Walking the Berkshires

Bear Necessities

(Sign available at Animal Den) 

One of the central underpinnings of conservation biology is that just about every terrestrial habitat type - from southern New England calcareous sloping fens to the fynbos of South Africa - occurs where it does and in its current form because of three, interrelated factors: Climate, Geology and Disturbance. Even geographically restricted habitats with very specific soil chemistry requirements are subject to these influences.  Over time, habitats can shift in species composition, vegetative structure, even physical location on the landscape.

Of these three factors, it is disturbance, particularly that which is caused by patterns of human land use, that has the greatest range of variability over the shortest period of time.  Geology (notably bedrock geology and the slope and aspect of terrain) changes very slowly on its own over many millennia.  The patterns of regional climate variation fall somewhere in between, though can be augmented by human land use at scales from the very local (deforestation, ground water depletion) to global levels.

This is one of the reasons why conservation biologists advocate conserving large landscapes to account for variability and disturbance and allow for change.  Save too small an area, and sooner or later the natural systems that sustained whatever was initially of conservation interest there will become fragmented or degraded by disturbance (human or natural).  Over time, changes in climate may cause species and habitat ranges to contract or expand.  If the connection between suitable habitat types is broken and species are unable to migrate, occurrences become extirpated.  If I were interested in conserving coastal wetlands in southern New England, for example, I'd be planning for their inland migration with projected sea level rise.

Environmental regulators, on the other hand, deal in occurrences here and now, often within jurisdictions that do not encompass the full range of the species or habitat types of concern.  What is rare in Massachusetts or Connecticut may be quite abundant elsewhere.  It still may be important for genetic reasons to conserve such species at the edge of their ranges (eastern timber rattlesnakes and bog turtles are two examples from our area), but it may also be that declining species such as meadowlarks and bobolinks are falling to levels more appropriate to our presently forested landscape rather than previously agricultural one.  There are policy and management implications at work here. 

Which brings me to the subject of polar bears.  Like all charismatic megafauna, they have an emotional appeal to many of us who do not actually try to coexist with wild populations (though the reality of that association does not necessarily preclude affection).  The species has a circumpolar range and population dynamics that appear to be driven by complex associations including prey availability, depth of permanent sea ice, and the ability to range over wide areas. This summer, the polar bear in the United States was listed as Threatened under the Endangered Species Act, due in large measure to changes in habitat linked to projected changes in climate.  Losing US polar bear populations because future environmental conditions may no longer allow the bear to hunt seals on the ice could have implications for the entire species through the loss of genetic diversity and range contiguity, even if some populations are less affected by climate change. 

Still, it has me thinking.

Most scientists agree that polar bears have existed as a distinct species for at least 100,000 years, and new evidence suggests their origin should be placed perhaps tens of thousands of years earlier.  If true, this suggests that when a young species, populations of polar bears survived the Last Interglacial period (127,000 - 110,000 years ago) when global conditions were warmer than today (though cooler than they could become in the coming centuries).  Possibly, the modern representatives of the species have evolved with a lower tolerance for climactic variation than their ancestors had nearer to initial speciation.  Even more likely, a shift to less suitable prey may bring polar bears into unacceptable competition and ultimate conflict with human populations where none existed during the Last Interglacial. I find myself in agreement with the blog World Climate Report on this point, when it says;

"If the bears fare worse this time around, it will mostly likely be because their natural adaptive response may run up against a human roadblock in the form of habitat disruption or other types of difficulties that an increased human presence may pose to the adapting bears."

Highly specialized species are more vulnerable than generalists to changes in habitat.  There were a number of New World vulture species that did not survive the Pleistocene because they lived off the carcases of extinct megafauna. Only the California Condor, which had access to a diet of stranded whales, lingered on.  Possibly there are populations of polar bears that have more prey options than others.   

If I were a conservation biologist working with polar bears, I would be thinking about the places where the best available climate projections and population dynamics data suggest could be refugia for this species; identifying viable connections between the bear's present range and these areas; and making this the focus of my conservation efforts.   

During the last Ice Age, such refugia existed for the temperate broadleaf forests of New England on what is now the Continental shelf off the southeastern United States.  It took thousands of years for the trees of our forests to recolonize the land after the glaciers receded, traveling north and west at the rate of seed dispersal.  When they did reappear on the New England landscape, the pioneer tree species occupied all available niches, even those considered marginal today.

