Wilderness -- A Scientific Baseline

Vermont Land Preserved for Scientific Study

In December 2003, the Northeast Wilderness Trust accepted a conservation easement on 115 acres located at the foothills of the Green Mountains. The property contains a diversity of natural communities, including ridge-top northern hardwood-spruce forest and low-elevation northern hardwood forest. The property's rocky ledges and rich soils support a great diversity of herbaceous plants including silvery spleenwort, blue cohosh, jack-in-the-pulpit, sessile-leaved bellwort, herb robert, St. John's wort and more. The property provides habitat for moose, deer, bear, fisher, songbirds and many other wild creatures.

The landowners, who own another 600 acres of forest land that will be preserved, are committed to the rigorous scientific understanding of forever-wild landscapes. Since 1998, a team of ecologists has conducted annual studies on the property of mammals, birds, insects, flora, amphibians and reptiles. The conservation of this property will preserve a baseline for scientific understanding of forever-wild landscapes and help provide linkages to the Green Mountain National Forest and other conserved areas.

Ecologist Marc Lapin reported that "Typical low-elevation landscapes—those where people work and live—until recently have not been seen as priorities for conservation, nor, because of their largely disturbed nature, have they been viewed as fertile ground for studying ecosystems and their characteristsics. These low and mid elevation lands, however, are the essence of the Vermont landscape; they are the most abundanct and they are, thus, the most characteristic of the region. Few areas of similar elevation in Vermont are conserved as 'forever wild' lands."

Reference: Lapin PhD, Marc, Ecological Assessment, 1998.