather than specimens, so canopy, understory, and shrub layers stabilize each other above and below ground.
This is the same principle behind our pocket forest and woodland restoration work: trees thrive in communities, not isolation. A restored system establishes faster, resists drought and wind better, and needs less from you every year as it matures
What This Means on Your Own Property
You do not need to own a hundred acres of Pine Barrens to be part of the processing side of the equation. Long Island is a patchwork of private yards, and collectively those yards are one of the largest restoration opportunities in the region.
On a residential scale, adaptive management looks like:
- Replacing struggling ornamental trees with native hardwood communities suited to where your soil and light are headed, not where they were twenty years ago.
- Planting a pocket forest: canopy, sub-canopy, and shrub layers installed together so the system closes canopy in a few seasons and begins taking care of itself.
- Keeping deep-rooted native vegetation on slopes and low spots, where it holds soil and puts stormwater to work instead of letting it run off.
Every one of these choices adds processing capacity back to the landscape. Multiply it across a neighborhood and you start tipping things back in the right direction.
The Call to Action Is Simple: Plant Trees. The Craft Is Planting Them Right.
Long Island’s woodlands are going to change over the coming decades no matter what we do. The choice is whether they change by neglect, one beetle kill and one fire at a time, or by design.
The Spadefoot team brings 100+ years of combined field biology experience to that design. We read what your land is already telling us, then restore the native systems that let it adapt and give back at the same time.
Healing Nature With Nature starts with the next tree you plant. Let’s make it the right one, in the right community, in the right place.