-: Hi, everyone.
I'm gonna be sharing updates on FEMC's work for 2024.
I'm gonna start with some administrative
and organizational updates about FEMC.
So first off, this year, we expanded our team
and also had a few staff promotions.
So both Elissa and Soren were promoted
to assistant director and data engineer, respectively.
And Nick Aflitto,
who is a new forest entomologist on the UVM faculty,
joined us as a faculty advisor.
We also welcomed a new ECO AmeriCorps member, Matt Rios,
and three student employees
who are helping tremendously with FEMC's work.
These include Nate Smith,
who's working with our web development team,
Molly Babowal, who's helping with communications,
and right now,
especially helping with conference planning.
And Elaina Buursma, who's our data archive assistant.
All right, moving on to reviewing FEMC's 2024 work.
We're gonna start by talking
about our regional and state projects.
This year, we continued our work
on monitoring the connections
between recreation and forest health.
And this really looked like building out the last stages
for the methods aspect of that project
and the geospatial analysis aspect of that project.
So the methods working group worked on refining a list
of monitoring methods to categorize
and identify methods that can be used
to answer forest ecosystem questions
related to recreation.
And these methods focused on monitoring birds,
amphibians and reptiles, soil, and invasive plants.
And from these methods,
they built a decision support tool
that will aid users
in selecting appropriate methods for their needs.
This tool is partially available now,
and we're looking forward to getting the last pieces
of it online very, very soon.
There's also a report available
that cites the validated methods
that are included in this tool and provides guidance
in developing a monitoring program.
So we're very hopeful
that this tool will be able to help for us managers
and researchers identify methods
that may be appropriate
to better monitor recreation's impact on forest lands.
We also expanded the geospatial component of this project.
So you may recall that last year,
we had developed recreation use hotspots
based on Strava data.
And we had combined that with other pieces
of spatial information to create a portfolio
of geospatial layers that could be used
to understand the impact of recreation
or the interactions
between recreation and forest health
across the northeast.
We received feedback that it would be great
to incorporate some other user data sets,
and with input from stakeholders,
we decided to use iNaturalist observations.
So the reason for this was that folks were thinking
that maybe iNaturalist users might be pretty different,
particularly from the folks who are mountain biking,
but maybe also from the folks
who are hiking and tracking that hiking on Strava,
and they're probably likely going to different places.
And so we now have trail use hotspots
based on Strava hiking and biking data,
as well as iNaturalist observations,
which are aggregated to the nearest trail
since many of them are off-trail.
The geospatial portfolio also now
incorporates soil suitability and trail use
based both on those hiking and biking Strava data.
And then also based on iNaturalist user data.
The lines here are colored
based on where you have potentially high impact
from recreation on soils
to the lighter yellows and oranges are lower impact.
And high impact is places
where there's low soil suitability.
So the soil suitability map is sort of the background there.
And also pretty high use.
And then where the lowest impact is most likely low use
and relatively high or relatively safe soils for recreation.
And then the middle is, you know, some combination of those,
and those combinations can vary.
And so this can help managers understand
where they might wanna target particular interventions
to protect soils in these areas.
The last product that I wanna highlight
in the geospatial portfolio
that we're providing as an output
from the Recreation & Forest Health Regional Project
is this one that incorporates an understanding
of the block forest block sizes,
particularly as they relate to wildlife needs.
So we assess three different buffer sizes from trails,
and then you're actually able
to see the dark green to light green is the size
of the forest blocks that remain.
And then you can also look at that
in comparison with how heavily trails are used.
And again, this can help managers figure out
where they might wanna
target different wildlife protection intervention efforts.
All right, next, I wanna talk
about a new regional project this year,
which was to assess the rates
of forest clearing and conversion across the northeast.
So the goal for this project was
to detect annual forest loss and regrowth,
which we're able to do at a 10-meter resolution
to identify the amount of true forest conversion
between 2016 and 2023.
This is important because there's a lot of maps
that provide information
about where forest has been cleared,
but when you look at those over many, many years,
you see that in many places,
forest is also regrowing in those places.
A lot of those locations
are under current active forest management
where there's a cycle of forest cutting and then regrowth.
