Hello everyone.
My name's Joshua Benes.
I'm the assistant Director for the
proposed Mount Mansfield Science and Stewardship Center.
I started in my role about a year ago planning a biological
field station on Mount Mansfield
in the abandoned telecommunications building
that's on the mountain.
It's something that's been kind of in the planning stages
for about a decade now,
and I'm hopefully gonna have some more traction
and more updates about that soon.
If you wanna talk to me about
the Mount Mansfield Science and Stewardship Center,
I do have a poster in the poster session right after this.
I'm happy to give you more details about my work
and what I'm planning.
This session is a lot more bigger picture thinking about
the whole region and mountain science
and stewardship networks throughout the Northeast,
and I have been kind of thinking about
this idea since I started my role
of forming a regional group of mountain observatories
for climate change monitoring and research.
And in October, I had the privilege of connecting
with Nat Scrimshaw at
this Northeast Alpine Stewardship Gathering
that was in Crass Ferry, Vermont.
And Nat has kind of been visioning
this regional stewardship network
that would focus on alpine areas called
the Northeast Alpine Stewardship Center.
And so Nat is in the virtual realm and I am here in person.
And so I wanted to give Nat just a brief opportunity
to introduce himself before we move forward.
So, Nat, go ahead.
Sure.
Well, I tend to wear a number of hats.
You can see I have my long trail hat on now.
I'm also very locally in the White Mountains.
I've been the trail adopter on Franconia Ridge
for the last 18 years,
part of the Appalachian Mountain Club,
Adopt a Trail program.
In my work,
I work with the World Trails Network Hub for the Americas.
And just to give a brief introduction as to what that is,
the World Trails Network is an international organization
that represents trail locations
and organizations around the world.
It has its offices in Geneva, Switzerland,
and the hub for the Americas is a regional affiliate
that works in South Central and North America
and the Caribbean,
and we have our offices in Campton, New Hampshire,
and we have programs in the White Mountains.
So as Josh was mentioning,
one of the projects that we have,
we're partnership builders, network builders,
and for the last year,
we've been discussing creating a Alpine Stewardship Center,
which really is a network,
and that's part of
what I'll be talking about a little later.
Awesome, Thanks Nat.
So this session will be interactive
and this is the first time
I'm have kind of this interactive brainstorming software
that I'm using.
So I'm hoping that you all will bear with me
and hopefully this works for all of us.
But I do have QR codes around the room here in person.
And for those of you in the virtual environment,
you should be able to scan this QR code
or go to ahaslides.com/FEMC,
and you should be able to get to this poll.
So just start things moving
and some kind of ice breakers here.
Just kind of curious what mountain range people
do research, monitoring, or stewardship activities on.
I have the QR code off here to the side as well,
if you need that.
But you should be able to interact
and add your mountain range,
or if you don't do research on mountains,
or monitoring or stewardship, you can put none or other.
And you should be able to select multiple mountain ranges
if you do work in multiple mountain ranges.
Just give another few seconds here.
Okay, very interesting.
So it looks like we have,
most of the participants are involved
in some type of monitoring, researchers, stewardship
in the Green Mountains,
White Mountains are not too far behind
and Adirondacks looks like it's in third place.
So interesting to see our audience here.
Next question I have for everyone is...
And this can be, you know,
just a place that you recreate or you hike.
It doesn't need to be, you know,
a place that you necessarily do research, but it could be.
But what's your favorite mountain in the Northeast?
And if you see your mountain already pop up,
you don't necessarily have to add it up again,
because we're gonna do a vote and then a result at the end.
So just kind of seeing how this software works for everyone.
I see some participants are still typing,
so we'll give just a little bit more time.
I see a second Camel's Hump,
so I'm just gonna x out one of the Camel's Humps.
Okay, we're gonna move on to voting now.
So please vote for your favorite mountain.
Okay and we'll hit next result.
So Camel's Hump gets number one,
White Face in Mount Washington shortly behind,
so, well that's exciting.
So it seems like the software is working well.
And so this last question before we kind of
go onto the main presentation,
what area are you most interested in?
Just kind of gauging the group,
if you're more interested in research and monitoring
or stewardship, outreach and education.
Based off of the nature of the conference,
I was thinking that we'd have more
of a research and monitoring community here,
but it's about 75, 25 or so,
so very interesting.
Great.
Well there we go.
So we'll kind of work with this interactive polling
a little bit more toward the later part of the presentation.
We'll also have one short breakout,
but great to see that that's working well for all of us.
So today's working session,
I'm gonna begin kind of giving
some summarizing opportunities for developing
a regional mountain and research network in the Northeast.
I will then turn it over to Nat and he will discuss
the Northeast Alpine Stewardship Center
and some of the networking
that he's trying to build around stewardship
in the northeast.
And then we'll kind of break out into dialogue
and idea sharing here in the group.
We'll kind of break out in to small groups.
The online group will break out separately.
Nat we'll facilitate that and then we'll kind of come back
in the end and I'll have using
the interactive software again
to kind of explore some of the questions
that I asked during the breakout sessions.
One thing that I wanted to note here as well is that
I'm fairly new to my role here.
I've been planning this field station Mount Mansfield
for about a year.
And so I'm really excited to connect with
the broader community here as well
and learn about some of the in-depth experience
all of you have with science and monitoring
and research and stewardship on Mountain peaks,
and I'm interested to learn a lot from all of you.
We do kind of have this hybrid environment
that we're working in now,
so I hope that it's gonna be a good experience for everyone.
You know, I'm kind of approaching things
from more science and monitoring end of things,
and I'm here in person here,
Nat is in the virtual environment.
And so during the dialogue and idea sharing phase,
he comes from things from the stewardship side.
But I hope that there's enough people with the monitoring
and research interests that are in the virtual environment
that can kind of help pick up
that piece of the conversation,
and we can all have a good dialogue
and get some great ideas from all of you
about ideas to move forward.
So I'm really thrilled to have this opportunity,
at the FEMC conference.
FEMC's number one goal is to contribute
to the efficient coordination,
of multi-disciplinary environmental monitoring
and research activities among existing efforts,
and institutions with common interests,
and long-term understanding management
or protection of force ecosystems.
And I think building these types of networks
that engage researchers and engage the public
are kind of at the core of building the infrastructure
that really ensures that the research and monitoring
and stewardship that we're doing,
that it can maximize the impact that it really has
on our land and in this case on our mountain systems.
