of the natural resource inventory perform for richmond bolton huntington and jericho with a special focus on the role richmond really glad everyone's here and i relate to give you a little bit of  working pretty hard for the last year on our behalf but i believe if you take a little step back probably most everyone is sort of a wildlife expert when it comes to looking out your backyard and saying you know what the deer want their i've seen bear in my backyard or our lands healthy say at the other end when i'm not here living in richmond or volunteering in richmond i work for the fisher wildlife department and i spent almost the last two years also working on the other scale of the side of this project  a statewide assessment of where important while life sites are was where plant sites wildlife biological diversity and work with with some of these guys as well as a whole bunch of other experts in the state through i come up with this something that was missing at the state scale and that's something that richmond and now both in huntington jericho have over many other communities in the state this sort of project has been done actually by these guys in the mad river valley and maybe a couple other places i'm not sure how many natural resource inventories you've done at the town scale but it's something that puts puts us in a in a great spot to try and figure out as a community what it means how much how important natural resources are to our quality of life to what makes richmond richmond and what we might want to do in a variety of ways to help maintain that improve it change or how how to plan for the future so that was a big part of what the science action project is looking to do and the real boots on the ground work has been done by our wood and i'm going to stop talking and let these guys present their work on our behalf and they'll be chances for questions throughout so please feel free let's try and keep it focused so we can get through the information because there is a lot to share but let's go all right i'm going to start my name just person so many colleges and wildlife biologist michael you going through here i used to live in this region when i was back in school the university of vermont i now live up in the northeast kingdom so i'm going to actually leave after my presentation on wildlife so i'd really like to encourage you to ask questions while i'm here so for the next half hour forty five minutes if you have questions about what i'm presenting on which is largely wildlife habitat and wildlife in richmond in the region let's just a guess you just raise your hand and we can address those questions while i'm still here i'm going to be leaving like i said they're calling for ice on the roads again and i had ice on the roads this morning i want to get home before i have to deal with it on the other end of the day as well but aaron worthily is a wildlife biologist with their wood as well and he will be here throughout the presentation and can answer questions if you have any after i'm gone our work focused on the for town region and it focused on natural resources that were  largely broken into three categories wildlife habitat which i'm going to present on wetlands and that would be you know natural communities and wetland function in value and why they're important on the landscape and  upland natural communities and michael did a lot of the work on wetlands and upland natural communities and so be presenting on those two topics i'm going to start  with wildlife and let's get started so first of all like to talk about a little bit about our goals and objectives the way the meeting will go tonight as i'll briefly talk about that i'll talk about the methodology that we used to assess natural communities in wildlife and wetlands and then we'll present the resolves so the inventory the goals and objectives were to inventory the natural resources the ones that i just talked about so i'm not going to go over that again to provide tact technical assistance to the towns and natural resource information so that you townspeople can decide along  with the town managers and planners how that information should be used to what degree and how you feel about and want to promote the protection of natural resources things like wildlife habitat coord or important natural communities sites where there are rare threatened endangered species and finally the intention was to engage you people in taking ownership in identifying important natural resources so that you have some incentive to go out and are encouraged to go out and protect these resources all right here's the four towns study area in the north we have jericho in the south we have huntington we know that this study area and compass is different from physio graphic regions or regions that are quite different from a land use in geology perspective as well as population perspective to the west we have the champlain valley biophysical region where we have you know relatively flatter lands a lot of heavy soils clay soils and silt soils that were laid down by a glacial lake champlain that extended  from lake champlain eastward into the mountains and then of course we moved over to the green mountain fizzy a graphic region which has extreme topography and of course elevations up to four thousand feet so this is quite a broad range of ecosystems and topography and for that matter land use and and the places where we live it's quite diverse right from the high mountains in bolton in huntington down to the lower flat lands further to the west so the methodology the methodology involves a computer based geographic information mapping system where we have already existing information regarding the location of plants and animals natural communities types a lot of information regarding wildlife habitats wildlife specific wildlife not just habitats but also we utilize information such as road kill information where we've compiled information about you know the that there that got killed on i eighty nine in the bobcat cap that got killed in your town on this road and all that stuff goes to inform our work in terms of mapping wildlife habitat and things like wildlife corridors so that along with information such as topographic maps and aerial photo interpretation we can do a lot of work in looking at the landscape  