Eco Foresters

About Eco Foresters

Western North Carolina, and only western North Carolina: twenty-eight counties from Cherokee and Graham in the far southwest, up through Buncombe and Madison, out to Ashe and Alleghany and down the foothills to Cleveland and Gaston. Fifteen services, an above-average list, and an unusual mix — urban forestry and wetland delineation alongside appraisal, cruising and sale administration. Herbicide application and timber stand improvement are listed too, which is the maintenance side of owning mountain woodland rather than the selling side. One thing the register does not say: this is not a commercial consulting firm. EcoForesters — the organisation writes its name as one word — describes itself as a non-profit professional forestry organisation dedicated to conserving and restoring Appalachian forests through education and stewardship, founded in 2015, and says its methods emphasise sound ecological management over other profit and production driven forest management approaches. It draws the distinction itself: where a commercial forester generally recommends the course of action yielding the most profit, EcoForesters says it will present all reasonable options and then recommend the one that most effectively conserves and restores the forest for current and future generations, while remaining economically viable and generating revenue to the landowner. What it offers landowners is forestry consultation — forest assessment, inventory and appraisal, forest stewardship planning, timber management and forest carbon evaluation — alongside conservation and restoration work, invasive species control, conservation easement baseline and monitoring reports, mapping and analysis, and landowner education; on harvesting it favours crown thinning and group selection over the clear-cutting and high-grading it says much of the region's forestland has already been through. Since 2015 it reports writing forest stewardship plans for 120 private forestland owners covering more than 126,000 acres across nineteen Western North Carolina counties and Vermont, and coordinating sustainable timber harvests on fourteen properties totalling more than 878 acres, so the tracts it handles run from very small holdings — it keeps a dedicated page for owners of fewer than ten acres — up to several thousand. A second office sits at Sylva, in Jackson County, alongside the Asheville main office. As described on ecoforesters.org, read 22 September 2026.

Can they handle a timber sale?

Selling standing timber properly takes three things. Here's what the state register credits this firm with.

Everything they're registered for

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Counties covered