And so this is not the first time,
this idea of forming a regional network
around alpine environments has been explored.
A 2013 paper by Papers At All summarized the results
of a workshop that was held in April, 2011.
39 researchers from all around the region were involved
in alpine research, attended this workshop,
and a survey was later sent to the researchers.
25 of them responded,
and researchers showed strong support for the creation
of a network of long-term alpine monitoring sites,
where a standardized protocol would be used to collect data
on biotic and abiotic parameters.
Out of the workshop and this follow up survey,
there were six priority areas of research
that were identified.
The first was focusing on snow cover
and timing of snow melt.
Second was monitoring tree lines.
Three was change in woody species, four plant surveys,
five, variation in weather and six was changes in phonology.
And so, you know, this group, you know,
kind of outlined a lot of priorities for research
in alpine areas throughout the region
and really expressed interest
in forming some type of network.
Then flash forward to 2016,
there was planning associated with the field station
that I'm planning,
the Mount Mansfield Science and Stewardship Center
out of the grant that was awarded through
the National Science Foundation.
The University of Vermont held
a Northeast Mountain Science conference
that was in 2016, that had a number
of different goals associated with the conference.
Researchers from all around the region came together
and were talking about ideas related
to forming collaborative networks
and working together for research throughout the Northeast.
And it concluded with a organization
of biological field station site visit
for the Mountain Mansfield Science and Stewardship Center.
And the kind of foundation and the ideas of forming
the Mount Mansfield Science and Stewardship Center
were all kind of put together back 2015, 2016 range,
but the funding for the field station
didn't really come until 2020.
And so there was kind of this period
of lag time where, you know,
the University of Vermont kind of brought up these ideas
and started engaging with a larger community
about forming a regional network.
But the funding wasn't there until
a few years later down the line.
So I'm kind of now in the role of wanting
to pick up this conversation again
and bring it forward and really kind of connect
with the broader community and think about the needs
for a regional network for mountain monitoring and research.
And so where I've personally picked it up
inside some of the planning documents
for the Mount Mansfield Science and Search of Center
was to develop a network between
the Atmospheric Sciences Research Center
on Whiteface Mountain New York,
and the Mount Washington Observatory in New Hampshire.
And the idea was to form a network of mountain observatories
for climate change monitoring and research in the Northeast.
So earlier this year, back in January,
I established connections with staff
at the Mount Washington Observatory
in the Atmospheric Sciences Research Center,
and we started meeting monthly over Microsoft teams
and just sharing ideas and thinking about strategies
of where we could collaborate and work with one another.
We met with the National Weather Service that kind
of encouraged us to look at this idea
of having different weather stations
at different elevational gradients
on each of our mountains and have some type
of collaborative network where we would work together
for monitoring on the three of our different mountains.
And this discussion made me think about
the work that Jamie Shaley does
at the US Geological Survey over
at Sleepers River Research watershed.
He has a much smaller mountain, it's the hills,
it's the Kittridge Hills, but his kind of experience
and having monitoring stations
at different elevations inside this watershed,
kind of our group decided to invite him
into this conversation and think about
how we could kind of participate
and work together at a regional level.
And so I just wanted to kind of dig in briefly
to each of our individual stations
and kind of the overarching work
that each of these stations does.
Paul Casson with a ASRC is here today.
So Paul, feel free to step up
and give a brief introduction about yourself.
And you can either go through a brief overview of this
or I can go through it as well,
so please introduce yourself.
[Paul] So I'm Paul Casson,
I'm the operations manager at Whiteface Mountain.
I work for SUNY Albany.
So we've been there since 1961,
Summit Observatory has been there since 1970.
So Josh reached out to me,
I actually went to that meeting in 2016.
I thought the idea had kind of perished (Paul laughing)
in the interim. I didn't realize that it was still a alive,
but there's a lot of parallels to to our missions here,
and I'm really on board with the idea
of standardized sensor networks between
these mountain top observatories.
We all are collecting data often in different ways.
Max men, hourly averages, one minute averages,
what have you.
So just having that kind of SLP
that brings us all together
and makes these data sets comparable over time,
I think would be a great asset.
A lot of what we've done has been based
on asset deposition research that is kind of fading
into the rear view mirror.
Now we're focusing more on aerosols in clouds,
organic acids in clouds,
PFAS measurements and precipitation in cloud water,
so there's a lot of future work to do.
We just gotta find the money
and I think we're stronger together than separately.
So I appreciate the opportunity.
-Thanks- -Awesome
-Guys. -Thank you so much, Paul.
so yeah, so ASRC is involved in, you know,
all this variety of research.
I had the pleasure of having a site visit back in October.
It's really great to learn about all
of their atmospheric science work
that's really, really their strength.
But they also, you know,
kind of are working in some
of the biological research sciences as well,
and they've also added this new stream flow monitoring site
on the mountain, which I think is very exciting.
The Mount Mansfield Science and Stewardship Center,
it's not built yet,
we're still kind of working on the infrastructure component,
and there's final pieces that need to happen
before that moves forward.
But we have a long term record of monitoring
the research on Mount Mansfield.
So the idea is that when this field station is built,
there'll be this hub for research monitoring
and stewardship on Mount Mansfield.
And the FDMC has been kind of a central hub
to the monitoring infrastructure on Mount Mansfield.
You can see on this map right here,
there's three key watersheds on the mountain,
Star is where
the proposed Mount Mansfield Sciences Stewardship Center
would be located.
And FDMC is already engaged in a variety
of different monitoring and research
on the mountain and has been for decades already.
And the Vermont Center for Eco Studies
is involved with alpine bird monitoring on the mountains
kind of Mount Mansfield is a central location
for their monitoring and research,
namely on the Bicknell Thrush on Mount Mansfield
and also Mount Mansfield's new place
for this new Summit to Shore project
at the University of Vermont.
This project is called the Cold Weather Summit to Shore
Environmental Observation Network.
Dr. Arne Bomblies is the PI of this project,
and Dr. Beverley Wemple is the co-pi.
And there's all of these new weather stations
that are added on Mount Mansfield
as a result of this project, which is really exciting.
Each station has three solar radiation sensors,
short wave and long wave apogee,
two sonic snow depth sensors, meteorological platform
that includes temperature, relative humidity,
wind speed and direction precipitation,
two snow pack temperature ladders, a soil heat flux plate,
and soil moisture and temperature sensors
at 5, 10 and 30 centimeters.