computer screens actually and that gives us a lot of good information about where to go on the landscape in particular to find specific things and we were fortunate that we got to go on the on land and we're fortunate that you allowed us onto your land i think we spent more time in the woods in richmond i'm sure we did than any other community in the four town regions so i was here most of the summer it seems like and it was wonderful the one thing i found out about richmond is i had i lived in this region and now i live near j p you know where there's big mountains and stuff so the first couple times i came here to work i didn't bring hiking boots i brought sneakers and stuff i said you know returns kind of flat i have to worry about it you know within a week i puffing up these steep hills and i was pleasantly surprised at just how much variation there isn't in richmond and how much you had to work to get into these nice sites get that that makes it better for the wildlife in the natural communities if we have to work hard to get there ok so we gathered a lot of data from existing sources we sought public information on a website where we consulted with forester's natural resource professionals biologist and other well informed people in the community to add the data that they knew about this part of the world to our existing data set so we  encouraged and we provided data site on line for local contributions to our information as well and then finally we went out and visited sites in the field and collected field data on all aspects i'm a wildlife biologist but trained in plants as well so when i went out i took natural community information not always to the degree that michael would be happy with but nonetheless we all you know share share expertise in such a way that i was able to do a lot through a lot of natural community mapping too it was really pleasant we don't have oak trees where i live so it was wonderful to come down here and see all the that warm weather natural communities and trees michael got to see bears which i didn't get to see being the wildlife biologist hanging out the old fours all right well that's the that's the basic methodology  my work focused on wildlife and michael's going to present lots of cool stuff about real local in local places with lots of nice pictures because the plant communities stand still while he takes pictures my you know my stuff doesn't have all that local picture and texture to it because the animals move around the landscape so mainly what we do when we map wildlife resources for towns is we map wildlife habitat that's generally what wildlife biologists do we anyways you know we see the exciting national geographic specials where they put radio tags on grizzly bears and stuff that day to day work for most wildlife biologists it is actually mapping the habitat looking at the habitat to see if the context supports certain animals and then making assumptions about the presence of those animals in other words you know central park has some wonderful bear habitat but then you have to put the context there and realize that you're not not going to find it and that's the kind type of deduction that we use you know we look at the habitat and we look at the the animals that we know are in the surrounding area and then we deduce whether or not they come into that have a tad and that's what we did here in richmond you know not just that we also saw wildlife and sign of wildlife so we have to figure out a way to make the wildlife information usable to plan or interesting to people and it seems as if and we've decided that the best way to do that is to break up your town into what we call contiguous habitat units from a wildlife perspective so we take these core forest areas we add on ever wildlife habitats that may be important for certain species such as a marsh or something that may be important for  and as long as they're not fragmented by something created by humans more often than not right we're talking about a hollow sing subdivision or a well traveled road or something we call that a contiguous habitat unit because that whole area contains habitat for a wide variety of different species of wildlife and so we manage or we present the information to towns based on un fragmented habitats in these contiguous habitat units and these these can continue as habitat units include a number of different environmental scuse me wildlife habitat elements ok so we've compiled c h use all over the town of richmond let's look at that see if we've got it has only what was it four six contiguous habitat units because it's a relatively on fragmented town the town of richmond had less fragmented habitat then say jericho did i say that right the town of richmond had guessed less forest fragmentation and bigger habitat units than jericho did but smaller than huntington and bolton because huntington and bolton have these large contiguous mountainous areas with no roads and k so we had how many are there for nine fourteen roughly contiguous habitat units the average size of units well about fifty five percent of richmond was what we would call wildlife habitat i guess that's it that's a pretty good figure i guess you wouldn't you would add you might be able to change a little around the edges but that's a pretty good figure start with you can see that the contiguous habitats in bolton were quite large over three thousand acres each one so very large richmond still still very big approaching a thousand acres in size for an average area of contiguous habitat alright i guess that presents the same sort of information except you can see her in bolton who are approaching eighty five percent of the town is part of a contiguous habitat unit and on the other end jericho's down below fifty percent of the town  and that's that's going to be a measure of you know the wildlife diversity the the amount of wildlife present in your town that is that doesn't do well around human beings for the most  part and you know some species do well in the presence of human beings whitetail deer and rough and grouse do pretty well where there are humans present but on the other end you know bobcat black bear fisher and species like that are going to be more common in the deeper you know woods that are more common in huntington and bolton and probably more common