family all the way from the champlain valley of you and lucy valley bottom land i've been to the hill and so that that boundary is somewhere probably in the middle of the slide again it's largely in part responsible for their tremendous diversity of habitats and wildlife and natural communities that we have in richmond where we're pretty fortunate to be in this sort of unique situation that's one of the reasons why they take these or the photos in the spring is to be able to distinguish between these different types of education so looking at another type of was a lot of land was more open it is today and water's going describing that by the transformation of the landscape by as you probably know hundred years ago or so which was about seventy five percent clear and then davies been slowly regenerating forests ever since then so that shows some of the transformation of this where the valley richmond has some of the best agricultural land in the state which is why agriculture has thrived here and continues to thrive and hopefully will for a long time i mean anyone has any questions feel free to  of my job is to take us underground a little bit today and in terms of the transition i was trying to figure out how to transition to from the talk about geology and we first we just threw in a blanks live then layer and i'm often in search of places where i can get that sort of earth full profile look at looking things from the side from meet the surface and so what i want to do in the next part of this presentation is take you  of deep into the year and kind of really think about how that controls what's happening above ground so we're going to take a layer cake approach and here's a here's my best sort of use of power going to show you the different layers of soil is really driving the history of what is happening there so the vertical profile so i want to start with with the bedrock which is really the foundation of any bedrock geology map of the mine there are some that are much more detail this one is this kind of simplified in some ways it's broken the bedrock classes and denying different classes was actually made by colleges who were thinking about what contribution to the different types of r metamorphosed rocking and it really when we say formation it's not one type of rock but many different types of rocks together that form one corporation just like you say northern harbor forest it's made of beach birch maple and many other species but there's a certain mill sites in jericho and they also are along with me contact so maybe there's something to that but sort of upstream from the gore which is what i meant to capture in this photograph is rockets typically considered part of the underhill  not a fine grain rock like you'd find in the under bill formation it started out as these of course with grains and sometimes if you look on the table over there you see a piece of what's called the blue towards conglomerate and you can see these chunks of course that were originally deposited maybe integrated stream maybe along the shoreline and i'll try to trace that history just a bit but when you look up look at this rock i this is it's just got this beautiful pinstriped pattern to it and we haven't been to go that route drive down there and  layers and you can see the sedimentary origins of a lot rocks here i'm happy to say though that recently the town put a bunch of chunks of pinnacle formation a wall on the parking area squeeze it all together and in fact one hundred years or so ago that people were having those thoughts for the first time that maybe this was all jigsaw puzzle fit together in some way and for a lot's happened in geology in the last hundred years and in the last forty years or so a geologist have really piece together the story of continents moving around with respect one another and here's the best the latest story is that well if you want to think about the story of seventy eight's the way through the history of the earth is when the story of the rock and we're thinking about beginnings and the earth we think had this look to it back then six hundred fifty million years ago happening with those convection cells and started ripping there are the supercross and great river valley started to her right around where vermont is right now and so things are being pulled apart and actually the story of the couple formation we this is the ocean that preceded the atlantic ocean off the north america but down about twenty degrees south latitude that's really very we're thinking about the rock in an environment kind of similar to where the bahamas would be in modern day world a shallow coastline or shallow marine tropical environment and actually this timing is key too because this is right when there are so there's no life on land at this point but there's an explosion of life that's happening in the oceans of the world especially the warm tropical air and these are one of the first fossils are showing up  we can find things that and every rock so here's a site here's the ancient north american continent and here is what europe is kind of on the other side here and  the green mountains that were for may have been the size of the himalayas today twenty five thousand thirty thousand feet high and so where we're sitting right now we may have been underneath a but not quite melted yeah this is a time when dinosaurs are roaming this and many other parts of her and she is doing thirty seven million years ago in the drastic things start to happen not look at the cycle starting to go the other way land forms were shape and sediments were rearranged to deposits and that's really critical thinking about up here to richmond which is somewhere right about here so here's the here's how far the so this brings us to our next layer the landscape because on top of the bedrock is a lot of material that was intimately associated with glaciation either was deposited under the advancing glacier or i think later was melting and interacting with the layers oil this is sort of the patterns that would be there and as you can see from the richmond is really a mosaic of difference official material but  for the landscape delos or left behind or there like even when the lake disappears you can figure out where it was dirty back up ring around the outside and many places below show up on the landscape especially when you're flying because through here here and this way and there's a tremendous flow of water moves through here and may have reshaped the landscape to some degree certainly left leg its legacy behind and then getting back a little further actually shows a better here's the here's the windows the river right down here so the flow of the ice is really right up to this set so it's covering the huntington river this point and so here we are richmond here's an outline of richmond as it's being influenced up to the contrary line be about six hundred feet above sea level or by day feet above present day lake level so get your barriers whether you were down into the champlain valley so for a period of time we had saw a lot of water or at least brackish water that was an arm of the atlantic filling the whole champlain valley all much of ontario was covered as they were even especially like open tundra areas and so this recently bigloo