well the weather may be throwing us off but this is typically the season State officials start what's known as prescribed burning in the state these are planned fires that maintain the health of our forests and prevent wildfires from both starting and spreading it's a problem that's increased in recent years and today a group of environmental experts told lawmakers that's just one of a number of threats facing our Woodlands Ted Goldberg reports after almost a year Senator Bob Smith is pleased with the work done by the forest stewardship task force they had 45 meetings or 45 hours of meetings and I think they very intelligently analyze the issues and came up with a good set of solutions for a lot of our problems these four task force co-chairs came to Trenton today and presented a 16-point framework for the state to protect its forests we wanted to find where 95 percent 80 percent of the participants could land on certain issues we learned early on that that was a very high bar given the group that was this large and this diverse Our Hope was that even if participants did not agree with every single recommendation that they would support the holistic package because their priorities were included one way or another the framework includes a wide range of advice for the Department of Environmental Protection like coming up with novel approaches to the state's overgrown deer population it impacts us and our cars but it also impacts our forests pretty significantly so specifically the New Jersey dep should identify and Implement new and Innovative steps and we say this because the actions that have been taken thus far are clearly not working would you elaborate on that why why are deer the Public Enemy Number One for Forest Health the deer population for proper regrowth of our forests is 10 times greater than what a sustainable population should be as well as a commitment to prescribed burning to avoid larger fires automatically we relate it to the Pinelands and we we think about you know catastrophic fire reducing fire risk thinning is an important element of setting prescribed fire but in no way can replicate the need for fire and for allowing in some cases some wildfire that can be contained to occur the task force says two-thirds of environmental groups here in the state support the framework our state has often lagged behind others to enact many of the priorities that have been identified in this support issues like regulating invasive species and scientifically designed deer management are two such examples some groups aren't on board they disagree with the part of the framework that recommends logging in parts of state forests the disturbances by mechanized Harvest sting of Timber and the removal of felt Timber including the need to cut new access rows causes impacts often devastating to sensitive ecological components of the fars we really should not be logging our mature forests in northern New Jersey after we log there's no path back to Forest because of the deer and the invasive species as for the price tag Senator Smith says the dep will have to weigh in before we have a good idea if all of this is feasible in Trenton I'm Ted Goldberg NJ Spotlight news [Music]