They were only able to do this in the absence of competition from others.  That's the rub, for the species with the greatest habitat requirements and in fiercest competition for its own needs is homo sapiens sapiens.   

I Spy With My Little Eye

Yesterday I was running quality control on a series of conservation maps produced by the Litchfield Hills Greenprint.  I found something that on the landscape that conflicted with our natural resource data, something a landowner had done in the last half dozen years that converted a wetland to a farm field.  I though I'd share how I made that discovery, although I'm not yet sure if there is anything to be done about it.

We maintain data for three overarching resources of regional conservation interest at the Greenprint - Prime Agricultural Land, Large Interior Forests, and Drinking Water Resources - and have developed data layers from a variety of sources to identify and analyze in a Geographic Information System or GIS.  Our forest resource layer includes data which were derived from satellite images, in which land cover is classified by which of 13 possible types is best represented in each 100' x 100' pixel. 

Our farmland layer includes the use of data derived from aerial photographs of actual farm fields which were then recorded digitally.  I found a place where both of these layers - farm fields and forests - overlapped, which should not have been the case as we excluded farmland pixels identified by satellite from the forest resource layer.

Even more intriguingly, the farm field in the forest did not show up on our prime farmland layer, which intersects the digital farm fields from aerial photographs with the State of Connecticut's Prime Farm Soils and Farm Soils of Statewide Importance data.  There is a high correlation between the good soils and existing agricultural fields in our region, yet when we turned on the layer that showed just the farm fields, there it was, jutting out into the forest and almost entirely outside of the area with agricultural soils.

Now the forest layer does not only include forest.  It includes 4 types of land cover - Deciduous Forest, Coniferous Forest, Forested Wetland, and Non-forested Wetland.  It does not consider areas of open water, and any heavily modified land cover types the satellites identified nearby - barren land, agricultural fields, turf and grass, developed land and power lines - got buffered by 300 feet and excluded from the forest analysis.  We kept the non-forested wetland in the mix because it is usually a small component of the forest and we were looking for areas of forest interior greater than 200 acres.  If we buffered the non-forested wetlands, we might have excluded the forest habitat we were seeking by forcing it below the 200-acre threshold.  I'm now wondering whether we should treat it as we did open water, and leave it out of the analysis altogether.

It was clear that what a satellite told us was forest or wetland was in conflict with what an aerial photograph said was a farm field.  So we did what everybody does and went to Google Earth.  And there it was: a farm field on wetland soils next to a forested wetland that used to be bigger.  This mowed field was so dark and muddy it was clearly still wet.  We never would have looked for it if our two data layers from two different sources had not been in conflict.

As for what to do about it, that is harder.  Farmers get a good deal of dispensation to manage their land "as of right", but even they need to go through a formal approval process to convert a wetland to agriculture.  There are also state rare species records in the associated forested wetlands, but very few people at the State to monitor them.  Connecticut identifies jurisdictional wetlands by soils, not by what grows there, and on the surface, at least, this area seems to qualify.  A satellite in 2002 thought it was in natural cover, and a plane that flew over in 2006 shows the field there instead.

So maybe the landowner went before the Inland Wetland Commission and got approval to convert the land to fields.  I can just as easily imagine that no permit process was followed, or if it was that it was pro forma only.  Aerial monitoring of conservation land is becoming more widely used, though, and anyone with a computer can use Google Earth.  A word to the wise: I am not the only one who may be watching.

"What if a Much of a Which of a Wind"

"what if a much of a which of a wind
gives the truth to summer's lie;
bloodies with dizzying leaves the sun
and yanks immortal stars awry?
Blow king to beggar and queen to seem
(blow friend to fiend: blow space to time)
-when skies are hanged and oceans drowned,
the single secret will still be man"

- e.e. cummings

The Selectmen in my hometown are spearheading an effort to erect a wind turbine, according to an article today in the Lakeville Journal.

"A plan to install a wind turbine at the transfer station is keeping its momentum with the Board of Selectmen.

They are being advised by consultant Walter Micowski of WM Energy Services to move cautiously and gather up to a year’s worth of site data. Extensive planning is key to ensuring success, he said, and may be a requirement for grant reimbursements...

...It’s a matter of scale as North Canaan officials look into producing a potential $100,000 worth of electricity per year. That will not be enough to cover all of the town’s needs, but will make a huge dent.