This is pretty different from places
where forest is actually being cut and then converted.
And so we wanted to do a project based on feedback
at last year's joint committee meeting
to try and identify those different rates of change.
We're using Sentinel-2 data,
and Soren is currently in the process
of running these models.
He has done a test that I'll talk about a little bit.
We have nearly 25,000 training points
or almost 3,500 per year
that we're running the model for.
And we're incorporating 17 different training layers,
which you can see in this bar chart at the bottom.
I apologize that my face is kind of in the way,
but I will send these slides as well,
so you can look at them in more detail if you want to.
All right, so at the time that I recorded this,
Soren was in the process of running some test code
for this project, and he reported
that we have a pretty high average classification accuracy
better than some comparable products,
and that the models are pretty good
at identifying regeneration
and actually able to notice reforestation
after a cut or a clearing within three to six years.
So that is that you can actually see regeneration
in the model in a relatively short amount of time.
Unfortunately, we're not able to include 2015 data
as there's a known issue with Sentinel,
but we are able to provide these data for 2016 to 2023.
And the next steps for this will be to run the model
for the entire region that will be happening
over just the next couple of weeks,
and then classify each year's data from that.
And then from there,
we'll be able to classify forest change and forest regrowth.
All right, so moving on to talking about our project
to build a DNA metabarcoding database.
It's a five-year project, so we started it last year
and did more work on it this year.
We'll be continuing through 2028.
And the project is
to build a region-wide DNA metabarcoding database
for insect's DNA metabarcoding information
that's coming from many of our partner states.
There currently is not a database, a centralized database
where this information can be stored,
but it has a lot of potential utility
for invasive species early detection
and may also be really useful for entomologists
or others who are interested in insect DNA
that's being found across the northeastern forest.
This year, we met with a good number of potential end users
and data contributors
who provided input on what the functionality
of this database should be,
what some of the pitfalls we
should be concerned about might be.
We were also able to meet
with a team doing fungal DNA metabarcoding rather.
And we're hopeful that those data
may ultimately be able to be in this database as well,
even though that's not the...
We were really focusing more on insect's DNA
when this project started.
Like I said, from those conversations,
we were able to identify desired tool functions
in the areas of concern, and from there,
developed a user experience designer position.
We have that position description ready to go,
and we plan to start the recruitment
and hiring process in early 2025.
Moving on to talking about some state-level work.
So this year, we were able to do a sprint project
for Rhode Island,
and that project was really looking
at what the land cover is
in Rhode Island's riparian areas.
So the goal was to create riparian buffer layers.
We have two different sized buffers
that show forest cover and land cover classifications
within Rhode Island's riparian areas.
So we have 100-meter buffer, 200-meter buffer.
We provided online download and hosting
of the resulting layers as well as a brief report
describing methods and products.
So this is a really great project for us,
perfect size for a sprint project
and really excited to be able
to provide this information for Rhode Island.
There are a few other state
and regional projects that I do wanna mention.
So one is that we did plan to update data in NEFIN,
which is the Northeastern Forest Inventory Network,
comparing different CFIs across the region.
We also wanted to update data
on the Forest Health Atlas
and update our Vermont Indicators Dashboard information.
This is underway, but one of the needs
that we identified this year while we were attempting
to accomplish this work is
that we do need another team member
with the skills and capacity
to both build and maintain automated data updates.
So we're currently in the process
to hire for a part-time position.
It's looking likely that they'll be a UVM graduate student,
and we're really excited to bring somebody on board
who can really focus
on keeping these kinds of tools up to date
with the most recent data.
We also did award New Hampshire sprint project,
and that's still TBD because it will be building
on the regional forest clearing work,
digging into that in more detail for New Hampshire.
And so we're waiting
on getting those results completely available
before we decide the exact direction we're going
for New Hampshire.
This means that we'll probably be
doing that work in early 2025.
And then of course, this year, we did all the things
that I kind of think of
as FEMC's regularly scheduled programming.
And these things will probably sound very familiar
to many of you.
So this includes our forest health monitoring work,
and I do wanna provide an update on that for this past year.
