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Conserving The Health Of Our Local Forest Community

Colby Hill Ecological Project

 

VFF staff are excited to be working with the Colby Hill Ecological Project in Lincoln, Vermont. At the core of this project is a team of scientists that annually inventories and monitors the biological diversity—plants, amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals, invertebrates, lepidotera (butterflies) and odonates (dragonflies)—of 680 acres of private land in Lincoln and Bristol. Now entering its eighth field season, CHEP is accumulating information that can help ecologists:

  • Understand the natural biological and ecosystem diversity of a landscape.
  • Assess the occurrence and conservation of rare species, and learn about species new to Vermont.
  • Understand the effects of human management on forest composition and productivity.
  • Determine biomass production.
  • Understand natural disturbance patterns and the effect of human forest fragmentation on these regimes.

According to CHEP’s founder and advisor, Lester Anderson, this inventoried land, to be preserved as “forever wild” through conservation easements, “will be the control site against which the biodiversity, biological integrity, and water quality of other properties can be measured to set goals for achieving conservation objectives that maintain and enhance the forest ecosystem.”

In 2003, Vermont Family Forests partnered with the Colby Hill Ecological Project, to administer the project and conduct public education outreach through workshops, newsletters, and one-on-one landowner contacts.

The Anatomy of Healthy Land

When you visit your doctor, you trust that he or she bases both diagnosis and subsequent treatment of your symptoms on a broad foundation of medical knowledge that has accumulated over millennia of investigation of the human body, constantly informed by the latest, most rigorous research studies. Because no matter how well intentioned your doctors might be, if they don’t understand the inner workings of your body, which conditions are “healthy and normal” and which are signs of disease, and how your body will likely respond to treatment, they may do you more harm than good in their tinkering.

Yet when we humans make management decisions for the lands we steward, we often do so with limited knowledge of the complexity of the land’s natural communities. How can we make critical resource management and conservation decisions if we do not yet know what species occur, what their relative abundance and distribution are, and what sort of population fluctuations they may experience?

Over 50 years ago, Aldo Leopold wrote, “The most important characteristic of an organism is that capacity for internal self-renewal known as health…A science of land health needs, first of all, a base datum of normality, a picture of how healthy land maintains itself as an organism.” The Colby Hill Ecological Project was launched in 1998 to create that base datum for this region of Vermont.

Nothing out of the Ordinary

There’s nothing about the Colby Hill land that is particularly unique or different from other forests on the western slopes of the Green Mountains—which is what makes its conservation so important. The baseline data scientists accumulate here will be applicable to a broad landscape. Says CHEP manager, Marc Lapin, “Conserved lands, and especially large chunks of conserved natural lands, are generally located at higher elevations or are centered upon features that are unique, such as the cliffs and talus of Bristol Cliffs and Deer Leap. The ‘regular’ part of the landscape, particularly in lower elevation zones, is often overlooked and is therefore under-represented in conservation networks.”

Rapid Ecological Assessment

CHEP Project Manager Marc Lapin and Project Advisor Lester Anderson hope that, as neighboring landowners learn about the biological inventory process, they will be interested in conducting such inventories on their own lands. But assembling a team of scientists to conduct a full-blown inventory can be expensive. Thus scientists use what’s known as a Rapid Ecological Assessment (REA), which allows landowners to gain a basic understanding of the species and natural communities on their land.

Such an assessment also includes a landscape analysis of the local area, including wildlife corridors, appropriate breeding habitats, and physical diversity (including geology, soils, and topography). This helps landowners understand how different land uses of a parcel are augmented by or in conflict with land uses of adjacent and nearby parcels.

An REA report can also include a preliminary ecosystem map, a tool that enables landowners to more fully appreciate the diversity and complexity of their land, as well as base management units on ecological boundaries.

A Case in Point: Lincoln’s Colby Hill Town Forest

To test the Rapid Ecological Assessment process and provide a service to the town of Lincoln, CHEP Manager Marc Lapin conducted an REA on Lincoln’s 175-acre Colby Hill Town Forest, which is near CHEP’s conserved inventory lands. Three scientists—Lapin (botany and ecology), herpetologist Jim Andrews (reptiles and amphibians), and mammologist Jan Decher (small mammals)—surveyed the 175-acre area in 2003. Their reports are available in PDF format.