And on top of the mountain as well,
they have a snow scale and snow pack analyzer
that's not too far away
from a very long-term snow record
that has been recorded for decades.
So a really exciting project and a lot of new infrastructure
going in on Mount Mansfield.
Kittredge Hills, Jamie Chanley is at a conference,
so another conference elsewhere,
so he wasn't able to attend today,
but they do long-term hydrology research
is what they're really well known for.
They've been doing it since 1959.
They work on stream system research,
dissolved organic matter, nutrient fluxes.
They are also part of this new Summit to Shore project,
so they're kind of part of this research project
at the University of Vermont,
and they also have long-term forest research plots.
Next we have the Mount Washington Observatory.
We do have Jay Broccolo
from Mount Washington Observatory attending virtually.
And Jay, if you cannot mute yourself,
please introduce yourself and feel free
to give a high level overview about
your work at Mount Washington.
Hi thanks Josh,
I really appreciate you having me here and so forth.
But yeah, I'm the director of weather operations
for the Mount Washington Observatory.
I've been there for about four years as an observer
for a period of time and now in this role.
But the observatory has been in operation
on the summit of Mount Washington since 1932,
taking hourly observations,
which started at six hour intervals
and then increased to three hour intervals
and now is done hourly.
And all of that data is fed
to National Weather Service, Gray in Maine,
and we worked with them pretty much
from an observational standpoint.
We also started introducing a Mesonet system
throughout the White Mountains in the early 2000's,
so that has really been progressing.
Actually in the next couple of years,
we plan on adding 5 to 10 and increasing
the sensors on the ones that we do have.
So on different ski mountains,
different state level organizations
like New Hampshire State Parks
who operates Canon and the summit of Mount Washington.
But also we're doing our due diligence with our data.
Currently we're in contract with the University of Delaware,
really making our data more accessible.
Currently we use a SQL system, which is really great,
but we have close to a billion records going back to 1932.
And just to put that into perspective,
University of Delaware operates the Delaware
and they have 2 billion,
so we have a comparable to an entire state.
So it's a lot of data to work with,
but they will be working with us
to make our data shovel ready.
And this is really great opportunity for the observatory
and hopefully for this entire community
because it's been hard for us
to get our data out and usable.
We do do some work with the AMC,
so Sarah it's great to see you here, hi, (Jay laughing)
and that is also a relationship that we're hoping to build,
but also we're really hoping to build a relationship
with everyone here and really have our data accessible
and usable by all these organizations represented here today
and elsewhere and in the future.
But yeah, so the main point of our resonate is really
to operate within the different structures
that operate within the White Mountains
for different forecasts or businesses.
We have one on the east side of the mountain
that Josh has put in this slide,
and then there's a map of the Auto Road
and then some of the local stations,
for example, the wild one is Wildcat Mountain,
which is a relay for a lot of communications
throughout the White Mountain.
But yeah, you can check out our homepage,
you can always see what the weather's doing,
but you know, it's a lot.
We take ten second samples and then they all get averaged
to a one minute and hourly average.
So listening to congruent data mechanisms
would be fantastic, especially in a region.
So very happy to hear that,
and Josh, I'll pass it back to you now.
Awesome, fantastic, thank you so much Jay.
And so overall, you know, our group, you know,
has been meeting monthly.
One of the things that we did was kind of inventory
our different monitoring stations and Mount Washington
is kind of thinking about this idea
of adding instrumentation along the cog railway side,
of their mountain to kind of have an elevational profile
on both the western and eastern side
of their mountain.
Mount Mansfield, you know, with
this new Summit to Shore project we're really well covered.
FDMC also had two weather stations,
they're about 2,900 feet
on the east and west side of Mount Mansfield
that have a long history as well.
And Whiteface Mountain is starting to add new stations
on the Whiteface ski area side of the mountain.
So overall starting to kind of think about
all of our different monitoring stations
and opportunities that we may have
to be able to work together.
All stations have temperature and relative humidity.
Most have wind speed and wind direction
and some have precipitation gauges,
snow depth monitoring and solar radiation.
And you know our group has been kind of thinking
about this idea of a possible coordinated network
of some way and thinking about what that would look like.
And, you know, what comes to mind for me, you know,
probably because of FDMC's regional involvement
and some of the current networks that currently exist
in the FDMC are being developed within the FDMC.
This includes DEN, the Dendroecological network
that mostly focuses on Dendro, Dendrology
throughout the region.
Northeastern Forest Inventory Network
that Jonna gave a presentation about earlier today.
And FDMC also has this portal of live weather station data
for five different weather stations,
two of which are on Mount Mansfield that's already in place.
So there may be this opportunity to be able
to integrate with FDMC
with some of our monitoring infrastructure,
and it's something that
we're just starting to think about and explore.
This is kind of a loaded figure
and I just kind of wanted to think about the broader picture
of how all these different disciplines
may be able to feed into
a larger observatory network in some way.
What I've been discussing so far has been kinda
this elevation dependent climate change column
where Whiteface, Mount Mansfield, Kittridge
and Mount Washington may be working together
in some capacity to better understand changes
of temperature at different elevations
on each of our mountains and other types of research.
And I'll kind of discuss this idea
of the unified high elevation platform in a moment.
But overall, what I want you to get out
of this figure right now,
and I'll kind of show it again
after I kind of go through some
of these different topics is that,
there's all of these different disciplines,
and all of these different types of research,
that are going on our mountain peaks.
And there may be an opportunity to be able to coordinate,
you know, research that's going on certain topics,
make them more regionally relevant and also
through in coordination be able to make
our research more relevant at a global level as well.
And so the first thing I wanted to explore with all of you
is this initiative that's called
the Mountain Research Initiative out of Switzerland.
And this is an organization committed to forming
an international research coordination network focused
on mountain environments around the world.
And one of their initiatives is called Geo Mountains.
And Geo Mountains contains a number
of different working groups.
One is focused
on elevation dependent climate change or EDCC.
This group is led by Dr. Nick Peppin
with the University of Portsmouth in the United Kingdom.
And I've been in communications with Dr. Peppin
and virtually participated in a workshop
that he held in Austria in September.