So this year, as last year, we were able
to visit all 194 plots throughout the network.
We have a crew of 12 research technicians
who go to New Hampshire, New York,
Massachusetts, and Vermont to do this work.
We usually divide into groups of three or four,
so that we can have folks
in different places at once.
Then there's a crew lead assigned to each of those groups.
We do have separate crews that go to Maine and Connecticut
and very kindly handle those plots for us.
We do overstory analysis as well as seedling regeneration,
sapling survival, and a browse and damages assessment.
I think many of you know this already,
but for those of you who are less familiar
with our plot network,
the two plot layouts adopted by the FEMC FHM program
accommodate plot layouts
from each state's historical force
health monitoring efforts.
So we have the clustered FIA style
that you see here on the left
and then also the nested CFI style
that you see on the right.
And that varies from state to state.
This was our third year being able
to collect data from across the entire region
and our fourth year from the entire region
except for New York.
So we're really looking forward to being able
to do some time series analysis on the FHM data
coming up in our upcoming FHM report.
But we are still working on analyzing the 2024 data.
And so in the meantime, I wanted to share some
of the 2023 highlights with you
that we haven't shared previously.
You can see a summary on the left-hand of the slide
of 2023 sort of summary information about seedlings,
saplings, mature trees that were measured.
But I'll let you review that
on your own rather than reading it to you.
I wanted to share a little bit
from these two charts.
So one was looking at percent of trees
that had poor vigor ratings across the region.
And you can see here that you can also assess
which states had more of those particular species
with poor vigor ratings.
But what we find is that particularly,
American beach and white ash have the highest percentage
of poor vigor ratings.
And this is most likely due to the diseases and stressors
that we're already very familiar with.
We also looked at tree size class by species.
And what you see here is
that there is some variability in the tree sizes
across these different species across the entire region.
And I'll let you dig into this information
in more detail on your own,
but these are the kinds of pieces of information
that we're able to provide in our FHM reports,
and we do make those available online.
So I really would encourage you to look at them.
Like I said, we're very excited
to start doing more time series analyses
in our upcoming report
for the 2024 monitoring season.
I've already mentioned some of the major successes
from 2024's forest health monitoring season.
But just to review,
again, we're really excited about the ability
both from the regionalization of this project
over the past several years and also from now
having three to four different data points across time
to be able to look at time series analyses
and greater regional patterns.
And we're really looking forward
to being able to do that,
particularly in the 2024 forest health monitoring report.
Also, last season, we updated our data entry system
to include online in-field data entry,
and that has really improved the efficiency
of our field crews
and for the QA/QC process following the field season.
So that's been a really big improvement.
And in 2024, we were really able to hone that system,
dial it in, and make it as efficient as possible.
We also expanded our crew lead training,
so we have better data quality control in the field.
And then looking ahead to 2025, we're excited again
to be exploring more trends and patterns
through the data analysis.
And then we will be shifting the FEMC crews
to different states.
So the New York DEC crew is gonna handle a lot
of the plots in New York.
And then the FEMC crew is going
to be taking over the monitoring
in Connecticut and Rhode Island,
which as I mentioned previously,
a Connecticut crew had been handling for us.
I also wanna provide an update
on our Ecosystem Monitoring Fund,
which has been running for the past few years.
So this was our fourth year
running the Ecosystem Monitoring Fund.
This year was somewhat smaller than previous years,
and we were able to make $40,000 available
for projects of up to $20,000.
As previously, these projects aim to provide support
for the collection, aggregation, analysis, and utilization
of forest ecosystem monitoring information.
And we received nine proposals
representing nonprofits and universities
located in Connecticut, Maine, New York, and Vermont.
And we were able to fund four projects,
and we did receive some additional funding
from the Forest Service
to get us to that fourth project,
which we were very appreciative for.
And those projects were located
in Maine, New York, and Vermont.
So these are the specific projects
that we were able to fund this past year.
As you can see, they range
from New York to Maine to Vermont.
They cover fungi, they cover citizen science,
they look at a long-term forest
and tree growth monitoring network
in coastal spruce ecosystems,
and then also look at urban forests.
So a wide range of topics.
