Okay, welcome.
If you are here for this talk, I'm glad.
If you're not here for this talk, stick around.
I mean, what the heck?
So I wanna know if I am, yep.
Okay, great.
So I'm gonna talk about a report
that came out earlier this year
called "Wildlands in New England,"
supported under the umbrella
of Wildlands, Woodlands, Farmlands, and Communities,
a New England-wide consortium of organizations
and institutions that has been working on this topic
for almost 20 years now.
Also involved is Harvard Forest, Northeast Wilderness Trust,
and the Highstead Foundation.
Here's all the partners that are involved.
And just gonna start briefly
by saying why we need Wildlands.
And I'll tell you in a minute what our definition is,
but Wildlands have intrinsic value.
The dominant condition on the New England landscape
prior to 400 plus years ago was wildland.
And so they are the natural condition
on the landscape and have intrinsic value.
They support biodiversity, as we heard about earlier today,
provide immense benefits for carbon storage,
as we heard about earlier today,
in plenary talk by Heather Furman,
provide ecological resiliency,
places for quiet reflection, and indeed, human health,
provide baselines for ecological research,
and contribute to our global, regional,
and statewide conservation goals.
So this study started with early conversations, as I said,
in 2005, a group that was working in Massachusetts
to identify, to characterize Wildlands and woodlands,
which means managed lands in the Massachusetts landscape.
This was later expanded to include all of New England.
With increasing pressure of climate change,
biodiversity loss, and challenges to human health,
the urgency was really brought forward,
and we decided to do a study on where the Wildlands are,
where the Wildlands in particular are in New England.
And as we heard, again as we heard this morning
so eloquently,
New England is part of the Appalachian region,
and as such is sort of uniquely positioned
to help in some of these biodiversity,
in the biodiversity crisis,
the climate change crisis, and in storing carbon.
These are some of the authors,
I'm not gonna list them all.
You can check this out later.
But our definition of Wildlands,
"Wildlands are tracts of any size and current condition,
"permanently protected from development
"in which management is explicitly intended
"to allow natural processes to prevail with free will
"and minimal human interference."
So this is important.
They are tracts of land, any size.
Size is not a criterion,
and any current condition.
They could have been,
they might be very compromised ecologically now,
but as long as they're permanently protected
from development, and management is explicitly intended
to allow natural processes to prevail,
we call them, in this study,
for the purposes of this study, we call them Wildlands.
The criteria that we used
to evaluate whether a property qualifies as a wildland
were three.
Wildland intent.
So there is intent stated in a legal document
or an agreement or a management plan
that really intends for natural ecological processes
to prevail over time.
And then the second one is
is this actually happening on the ground?
Is management happening for an untrammeled condition?
Untrammeled meaning without the interference of humans
or without management by humans.
Doesn't mean humans don't go there.
It means that nature manages.
And then the third thing is permanent protection.
Permanent legal protection.
And I will say that permanent,
the word permanent is really a relative term.
There's no such thing as permanent, as we all know,
if we think in geological time,
and also in human history time,
permanency is an elusive concept.
But we're talking about long-term legal protection.
So the methodology for this study,
we first developed a scope,
what is a wildland, which I just said.
We did some outreach.
Outreach to public agencies and conservation organizations
throughout the region to do this inventory,
and we did a systematic review.
And I am telling you,
we looked at every single conservation easement,
every document, every legal agreement,
really perused them.
And when I say we, I don't mean me.
I mean people at the Harvard Forest,
people involved in this research.
There's a long list of people who are involved
to evaluate whether they've met these criteria
and then analyzed the data and produced some outcomes.
So we think that this is the first study
in the United States to map and characterize
all permanently conserved lands in one region
that are managed to be forever wild.
And so here's what we found out.
What we found out, well, here's the four questions
that we posed and answered.
How much wildland, as we define it,
currently exists in New England?
Where are the Wildlands located in New England?
What are the characteristics of these Wildlands?
What are they like?
And how well are they currently protected?
What is their protection status?
So the punchline is basically this,
81% of the New England landscape is forested.
That's not news to you probably,
but 3.3% of that is classified in our study
as qualifying as Wildlands.
So 3.3% of the landscape is Wildlands.
And so those are shown in the dark on this,
dark green on this map.
This next trio of maps shows forest cover in New England.
And then the second one is forest cover in lighter green.
And then the darker green is conserved land.
And the dark, dark green is the Wildlands.
So the Wildlands, again, on the right.
So you can see, obviously there's a lot of conserved land,
but those are not Wildlands.
Those are lands that are managed for other purposes.
Another aspect of where are the Wildlands
is there is, part of this study,
one of the products of this study,
is there's an interactive web map which you can go to,
and you can click on any one of these polygons
and find out more about the parcel.
When it was designated, who owns it,
how large it is, and that sort of thing.
This is a living database, and we encourage people
to add to this database,
and there's a process for doing that.
So I encourage you to do that.
So then what is the protection status of these Wildlands,
and what's the historic and current protection status?