And the group has been working to understand changes
in mountain environments at different elevations
and has been working with collaborators
to develop a unified high elevation platform or UHOP
so that multiple mountain observatories
can conduct monitoring of alpine areas in a consistent way.
This would allow researchers
to better understand climate change
and mountainous environments at an international scale.
And you can see from their worldwide map so far
the yellow points are the ones
that are functional UHOP transects.
And the one that's in the northeast that they have
is the Mount Washington's Observatories Auto Road.
Another working group through Geo Mountains is called
the Mountain Observatories Working Group.
They define mountain observatories
as sites, networks of sites or data rich regions
where multidisciplinary integrated observations
of biophysical and human environments
are conducted over a lengthy period of time
in consistent ways according to established protocols,
using both in SIT2 and remote observations,
and the group's current focus is developing regional groups
of mountain observatories throughout the world.
Current groups is the virtual Alpine Observatory,
which is in Europe.
They are a network of 16 European
high altitude research stations.
On their website you can find a list
of the different mountain observatories in their network
that include both research stations, so you know,
thinking research stations like
the Mount Washington Observatory,
the Mount Mansfield Sciences Stewardship Center,
and the Atmospheric Sciences Research Center
and research infrastructures as well.
So thinking beyond, you know,
our current environment of research stations
and all the different research infrastructure
that we have in mountain environments across the northeast
so the Mount virtual Alpine Observatory
in Europe kind of brings them all together.
Their network allows efficient access to and visualization
of institute data generated by the network
and relevant remote sensing and modeling data
for the member institutions,
wider research community and stakeholders.
I couldn't find on their website
if they were officially a non-profit organization,
but I kind of sense that they were,
because they have their own staff
and they have their own steering committee.
There's another active network in the Western United States
that's called Surmount,
and it is a collaborative open science consortium,
comprising agency of university scientists,
natural resource specialists and program managers dedicated
to improving understanding of climate variability and change
and to enhancing the capacity
to sustain Western North American society.
The network is solely a grassroots initiative
with no central program staff or support.
They have their website,
which is under the US Forest Service
and there's not much recent content on their website,
or on their social media profile.
Their latest strategic plan was from the year 2007,
but they still seem to be having conferences and meetings
and they seem to be kind of a coordinated network,
just kind of connecting
and understanding the various research
that's going on across the Western United States.
And so the Mountain Observatory working group
in Geo Mountains has been working on fostering
and facilitating the development of other regional networks
of mountain observatories through
bringing together regional researchers,
practitioners and international experts experience
and running successful mountain observatories
in a series of regional workshops.
And they recently hosted all of these workshops
in the last few years in these data poor regions
that are throughout the world that I haven't read.
And they've been working on
all of the different research infrastructures
that are in those areas to develop
a regional groups of mountain observatories.
And so I've been in correspondence with Carolina Adler
and Marie Shahgedanova
which the Geo Mountains Mount Observatory working group,
and they invited me to develop a regional group
of mountain observatories in the northeast region
that would participate in their international efforts.
They were also said that they would be willing
to host a web presence for our group,
as that is something that they are doing
for the other regional groups around observatory soon.
They also encourage me to think a little bit more about
taking over the entire Appalachian Mountain range because
they kind of think about these big pictures.
I was thinking that it might be a little too much to chew
and think about the entire region,
but that's what they were encouraging me to think about.
And another interesting thing to note is that Geo Mountains
also has this inventory
of institute observational infrastructure
that they've been developing,
and I've been adding the FDMC monitoring stations
on Mount Mansfield to this inventory network.
And so briefly now I just wanted to go over
some other international mountain monitoring initiatives
that are good to know about.
There's this initiative called GLORIA,
which is the Global Observation Research Initiative
in Alpine environments.
And this program aims to develop
a worldwide long-term observation network
on vegetation and temperature data
and mountain environments around the world.
And they have specific methods to collect data
about alpine plants and soil temperature
that can be recollected every five to 10 years.
There isn't any in the Eastern United States right now,
but this might be an opportunity for some
of our mountain areas to be able to kind of
join and participate in an international network.
There is also a mountain ponds and lakes,
Sarah Nelson, who's here virtually with us today
with the Appalachian Mountain Club,
has been starting to reach out to researchers
about the potential for monitoring Mountain Ponds
in a more coordinated way.
And she's begun pulling together existing data
with colleagues at Humane Farmington
and published a paper about Mountain Ponds last year.
It's also interesting to note that an international survey
of Mountain Lakes, which is Moser et al 2019,
showed that the Northeast US Appalachians
is currently a whole in their current global data set.
Sarah, is there anything else
that you wanted to kind of quickly mention
about mountain ponds and lakes?
Yeah, I think you covered it.
They're unique ecosystems and originally, you know,
as you mentioned for Whiteface we were doing
a lot of mountain pond research as kind of sentinels
or the canary in the coal mine for acid rain.
But we have recently been thinking of them in this paper
and some previous work as now sentinels for climate change.
They are exhibiting some stronger and different signals
than lower elevation lakes
that we've been monitoring over the same time period.
So it is, you know, similar to what you all
are thinking about in terms of weather and climate,
the lakes and other fresh waters at elevation
are behaving differently and really interesting
to study and telling an interesting story.
Awesome, thank you so much.
And yeah, so in the last piece
I just quickly wanted to cover is Dr. John Pomeroy,
the University of Saskatchewan,
has been developing an international collaborative network
around alpine catchments.
These catchments focus on specific watersheds
of mountains worldwide
that have heavy monitoring associated with hydrology,
snow pack, weather and other features.
There isn't any sites
in the Eastern United States right now,
so there may be this opportunity
for some of our watersheds
that are coming off of alpine areas,
to integrate into this international effort.
And so kind of stepping back again
and looking at this big figure
that I showed all of you before,
I didn't dig into every single one of these topics,
but just kinda wanted to paint this idea
that at least the way that my brain is thinking,
that there's all of these various topics,
I don't have all the topics here,
but there's ways that each one of these research areas
can integrate at a regional level
and then also at a international level
and being able to tie in to
a potential mountain observatory working group
through Geo Mountains,
maybe a good kind of umbrella way
to tie all of these initiatives together
in some capacity and move our research forward,
and make our research in our region more globally relevant
in our mountain environments.
And so with that,
that's the extent of my presentation
and I'm gonna turn it over to Nat
to talk about the Northeast Alpine Stewardship Center.