The selectmen are also hoping to spark a groundswell of commercial and residential installations throughout the area, and get past the notion that there are not a significant number of viable sites in the Northeast."

North Canaan is quite a bit different from its neighbors here in Northwest Connecticut.  This is a town with mines and light industry and one of the best remaining clusters of family run dairy farms in the state.  Nearly half of the workforce living in Canaan actually works in Canaan.  Something on the order of 1/2 of all the children in the primary school have a parent or grandparent who went there, as compared to a regional average of 10%.  This is a town of working people with a strong volunteer ethic.  Environmental causes are not at the top of the list, and Canaan only adopted zoning in the last decade, but residents care about their community and even those who have been here for generations often say that business as usual may have served them well in the past, but now there are new challenges that may require new thinking to solve.

So siting a wind turbine at the transfer station, which does not affect the view of a single residence, has not given rise to the kind of opposition on aesthetic grounds that often happens elsewhere.  If we start sprouting turbines, this may become a greater question, but the current proposal seems to be raising concerns about the feasibility of the site to produce sufficient energy and the costs involved in erecting and maintaining the turbine.

I have more than a passing familiarity with the environmental and economic issues involved with wind generation.  Very often, it comes down to a trade-off between proximate impacts and regional benefits.  There are places of enormous historic significance that would be degraded on aesthetic grounds by turbines - none at Gettysburg and Yellowstone, please - but I, for one, am not swayed by the argument that turbines are unattractive.  The tangle of electric lines that crisscrosses our streets is ugly and mars the view, yet we have accepted it for over a century.  This aesthetic argument is not one I would expect to gain much traction in Canaan, unless turbines are proposed for certain iconic viewsheds.  Then perhaps it will.

There are legitimate concerns about the forest fragmenting impacts of turbines erected on mountain ridges and associated bird and bat strikes.  In our region, there is a high correlation between areas with good wind generating potential and areas of environmental significance.  As with biomass generating plants, the trend seems to be toward many smaller installations rather than one concentrated massive one.  I wonder which will turn out to be more desirable from an ecological point of view.  With wind, although I do not dispute individual landowner's rights to try and get off the grid, I believe it may be better environmentally to identify a few feasible sites for larger numbers of turbines than to have them scattered everywhere. 

It still matters where they are sited and many viable sites are in mountains and wilderness, so clearly good environmental information is needed, but we cannot have it both ways.  The Delaware Audubon Society supports an offshore wind farm, having helped to get a less sensitive site selected and recognizing that offsetting fossil fuel use and associated greenhouse gas emissions as a greater conservation gain.  Habitat destruction remains the single greatest threat to biodiversity, but that comes in many forms, and some of it is due to climate change.  Changing over a coal, oil and natural gas based economy to one that makes far greater use of alternative energy is going to require compromises by all concerned.  These should be informed choices, with mitigation where possible, but if environmentalists buy the premise that we are experiencing the sixth great extinction event in the history of Earth, and further that the choices we make now can determine how severe these extinctions will be, we are going to have to find ways to support rather than block some of these alternate energy projects even when they affect things we care about.

   

Interview with a Blogger

I am flattered to be profiled with an interview today at a blog and environmental forum called My Greenpeace Buddies.  I was approached to share my thoughts as a blogger who writes about ecological matters, among other things, and was happy to oblige. 

Given my strong preference to focus on areas of common interest rather than positions - except in those cases where reason is clearly out of the question, such as where a certain southern African dictator is concerned - the interview goes strongly down the path of being "occasionally nettlesome" but "fairly non-partisan".  I talked about how individuals and institutions change their behavior and some of what is and is not helpful in that regard. 

I suspect this may be the only time that my right-of-center cousin Tigerhawk gets an acknowledgment in this or indeed any environmental forum.  Anything for bilateral relations, dear readers. And yes, I do know the difference between "affect" and "effect"...just not when I wrote out my responses.  Plus, I found an opportunity to quote from The Last of the Mohicans and it wasn't anything about noble savages.  Fellow English Majors can rest easy that my undergraduate degree is in no immediate danger of revocation.  Mugabe's, however, is another question.

Drop in if you like and check it out.