Well, in this chart you can see,
there's a general trend upward in protection of Wildlands
in the region that goes, you know,
sort of exponentially upward in the last couple of decades.
Each one of those bars is a decade,
if you can't read that thing on the bottom.
And then interestingly, who owns,
the nature of the ownership is interesting
as it's changed over time.
The last couple of decades, the green on this chart
is conservation organizations, NGOs.
The red is federal and the blue is state.
So there's a bump there in 1940,
and that's the establishment of Baxter State Park.
But beyond that, a lot of it has been, since then,
a lot of it has been federal land, forest service land
and wilderness areas in particular.
But most recently, the last couple of decades,
there's been a lot of activity
by conservation organizations,
the Nature Conservancy, Northeast Wilderness Trust,
others doing wildland conservation.
And then who are these ownerships?
How is this ownership of Wildlands distributed by state?
Well, in the upper left you see New England
as a whole is is approximately a third federal,
a third, slightly more than a third state,
and about a quarter conservation organizations.
And just picking out a couple of states
that are contrasting.
Massachusetts, most of the wild lands in Massachusetts
are state lands.
Most of the wild lands in New Hampshire are,
not surprisingly, federal lands, federal wilderness.
In Vermont here we have about half federal,
about 31% state
and about 12% private conservation organizations.
The other two categories are skinny categories,
but important ones.
Private lands that don't,
that aren't conserved in any of these other ways.
And then educational institutions.
So the University of Vermont, for example,
is one of the educational institutions
that does protect Wildlands.
So, and then what is their protection status
in strength of management and permanency of protection?
This chart is probably impossible to read,
but basically it's a gradient.
This axis here is permanence of protection.
So what are the legal protections?
And then the upper axis is
the actual management on the ground.
So just a couple of examples.
In the upper left is the Harvard Forest Pisgah Tract,
which actually does not have permanent legal protection,
but has been managed for decades as a wildland,
and the expectation is that it will continue
to be protected that way.
So has very, very strong on the ground protection
but not legal protection.
Whereas there are some other places
that have high legal protection
on the right hand side,
but on the ground it's a little unclear
whether the management is actually
for a completely untrammeled condition.
Just some examples.
I'm just gonna run through a few examples
of some of these Wildlands,
Baxter State Park.
I'm gonna just look over
and see how many more minutes I have.
Two minutes.
Okay, thank you.
Baxter State Park,
which is the largest in New England,
Muddy Pond Wilderness Preserve in Massachusetts,
Monhegan Island,
surprisingly a lot of that is wildland,
Groton State Forest here in Vermont,
Connecticut College.
And then in New Hampshire, the Vickie Bunnell Preserve,
which is one that's protected by ownership
by the Nature Conservancy
and an overlay easement by Northeast Wilderness Trust,
what we think of as the strongest protection.
Key recommendations, we recommend first that
center Wildlands in an integrated approach to protection.
Recommendation two, strengthen existing Wildlands,
developing clear intent,
developing permanency of protection.
And recommendation three, more.
We just need more Wildlands.
So advance wildland conservation
significantly, thoughtfully and strategically
with some priorities such as
okay, we've got lots of high elevation,
don't need more high elevation.
We do need more old forests.
We do need more low land Calcareous areas.
We have Vermont Conservation Design to help guide us
in these areas in advancing more old forest.
So Bob Zaino will be talking more about that
in just a minute.
We do have Act 59 now.
It's the law,
and we have new regulations
in our use value appraisal program.
So I'm gonna end there.
We've got some reports.
I've got copies here of an executive summary of the report.
And please just google
Wildlands, Woodlands, Farmlands and Communities
or Wildlands in New England for more information.
And I'll stop there and take a couple questions, I think.
Is that correct?
Okay, thank you.
(audience applauding)
Good, there are no questions.
So now I can tell you one more thing.
There's an online publication
that we've just launched called From the Ground Up.
Check that out.
Okay, yeah,
(audience member talking)
Turning Degraded lands into Wildlands, and that's great.
And our, I noted that our criteria
did not include current conditions.
So we welcome degraded lands into the Wildlands category
as long as there's an intention to maybe manage a tiny bit
for the first year or so, plug some ditches so forth,
but then leave nature to take its course.
Yes.
(audience member talking)
A place that is invaded, I'll repeat the question,
a place that is invaded by,
heavily invaded by non-native plants.
Yes, so I have a mixed response to that.
The first is we, in our definition of Wildlands,
we do allow for some short term management,
intensive, short term, targeted management
and maybe longer term for invasive species,
but really targeted and really thoughtful
because they're not, they don't all behave the same.
Some of them actually will blink out on their own over time
if you just leave it alone.
Others do need management over time.
So just being really thoughtful and careful about that,
but not ignoring it.
I agree.
Yeah, one more question.
(audience member talking)
Thank you, yeah, so support for this work.
Support for the work, and I think I'm hoping
that the subsequent couple of talks
will address that to some extent.
Really good point.
Really good topic.
And I think I'll leave it at that.
And thank you very much.
(audience applauding)