- Hi, everybody.
We have officially made it to the end
of the 2021 FEMC Annual Conference.
I know that historically, if you're like me,
you've really enjoyed the FEMC Conference as a way
to be able to connect with colleagues, old friends,
and also to have an opportunity to mingle and maybe identify
new potential collaborators and partnerships.
And so I know,
especially as the second year in a row that we have pivoted
to a remote format that has sucked a little bit of the joy
out of what this conference usually means for all of us.
But at the same time,
I think it's kind of poignant that the theme for this
year's conference was re-imagining forested communities
in a time of disruption.
So originally when we started planning for this conference,
I really thought of this from a very forest centric
perspective, very much in terms of the forest ecosystem
and the communities that it supports.
But now I realized that we also are a professional community
of people who work to really sustain this forest ecosystem
that we depend on.
And we are also in a time
of great disruption, both professionally and personally.
So I just in particular, wanted to again,
give a big shout out to the FEMC staff for really being able
to pivot us from what we had hoped would be an in-person
or hybrid conference to this online format
and how much effort it took
to make sure that this would go smoothly.
I still am terrified of course,
that the technology will fail us in some way,
but hopefully it has worked well for you
and you have been able to feel engaged and
that you're able to actually participate.
I also want to thank all of our speakers for being willing
to share their knowledge and expertise and perspectives.
When you're looking at a computer screen
and we don't have the applause or ability
to interact as much with people after our talks.
But I did want to highlight again how impressed I was
with the lineup of presenters that we had this year.
I'm always particularly impressed by the diversity
of disciplines that are represented at this meeting,
the diversity of perspectives and approaches
to all of us, really working towards the same goal.
How do we maintain these resilient forested ecosystems
and communities when we are facing
so much change at the current time?
So I just wanted to highlight a few of the things that I was
able to curate as I sat here, absorbing all of it.
And again, this is still ongoing.
I've had, you know, just a couple minutes,
bear with me while I just share some of the things
that I thought were particularly poignant,
just in terms of sharing different approaches.
Erica Swendson was our plenary speaker yesterday morning,
and I really appreciated her perspective on being able to
engage local communities in the stewardship of their forest.
And she provided quite a few examples of how this has worked
in an urban setting,
but I think that there's real opportunity there
for all of us working across the Northeast
to think more about how our regional partnerships,
for example, those of us working here together, you know,
with the FEMC Collaborative, the larger collaborative,
how can we maybe work to engage more
of our local communities to really increase the impact
that we have and our ability to respond to change?
Similarly, I thought that Jordan Tourville's talk
on migration of the treeline was a great example
of how the forests are also responding to change.
We respond, we manage, we adapt,
but the forest are also doing their own thing.
And the evidence that he presented about change we're
already seeing, I thought was particularly interesting.
Also Sarah Wisner presented her modeling her refugee
and modeling as a way to further inform management
as we are helping these ecosystems adapt.
And what I found particularly interesting about this
approach is that it could be applied across taxa.
So we're not really just focused on a forest refugia,
but what about habitat refugia and thinking
about this as something that we all might be able to learn
from and incorporate into our work.
Similarly, oops, sorry, wrong direction, similarly,
I thought that it was really interesting thinking
about how we approach adaptive management and Julia Burton.
Our plenary speaker this morning was focusing
on deontological traits, functional traits.
How can we make sure that we're not just thinking
about species diversity or structural diversity when we are
planning for adaptive management so that we can make sure
that we do have ecosystems that are truly resilient?
So it's sort of a different way of thinking about adaptive
management that wasn't always at the forefront of my mind.
Julia also provided the first big belly laugh that I've had
at a conference in a long time and made me perhaps a little
bit I'm happy that I was muted when she had this figure,
sorry, down in the bottom left here,
they Run Forrest Run, oh my gosh,
I happen to be a Forrest Gump fan.
And I just thought that was, that was great.
So keeping it light, thank you.
We also had several sessions that were presenting new tools
or techniques that we might be able
to incorporate into the work that we do.
Adam Zylka presented some of the work from the spatial
analysis lab at UVM in it using drone technology.
And in particular,
this fuse LIDAR multi-spectral imagery to really be able
to map forest disturbance,
and in this case, defoliation in terms of severity, extent,
but then also be able to track response.
So maybe we can see how forests are responding
on a faster timeframe and at a higher sort of detail level
of detail than we usually get from the monitoring efforts
that we have, so really interesting again,
to think about how we might be expanding that work into our
forest health monitoring.
And Pia Ruisi Besares, our FEMC project manager
presented on one of the new FEMC tools
that just came out on climate indicators.
