Work the woods. Keep them connected.

What a woodland project does

• Stewards map core areas, retained corridors, roads, open water and road crossings, with a minimum corridor width and where it comes from. Another steward reviews them before they are used.
• The old-growth spine follows streams, valleys and ridges. The engine drafts its corridors from mapped stream and ridge lines, shows where one disturbance would still cut a link, projects which links run through forest at old-growth age as stand ages and consent accrue, finds routes toward cooler ground, and names the woodlots whose owners’ consent would complete the next link.
• Every member’s harvest or treatment plan is checked against the reviewed corridors. A plan that breaks a link is blocked; members can let it proceed only by a recorded vote, and another steward still reviews it.

What it does not establish

The check is structural: whether mapped retained forest of at least the minimum width links the same core areas after a plan as before. It does not establish that wildlife moves through a corridor, that populations stay genetically viable, that a stand is old growth or that a plan meets any regulation. Projections assume no fire, storm or new road. Calling a stand old growth takes field evidence reviewed by someone other than the person who mapped it.

Have a woodlot that could be first?

The first season of Unbroken Woods needs one owner or a small group of neighbors: woods you work, a harvest you are planning, and a willingness to have the corridor map and a forester’s review published. Exact boundaries stay private unless you choose otherwise.

Email justin@viridisconservation.com with the town, the rough size of the woods and the harvest you have in mind. Leave out boundaries, parcel numbers and other private details until we talk.

The open method

The corridor check and the spine come from Dendritic Forest Management, an open-source (MIT) engine that anyone can run on the same data. Every result records the engine version and a checksum of its inputs. Woodland layers move between tools as a Landscape Package.