in your bigger contiguous habitat units ok so for each c you we compile information all the way from the size of the core habitat which i'm going to go through each one of these in a minute and show you a map of where you find core habitat enrichment and the importance of core habitat for different species so you can look at this now we can go through the list but i don't want to dwell on it dear winter habitat the amount of wetlands in each c h you the presence of wetlands that are have particular species in them that make them likely to be visited by black bears especially in the spring after bears leave their dens in are in need of food and you can predict where those would occur in the landscape based on the type of food there and whether or not they're greatly disturbed by humans so if they're right next to a busy road you know the chances of them you being used by black bear even if they have appropriate food sources go down as you might imagine  you know you're all thinking yourself and i see that there you know in a weapon like that we may have seen a young male or something males or risk taking animals you know in the animal world so they'll use the young males will will now and then go to these sites you know where they can see by humans or be seen by humans but overall the you know the likelihood is greater if a wet lynda's out in the middle of the woods somewhere protected by forest and stuff not in your we look at forested stream side or right pairing corridors because they're important for a broad range of birds mammals and for movement corridors on the landscape we look at the presence of  that are important for animals and you know animals know where they're at on the landscape and and go to those sites when there's beechnuts available and acorns available the presence of ledge or tallis the presence of locally significant natural communities and then we take all this information let's get into the specifics of each one more interesting ok core wildlife habitat core wildlife habitat is wildlife habitat that's at least three hundred feet distant from human disturbance ok so this is habitat for species that don't do well in the presence of human beings let's go to the next slide unless you want to yeah so it's important because it provides what we call forest interior habitat forest interior habitat is force structure that's minimally affected by edge or you know human activities are cutting now and silver cultural activities can create internal edge in these force and it's not so bad but where you create a lot of bad habitat new openings you can get a decrease in the reproductive success of songbirds because they're parasitized by by parasites they're  searched out and in preyed upon by predators and things like that so these forests interior habitats are very important for species that are sensitive to human beings both mammals but also birds that are more sensitive to things that would negatively affect their reproductive success and in particular that parasites and predators these source scuse me these core habitats are important for species that have  different habitat needs across the landscape so they have to be mobile and move across the landscape you know we don't want those species to have to cross you know route one eighty nine all the time or busy roads right  if they have contiguous habitat they can go to the different habitat elements that they need on harassed by human beings for instance black bears black players yeah go ahead squares they can be quite small but have a very small core area in the middle so it's shape depend well if you're thinking about what animal might live there in are there breeding populations of it the bigger the animal in general the bigger that korea area has to be to have a breeding female situated there in a much bigger to have a viable population of breeding females just in that core area for something like bear we're talking about you know the size of the you know you may not even have a viable population of breeding bears in one core area and richmond richmond well this is strictly an exercise of looking at their photos and seeing where human beings that been and we have well seeing where they've left sign of where they've been you know where they've built roads where they build ranges right males generally in the animal world don't defend home ranges as much as they defend female home ranges because they're more interested in including females in their home range than actual habitat elements that are critical to them  and the source areas are important because in a lot in what we call the source areas reproduction exceeds mortality for a lot of really sensitive species so we may see more bears you know on the road and in these smaller habitat units but if you got rid of the source areas you would you would see a population decrease because where we see them on the side of the road and stuff there's actually a lot more  well we don't know this for every species not like we've gone out and measure did but we know that in general when animals come in time to contact with more humans and that mortality increases in relationship to reproduction so these areas are really important to protect from maintaining the broader population of their in moves and bobcat in fish or in your town and k just because you see them out in the small with lots and stuff doesn't mean there's females breeding there and so the population becomes very dependent upon these deep woods source here is ok for these species right for our oven birds and would thrushes for our raptors for us raptors and far dolls and for the various mammals that i've just talked about a couple of these of which were taken in this region ok another important habitat our dear wintering habitats because we live towards the northern edge of the white tail deer range the white tail deer extends all the way down into central america and stops on its northern edge near the it will wrench and mountains up in combat so we're towards the northern edge of where the white tail deer lives in order for the white tail deer to get through the average winter it needs to  it doesn't have the physical physiological or morphological characteristics to allow it to live in a cold place with lots of snow so it dops behavioral adaptations and those behavioral  term and