- [Peter] Welcome everybody
to the FEMC Monitoring Cooperative Conference...
Virtually.
Hope everyone's hanging in there on this a snowy day,
at least in the new England area.
For those of you that don't know me, my name's Peter Church.
I'm the Director of Forest Stewardship for the
Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation.
And I'm currently the chair of the FEMC Steering Committee.
I'm happy to welcome you to the 2020 FEMC conference.
And although I'm sad, I'm not up at UVM,
I am happy that I can present this year
our conference titled
Revealing a Changing Forested Landscape,
where we have come, from what we have learned,
and what's next in longterm ecosystem monitoring.
Despite these difficult times,
the past year for FEMC has been another year of growth
with more cooperators getting involved
and the resources and tools growing in scale and scope.
I'm pleased to welcome Connecticut
and Rhode Island to the program.
And I want to acknowledge Maine's expanded role
in the Cooperative.
These expanded partnerships will further
strengthen this focused regional effort
As Jim Duncan will share in a moment,
there are some exciting new developments
and initiatives that come with this growth.
The evolution of the FEMC brings new opportunities
for sharing information on forest conditions
across our region and increasing regional connections.
That makes this a timely moment to take and step back
and think broadly about what we've learned
from long-term monitoring over time,
where we are going next,
and what's the focus of today's conference.
Today, we're fortunate to have two great plenary sessions
where Dr. Miller and Dr. Driscoll
can present some of the stories of change
in our regions for us and what is on the horizon.
I hope this can in turn, challenge us to think
about what our monitoring needs look like in the future
as we continue to track change.
What has surprised us...
in our monitoring work and how did we respond?
What can we do differently next time?
What future opportunities are there for monitoring
and exploring the data we have?
How do we use new and innovative methods for monitoring?
I encourage you to keep these questions in mind
and engage in the many aspects of the next two days
to make these new connections.
Thank you for being here and again,
sorry we all can't be together live in person.
And with that, I'm going to turn it over to
Jim Duncan, the director of FEMC.
Jim.
- [Jim] Thank you, Pete.
And thank you for your leadership and guidance
over the past two years.
We are extremely grateful for the service
that you've given to FEMC
and look forward to continuing to work
with you in the future.
And thank you to all of you for participating.
This has been a difficult year
and this is a challenging conference to participate in
but we're also able to think
about opportunities to engage during this conference
in ways that we may not have otherwise had.
And so there's some silver linings:
our networking breaks,
being able to engage with speakers
during the contributed talks,
and making connections
that we might not physically be able to do.
We know from past feedback how important networking
and connections and physically being together is.
And so we appreciate you all being here in spite of that.
I hope we can take advantage
of some of these opportunities that we've given you today.
And thank you to all the invited speakers
for all the work that you're doing
to make this conference happen.
I'd also like to recognize the awesome work
of our Conference Planning Committee
in helping us pull all this together.
Laura Kenefick, Leslie and Depiki Sheru, Brittany Mosher,
and Alexei Saran were invaluable supports
for us as we developed the theme in plenary.
So thank you to each of you for your time and energy.
Before we get into the plenary session
I'm going to use organizer's privilege to share a little bit
about FEMCs activities over the past year
and what's coming up in the year ahead.
As we close out this strange year,
FEMC has continued to grow.
As Pete mentioned, we're excited to be welcoming
Connecticut, Maine, and Rhode Island into the FEMC.
And this rounds out a really strong and cohesive unit
for thinking about forests in our region as a system
unto themselves, and also as a part of what
knits us together as a human community.
I'm excited that we'll be starting a new type of engagement
at the state level as well with the development
of state coordinator positions.
These professionals will be based in each participating
state forestry agency
and they're going to coordinate with FEMC staff
on state and regional project work.
This opens up a wealth of new opportunity for the depth
and breadth of work that we can accomplish as a cooperative.
So, please keep up with our newsletter.
We're going to be introducing them in batches
over the coming months and many of them are on today.
So thank you for joining up and for joining in.
Our team continues to grow as well.
I would normally get to ask all these great folks to
stand up and maybe ask John to stop running around
for a second to be acknowledged,
but I just want to be able to show our staff,
the faces here form the core of who we work with,
but we're also lucky to have
even more folks involved throughout the year.
Right now, Clark Cooper, Azana Wolf, Joe Robertson,
are all bringing their expertise and insight to the work,
as well as the people you see here.
And as we've had the bid goodbye to Allie Casibez
as our Project Manager this year,
as she moved to Forest Parks and Recreation,
we're fortunate to be able to bring on
a couple of new staff as well.
