Voluntown — For resilient roadside trees, broad and bushy beats tall and slender.

“A big part of what we love about Connecticut is our forested roads,” Jeff Ward, senior scientist at the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station said Friday, surveying a line of thin, towering white pines paralleling utility wires along Route 165. “What we want to show municipal officials and landowners is that they can manage their roadside forests, to show that you can have a nice looking, healthy forest that provides good habitat and reliable power.”

As part of the state’s Stormwise project, created in response to widespread outages after severe storms in 2011, Ward and Thomas Worthley, assistant extension professor at the University of Connecticut, have identified this property in the Pachaug State Forest as the New London County resilient, healthy roadside forest.

By the end of this year, many of the tallest pines and oaks that threaten the power lines in this 100-foot wide, 1,100-foot long strip will be thinned out. Shorter growing varieties such as dogwood, blue beech, witch hazel and ironwood will be encouraged, and pepperbush and other native shrubs given room to spread into needed wildlife habitat.

Overall, the plan favors trees with fat trunks and wide crowns that are best able to stand firm when buffeted by strong winds. After a buffer of the stoutest trees along the road and utility lines, there would be a second tier of oaks and maples, then, farthest from the road, the tallest growing evergreens.

“We want to bring forest management right out front where everyone can see it,” said Worthley. “We can have forests that provide all the stormwater control, wildlife habitat and aesthetic benefits, but are less risky. What we want to communicate to the public is that there will be a change, and it will require some disturbance.”

The purpose of Stormwise, a collaboration of UConn's Department of Natural Resources and the Environment and the School of Engineering, the state, the state's two biggest utilities and the U.S. Forest Service, is to create more resilient border woodlands, since fallen trees are the main cause of outages. One site in each of the state’s six counties has been chosen to demonstrate the management techniques the Stormwise team is advocating.

“We did a risk assessment on every tree here,” Ward said, “to determine whether it was hollow, or had root decay or stem decay, and whether the branches are too close together or it was crowded near other trees.”

Trees marked with white rings are the “winners,” Ward said — the ones that will be kept and given more room to grow — while other markings denote the ones slated for the saw.

A second aspect of the project, Worthley said, involves bringing utility companies that have been the “de facto managers” of much of the state’s roadside forests together with loggers and landowners. The purpose, he said, is the enable loggers and landowners to extract some economic benefit out of good forest management, by cutting roadside trees in a way that preserves their value as lumber or other forest products, instead of just turning the felled trees into mulch.

“We’re trying to have an eye for what can be turned into a product,” Worthley said.

The third component of Stormwise, Ward said, is working with Audubon Connecticut to survey each of the demonstration sites to determine how to foster improved bird habitats while managing them for storm resiliency.

Overall, Worthley said, the project intends to give the state’s roadside forests a makeover that will benefit wildlife, utility customers and utilities, who would both benefit if maintenance costs could be cut and outages reduced.

“Wouldn’t it be nice if the power companies only had to come back every 10 to 15 years to do trimming instead of every four years?” he asked, referring to the current schedule utilities follow for tree-trimming.

j.benson@theday.com

Twitter: @BensonJudy