The Nature Conservancy Celebrates 30 Years of Restoring Red Spruce in Maryland

The Nature Conservancy’s Maryland and Washington D.C. chapter celebrated a restoration milestone this spring, which marked 30 years since it began restoring red spruce trees in Western Maryland with annual planting events. Since 1996, TNC has hand-planted more than 100,000 red spruce trees in Garrett and Allegany County with the help of partners like Maryland’s Natural Heritage Program and the Central Appalachian Spruce Restoration Initative (CASRI). Just as important have been the hundreds of local volunteers—many of whom have shown up year after year—to plant red spruce seedlings every April.

“The effort to help bring red spruce back to Maryland is one of the most special ongoing conservation projects that we’ve ever been a part of,” said Deborah Landau, director of ecological management for the Maryland and DC Chapter. “It can often take years to see long-term habitat restoration efforts pay off—particularly forest restoration—which makes this truly worth celebrating. We have healthy groves of red spruce trees reappearing on Maryland’s Appalachian landscapes, providing a glimpse of what these incredible forests once looked like.”

More than a hundred years ago, red spruce trees were found throughout thousands of acres of Western Maryland forests, where they provided critical habitat for saw-whet owls, American martens and countless other Appalachian species. At the turn of the 20th century, the demand for red spruce lumber resulted in nearly all original red spruce forests being cut down in the state.

In 1996, ecologists from Maryland Heritage realized there was a trove of red spruce seedlings growing in West Virginia that could be replanted in places where they had been lost. They approached the Maryland chapter of The Nature Conservancy about planting the spruce seedlings on a TNC preserve called The Glades, and that kicked off an annual restoration event.

“The first seedlings were from a right-of-way near Canaan Valley, West Virginia, and were growing on rocks and other spots that gave them twisty, curvy root structures,” recalled Garrett College Professor Kevin Dodge, who assisted with some of the first plantings. “Folks would go and dig these gnarly seedlings up, which were already adapted to stress, and they became the first seed source for the Glades. When the site was surveyed years later, we found a remarkably high success rate considering the state of those seedlings when they were collected.”

In 2020, the project began collaborating with the Central Appalachian Spruce Restoration Initiative (CASRI) to help intentionally source saplings that would provide more genetic diversity to other spruce trees in the region.

“Being able to bring more genetic diversity to these red spruce stands will not only help support better future regeneration of the species but also make these trees—and the whole ecosystem by extension—more resistant to threats like disease and climate change,” said Nature Conservancy Appalachian Forest Director Katy Shallows. “Preserving and supporting these forests is critical to maintaining the benefits they provide to both people and wildlife, including providing habitat, removing carbon from the atmosphere, and protecting water and air quality.”

This April, local volunteers and members of the Chesapeake Conservation and Climate Corps joined TNC and other partners at The Glades Preserve 30 years later to plant almost 5,000 red spruce saplings. The Glades is one of oldest peatlands in MD, dating back 18,000 years, and is home to a variety of unique plant and animal species more commonly found much farther north.