ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, July 8, 1996 TAG: 9607080108
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-4 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: NEWPORT NEWS
SOURCE: Associated Press
Rapid growth by Virginia's sprawling cities and towns over the last decade is eating up forests, creating a patchwork of woods that are less environmentally and economically useful, according to a U.S. Forest Service report.
The report looks specifically at the 14 million acres of central and eastern Virginia that drain into the Chesapeake Bay - roughly 55 percent of the state.
In the decade ending in 1995, some 2.3 percent of the forests in that area - nearly 200,000 acres - were destroyed, according to the report.
New homes, industrial parks and shopping centers accounted for most of the change, said Richard Cooksey Jr., a planner with the Forest Service in Annapolis, Md. The forests that remain are often fragmented, becoming less useful as wildlife habitats or in maintaining clean air and water.
``We're actually reducing the effectiveness of the forest,'' Cooksey said.
At the same time, ownership of the forests has also become more fragmented, as more people build houses in the woods. That, in turn, is making large forest areas unavailable for economic activities, such as logging or public recreation.
``If we chop up that forest too much, it loses its ability to act as an economically viable unit,'' Cooksey said.
The report lays out the health of forests in the entire Chesapeake Bay watershed, the 41 million acres from Virginia to New York that drain into the bay. Forests are important to water quality in the bay because they help filter nutrients and sediment, stabilize soils and moderate flooding.
``Acre for acre, forests are the most beneficial land use in terms of water quality,'' the report says.
Overall, the amount of forest in the watershed has remained static over the past decade or so, said Cooksey. Forests have made a comeback in more remote areas, including the headwaters of the Susquehanna River in southern New York and northeast Pennsylvania and the headwaters of the Potomac in West Virginia.
But those gains have been offset by losses in and around urban areas, particularly in Virginia and Maryland. The area between Richmond and the Peninsula lost 7 percent of its forests between 1985 and 1995, almost 30,000 acres, the report says. That's similar to the rate of loss in the Washington suburbs of Northern Virginia over the same time period.
``The most clear and consistent finding is that the counties closest to the bay have experienced the greatest forest decline,'' the report concludes.
The sprawl of cities and towns has outpaced population growth, the report notes. While the number of people living in the Chesapeake Bay watershed increased 50 percent to 12.4 million between 1950 and 1980, the amount of land used for houses, stores and businesses increased 180 percent.
Forests once covered 95 percent of the Chesapeake Bay's watershed. By 1900, roughly 30 percent to 40 percent of those forests remained, the rest having been cut down for fuel and lumber and to create farmland and cities.
Forests made a comeback from that low point, reclaiming abandoned farms and old logging and mining areas, so that by 1970, forests covered 62 percent of the watershed. But by 1990, that figure had dropped back to 58 percent.
AP-DS-07-07-96 1540E
LENGTH: Medium: 67 linesby CNB