So we know that there are a lot of people out there that are
collecting data that are relevant to the impacts of climate
change and being able to monitor and assess those impacts.
But what I think is particularly great about this new tool
is its ability to help us identify gaps.
So where do we have information that we can use
and how can we pull that data together,
but also where are we missing information either in terms
of the metrics that we're collecting or the spatial
distribution at which we are able to gather that data?
So this is the kind of work that I think we really need to
have a more complete picture of how our forest ecosystems
are responding to stressors
and in particular climate change.
So I'm looking forward to seeing more work done
within that tool as well, to bring together these metrics.
So the other thing that our plenary speakers in particular
were able to do was not just present their good work,
but also sort of reflect on what the grand challenges are
that lie ahead of us.
And Nancy kicked us off yesterday morning,
Nancy Mathews kicked us off talking about how we really do
need to increase our connections and our resiliency as a
forest ecosystem, but as well as a professional community.
And I think that was what sparked me thinking
of our community of professional foresters,
community outreach coordinators as land managers,
decision makers, we really are also in a time of change.
And we need to be thinking about our ability to adapt
to our work environment and the limitations
that are placed before us.
Jim Duncan, if you take this out of context,
it seems like we already do this he's question that he posed
was how do we move beyond simply responding to change?
I think from a forestry perspective,
we are moving more and more towards adaptive management
and we do try to be proactive in our planning, but again,
if you think about this across a broader context
of our communities, as well as our colleagues,
how can we more proactively make sure that the work we're
doing is having impact and how can we continue
to connect with each other, and with our stakeholders?
Jim always also provides the gem,
but I don't think we've made it through a conference
without something on the theme of archiving your data,
but I put it up here and not just
to be funny, but that it really,
when we are in a time of change and in particular, you know,
people come and go and projects start and stop.
If we can make sure that we're all actually stewarding our
data as well, we can really make sure that our information
as a collective network can continue to have impact.
Julia Burton, again,
thinking kind of outside the box and how do we adapt
our approach to adaptive management,
and should we be thinking beyond some of the more,
just traditional metrics that we use
to inform our decision making?
So that was just sort of interesting
to think about our entire approach to forest management.
And then back to Erica Svendsen,
full circle, very philosophical.
This question resonated with me.
How do we engage all of our capacities
and cultivate new potential?
So I think that we're pretty good
at highlighting what we do well,
and we have an idea of knowing what we don't know
and what we do know, and we need to know,
but this idea of cultivating new potential,
particularly in the context of her work is something that
I think, especially in terms of the FEMC, it does resonate.
So how can we as a collaborative,
this regional collaborative,
how can we increase our capacity
and cultivate that new potential particularly,
and maybe working more
with local stakeholders and engaging
our community of collaborators to do that as well?
So hopefully you also were able to glean some gems from the
sessions you were able to attend, where do we go from here?
I do encourage everyone to please stay connected
if there is one silver lining to COVID, it's that
I think we're all much more technologically savvy now.
Just as an example,
we now have a conference resource Padlet.
I've put the link to that up in the top of the chat.
This is a great way for you to share with everybody else
anything that you have going on that you think would be
interesting to others, for example,
are there job postings you'd like to advertise,
funding announcements that you know about,
other news or upcoming events
that you think people would be interested in,
please do feel free to visit that Padlet
and contribute your thoughts there.
Similarly, you should be receiving a request
to fill out the post-conference survey.
This is a survey that we do use every year to figure out
how we can make the conference a better experience
for all of you, and also increase our collective impact
as a collaborative network.
So please do take the time to fill that in.
And I did also put a link to that in the chat already.
If you'd like to preempt the email.
Along those same lines,
if you did participate in a working session,
these are typically projects that are ongoing
and you might expect to be hearing from the organizers
of some of those working sessions.
And I really do encourage you
if that was of interest to you
to consider joining in those ongoing efforts.
So with that, I just, again, want to say, thank you.
So many thank yous out there.
And Jerry, I'm so sorry to hear
that you had the tech issues.
We will continue to improve that as well.
But a big thanks to the forest service as always
for continuing to fund the FEMC and this conference.
To our conference committee for helping us
really hone in on a very timely theme
to focus on and helping to identify speakers
that could really make that an informative theme
and conference for us to build on.
I want to thank all the presenters,
those who led the working group sessions
for adapting to this format, and honestly,
to all of you who did attend and who stuck through all
of this in spite of the Zoom fatigue, so with that,
I wish you all a fabulous weekend
and a restful holiday season, and please do stay in touch.
Thank you, everybody.