And again, this is really a way for FEMC
to expand the number of topics
and projects we are really able to touch.
So looking collectively across all four years
of the Ecosystem Monitoring Fund,
we've been able to fund 20 projects
with nearly $400,000 awarded from federal sources.
This brought in almost $500,000
in non-federal matching funds.
So this has been a really important piece
of meeting FEMC's cost share obligations.
But not only that, it's been a really important way
that FEMC's been able to expand its monitoring reach
to places where we might not be able to get to otherwise,
topics we may not be able to cover otherwise,
and expand the network of partners that we work with.
So we funded projects that cover a range of topics
from on-the-ground monitoring to remote sensing
that look at understory and forest canopy.
They look at wildlife, they look at fungus,
they look at bacteria.
They've used citizen science methods
or they've developed new methods.
And we've worked with nonprofits,
land trusts, colleges, and universities.
So this has been a really exciting program for FEMC.
We are hoping that we'll be able to continue it in 2025
and are currently assessing the budget
to see if that will be possible.
But if it won't be possible,
we will continue looking for ways
to be able to bring this back in future years.
And then of course,
there's always even more happening
behind the scenes for FEMC,
and it's really important to me
to mention all of the work
that our web development team
has been working on this past year
to upgrade FEMC's web infrastructure.
These are just, quote, a few highlights,
but as you can see, there are many things
that the web team has worked on,
including reviving the Vermont ANR permit relationship
and workflow to drive data to our archive,
setting up new data shares for large data storage,
which has been really, really important for our capacity.
Creating a data archive tutorials page.
We've worked on a CodeIgniter upgrade
that's really, really important
and has taken a good portion of the year,
and actually is the reason
that we brought in Nate Smith,
that student employee who's been working
with our web dev team.
We upgraded and added features
to our eco news website.
We assisted in transferring Lake Met Station equipment.
We continue development and refinement
of our online data collection forms for FHM,
and so much more.
And I just really wanna give a shout out
to our web dev team.
They carry so much of what FEMC does
because everything we do practically is delivered
via the web and our website is really huge.
So there's a ton of work that they're doing all the time
that I think otherwise goes unseen.
And I think it's really important to recognize this work
and that there's so much to it
and that FEMC just really couldn't function without them.
I wanna share some details
about the work FEMC already has on deck.
I talked a little bit earlier
about the work that FEMC did in 2024
on the DNA metabarcoding database.
This is that five-year grant that we have
that's funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.
Looking ahead to 2025, this work will be continuing.
We're really excited that we're gonna move
into the process for hiring a user experience designer,
and then developing the designs for the database.
We're really excited for it to be really user-friendly
and have a lot of cool different functionality,
so that it's a really usable database
that can provide a lot of different kinds of information
related to insect's DNA.
We'll also be receiving feedback
on those designs from data owners
and potential end users of the database to make sure
that those designs really will meet their needs.
And then from there,
we'll begin building the beta version of the database.
We also will be
wrapping up the Forest Clearing Regional Project I
discussed earlier.
I expect that this will be wrapped up in early 2025.
We'll be doing model runs for the entire region,
and then classifying each year's data
to get those rates of forest clearing, forest conversion,
and forest regeneration over the entire region.
And then I also wanna mention a couple
of more partnership efforts
that FEMC has undertaken in the past year
that are expanding FEMC's regional and national reach.
So one of those is participating
in the Forest Service's Forest Health Monitoring program
modernization efforts
and also regional coordination efforts.
So I've had the opportunity
to attend two different workshops,
one in Davis, California in the spring
and one in DC in the fall.
Really thinking about indicators in the context
of the Forest Service's Forest Health Monitoring program
and also have spoken with them
about participating in some efforts
that they're undertaking
to better coordinate data collection
and data sharing across the region
where there's currently a good amount of overlap.
We're also participating
in the expansion and centralization
of a monitoring network in Vermont
in the northeast region that's led out of UVM.
That's all we have for updates on FEMC's 2024 work.
We're really excited about 2025,
and welcome you to get involved
with many of the projects that we have.
Come to our conference, come to webinars.
We hope to see you around.
Thanks.