short distance migrations to conifer forest what is it about conifer forest that they like conifer force hold snow in the trees so there the average snow depth in a conifer force during the winter is decrease because that snow is held up in the trees some of it melts or in eventually evaporates up into the sky so there's less snow in conifer fours let's go the next sli space is frigid cold hundreds of one hundred degrees below zero and unless there's a canopy that separates the deer's warm body from that cold sink of outer space dear lose energy to that to that outer space to that that cold sink of outer space and so what they do is they stand conifer force that creates a canopy that breaks that direct radioactive heat lost connection between the cold outer space and the ground level and that's why deer are like conifer stands because then they only exchange their body heat with the ambient temperature on the ground instead of one hundred below zero up above so there's i'm giving you two quick answers to why deer like conifer stands one is the lack of snow the other is the thermal benefits of living in a deer yard but they are very important to deer in this region they may becoming less important as our winters are changing but at this point there are still protecting deer yards and i think that's still a good thing to do especially in your higher elevations and cold regions and areas where you get a lot of snow so we map here yards is likely deer yards and potential deer yards with the south and west facing aspects as likely deer yards because they get greater thermal  benefits from the south and west facing slopes slope conifer stands and deer are less likely to use north and east facing conifer slopes did we find a lot of deer yard use nerf field investigation no we did not deer did not use deer yards very extensively last winter so we did not find scat piles recent browse activity that indicated a lot of deer use last year that doesn't mean they're not useful because if we get a thirty degree below zero temperatures are deep snow we can have large scale die off of white tail deer ok so these habitats remain important to protect ok legend tallis communities we have extensive legend tallis in the in the southeast we have large ones north of the  freeway up here towards the east as well these everyone in the talus is callouses where you find the rock pile next to a ledge where the rocks are broken off the side of a of a ledger a mountain and accumulated at ledges but for other wildlife such as porcupines bobcat we're looking at broken ledge being important where there's little nooks and crannies going into the ledge where something like a bobcat can tuck itself into and defend itself against a coyote or some other you know aggressive predator specially if they have young and that may be kind of new right because coyotes are new here you know they're relatively new couple what twenty years couple of decades of being here in many places in vermont so that may be you know in evolving relationship with ledges if indeed these are heavily preying on bobcat so a lot of these habitat know it's trying to stay in the thermal nutro zone where it doesn't have to expend energy to stay warm or cold so if it's really warm an animal has to sweat right or pant or something and then all expends energy so animals try to you know stay in that zone where they don't have to expend energy and that can be both when it's cold and warm in legend tallis communities do that and animals that take advantage of this are the ones listed there and you probably know many more you've probably seen the  in these habitats bobcat spend an awful lot of time in these habitats and i think they're also there when they've got their young and they're moving about the landscape especially in an environment that has coyotes present another nice thing about ledge habitat or tallis habitat is rocks are breaking up there and releasing nutrients so you often find unique natural communities  sites where there's a lot of minerals in the soil creating perfect habitat for things like this ginger for instance ok next so hard mast hard mast is mast as a is a term that we use to describe tree species that sort of synchronize their production of acorns and beechnuts you know the two species in particular i'm talking about here so as you probably that's the term that we applied to masting trees they're important because they provide a fatty food source for a lot of wildlife bears search them out certainly the beech trees michael  oak forest coming in for the acorns we know that turkey or squirrels certain birds all use hard mast and seek them out on the landscape when when they're acorns and and nuts and things are available so they're very important lot of people call them keystone habitats because their importance on the landscape is is greater than their the amount found in the landscape right next wildlife corridors i should mention that the core doors that we did here are not field verified it's not like we went out and sat at these spots and saw wildlife crossing and i want to get that out right away our wildlife corridors were mapped largely by looking at things such as land cover type and land cover type to some degree tells us the amount of human involvement on the land o human interference and as you'd expect most wildlife move about the landscape where there's less humans present ok secondly we we utilized information from fish and wildlife the department of transportation that looks at the proximity of important wildlife habitat in relationship to roads to help us predict where they may cross those roads things like wetlands and beach stands where animals may be moving towards those habitats or core forest far away from human beings that may also indicate that wildlife may move in those in those in those environments as well we also used to some degree the road tracking data to compliment you know our interpretation of the landscape about where wildlife may be moving  ok we got going on this grant fairly late in the process we didn't do as much road tracking as we would have wanted to because the money didn't come in the grant didn't come in and we were given the go ahead early enough otherwise we probably would have done more road tracking and then you know my memory serves right when it got to that