Getting Close

For more than 2 years, our family has been working to negotiate the sale of a conservation easement (called Conservation Restrictions or CRs in MA and CT) on +/- 19.55 acres of our beloved "Windrock"  in Wareham, MA.   This is what I do professionally, but this time it is on behalf of my children, parents, sister, aunts, uncles, and cousins.  Saving land takes time, and getting agreement on the terms of a CR on behalf of so many when there are two co-holders and a host of reviewers is a tall order.  There are many ups and downs and you learn to hold a steady course and respond in a timely fashion to whatever challenge arises.

I don't want to jinx it.  But we are now within three weeks of a tentative closing data and we are feverishly working through the conservation transaction punch list. Our family has come together in an extraordinary way to do what is right for the property and honor the love and conservation vision of my grandparents Robert and Athalia Barker, who bought the place more than 61 years ago and wanted it to remain in the family and as intact and unspoilt as possible.   Selling this CR allows us to retain title to the entire property and helps ensure that we can maintain it as we have loved it for future generations to enjoy.

We can see the runway and are preparing to land.  When it is over and we all can exhale, I'll share the details. 

Don't Got Milk

Here's a swell idea. Tax dairy farmers for the methane produced by flatulent cows.  Now it is true that cows produce more greenhouse gas than any other source, including vehicle emissions.  Yes, livestock are major resource consumers and yes, overgrazing, deforestation and a host of other ills can be pinned on unsustainable farming practices.  But taxing the farmer for cow farts is a bit like punishing the prostitute and not the Johns.  Estonians must not like milk.  The Kiwis made a stink about a similar measure in 2003.

Giving a Fig For Newts

This is the kind of news story that makes it hard to be a conservationist.

"I know it's the law, but it's very frustrating and bordering on the ridiculous that the fate of newts takes precedence over humans."

The British couple in this story from Dauntsey, Wiltshire  are understandably frustrated that they are unable to return to their flood-damaged home until the blocked drainage ditch on their property that handles run-off from a nearby motorway is surveyed for rare great crested newts this summer.  Rare species legislation generally focuses on species occurrences, regardless of how marginal or human altered the habitat.   If you've got newts, you've got issues.  This tends to set up an adversarial relationship between critters and people.  What incentive is there to provide a safe harbor for rare species on private property when there are no benefits for the landowner to doing so? 

This particular case looks like it will resolve itself in a few months, since relocation of any newts that are found is possible under applicable law and the landowners have another suitable site on their property where the newts occur.  But as I have said in this space on previous occasions, when human beings are given a choice between our health and well-being and that of other creatures, we generally side with our own species.  When we are given no choice, even in compliance we take our own side.  There are other options.  Community-based conservation is applicable in the developed world as well as the developing.

Bury Me Not...

When you "shuffle off this mortal coil, turn your body back to soil" as Loudin Wainwright III acidly puts it in the lyrics to "Suicide Song", will you still have a carbon footprint?  How green is your cemetery?   The Funeral Consumers Alliance of Eastern Massachusetts is a strong believer in going out the natural way and according to the March 12th Berkshire Environmental Action Team newsletter is seeking a partnership to establish a "green cemetery" in Massachusetts.

"A green cemetery is a natural burial ground that conserves land while providing an alternative to standard burial. It is a cemetery that encourages sustainable and ethical practices by banning the use of toxins and non-biodegradable materials. Green burial is interment without embalming, metal or hardwood caskets, casket vaults or cement liners, and often without permanent markers (although in some cemeteries, natural stone markers are permitted). An un-embalmed body may be wrapped in a shroud and placed in the ground or buried in a biodegradable casket. Typically, family and friends of the deceased have the opportunity to be more directly involved in the burial.

The FCAEM is looking for a conservation group to partner with on this effort.  As a conservationist who spends a good deal of time thinking about land use and management questions, I confess I had not been paying close attention to the green cemetery movement.  The Litchfield Hills Greenprint considers rural cemeteries to be permanently protected open space, since a change of use is highly unlikely and there are demonstrated habitat and recreational values provided by these spaces.  I have written here about America's rural cemetery movement and the rare species and habitats that persist in old pioneer graveyards where the prairie has never been plowed, or where frequent mowing has mimicked the natural disturbance of suppressed fire regimes.  The conservation benefits of these places has not been a question for me, but their management and the actual burial practices associated with them is a new angle.