You know, first to begin with, what I wanted to do
is to talk a little bit about the origins
of the Northeast Alpine Stewardship Center.
And as you can see, it's really a network, not a center,
which is something we can talk about what the difference is.
But it comes from the work that we've done
on Franconia Ridge personally,
as I said, I've been working there for 18 years,
but for the last five years,
after the Forest Service pulled together a working group,
the Franconia Ridge working group,
to address what was really pretty severe deterioration
of the ridge from overuse and hiking.
We developed a pilot project
to put Summit stewards full-time on the ridge
during the summertime.
This was part of a Franconia Ridge
visitor user management planning process.
And this photo just gives you a sense
of what you can find on top of Mount Lafayette
on a busy, sunny Saturday.
You can have up to a hundred people clustered on the summit.
Looking at the daily totals,
this is from this summer, from May through October,
there were about 40,000 people who traversed the ridge,
and the spikes that you see there
between 800 and 1,000 people a day
are what happens on a popular weekend.
So what we have is clustered on about 1.8 miles of trail
a wave of people that cross the ridge.
And that's one thing I want to emphasize is that,
it's not so much the absolute numbers per day,
but it's how they flow across the ridge,
because the hikers, you know, come,
and most of them start hiking
at certain hours in the morning
and this wave washes across the ridge during the day.
And what we end up having is peaks
of about 150 people passing per hour.
This is based on the data loggers that are up there,
which is a pretty highly concentrated number of people
to be on the trail.
So one thing just to understand the implications of this
and why we've made such an effort
to add to the stewardship presence on the ridge,
to look at one of the basic tenets of recreation ecology,
which is the asymptotic relationship between visitor use
and environmental impact, which results in
this sigmoidal curve that you see.
And you know, very simply it's not that complicated.
If you have a relatively few number of hikers or campers
in a site over the year, you'll have very limited impact.
And as the use increases,
you start getting an exponential growth in the impact.
Eventually it levels off because
you've essentially trampled or destroyed the site
and there's no more damage you can do.
And that's basically this sigmoidal curve that you see.
So what resource managers have developed based
on that principle,
this is a figure that shows camping impact,
but you could do the same for trails,
is that initially you could conceivably have
an approach to management which is allowing
for the dispersal of use.
So if you're campers,
you could be dispersing throughout a large area,
or conceivably you could be bush whacking
all over the White Mountains and have very little impact.
But the problem is that as use increases,
impact grows exponentially.
So the approach of dispersal really rarely works
and certainly doesn't work in any high use area.
So then there's this concept of containment, you know,
you keep people in areas that are highly impacted.
So campsite that are high impact sites,
and obviously keeping people on the trail
is the way that you can contain people on a trail,
and this is what we try to do in the alpine zone.
One thing that I've sort of looked at is
I've sort of used this asymptotic, you know, relationship
and used it as an analogy for looking
at trail impact over time.
So if you look at a site like Franconia Ridge,
what you'll see is that you know,
in the early years of trail use, you know,
late 19th century, the early 20th century
up, you know, through until the post-war period,
the use was relatively low and there wasn't really
a need for containment strategies
'cause the impact wasn't high.
As the seventies, you know,
you get into the sixties and seventies and eighties
and the post-war boom and recreation,
you started to need to do erosion control work.
That's when the screen walls were built on Franconia Ridge.
And that was a successful containment strategy for a while.
It worked until the use increased so much
that we started in the, you know,
early two thousands, mid 2010s to really see that
the screen walls weren't working anymore,
the only having alpine steward weren't working anymore.
And that's when we developed this more permanent presence
of stewards up on Franconia Ridge,
after the 2016 planning process
with the visitor use management plan.
Now, one of the things I wanna emphasize is that,
the stewardship approach that we have
differs a little bit from some of the, you know,
caretaker programs or alpine steward programs
in other locations.
We do both what's considered level two
or trail construction trail work,
and we also do the education and information together.
And this is what is called
an integrated management approach
where you use both direct management,
which is interventions like screen walls
and erosion control work, trail work,
and you do indirect management,
which is the education and information
which can be signage or personal contact.
And I'm just highlighting here this article
that just came out by by Park Marion and Wimpy,
that talks about the efficacy
of this kind of integrated trail management.
So anyway, just to give you a little sense
of what we do and what this is all about,
this approach that we started up on Franconia Ridge,
is a partnership approach.
It's based on working with lots of different groups
that are up on the ridge.
The AMC obviously is a big presence there
with the caretakers that work at Liberty Springs
and the Alpine Steward program.
There's also research in monitoring,
the hut crew has a hut naturalist program
and they do education on the ridge.
And we introduced another element
which were college aged summit steward interns,
that worked on the ridge during the week.
Let's see, now I've lost where I am.
Here we are.
So as I say, this is a partnership
and this is just listing, you know, some of the partners.
It includes working with the trailhead stewards
that are at the base of the mountain.
We go out with the Backcountry Rangers
from the Pemi District.
We've worked with the trail crew, you know,
as I mentioned before,
we work closely with the Alpine Stewards.
So the whole approach is a partnership approach.
Last year our program included
a Chief Summit steward that worked May through October.
We had two paid Summit Steward college interns
that worked for 10 weeks and then one volunteer
that worked for 10 weeks.
We had visiting International Trail Fellows.
These are professionals from around the world
that come and visit and study and do research
with us for the summer.
And then also we have a volunteer program
where we work with West End Trail Tenders,
which are volunteers that do trail work.
Won't go into a lot of detail, list all of these out.
The main thing that I wanna point out is that
this does involve both the direct management,
the trail work, and also, you know,
what's considered indirect,
the education and information
and where we can, we contribute to monitoring.
And that's I think one of the opportunities
that's really important to talk about.
Really with the stewardship programs that we're developing,
I'm really interested in looking at
how the on the ground stewardship
can be connected to education.
We have the college internship program,
but also how the stewards can contribute
to research and monitoring.
I do wanna just sort of take one step back and say,
you know, this program has been very successful,
it has really changed the conditions up on Franconia Ridge,
but it's not the entire solution.
And what ends up happening is that
once you reach a certain threshold, a certain density,
and it's usually seems to be
over 150 people passing a spot per hour,
the education and information doesn't work,
the screen walls don't work, the signs don't work.
I don't know if anybody's familiar
with the graphic above here,
but that's a Lorenz attractor
part of the, you know, chaos equations.