point we just didn't have good tracking conditions when we wanted to go out and it's kind of a waste of money your money to go out in track when it's not good tracking conditions but this is a first cut at wildlife corridors we have several towns including the mad river region where we're now going back and confirming  these model sort of derived wildlife corridors ok the mad river has done several years what we've done with mad river demand river region several years of confirming the presence of the remotely determine corps doors so we don't have to do that for you you get your conservation commission together or other people that know how to do wildlife tracking and go out and find your own corridors this may be a first good cut of where to look  but we encourage you to to go out and tell us we were wrong and tell us where we were where we were right in you know in different locations ok michael warm blooded animals the cold and clammy things is a totally different picture for this we're talking about things like wood frogs and spotted salamanders and some of you may have been out on the first warm spring night and there's the there's just these things all over the roads and basically what's happening is that the they used that they spend most of their time up in the forests and then in the first rain warm night in the spring they come into vernal pools and wetlands to breed and then leave  it's a can be a pretty explosive migration and knowing their habitat upland and wetland and location of roads we can map out potential crossing areas where these things may be crossing ok again like the wildlife corridors this is a remote exercise based on habitat that's not feel verified but it's something that the town can certainly do is go out and check these sites so the road segments are rated as high a medium or low various c h use these are wetlands that have i don't remember that is the exact percentage but we did we had a cutoff for when a well and had a certain percentage adjacent to a busy road or something and then we also looked at different wetland types that were likely to have preferred food species that bear utilize and spring in early summer sometimes late summer as well and and so bears will go to these sites and the reason they go to many of these sites is because their sites were warm ground waters being discharged from the earth to an environment in spring time where ther may be snow on the ground and there are no buds there are no buds yet on the trees in so these these  may be the first place that there's good leafy vegetation for bears to eat and they know this on the landscape not just bears but but we do find a lot of bears in in in particular and in in these wetlands in spring and not just here it's also throughout it seems like at least in the northern hemisphere that they gravitate to these sites let's see an example of one with this richmond pond i believe and you know generally don't get bear coming out into the to the edge of this pond right you get them more closer to cover where they feel comfortable eating grasses and said his you know preferred foods sometimes they'll come to the edge but generally they stay closer habitat in town providing habitat for things like ruffed grouse yellow warbler and the woodcock for example ok this was  e part of two days that we spent driving your roads and stopping at every track that we encountered and doing the best we could to determine the species that it was without going on people's lands because the road tracking data we don't get we didn't seek your permission to go on your land so we had to stay within the right away of the road so that we wouldn't you know upset people that didn't want to doing this work and generally that's the best way to operate hotspots where we where we found more crossing this is just a preliminary slapshot snapshot slapshot hockey player what can i say so you know i encourage you to go out and do more of this work course you have s morse nearby that helps communities do this type of work but i'm sure you have an expertise around here to do it yourself  in bolton there's just no way to pull off you know so you're driving for every track a mile back you know i got to pull over somewhere in the hike back a mile richmond was a little bit easier you could you could find a place to pull over pretty easy in richmond very substrate dependent yeah and you can do it where you've got an appropriate substrate quite readily unfortunately that that's not much of the landscape right next running in general power line companies don't mind shrubs growing they don't want anything to grow there that would have a maximum height at you know size tall enough to interfere or with their wires so i think there is you know some companies that would be willing to listen to you you know if you were to suggest that curvaceous plants and woody shrubs should be ok because you know they should be able to live with that it's not going to interfere with their canopy what's the impact of that will some powerlines spray a lot of herbicides as well i guess they don't here's what you're suggesting those power lines which is why you find a lot of raptors hunting there and a lot of predators visit those sites but they move in and out so they wouldn't be affected as much by the clearing activity except how it affected the density of small mammals so i would think animals that depend on that habit to tap habitat directly might be affected the greatest erin what kind of birds might that be you know further two steps further are many steps you want to go further with it to add additional information to it make it more timely useful and robust i guess john is the the person who can answer that question about how that may  public site sightings data this is information that we obtain from biologist forests near their natural resource practitioners in the region we incorporated this data into our write up as much as we could i went through all this data when i was writing up the wildlife the wildlife part of this report and incorporated as much as i could and i know aaron did the same thing and in and michael probably did the same thing as well so you know it wouldn't be in the main body attacks that might have been written by me but it would be right under it and be just as important and you put whatever