NEFF's founders believed one of the best ways to encourage people to properly manage their woodlands was to have examples of managed forest lands scattered throughout New England. In 1945, NEFF received a gift of 644 acres in southern New Hampshire, which became the first Foundation Forest. Today, NEFF owns 127 beautiful forests covering over 22,000 acres, which serve as outdoor classrooms for demonstrating sustainable forest management techniques. The forests provide an important source of income to support the work of NEFF, and are used as education sites in a variety of cooperative agreements with local and regional conservation organizations.

NEFF's forests are managed based on a set of Principles adopted by our Board of Directors. Management plans are written by a professional forester for each forest, and these plans serve as a guide to the short-and long term management goals for each forest and inform our decisions about specific actions to be taken on each forest. In the list below, forests marked with (++) are scheduled for management plans this year. If you have information that is pertinent to our planning process for any of our forests, please contact us.

NEFF also holds conservation easements on over 16,907 acres not including over 762,000 acres of easements from the Pingree Forest Partnership. To see a full list of our easements, click here.

An alphabetical listing of our Community Forests by state can be found by clicking on the state above. We also have a very cool clickable map of our Community Forests. Click on a forest on the list or on the clickable map to see a description and a brief history. There are maps, with trail locations, for 32 of the forests (marked with a *). For more information about any of our forests, please email us.

We encourage you to visit our Community Forests. Please remember that these are working forests and you may see evidence of recent or active timber harvesting. The New England Forestry Foundation encourages hiking, cross-country skiing and mountain biking. No motorized vehicles are allowed without permission.