And that's what I see happening on Franconia Ridge is that
you reach a moment where conditions become chaotic,
and I consider trails to be complex systems
that exhibit this kind of chaotic behavior,
and it's very hard to predict and manage,
but I think this is one of the reasons
we really need to think about capacity
and app and numbers in the future.
But anyway, just to give you a few little, you know,
pictures of what we do, sense of what we do.
You know, obviously
we're constantly preparing spree walls, cleaning drainage.
We do a lot of putting a brush in areas
that have been trampled
and that creates lovely little micro habitats
that help with re-vegetation.
We're constantly cleaning off the steps and removing rubble.
We are working to maintain certain open areas and outlooks,
other areas that hikers can spread out
and still contain them.
As I say, we do do trail work.
Here's just a example of reconstructing some steps
so that makes it easier for people to stay on the trail.
We install educational signage.
We have these different size signs
ranging from mini kiosks, to these little micro kiosks,
to medium size kiosks that we have on the approach
to the alpine zone.
And here's a little mini kiosk example.
And just to say, this has had an enormous effect,
Little Haystack is a great example.
It's a little hard to see in this photo,
but the area here the summit is...
Actually you can't see my arrows or can you?
[Joshua] We can, we can.
Okay.
So this is the summit area up here
and where people are supposed to be,
this entire area here
where people are spread out is off trail.
And what we saw, you know,
when we first started this work in 2017-18
is that the area had absolutely no vegetation.
We put up string fencing
and we also added educational signage.
And between 2017 and 2022,
we saw this incredible transformation
of Mountain Sandwort filling in,
and eventually Highland Rush started coming in as well.
And this really we attribute to three things,
the additional presence of an AMC Alpine Steward,
the addition of the signage and then the string fencing
in the Summit Steward program.
As I mentioned, there's opportunities also
for stewards to participate in monitoring.
We are using a platform called Restore
to map and help monitor areas
that we have put string fencing up,
so that we can get a sense of how successful
our strategies are.
As educational part of this program,
we have weekly what we call fireside chats
June through August where the Forest Service
and other partners are invited and their informal seminars.
We had a international trails gathering
for our international folks
August 9th through 12th this year
on sustainable trail management.
A virtual summit for summit stewards,
caretakers, ambassadors all the way from Costa Rica,
Canada and Green Mountains and Adirondacks.
We have sponsored exchanges, field visits,
on the left here we were on Welch and Nicki
with Care Green Mountain Caretakers,
Green Mountain Club caretakers on the right were hiking,
showing the work that we do
on the Franconia Ridge with Mount Moosilauke stewards.
And here we are visiting Mount Moosilauke
at the end of the season,
seeing that they took the work, some of the ideas,
the string fencing and the signage
and used it to improve conditions on Mount Moosilauke.
Here's our virtual summit that we had with
the caretakers and alpine stewards from the region
and even internationally.
Also, and this gets with how maybe
we can start connecting research monitoring
and the summit stewardship.
All of our summit steward interns
have projects that they do,
and I'll just show you the three projects from this year.
This is an intern from University of Maine, Orono,
who is currently doing his honors thesis,
creating a structure from motion survey.
So it's a highly detailed three-dimensional model
of the Franconia Ridge trail,
which is gonna help us with vegetation monitoring
as well as identifying and mapping
the places we wanna do trail work.
One of our interns did a litter survey
and this is a little hotspot,
you can see the hotspot where on Little Haystack
where most of the trash that we find is.
Another summit steward worked with our international trails
and sustainability task team on something called
a Trails and Sustainability Toolbox,
which is kind of a Wikipedia
for trails' research and trail management.
And she helped us enter data and do a graphic design
for a presentation that I did in Greece
at the World Trails Conference.
Just an example of the Visiting Trail Fellows that we have.
This is Andras Molnar from Hungary,
he's actually a mathematician and he looks at trail design
in terms of graph theory or network connectivity,
and he did an interesting analysis
comparing Mount Mansfield and Franconia Ridge,
and how the trail configurations affect
the flows of hikers across the ridge.
So that's an example of what we've done
over the last few years,
and what we are hoping to do is to turn this
into a more organized program
and incorporate the northeast
And very quickly what we're looking at is for next year
having a paid 10 week summer college internship
for Franconia Ridge,
and we're working with the Pemi District
to expand it to the Crawford path.
We also have some funding available
for a paid trail crew that would specialize
in sustainable trail construction and maintenance.
We have a five week academic summer semester field course,
which is gonna be hosted
by Binghamton State University of New York.
And that will be a field program in the White Mountains
and they will be working on both Franconia Ridge
a couple days a week and the Crawford Path.
And we want to continue the international fellowship program
to give opportunities for researchers from around the world
and professionals to come to the northeast
and have an opportunity to do research on trails here.
And part of what we'd like to do
is even though we are centered in the White Mountains,
we'd like to eventually have the internship potentially
place interns throughout the northeast,
have a academic summer program
that would actually include, you know,
partially a visiting field program
where we visit different sites in the northeast
and also potentially in the future,
have International Trails Fellows doing research
and studying at other locations.
So that's it in a nutshell.
What we really are hoping for next year,
and we're working on the funding,
is to have a full-time coordinator for this program,
at least one chief summit steward that would work 25 weeks
and two to four summit stewards that would work 25 weeks.
We'd like to have four paid summit steward interns
that could work on both Franconia Ridge
and the Crawford Path.
We're looking to have 8 to 10 students
for the semester course, two visiting trails fellows
and continue working with the West End Trail Tenders.
So that's the vision, you know,
that's what we're working on,
and it's really built on an existing network,
which the Waterman Fund has been nurturing and fostering,
you know, for more than 20 years now.
And actually predates that because University of Vermont
had mountain stewardship conferences
going back into the 1980s and 70s.
And so we really wanna build on that existing network.
I mentioned briefly the trails and sustainability task team
that I'm also the co-chair of,
which has representatives from all over the world.
There's a possibility of connecting more with that group.
And the other project that we have
is the Pan-American Trail Network,
which is an exciting new vision
to develop a trail and trail network
between Alaska and Patagonia.
And I'm just very briefly going to throw out
our structure for that,
because I think part of what
we want to talk about in the future is,
well how do we build this network?
And I just wanted to give you an example
of how we're trying to build the Pan American Trail Network.
