Next up in our Family Forest Carbon Program forester series is Tristan Kinnison, based in Athens, OH. Tristan works with landowners in Ohio and West Virginia, and is an ISA Certified Arborist with a Bachelor of Science in Wildlife and Conservation Biology and a minor in Plant Biology from Ohio University in Athens, OH.

Tristan grew up in a small town in southeast Ohio. As a child, his family relocated to Columbus where he felt less at home in the more urban landscape. His grandparents lived on a farm with several acres of forest, and all his happiest memories involved leaving the city and going into the woods. Tristan’s visits to his grandparents and their forests brought solace to his life. He declined admission to the Ohio State University to remain in the hills and forests of his youth. He has since then been committed to understanding, enjoying, and improving the environment of his Southeast Ohio home. 

Tristan’s father worked as a surveyor for most of his childhood, so he observed that forestry and surveying are closely linked in rural areas, with most harvests hinging on ownership boundaries. In college, he worked with Americorps, solidifying his commitment to helping landowners and the environment. Tristan also worked with an Athens-based environmental non-profit, Rural Action, on environmental and social restoration in Appalachian Ohio. He educated landowners on the benefits of forest farming, showing them how to earn revenue from their forestland, and how deferring harvest helped increase biodiversity and steward pressured plant species. Helping landowners develop a source of income other than timber extraction led to his work with the Family Forest Carbon Program. 

Tristan’s favorite aspect of being a forester with the program is meeting with landowners and helping them see their forests in a new light. He believes people’s love of forests and their desire to be good stewards of forests is instinctual. Tristan wants to help by providing the information they need, and he finds this work truly rewarding. He feels that the program does more than providing money to landowners and improving forests land, it also helps people to understand that their efforts have wide-reaching and ultimately globally-important impacts.

To find out more about how a professional forester like Tristan can help you reach your own woodland goals, see https://familyforestcarbon.org/. 

And remember, if you are thinking about enrolling in the Family Forest Carbon Program but want to work with your own forester, they can become a FFCP consulting forester.