Forests Archives | Bainbridge Island Parks & Trails Foundation

Moritani Preserve a model for conservation, restoration

For a forester, a walk in the woods is never just that.

When she first stepped into Moritani Preserve, Malloree Weinheimer – atypical of her profession, perhaps, with a background in art history – could see the cascading layers of meaning that overlay the land: ancestral home to the island’s indigenous peoples; the vestiges of commercial berry production, when Japanese and Filipino farmers cleared the property and worked the soil; to over-dense stands of Douglas firs planted 50 or 60 years ago, presciently, to buffer against creeping suburbia.

And the poor health today of those same trees: hundreds of “lollipops” with skinny trunks, withered branches and mere tufts of green at the top. The trees may look pretty to the untrained eye, but the picture of forest vitality, Moritani Preserve is not. Yet.

“It’s overstocked and looks like a (tree) plantation on the north part,” […]

Environmental Conference videos now online

Nothing defines Bainbridge Island like our beautiful natural spaces, especially our forests. So we were pleased to see so many of you at The Future of Our Forests: Bainbridge Island and the Climate Crisis, the recent Bainbridge Environmental Conference, as we gathered online to confront the profound challenges these majestic resources face.

The Parks Foundation is proud to have played a lead role in planning the conference. Stewardship of our forested parklands is absolutely central to our mission, through the Student Conservation Corps, Earth Corps and other environmental programs sustained by your support.

Our goal for the conference was to move past “talk” toward plans for tangible action at every level: from thoughtful, active management of our large forest tracts, both public and private, to small actions at the homeowner level for protecting habitat and wildlife, to a deeper appreciation of the health and wellness benefits that our precious […]