There are protocols for green golf courses that I'd imagine would be applicable to rural cemeteries.  My friends at the Ecological Landscaping Association could doubtless offer some pointers and best management practices for these spaces.  I believe the main challenge besides changing consumer expectations and behaviors would be in local zoning and public health ordinances that might not be aligned with winding shrouds, and biodegradable caskets.  Coincidentally, there was a piece on a UK manufacturer of Ecopod coffins on Marketplace this morning that raised this point, as well as questioned whether importing these things from Britain really resulted in a reduced carbon footprint when compared to wooden caskets made locally.  As for how all this compares to cremation, there is certainly an immediate carbon release into the atmosphere but less land required for burial and decomposition. 

If you have an opinion on which is the greener option, you can jump into this thread at Live Earth where they had a fine old time getting down and dirty on this topic.  I would caution those who advocate a tilt over the side to Davey Jones, however, that burial at sea is not always forever.

Mapping The Woodlands: GIS Wonkery in the Litchfield Hills

The landscape of the Litchfield Hills is 75% trees.  Connecticut as a whole is about 60% forested, and actually loses more forest cover now than it replaces through natural succession.  We still have forested uplands in Northwest Connecticut that are of sufficient size to sustain a broad array of animals that depend on contiguous, intact forest habitats for their survival.

The Litchfield Hills Greenprint has developed a novel way of defining these areas and is using it to help its conservation partners set regional priorities for conserving large forest habitats.  We did so because we were not satisfied with existing data sources for this resource of regional significance.

Both The National Audubon Society and the Nature Conservancy recognize exceptionally large blocks of relatively intact forest habitat in Northwest Connecticut.  In TNC's case, its Lower New England / Northern Piedmont Ecoregion Conservation Plan (2000) emphasized predominantly forested areas bounded by roads encompassing at least 15,000 acres, which TNC considered the minimum area needed to withstand the impacts of major natural disturbance events.  TNC believes conserving these forest blocks can serve as a "coarse filter" for most of the region's terrestrial biodiversity. 

It is a very coarse filter, however.  There are very few of these places and TNC had to ignore a number of smaller roads and fragmenting features to define the areas.  It is hard to explain why some roads were considered fragmenting while others are overlooked.  I remember one fragmentation metric that did not consider roads where two people could stand and toss a Frisbee for five minutes without having to step out of the way of an oncoming car.   I give them points for creativity, but it is still an imprecise means of determining traffic volume and more than a tad subjective. 

Merely buffering a digital road layer and selecting larger patches of interior forest as the Greenprint had initially done also proved inadequate, since Connecticut's Geographic Information Systems (GIS) road layer is a real mess and lumps together private driveways, trails, and roads digitized from old topo maps.  This makes it exceedingly difficult to select as "fragmenting" a set of roads of a specific width, surface, and traffic volume using digital data.

We needed to be able to account for the impacts of habitat fragmentation as we defined core forest habitat. We decided not to consider roads when defining boundaries, but instead to use the 2002 remote land cover data: the most current available for Connecticut.  These data layers recognize 12 land cover types, 11 of which occur across this landscape.  The results are shown on the map above in pale green. 

Here is how we did it:

• We selected altered land cover types - grass and turf, agricultural fields, barren land, utility lines, and developed areas (buildings and associated road infrastructure).
• We buffered them by 300 ft.  We chose this distance to account for some of the significant edge impacts on core forest habitat, which include the spread of invasive exotic plant species from disturbed areas and invasion by brood parasites that threaten interior forest nesting birds. 
• We then selected the remaining terrestrial land cover types (coniferous and deciduous forest, forested and non-forested wetlands) and made a single shape file. 
• We clipped the buffered areas from the habitat shape file, and eliminated patches of contiguous habitat that were <190 acres in size.   What remained represented our region's predominantly forested core habitat. 
• We added the lake cover layer , which we did not want to buffer or to count toward the computation of overall terrestrial habitat.  Nothing more resembles egg on one's face than standing up before a commission or land trust and pointing to a purposed forest habitat that is 90% below the surface of a lake.

This is what it looks like close up.  Permanently protected open space shows up in dark green, while the habitat is pale green.  You can see that small roads that had closed canopies were not detected by the satellite, but houses in clearings and large open fields were identified and buffered.  The remote data looks at 100' pixels and classifies them by their dominant land cover type. 