weight on it you feel is appropriate grassland habitats you get quite a few grassland habitats in general we're talking about grasslands that are other than grass that are other than agricultural habitats that are constantly in row crop so corn or something else that you know is grown in rows those sites tend to have last wild life value although certainly we know you know certain animals will go to to eat corn at certain times of the year if there are more wild resources such as beechnuts aren't available but that's a different suite of of animals then the ones that use grasslands which include a lot of bird species the link which condition of the stream course in vermont there may have been some places that had grasslands some floodplain zones but most of it would have been forced did either as upland forest or is floodplain forest next these places are important as you know habitat for stream side birds such as the belted king fisher aquatic mammals otter and make and providing  because they provide they provide more linear movement corridors for many species of wildlife so many species use these corridors for movement  you know on the landscape all right some of our recommendations we recommend that the core wildlife habitats remain un fragmented i think if you're going to decide to go in and build roads and houses into all your large forested areas that's got to be a town wide decision right you guys are going to lose a lot potentially if you do something like that so we recommend that it not happen and that it be something that fours but for the most part cutting trees is is compatible with wildlife habitat and then we recommend the buffers that are generally applied to particular wildlife habitats in the  state today under regulatory programs and that includes buffers of three hundred feet for deer wintering areas and the reason we suggest you stay at least three hundred feet away from deer wintering areas is you have to provide a buffer if you just if you allow a lot of noise and human activities and destructive activities near deer yards deer expend just as much energy being stressed and moving away from that and running away from dogs as they would if you build condos in the middle those deer yards so they do require some sort of buffer in particular to your yards bare habitats the state wide level are given buffers of of a quarter mile and that includes breeding or overwintering of animals in general you know keep your houses at least one hundred feet away to to allow those animals to utilize those habitats without disturbance we we it you know it's a wonderful thing that we have so much force land but it means that grassland in trouble and species are decreasing in direct proportion to our increase in forest so it's important to continue to provide  habitats for those species as well and lastly but perhaps most importantly from my perspective is if you want to continue to have such wonderful wildlife habitat in richm you've got to provide a way for them to get across the landscape in a way where both you and they can live in this town together and so i encourage you to do more work on identifying important wildlife core doors that doesn't mean you have to go and buy them and protect them as wildlife corridors you can do a whole lot of stuff short of that to protect wildlife movements you know enlarging call over it's encouraging vegetation to the edge of the roads putting up signage you know whatever it takes i think allowing the potential for wildlife to move across the landscape in richmond is probably the most important recommendation up there coming from me anyways all right hollow the case there are certainly ways of identifying priorities for travel corridors as a matter of fact the mad river region has done that now and has identified four five ones that we mapped where we're going out this winter and doing game camera work to identify animals crossing there and tracking exercises and we look at it this summer to characterize the vegetation and the likelihood of wildlife movement there and we've identified landowners to give us access to those sites aaron is the one who who does the work with wildlife corridors in particular so he could work with the town and identifying priorities i'm sure there are other things you could look at such as where are there conservation lands or something or or you know as a town you could decide where you know what sections of town corridors are most important in our role really was to provide the data and what rich we want to do with it well that's what you guys have to decide like so we've done our work now we give it to you and now you've got a lot of work to do figure out you know what exactly you want to do and how you want to use it i know in the case of ever towns there are plenty of free resources to take this to the next step gans helka hawkins at the state is a conservation biologist that works with towns and helps them work take this information further i know that i think it's brian shoop at the vermont natural resources council is working in detailed work with towns to take this information one step further and many well it's interesting we certainly know that there are recreational impacts of on wildlife i would say that if you're going to allow something like that in a c h you you identify critical areas when  within that c h you use resource professionals to see where you can bring that recreational activity in without having a negative impact on species of concern and you can do that  years ago in a long time now i participated in it with rick paradise in doing that very sort of thing how to plan recreation into core areas you know you if you core area maybe you skirt the edge of the of the best locations you know up to the most important wildlife habitats and make people work at getting into those habitats right don't make a a wide trail make a narrow trail make it in uphill trail to get in there make it harder for people to get there so that only the people who really want to work get there it decreases the number and you know you'd think the impact on wildlife or sensitive resources already ready to hear about wetlands and natural communities i guess for michael thank you those are actually wildlife habitats and so we do that process first and then all that information gets tied into