CHEP Neighborhood Biodiversity
Outreach Project
Managing for Biodiversity Conservation
Across the Landscape
As a landowner, there are many things you can do to conserve your
forest’s health. You can maintain water quality by carefully
planning and maintaining your access roads. You can boost forest soil
health by avoiding soil compaction, grazing, and rutting, thereby
conserving site productivity. You can maintain snags, dens, large
downed woody debris, and vernal pools, which offer habitat for wildlife.
But no matter how well you manage your own forest, the health of its
native biological diversity depends largely on forest health on a
broader level that extends well beyond the boundaries of your property
– what ecologists call the “landscape scale.”
In several Vermont communities, residents
are collaborating to plan for forest management that maintains contiguous
forest tracts, wildlife corridors, riparian buffers, and wetlands
across the
landscape. In Newfane,
Vermont, for example, landowners began talking together about maintaining
wildlife habitat. These conversations led to creation of the Newfane
Wildlife Habitat Improvement Group (WHIG), an affiliation of landowners
that includes 50 properties covering 7,000 acres in three towns.
WHIG landowners coordinate management plans to maintain natural
communities, wildlife habitat, and travel corridors.
Lincoln’s Colby Hill area not only links the Champlain Valley
lowlands to the spine of the Green Mountains, but also bridges two
significant blocks of conservation land in the Green Mountain National
Forest—the Bristol Cliffs Wilderness and the eastern flanks
of Mount Abraham. In the coming months, CHEP will be talking with
landowners in this region to explore the idea of collaborative planning
to help ensure that natural communities and wildlife corridors on
these low-elevation mountain lands remain healthy and intact. Lincoln’s
landscape is a special place that attracts people with deep interest
in land stewardship, and the impetus of the Colby Hill Ecological
Project primes the area for cooperative “neighborhood”
management.
Ecological diversity is high in the Colby Hill area, with a mosaic
of many natural community types, including various upland forest communities,
forested and open wetlands, shallow to deep soils, seepy to dry slopes,
and sandy to ‘heavy’ loam flats. Plant life, small mammal
populations, and insect and spider assemblages have been seen to differ
among all these different parts of the landscape.
Maintaining connections with natural forest cover and maintaining
large areas of the different natural communities is important to the
survival and proliferation of many native species. Because genetic
exchange and population dynamics occur at large scales, they require
intact landscapes where ecological processes can flow across property
boundaries. Learning ‘what’s where’ on the land
is the first step in understanding where human management activities
can be most critical, and working together as neighbors is one of
the best ways that we can maintain the natural resources we value.