We have Pia Ruisi-Besares on as our new Project Manager,
Elissa Schuett has joined up as our Outreach Professional,
and we're proud to have Emma Gwyn here as part
of the Vermont ECO AmeriCorps program.
Each of them has done a great job jumping into the program
in fully remote.
So please take the time to connect with them
during the conference if you can.
Several new tools are available
since the last time we got together.
We've collated dozens of key forest regeneration studies
and methods to support assessments of
how forests are regenerating.
We've brought together urban tree inventory data to
help explain the economic costs of invasive insects.
And we're providing easy, ready to use spatial data
and trend analysis to support those investigating
the connections between forest cover and water quality.
If you haven't already,
take some time to explore these tools,
and if you have any suggestions
on how we can make them stronger,
please let us know.
We're in the midst of some exciting efforts as well.
We have some work going on to
integrate inventory program data from across the region.
There's a talk later in the conference about this
I encourage you to check out.
FEMC is excited to have been involved envisioning
what a coordinated monitoring of restoration efforts
could look like and we're really excited to announce
a release at the fully redone Forest Indicator dashboard
for Vermont and similar dashboards for New Hampshire
and New York are about to be launched.
And our regional project work continues.
As we speak we're in the middle of several great projects
I wanted to give an update on.
One of these is focused on identifying and reporting
changes in disturbance regimes.
We're trying to make information about disturbance
in our region easier to access and work with
and taught people to say something about what is changing
and what is not yet changing in those disturbance regimes.
This involves not only looking back
at key disturbances of today,
but also digging further back into historical data
from reports, old files, and other sources of at-risk data
to understand what the longer picture
of disturbance and change is in our region.
Another large undertaking for our staff
and our larger Cooperative
is to provide a summary of where and how we are
monitoring forests for signs of climate change,
maybe starting to have an impact
on the systems that we depend on.
Working with a great team in the region,
we're identifying the indicators,
where these indicators are being monitored now,
and where there are gaps in our monitoring
that may need to be filled.
And finally, we're bringing together information
on the ways that we monitor, the methods, and the systems
so that as new monitoring comes online
we can try and get the most comparability
and interoperability in that data as possible.
As we step into 2021,
there's a couple of exciting things to look forward to.
We have a couple of regional projects that we'll be starting
up as the other regional projects wind down.
The first is A regional assessment of browse
and how browse is impacting forest vegetation.
This'll be a combination of compilation
of existing knowledge, development of model methods,
and potentially collection of new data
to understand what the full picture browse impacts are
at a regional scale.
A second more focused project is to make a proposal
about how we might monitor the impacts
of recreation on forest ecosystems.
Again, looking at what is being done already
and what we might need to do
as a region to better understand this issue.
And finally, this summer we'll begin expanding
our forest health monitoring program further.
It currently covers Vermont and Massachusetts,
we'll be bringing that forest monitoring annual network
out to the region starting in the summer,
working with our state coordinators.
And many other great activities underneath all of these,
but these are going to be some really significant
efforts that we'll be jumping into here
in the coming month or two.
And finally, something entirely new.
We are going to be launching
the Forest Ecosystem Monitoring Cooperatives
Monitoring and Assessment Fund.
This is a new effort proposed by our steering committee
to support maintaining critical monitoring
in the region with the potential for supporting a variety
of activities from upgrading old data log equipment,
to piloting a monitoring program,
increasing the comparability of a monitoring program,
supporting monitoring that may not happen every year.
So be on the lookout for that in the spring.
And finally
It's been 30 years, 2021 marks the 30th year
since the inception of the Vermont Monitoring Cooperative.
And it's been five years
since we launched the FEMC at our conference.
And so we are in the process of going
through strategic planning,
and I'm hoping that as many of you as possible
can join us today at 12:35 for listening session
to help us make this cooperative stronger
and something that will last another 30 years.
Finally I would be remiss if I didn't acknowledge
the funding and support that keeps the core of FEMC going
from the Forest Service, Massachusetts DCR,
Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources,
and the Vermont Agency of Natural Resources,
as well as a lot of in kind support and increasing support
from each of our state partners beginning in 2021.
And we're also fortunate to have a number
of other organizations funding monitoring in the region
through the work that we do here at FEMC.
I also want to extend a sincere thanks to Senator Leahy
for his continued support for the Cooperative
as well as his larger commitments
to helping us preserve and understand forest ecosystems
in the larger natural world and our region.
And finally, I do want to thank
John Chung and Elissa Schuett and Emma Gwyn
for their fantastic work organizing this conference
and pulling all the pieces together.
They are an amazing team
and we couldn't be here without them.
So thank you each of you for your time and effort.