shaded landscape was perfect environment for for that and here's what one people have seen now apologise if i were you and i decided we couldn't fit so much in we were not doing much with the human history on the landscape we're saving that for another presentation but it's obviously critical to thinking about our landscape here it is critical to the story of this man so i just want to show you that all the people have been in the richmond landscape maybe for eight to ten thousand years european selling really began in earnest in the late seventy's hundreds and the pre settlement for us certainly but they encountered were diverse had diverse structure enormous tree many different species although when you read accounts of it actually people think of the forty percent of the forest and shouldn't counting w beech trees but that down ten percent who actually may be losing beach right now in some ways but here's a rendition from the harbor forest of what the pre settlement forest might have looked like and then if you imagine richmond being settled in the in say the late seventy nine people were clearing away the forests and setting out their homes that and far subsistence farms at that point and richmond certainly has a rich history  that certainly historical society looks like today and already have really pieced together in fascinating ways and you can read the whole human habitation i'm going to sort of fast forward to the height of the agricultural period  certainly face corners was one of the major original southern areas jonesville and richmond are both big commercial centers especially when the railroad comes in but we focus in on here this is where  mammoth excavation in new york state and then when you find them they're often very well preserved and here's here some of the tusks and often the skeletons can be completely reconstructed nobody's found the rest of the skeleton of this ma landforms of richmond are shaped by the bedrock some of the finer features are shaped by the surface will geology but it's actually the actions of the rivers that give it some of the finest details and really intimately influence where we build our houses where we build our have our farms there's an old floodplain here you go up a little bit right sledding slope up on the next one above there are lots of abandoned terraces of the new city grid the graveyard is up on the little terrorists which makes sense very easy to dig in that kind of material across from there lots of terrorists so i think when we were named richmond paris the apartment complex right on the side i think it's built on the terrace by the way and it's actually a spot i know we're not talking about human history too much but side a lot of native american activity in fact if you were living in richmond back in the early ninety's you know along huntington river bridge there was this amazing excavation done where they found a tremendous number of art right on the terrace as well so the soils develop in sufficient deposits and i'm going to kind of move quickly through these but there's a real diversity of soils in richmond that are really due to this or fishel material but they are late seventy's hundreds but when the land is clear for us there was a tremendous amount of the roaches that brought material down out of the bills and collected in the low and areas so the soils have changed quite a bit of human influence on the landscape lots of different soil textures of it and move through these because i want to build the rest of our layers of the landscape in future programs of the talks and walks i've heard about what's the influence of the the substrate on the formation and the underhill formation and on top of that is the superficial geology which gives a sense some of the finer textures on the landscape but really have a tremendous influence on human activity and the types of soils in an afforded from a educational and conservation perspective and it's what to keep in mind that what's happening above the surface is largely due to what's happening below the surface but we're going to take a short five minute break make sure you  for the door prize and we'll get back together conservationist work as a vision and then stewardship and community service and education and the projects which are going to run through really knows a great a number of the different parts of the night first mission and also the degrees organizations who are working mind institute of natural science and the working family foundation and to program to to give students the the chance to get out in the community and map important community resource natural resources ultra gather all this data create maps and present this is just good to members of the community and to community organizations you know it's a way of getting students out in the community working on real world projects and collecting some pretty valuable data and the students at the sequoia team have been working on a lifetime of british workers or this fall learning from their teachers and from other experts to the to the east of where it is now or where it was her so that summer we can talk to the foundation a lot of the work was done by lamp post on here's your community members and we also i've gotten a lot of help from the vermont you conservation corps which has provided crews for the last three summers to help us work on the bar and in fact the barn is going to be the home the permanent home for  which was brought to the site as the farm was taken apart or actually before it was taken apart each of the timbers was was inventory and catalog and so for the pieces that we could say we stockpiled  part of the frame it's being constructed right now we are are hoping where we're planning to finish the frame in the next couple of weeks and then all goes well i actually get a layer of sheeting required two hundred acres behind the barn site which is  is land again it has a tremendous diversity of wildlife habitats also agricultural land in the part of the of the land and waters class studied this property two winters ago and produce know set aside all this land is forever wild and it's all going to be a big nature preserve the the idea is really to preserve opportunities for people plants and animals and it's protecting habitat probably habitat and providing connections for wildlife perhaps for wildlife so they can move between the various parts of their range so it's really it's not designed to create a to move to a greater landscape including across the interstate barrier event and so they can use large mammals especially can get from one part of their range to the other and one of the things that we're looking at is actually creating a recently that the uplands for mine was awarded three point one million dollars to wire development rights on productive manage forest lands and all that money will be used in time and up and down a new ski river through the landscape and hope it's given you a new way of looking at a different kind parts of the landscape so that when you go out next time you have just a slightly different perspective the thinking about where the you know how the landscape evolved how it's changed over time and how some of the efforts underway today will be protecting that landscape for future generations thanks