RAFAEL GARCIA
K-State Research and Extension News Service
MANHATTAN, Kan. — You may not think about it often, but you have a favorite tree, Matthew Norville bets.
Maybe it's a droopy weeping willow that you wove through as a kid in your grandma's backyard. Or a towering, mature oak older than the city park it shades. It might even be a young evergreen at the town crossroads that shines bright with decoration each winter for the holidays.
"People hold trees close to their heart," said Norville, community forestry program coordinator for the Kansas Forest Service. "It's fascinating how people make trees a big part of their community, and not just physically."
Trees have always been a part of the Kansas landscape — thousands of Eastern cottonwoods and maples, among other species, have long dotted the waterways and low valleys of the old prairie landscape, serving essential roles in the state's ecology.
And as communities have sprouted across the state, so too have the canopies that have provided shelter, recreation and natural beauty for Kansans for more than 150 years.
Through the Kansas Forest Service, professionals like Norville are ensuring that one of the state's most precious resources can continue to thrive — with the right trees in the right places.
Overseeing 5.2 million acres of Kansas trees takes community partnerships
Founded in 1887, the Kansas Forest Service serves rural landowners, communities, rural fire districts, forest and arboriculture industries, and everyday Kansans through various local, district and statewide programs, said state forester Jason Hartman.
"We provide a variety of services through our conservation tree and shrub planting, fire management, community forestry, rural forestry, marketing and utilization, and forest health programs," Hartman said.
The independent agency is housed within K-State Research and Extension, with a separate state office and headquarters about a mile west of the university's Manhattan campus.
The Kansas Forest Service exemplifies the engagement-focused mission of K-State, which aims to integrate engagement across all the university does. By building direct connections with communities and landowners statewide, the service represents exactly the kind of real-world impact K-State envisions in leading as a next-generation land-grant university.
The two entities are also working together to build the Kansas Rural Fire and Workforce Development Center, a new $5 million shared facility that will boost current efforts to provide critical training and equipment for firefighters and state-of-the-art instructional space for academic and regional workforce development programs.
"For most of our existence, except maybe those first 10-15 years, we've worked hand in hand through and with the K-State extension system to connect people to our publications, resources and expertise," Hartman said.
While Kansas isn't known for having huge, dense thickets across its landscape, the state still has extensive stands of trees throughout its hills, prairies, riverways and communities. About 5.2 million acres of forests, woodlands and trees — or roughly 10% of the state's total area — make up Kansas' canopy.
The vast majority of those forests are on private land, and to care for and manage them, the Kansas Forest Service relies on partnerships with local landowners and communities to ensure the state's forests remain vibrant and healthy.
"In Kansas, we don't have any public or national state forests," Hartman said. "That means that our connection, as a forest service, has to be different. We have to connect through our communities."
The forest service also plays a key role in removing or keeping trees from areas where they don't serve a useful purpose.
That includes the removal of dead or sick trees in urban areas, as well as work to stop or reverse the trend of woody encroachment — or the overgrowth of woody trees, shrubs and bushes on traditionally grassy plains — both to help preserve local ecology and to remove fuel for dangerous wildfires.
"In forestry, we always say that it's about putting the right trees in the right place," Hartman said. "We like trees where they belong, and we're just as much against them being where they shouldn't be."
Forest service is rooted in every corner of Kansas
At its headquarters in Manhattan, the Kansas Forest Service hosts most of its statewide programs, including its popular Conservation Tree Planting Program.
The program — which grows and processes tree and shrub seedlings from both in-house and external partner nurseries — sells and ships hundreds of thousands of plantings each year to private landowners, foresters and communities around Kansas.
These plantings serve as wildlife habitats, windbreaks, wood lots, timber plantations and riparian plantings that help prevent erosion along stream and river banks.
The state headquarters also hosts a shop for the forest service's Federal Excess Property, Firefighter Property and Equipment Donation programs.
These three programs support volunteer firefighter departments across the state with essential fire-fighting equipment from federal surpluses at a fraction of their retail costs. The service has agreements with more than 500 Kansas fire districts that have put more than 600 pieces of equipment, valued at more than $43 million, on the front lines fighting Kansas wildfires.
But much of the Kansas Forest Service's most visible presence is in its fieldwork, which comes from district offices across the state.
Through these offices, the Kansas Forest Service provides expertise via its staff of fire management officers and rural, community and district foresters.
Staff at these offices make hundreds of visits to volunteer fire departments, local landowners and communities across the state, serving as expert advisors and connectors to resources.
"Much of this work does take money for landowners to accomplish, but our foresters connect landowners to opportunities through groups like the National Resources Conservation Service cost-share program," Hartman said. "They also host educational events with the public in their areas, and they go to schools to get students informed and interested in natural resources."
Community foresters are the agency's connection to the state's smaller communities. While medium and large cities can typically hire staff with forestry training, smaller towns rely on the Kansas Forest Service's community foresters to provide technical expertise.
These foresters develop strategic plans to help towns identify, manage and plan care for the trees in their communities, said Matthew Norville, the community forestry program coordinator.
"We work with towns of 98 residents to tens of thousands. The size doesn't matter — we're here to serve all Kansans, but we also prioritize helping our communities that would otherwise not get that kind of expertise," Noville said.
Serving Kansans through trees
In terms of state funding, about 30 cents of each Kansan's taxes go toward the Kansas Forest Service, Hartman said.
But calculating the return on those 30 cents of per-capita investment is difficult. Although they may not realize it, most Kansans benefit from at least one of the agency's services, said Ariel Whitely-Noll, communications coordinator for the Kansas Forest Service.
"Whether they're someone who is buying a tree through our conservation tree program, or they live in a community that has had a canopy study done by one of our foresters, or they live in a community that was protected from a wildfire because of the training and work of our staff — it's hard to quantify exactly how much value the Kansas Forest Service is providing for the state, because there is so much we do," she said.
There's never any shortage of work for the Kansas Forest Service, Hartman said. Changing climate conditions means foresters must help communities adapt and make new plans to protect their forest ecosystems. Wildfires are getting hotter, more extreme and more common, happening during parts of the year when they used to be rare.
Invasive species of trees, like the Bradford pear, and insects, like the emerald ash borer, continue to require the constant vigilance and prevention efforts of the Kansas Forest Service's collective staff.
But no matter the challenge, Hartman said his staff always rises to meet it.
"The staff of the Kansas Forest Service are some of the most dedicated you will find anywhere," Hartman said. "Doing all they can for public safety and natural resources is what drives them to excel."
Ultimately, the Kansas Forest Service isn't about any single tree or forest.
It's about people, and putting tree resources in places to support them.
"If a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound?" Norville said. "The famous answer is that it depends on whether someone is there to listen to it or not. In that same way, does forestry matter without the people? No, it doesn't, and that's why we focus so much of our work on solving peoples’ forestry problems in Kansas.
"That's our main purpose — to serve Kansans as best as we can," he continued. "We're not here for the trees. We're here for the people."