So we are working with existing trail organizations,
national trail organizations
from South and Central and North America.
This is over here in developing a cooperative group.
We formed a steering committee
that meets once a month of this group.
That group overlaps.
We have a couple of members of our board of directors,
it overlaps with the hub
for the America's Board of Directors,
and we're developing programs within the hub of the Americas
to support this Pan-American project.
Now, I know this is in Spanish here,
but you'll see these three sort of areas of conservation
and connectivity, economy,
(speaking Spanish) is cultural heritage,
And this reflects the fact that the Pan-American Trail
is trying to work on the relationship
between trails and conservation and connectivity,
connecting protected areas through long trails,
economic development through trails and tourism,
and the role the trails play in cultural preservation.
And so very much a part of what we wanna do
is get involved in conservation and research,
and promote connectivity and reforestation and restoration.
And that gives us an opportunity to then work with
a whole bunch of other groups, universities,
NGOs from around the world,
and also government agencies in a larger collaboration.
And so we're co-creating this vision of a trail,
long trail together in this larger network.
And just a last point to think about network planning,
(Nat laughing),
you know, networks come in different forms.
This is a graph from an article about
how to build a network,
and the main thing I wanna just pull out from here
is that we're used to thinking of organizations
as traditional hierarchical structures like up here.
We could go to the other extreme and have flash mobs
and have completely decentralized ad hoc networks.
And then there's all sorts of structures in between,
from coalitions to, you know, membership networks,
and you know, networks of networks,
which I think is some of what I was hearing Josh talk about.
I mean, we were just talking about different networks
and maybe how we could network together.
And so as I think we think about structure and organization,
you know, to be flexible and realize
that what we're looking for
is where do we place ourselves on a spectrum.
And with that I will stop.
[Joshua] Awesome, thank you so much, Nat,
really appreciate that.
So again, we're gonna go back to aha slides again,
and just kind of a question gauging the group.
You won't break our feelings or hurt our feelings
if you answered no to this question.
But could a Mount Observatory or Alpine Steward Network
potentially bring value to your work research or outreach?
And let's see,
I thought I was able to put the QR code
on the side here in case somebody would need it.
There we go.
Great, so we have a good percentage
that people might see some type of value
in the coordinated network of some way.
That's great.
And next question, something that Nat and I
have kind of been talking about
is what scale would an alpine researcher monitoring network
be the most effective?
You know, this is meant to be kind of just a prompt
to make us think about how the group is thinking,
but you know, looking to get some dialogue flowing
within the group here and also virtually as well.
[Attendee 1] I think it would be hard
to do an entire Appalachians one,
but especially just how geologically
the mountains are put together.
But I do like a northeastern
and or a New England, New York situation.
[Joshua] Yes.
[Attendee 2] I would say as the climate continues
to change and you know,
ecosystems are moving from the south further north,
including some portion of southern, the Catskills,
maybe the Berkshires may be important, but I don't know,
it's just my two cents.
Great.
Can all the virtual attendees hear people in the room okay?
-[Attendee 1] Yeah. -Okay, great.
Any other thoughts, reactions, feedback?
[Attendee 3] I'm curious what it would take
to expand it to like...
Obviously it would be great
to expand it to the Appalachians,
but like how feasible realistically would that...
Like, what would it take?
Yeah,
I mean it's a really good question and you know,
one thing that I was thinking about,
there are other biological field stations that I know of,
like Highlands Biological Field Station in North Carolina,
and Mountain Lake Biological Field Station,
I think in Virginia.
So there's other kind of field stations
that could potentially be involved
down in southern Appalachia area.
But then kind of thinking about
the stewardship component as well.
You know, this is something that the, you know,
Appalachian Mountain Club or Appalachian Conservancy
or other things that are kind of focused
on the Appalachian Trail Network
could be connected with in some capacity.
Maybe that would allow integration
into that type of network.
But yeah, for me it's difficult to process something
at that large of a scale. [Joshua Laughing]
[Attendee 2] Right, that's what I was thinking.
[Attendee 1] I suppose to expand upon
what I was saying earlier, Josh,
and just listening to some others,
but thinking about kind of what Nat said about networks.
So like, I think the southern Appalachians,
because they're separated in a number of different ways,
geologically and just spatially,
like that would be its own like southern Appalachians,
and then there'd be a northeastern Appalachians,
and then those two could communicate something like that.
Yeah, yeah, different ideas
and ways to think about things
I'll go to the next kind of questions here.
Just kind of briefly
thinking about organizational structure.
And I'm using the word initially here, you know,
I'm thinking about what the first step would be
if we were to come together,
you know, and start thinking about
how to collaborate work with one another.
And these are just really broad categories.
(Joshua laughing)
There's a lot of different...
You know, what Nat was showing of all the different ways
of networking and connecting.
There's a lot of ways that you can think about this,
but just kind of general thoughts on, you know,
what the first step would be.
You know, personally I think that there's, you know,
some type of NSF planning grant or something in the future
that would really help us think about,
you know, regional coordination in some way.
But, you know, just kind of some ideas
on ways to network and connect.
So a lot of support behind forming a network
that's hosted by a regional organization
with a compatible mission could
be something FEMC or AMC related.
Any kind of general thoughts or ideas
from the group on this?
[Attendee 3] I guess I would just say that
I recognize the heavy lifting that's gonna be involved
in any organization.
I do worry about equitable access
for smaller organizations, researchers,
with smaller nonprofits and smaller colleges
about recognizing the sheer amount of work
it would take to organize this,
but making sure they have a place at the table
and are treated equally.
Yeah.
[Attendee 3] In terms of their research.
[Attendee 2] That's a really good point.
[Attendee 1] I think also that some of these places
also distribute their data to a multitude
of organizations that would not be included in this.
Yeah.
So yeah, something to think about some more,
you know, for our initial group of mountain observatories,
thinking about how our data can be conducted,
which is a lot smaller scale
of a regional group of Mount observatories.
But, you know,
for our, you know, field stations, just thinking about,
you know, maybe FDMC being a resource for hosting our data,
you know, is a really good first step.
But thinking about this broader network, you know,
there could be some coordination that could happen
at, you know, these larger scales.
We're gonna skip over this session.
Kind of looking at the time,
I feel like we're doing fairly well in terms
of kind of thinking about this as a larger group.