and used by jeff and aaron when they do the wildlife habitat assessment while in richmond sixteen different natural community types you can see kind of a rough breakdown there different natural different community types in the totals down there some of them really are maybe more potential weapons when we're doing a remote inventory sometimes we can't tell  sure that's definitely a well and there were a little unsure and so this includes what we call potential weapons but there's quite a quite a diversity as you can see everything from your you know kind of a wet agricultural field to these these have all these wetlands in the town but they're not necessarily all created equal right we want to figure out a way are some more important than others ok and there's two different ways to do that with whelan's one is looking at  the national community and this is a this is a methodology that it's used by fission while a department you take a look at how rare the community is and combine that with information on different characteristics of that community  other ways to look at functions and values what kind of role is that where the playing on the ecological landscape and these this list of functions values is is also kind of a state standard that's used by the mt while in office and and we've incorporated our analysis to include all of those features and so using those two things we come up with a list of what we consider to be significant wetlands and weapon systems in the town  report so that you it's all in one place so much to talk briefly about each each one of these sites here richmond upon i'm sure many of you know richmond pond well thank you right for allowing me to  expands as a beaver moving in and out significant for quite a number of functions and values water quality fisheries wildlife flood control  community because there's that kind of mosaic of different natural community types very very nice  among them flood control when we look at when we look at wetlands that provide flood control we need a well in that that allows the river to expand ok and something with persistent vegetation that slows down the flood water slowly releases them it also creates a lot of micro habitat as well you get these little back swamps that drain very slowly hold water for a long time sometimes open water throughout much of the year and provide really valuable wildlife habitat cage left pond and other real gem in the town i'm sure many of you of have been there have recreated there have trumped around on it a lot of really great diversity of of different community t and a wide variety of functions and values one of the highest scoring wetlands in terms of function values in the town a lot of that has to do with these last two and that there's not a lot of that you can say people really you recreate in right ok at the people you say i'm going to go recreate in a while and they look at you like you're a freak right so but pond is one of those in flux because of the beaver but provides just such a wide variety of wildlife habitat for so many different species very important very important on the  also significant because of functions of values the floodplain forests are the highest ranking wetlands for function of the values in in the town water quality they're often perched in between agriculture and the surface water and then when you see the river ok and so they they have the capacity to filter out any excess of nutrients flood control for obvious reasons wildlife habitat jeff talked for a long time about these these co and they can also include these significantly large back swamps right where you get the water that sits there and a whole host of reptiles and fifty ns birds use that as well as really visible and recreation you know people are constantly canoeing efficient on the river and using and using these sites erosion control fisheries you know they they the trees hang over the banks that provide shade branches fall in its habitat that whole thing but i also consider floodplain forests to be one of the most abused and beleaguered natural communities in the state ok most of these sites occur on the really good agricultural land and most of them are gone there they were fairly extensive in these in the valleys of these these larger rivers and now really all we have is is fragments and so i think it's really important to to you know if you have a willing landowners to maintain these fragments and also me maybe important to you know to maintain them you might need to do active management and that's because invasive species are real problem in the sites invasive species love disturbed soil and flood plain forests often have disturbed soils because they get they get flooded and they get scouring ok and so you get things like got wheat or bishops we just moving in looks kind of nice but it's nasty ok and  chokes out a lot of native vegetation and of course that along the banks the japanese knotweed which is really difficult  so for wellens you know you basically want to avoid impacts to them they're fragile systems and the key one here is the hydrology hydrology is really something that that drives the formation of function the values are ok so for each weapon that we mapped there's a list of all the function the values and whether or not it's you know how that how that well and if it performs at the high medium or low  gnificant national community sometimes if we see a site that looks really good but it falls just below what the state would consider a state significant community we call a locally significant and by going through that process we've come up with a list of states or significant natural communities in the town this includes data from other people as well so for this talk i'm going to huckleberry hill south is that we didn't really know what to call it but this is a view i c c land here and it's you know just north of the interstate so one of the interesting things about richmond i think jeff alluded to this briefly was the amount that's present and probably some of the largest red oak northern hardwood stands in the northern part of the state or enrichment in bowl ok those south facing slopes just north of the new ski a more southern species ok and we up here we find it only are on the south facing slopes ok and so on the south facing slopes you have the