These forest habitats cross jurisdictional boundaries and occur across many ownerships.  The number of forest landowners in southern New England doubled in the last decade, but the overall area of forest declined.  The inescapable conclusion is that forest parcels have been divided and are managed - if managed at all - in lots of ever diminishing size and often without regard for the larger forest system in which they occur. 

This kind of resource mapping offers landowners, land managers, land trusts, municipalities and regional planners a new way of understanding the distribution and protected status of our larger forest habitats.  If you overlay these data with actual parcels of land, you start to see opportunities to locate development so that it creates less habitat fragmentation, or identify large forest parcels to try and conserve.  We believe that we in the Litchfield Hills need to conserve at least 20,000 additional acres of this forest habitat where it expands cores and connects corridors, and do so in the next dozen years. 

These maps do not tell us whether there is a willing landowner, or how the forest is managed.  That sort of data comes from those most closely connected to the resource and the communities in which it occurs.  The maps help focus attention on the resource and structure that discussion.

I Sense a Disturbance in the Forest

We've left our forest at Windrock largely to its own devices.  Our family still takes a small amount of cord wood from standing dead trees or blow down, but by and large the wind and the deer and the Hemlock woolly adelgid are the primary influences on the current condition of the woods.  When I walk through these woodlands, as I had occasion to do this past weekend, I carry with me the long view afforded by nearly four decades of personal connection, coupled with a naturalist's eye for the patterns and processes at work here.  The trees and the stones and the thick layers of duff on the forest floor have stories to tell and hold clues to the future.

Everything that grows, thrives or fades away in a  terrestrial habitat or ecosystem can be understood as the result of three powerful influences: geology, climate, and disturbance.  My grandparents' property in Wareham lies on a great smear of glacial overburden laid down during the last ice age.  There are granite erratics like the one that gives the place its name "Windrock", and poor, well drained soils that perk well and feed groundwater to the regional Plymouth-Carver Sole Source Aquifer. 

The woods run down to within sight of the bluff and the bay and tree species change as the wind and the salt air determine which ones can endure and which must remain further back in the company of their taller brethren.  Here you will find Atlantic white cedar and pitch pine and scrub oak and green brier, and in recent decades tangles of oriental bittersweet and Japanese honeysuckle vine, but not the white pines that shun the salt and require a bulwark against the wind.  Here, too, are Doug fir and jack pine and even an English oak, for this is not a landscape devoid of human impact. 

While the hurricane and the ice storm and the long suppressed but still feared wildfire have great effect, the forest is neither primeval nor is the best ecological option to blithely let "nature take its course."  Nature does not work in a vacuum anymore.  The legacy of human land use alters everything.

There are stone walls running through the woods.  One of these clearly marks a property line, though the division of  land likely came after the stone fence was laid and not before.  This was open pasture in the 1800s, and sheep grazed the broom sedge that now clumps in the openings near the shore but not in the shade of the trees.  When my Grandparents acquired the property in 1947 the forest was younger, the trees lower, and the species composition different than one finds today. There were many more pitch pines back then: early successional species that require periodic fire to germinate and reduce competition from oaks and other species.  Those few that remain in the woods today have stretched to their maximum heights to find space in the canopy, and none are regenerating. The slow growing oaks - black, scarlet and white - are nowhere a significant component of the forest except in the scrub near the bluff, for they are subject to the predation of deer and are shaded out by fast growing white pine.  The hemlock stands in the forest have suffered under the invasive adelgid onslaught and most of these trees are dead or dying now.  A few sassafras, the odd birch near the barn, a clone or two of invasive locust and some wild holly may been seen, but the rest of the forest is single-aged white pine, and when it goes down in a big wind the blow down can be extensive.

There are places in the forest where there are distinctive mounds and depressions in the soil: cups and pillows that mark where giants fell.  You can tell by their orientation the direction of the wind that brought the shallow rooted trees down, and whether it was a winter nor'easter or an onshore hurricane.  White pine seedlings sprout in these canopy openings.

There are many deer in the woods, and heavy browse lines crop the rhododendrons. There are Cooper's hawks and foxes and eastern box turtles near the forest edge.  There is a vernal pool with polliwogs in spring.  There is room for 4 approval not required house lots on the road at the end of the property if we are unable to conserve it through a conservation transaction with the town and local land trust.  Currently we are hung up on the limited forest management rights we wish to retain.  Hopefully we will navigate this as we have other obstacles and have something to celebrate this summer.