So I think I'm just gonna kind of go
through these different questions here as a larger group
and we can kind of all reflect on them together,
seeing the amount of time that we have left.
But the first question I have here is,
in what ways could a regional mountain observatory
or alpine stewardship network expand opportunities?
So just kind of throw your ideas up on the board here
and we can talk about them as a larger group.
[Attendee 4] What do you mean opportunities?
(indistinct)
Opportunities for research coordination
or for kind of integrating stewardship
or research into academia for,
you know, kind of just broadly thinking about
the various opportunities that may be available
by forming a network in the region.
(softly talking)
So access to very large grants, really good point.
You know, thinking about funding opportunities
and, you know, collaboration at larger scales,
you know, allow, you know,
the ability to potentially apply
for larger amounts of funding and work together.
Collaboration, initiate ideas,
possible increase in strengthening of funding opportunities.
So I'll see some participants are typing here.
Synergy, uniformity and data collection at broader scales.
Coordinating around assisted migration,
which is why I was torn toward it being Appalachian wide.
Understanding trends, being seen in some areas
and management successes so that we can apply elsewhere.
Both coordinating stewardship efforts,
or intentionally trying different approaches
on different sites.
That's a good point.
Could provide a foundation for securing funding
and also an outlet for publishing
the organization's efforts and accomplishments.
Creating entry level jobs and conservation
for young people, working to collect data
and steward summits.
Increasing diversity,
generating public support through events.
All great ideas.
Anybody wanna jump in verbally
with any thoughts or reactions?
[Attendee 3] I totally agree
with the funding opportunities.
I mean, grant writing is an art
and a lot of smaller places might not have that expertise.
Yeah.
Great, now on the flip side of this,
what barriers exist to unleashing these opportunities?
And, you know, I don't know if people
just wanna write down the barriers first
and then maybe we can talk about as a group,
how some of these barriers could be overcome.
Organizational processes, something we talked about earlier,
thinking about how we all network and connect.
Focus on shared goals.
Translation of monitoring products
to conservation and stewardship.
Need for inclusion and equity,
drifting towards hierarchy,
losing the network to a dominant organization.
Is that interesting thing to think about?
Equity in access to alpine summit, natural communities,
public interaction aspect,
crossing funding government jurisdictions
across multiple states.
Communications between state agencies,
academia and the NGOs, servers,
I dunno, whoever wrote servers.
Maybe if you can clarify or think about it a little bit,
just provide a little more detail if you're willing to.
(Joshua laughing)
Funding from our host institutions
to work on network development,
computer power and space and where it's housed.
Okay, that's the clarification there.
Capacity of some partners currently at maximum already.
It's another very good point.
So any kind of ideas and feedback about some
of these idea and barriers and potentially
how some of these barriers could effectively be overcome?
[Attendee 3] I think the larger the network,
the more difficult it would be because of these barriers.
So, you know,
three sites I could envision, 30 would be a lot higher.
Yeah.
Feel free to chime in here at any time, everyone.
[Attendee 2] There are certainly large grants from NSF
for the development of cross collaboration
in novel networks like this,
would be the potential for funding for that.
Yeah.
[Attendee 1] I just think it would be important
to go, you know,
a step at a time and not rushing processes
and letting people's relationships be at ease,
so basically like a very much a timing issue
and you know, that way you're not overpowering anyone
and everyone is kind of coming in,
which may take a long time,
but I think to build relationships, it takes time.
[Joshua] Yeah, good point.
[Attendee 3] I don't see it up there, Josh,
but maybe turf battles.
[Joshua] Turf battles.
[Attendee 1] so many jurisdictions involved,
federal government, state government,
local government, private enterprises-
[Joshua] Yeah.
[Attendee 1] Various nonprofit hiking clubs.
I mean, I think it's gonna be some head banging,
you know, everybody wants the same end,
(Joshua laughing)
but how to get there.
[Joshua] Yeah, I can see that.
Yeah.
Okay well we'll go on to the next question here.
What would make you comfortable investing time
to participate in a Mountain observatory
or alpine stewardship network?
So, you know,
we kind of discussed some of these ideas on,
you know, organizational structure and, you know,
we all have these very busy lives, you know,
and very busy careers that we're all involved with.
You know, is there some aspect of,
the way that an organization would be structured,
or you know, the way that it hosts meetings
or other things that would make it
kind of important aspects of a network
that would make it more approachable for you to share,
to participate and connect with the larger network?
Relationship oriented,
knowing that the results of the work would lead
to tangible conservation outcomes.
Knowing that organizational goals are to include
and invite all people into conservation work,
knowing data collected will inform management,
achievable goals.
Connection to on the ground action,
regular meeting times once a month.
And that's something that our smaller group
has been doing right now.
And if anyone here in this group,
both online and in person are interested
in being part of the conversation
of our smaller group amount observatories,
please reach out to me and let me know.
And we're planning on meeting again in January
and our group is very inclusive,
and I think that we'd love to have
you be part of the conversation.
Bowney and birdy, the fun stuff,
great.
Not going in alone,
modeling our network after other successful networks,
great point.
Linked to other regional initiatives such as staying
connected initiative, it's a great idea.
Making fun group hikes, parties, data, info sharing.
Yeah, you know, right now, you know, overall, you know,
we kind of have this loose idea and we kind of shared a lot
of these ideas with all of you today about possibilities,
and I think really what it takes is, you know,
just being connected and learning from one another
about our work and what we're doing.
I do think that there could be these opportunities
for networking grants of some sort in the future
to really develop some type of network.
And that, you know, Nat's network
is a little bit more, you know,
developed than the science and monitoring network
that I'm looking at.
But, you know, both of our networks
are kind of in the early stages here.
There's opportunities for our networks to, you know,
potentially either interact in the future
or, you know, connect in some way.
You know, there's just so many different opportunities
and ways to kind of think about all of this.
So I hope today's, you know, discussion
and our presentations kind of leave you
kind of thinking a little bit more,
and kind of ruminating on some of these ideas that we had
and both Nat and I would love to hear from you as well.
So, you know, reach out to us
and, you know, give us additional thoughts
or let us know that you want to be included
in future discussions or involved.
We would love to continue
the conversation with all of you going forward.
So really appreciate all your time today, everyone here,
and yeah, thanks for everything
and looking forward to continuing the conversation later.
(Joshua laughing)
(attendees clapping)