northern hardwood forest but you also have a lot more red oak mixed in ok and so we call that the music because of there's also these southern slopes you can get red oak mixed in and also occasionally red pine now when you have these southern slopes and red oak mixed with the northern hardwoods sometimes if you get very steep slope with a really shallow soils or thin ridge with really shallow soils you get all the northern hardwoods like the beach in the maple they can't compete and it's all r occasionally you get a you know a little bit like a like a red pine or a white pine in there as well ok and that's a different natural community altogether and it's an uncommon natural community it's also occurs on much smaller areas because the site conditions necessary for that are much more localized ok because the dry red oak pine forests i mean there's ten stands in this huckleberry hill self site comprising only thirty three acres but because it's an uncommon community and occurs on these again fairly diverse area we've got the background northern hardwood forest in the light green and then there's these series of bridges that kind of run north that roughly north and south and have hemlock and northern hardwood forced on them woodland ok they're very sparse and you get a lot of huckleberries and blueberries and heat shrubs coming up bedrock is is exposed really uncommon community really nice site there's even some red bind one red pine stand up there ok where it's just red pine trees now this is different than the red pine you see down in the valleys they're all in straight rows and they're nice big trees are eight plantations this is native red pine that probably used to be more common but they're maintained by fire ok the red pine cones or serranos cones fire comes they open up and seas are viable and the and the fires also reduce competition from other species we don't have a lot of fire anymore ok so the red pine stands that we find are small this one was i think even less than an acre ok but and this i think is one of the larger drywall pine forests in the town forty two acres where we say there's five stands but it's the same community because you know sometimes they're just separated by just a little bit and so you consider really the same the same occurrence very nice stand some really large oak trees to up their state significant natural community very nice hemlock forest not all of these were visited and this is true for a lot of this there's a lot more field work that needs to be done you know we might have visited in a couple places and then but we've mapped it you know variability and that's what we see some areas are fairly young other areas there's a nice large trees there's also a lot of these inclusions of very dense hemlock as hemlock for us and because even though it's more common  community because it's such a large size it's considered state significant so what does that mean though for something as common as the hemlock forest hemlock known harder for speech states well there isn't any regulatory implications ok it's not like ok it's state significant someone's going to come in and say this is how you have to manage your forest ok we like to think that is like this is information that the landowner can use right the landowner knows their land better than i ever will ok what this is is kind of a state wide perspective like this gives the global view of what your woods are like compared to other ones in the region ok having said that the larger more common communities like northern hardwood floors or hemlock hardwood forests are definitely more resilient to small disturbances ok  logging activities usually not that big of a deal in a lot of cases you know logging can increase while that habitat sites without degrading the natural community and the main thing like jeff talked about if you want to avoid fragment the smaller communities like to read oh dry road opine in the red pine forest you know if you do some clear cutting in there that's you know especially the one that's only an acre right that's a significant disturbance and so you really want to you really want to do only selective logging or none in the luckily you know some of these are not anywhere near where typical development is going to occur and many of them also going to have marketable timber but basically it gives you this website and shows you what's there and how to how to get it every the report and everything is there for downloading the g i s all this data is there if you don't any software we've also created on line map which you can get to which you can zoom in and display these different features on this online map and interact with it that way  so i think yeah yeah most of the bases that i ran into were in sites that were kind of reverting old pasture and that we've mapped as white pine northern hardwood for us you know especially  overall there's not a lot and looks pretty good i mean if you compare it to southern new england especially you know but off to my head those are the ones that that i'm thinking of where you have a kind of this this mosaic of field an old field and forest you know recovering forest beginning and bases in there but i didn't really see any end in these more remote sites you know like any of the old forests are you know any of the hemlock row we spent oh the record the question was how accurate is our data given that we weren't able to field check everything and i think that's going to vary a lot on which data we're talking photos but sometimes i'm not sure if it's white pine hemlock or spruce right and certainly any time that we feel shocked we can confirm that other than that i think the biggest things are going to  the biggest and actors are going to be boundaries you know like oh well you know the red oak really goes five hundred feet more this way than than i mapped it or things like that you know  or that was able to correct the you know no no i mean it's interesting in that you know we've done this for maybe a dozen dozen other towns and i originally map to a lot more reds first here but i got here in every side was all hemlock you know and so you know i went back and changed everything there's very little red spruce here and i mean it's higher much higher up this all year and so certainly the areas that were able to change right yeah