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Research and Education in Ecology, Conservation and Forest Biology
July Highlights
Harvard Forest Welcomes New Senior Ecologist
We are very pleased to announce that Elizabeth Crone, Associate Professor of Wildlife Biology at the University of Montana, will assume the new position of Senior Ecologist at the Harvard Forest this fall.
Elizabeth has a PhD in Botany and Genetics from Duke University and is a population ecologist with an emphasis on wildflowers, butterflies, and bees. Her research focuses on improving predictions of the effects of human-caused changes in landscape structure and climate on plant and animal population dynamics, and addressing challenges in conservation and management while advancing new approaches in theoretical ecology. To address emerging research questions, Elizabeth uses mathematical and statistical tools (such as Bayesian statistics and decision analysis), as well as experimental and observational field research.
Elizabeth’s position will begin at half-time this fall as she transitions her graduate students and shifts her new and ongoing NSF-funded research to Petersham where she will be in full-time residence beginning January 2011.
Artist-in-Residence: Regan Golden-McNerny
From July 10 to 20, artist Regan Golden-McNerny will be visually investigating what scientists know about the woods, studying both Harvard Forest and Minnechoag Mountain, a more suburban forest in Ludlow. She will draw and photograph, visit field sites with researchers, and comb the archives here at Harvard Forest - and present her drawings, notes, and photographs for students and the public at the Fisher Museum. Her residency is supported in part by the National Science Foundation’s LTEaRts Program. Regan comes to Harvard Forest following a residency at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. Examples of her work are available on her website
Join us at 4:00pm, Wednesday, July 14, for an Art Talk and Q&A with Regan Golden-McNerny, who will be presenting her drawings, notes, and photographs.
Field Wireless Network
The Harvard Forest Field Wireless Network (HFFW) became operational this spring with funding from the National Science Foundation and Harvard University. The HFFW provides high-speed Internet access to field sites across the 400-ha Prospect Hill Tract, enabling researchers and students to monitor and control their equipment over the network and to collect and process data in real time.
One such project is a regional phenology study by Prof. Andrew Richardson (Harvard Dept. of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology) that utilizes four tower-based cameras to record changes in the forest canopy and subcanopy over time. The HFFW is jointly administered by the Forest and Harvard Network Operations.
Wildlands and Woodlands Regional Conference
The successful release of the Wildlands and Woodlands vision for New England culminated in a standing-room only crowd at the project’s regional conference in Concord, NH, on June 4. The host of the event, the New England Forestry Foundation, registered 275 attendees—landowners, scientists, forest industry professionals, conservation organizations, land trusts, philanthropists, media representatives, and policymakers. The attendees came together in the morning for keynote lectures about the Wildlands and Woodlands vision by David Foster and James Levitt of the Harvard Forest, followed by V. Alaric Sample, President of the Pinchot Institute in Washington DC. Conference attendees expressed their thoughts during afternoon workshops on land protection partnerships, innovative conservation finance, protecting farmland, and establishing woodland councils.
Browse the extensive news coverage from the W &W project release.
Grad student news
Israel Del Toro received two grants in June - $5000 from the National Geographic Society and $3500 from the Lewis and Clark Fund of the American Philosophical Society. Both awards will help Izzy, along with REU student Adam Clark (Harvard '11) sample ants throughout northeastern North America this summer. Izzy is a graduate student at the University of Massachusetts, where he is studying the impacts of climate change on distribution and range expansion of ants. His Ph.D. advisor is Harvard Forest Senior Ecologist Aaron Ellison.
Landowner Decisions: Differences in the Northeast
The future of landscapes dominated by private ownership are largely a function of often independent decisions made by hundreds or thousands of individual private landowners. Most owners do not have plans for their land or avail themselves of professional advice, and instead make reactive decisions based on immediate need or circumstance. Since most owners do not receive professional advice, we studied the social networks of informal contacts around landowners as potential sources of information and advice about land.Our pilot 2008 work based on interviews estimated networks of 7-10 people, on average, around woodland owners who have made a concrete decision to either ease their land or harvest timber. A subset of those contacts (i.e., 1-2 people) were identified by landowners as important or influential to a concrete decision. This was in a state (MA) where harvesting is regulated, thus necessarily involving a forester, and with well over 100 land trusts creating a dense and vibrant network of easement expertise in the public and non-profit sectors. This summer Dave Kittredge and Mark Rickenbach (former Bullard Fellow; Univ. of WI) are working with Megan Jones and Kristen Schipper (REU students) to probe landowners and their networks in two distinctly different-but-adjacent states and policy environments:
- VT: with no regulated harvest, essentially one land trust with statewide influence (Vermont Land Trust), and state forestry agency county foresters charged primarily with overseeing their state's current use property tax program; and
- NH: with no regulated harvest, many state and local land trusts, and county foresters who work for UNH's Cooperative Extension System. These county extension foresters are active local educators, with proactive local programming.
Do different agency and policy contexts result in different egocentric networks, and the extent and ways in which landowners rely on informal networks for information?