 of the National Weather Service is telling me it's so squall and storms and wind and all that kind of stuff. So thanks for being here. My name's Sean, I'm a staff naturalist here. And just by way of a couple of quick introductions, so it's really our huge pleasure to welcome Liz Thompson from the Vermont Land Trust, Eric Sorenson, and Bob Tano from the Vermont Department of Fish and Wildlife to come here and celebrate the launch of this new edition of Portland Woodland, Wildland Together. As a naturalist and educator here, and as a student of natural resources in Vermont, this book has been just instrumental in me understanding the place in which I grew up. And I was actually just upstairs scrounding around trying to find my copy of Portland Woodland Wildland and realized that it is stuff to where it belongs, which is in my field backpack next to my shovels and hand lenses and binoculars and all that stuff. So I'm proud to say that I can't find it. It means it's where it's supposed to be right now, which is in my car with all my other field gear, which is where yours should be too. So yeah, this book really does something very special, and it's appropriate that this special thing exists to describe the natural resources here in Vermont. It not only is a fantastic window into the different pieces that make up the landscape around us, this tree and that bird and that flower, but especially the patterns and the processes and how it all fits together and what it means when you walk into this particular set of woods and why it feels this particular way. So without overstepping all the things that they're gonna talk about, I also want to mention that Bear Pond Books is here as co-host of this, this whole thing, and they'll be available all selling books now in the talk and Bob will be available to sign your treasure of copies after the talk tonight as well. I also want to thank the Hardy Plant Club of Northern Vermont for helping promote this and co-host this and advertise this with us as well. So without further ado, help me welcome and celebrate Bob, Liz, Eric, and the new edition of what Lynn, Lynn, and why Lynn. Well thank you for coming, and it's really great to see some of your friends and some of your faces too. It was a beautiful afternoon. We were morning earlier. It's pretty hazardous. But I'm gonna start and then Eric and Bob will follow. But the way this is gonna work, the way this talk is gonna work is we're gonna, each of us is gonna talk a little bit about a few of our favorite natural communities and just sort of personal journey in a way through the natural communities of Vermont. In the process we'll talk about what's new in this edition of the book and some other important things. So just here with us, and I told Eric that if I talk too long he could get this thing and I'll be able to start. We hope to each talk about 15 minutes and 10 seconds. So this book, the new edition of this book, actually let me start by reading something. Wetland, a swampy mysterious place, a marshy pond where beavers live, morning mist and ducks among the captails, a dark, cool, mossy forest, cotton grass and orchids, muck, marsh gas. Woodland, a walk in the autumn woods, beach and black bear, a dark hemlock ravine, wildfire on a pine mill, hobble bush and spruce, spring wildflowers. Wildland, a natural place, wind, rain, snow, wildfire, cliffs, gullies and gorges, a calm, quiet, healing place. Wetland would live wild man. This, there's three authors listed. I happen to be first, but that doesn't mean I'm first. It's just because I'm the oldest actually. I've been doing this since 1984, so I've been around for a while. That's the only reason, of course, it's a true collaboration, a true three way collaboration of the three of us, and also these three organizations for my life department, Vermont Land Trust and the Nature Conservancy, who have all been involved in this for the years. Really important to just know that. So what's a natural, actually, when we gave this talk in Burlington a couple of weeks ago, a few weeks ago, partway through, Eric said, hey, can you say what a natural community is? So this time I put a slide in there. A natural community is an interacting, assemblage of organisms, their physical environment and the natural processes that affect them. That's how we define it. And this is actually a picture that was in the first edition of the book, or we've done the cover. So I wanna talk about some of the things that are new in this edition of the book, but the most important thing that's new is that Bob Zano has joined us, I think he will partner with us for it. And that picture was not taken in Vermont, right? That's the word, Minnesota, is that right? And Bob has been just incredibly helpful and important in this work and updating this new edition of the book. He's been graduating from the Field Naturalist Program and has been doing this kind of work of mapping natural communities in the state of Vermont for the last 10 years. And so he's gained a wealth of knowledge, knows a lot more about it than I do, and is just a really great partner in this. And he is also, by the way, our succession plan. So I look forward to seeing how Bob carries this work forward in the years to come and engaging all of the collaborators that have helped us in this work. Speaking of collaborators, you know, there's three of us, but this is really the work of many, many people. And these are really just a few of them. There's just lots of people, some of whom are here in this room who really helped us advance this work over the last number of years. And so this was a group of people who met two summers ago to study a particular natural community that I'll be talking about in a minute. So here's a list of what's new. There's 17 new natural communities. There's one which, and each of us will talk about at least one of those. There's one new biophysical region with Eric. We'll talk about that. There's more emphasis on climate change and conservation. New information on wildlife habitat, mostly assembled by Eric, and how to talk about that. We have new geology maps and lots of new photos, which we are, most of them taken by friends and colleagues of some of you are here. And we're proud of that. And each of the communities profiles has been enhanced and really edited in depth. So going back to Bob for a second, one of the most important things that Bob did in this process was he asked a lot of questions. And his favorite question to ask, we'd be sitting around, like the three of us have countless meetings, I mean, endless. No, one, fun meetings and wonderful, but there were a lot of them. But Bob's favorite thing was to say, he'd read something, you know, we'd have the text up on the wall and he'd read something from the first edition that he'd say, is that really true? Sometimes it was, sometimes it was. So he actually revealed some errors in the first edition of the book. So we appreciate that. So that's, you know, so we really did edit hard and that's everything is really quite advanced now. So this little diagram is not new. It was in the old edition of the book, but in the new edition of the book, this is a, sorry about that, this is one of Bob's brilliant ideas. We put it on the back page of the book so he could quickly get to it. And so it's just a quick guide to the natural communities at Vermont and the groups of natural communities. So it divides into upland natural communities and wetland natural communities in the uplifts. We have forests of woodlands, open uplands, and then the wetlands are similar, forested and open, and then three to four types within each of those categories. So I'm gonna talk about northern hardwood forests. So within the upland forests and woodlands, we have three, what we call formations. And I'm gonna start with the northern hardwood forest formation. So this is a group of seven natural community types that are northern hardwood dominated but have slight differences. And so, for example, the northern hardwood forest, oh, here's something else that's new in this edition that some of the illustrations are now colored, and which they were all black and white first. And here's something else I have to remember to say, and this is super important. Not only do we have these wonderful illustrations, but the design of the book, the way it's all laid out, is the work of Lyndon Moravoli. And Lynda's right here, and it's just an absolute pleasure to work with all the way through, and she was very patient with us. Because it was a long process, much longer than we expected initially. That's just wonderful design work. So the northern hardwood forest is the most common natural community in Vermont. It is what we call matrix natural community, meaning that it covers the majority of mid-elevation forests in Vermont, and this is a northern hardwood forest greening up in the spring. And you can see in this photo, you can see where the sugar maple is. Those are the green, greening up trees, and the red maples are more up on the ridges. They leaf out a little bit later. So the idea is that it's, northern hardwood forest occupies most of this image, but in places, is there a point on this thing? That's not good. That's not good. Oh, yeah, so you see the sugar maple here, but it's sort of pockmarked by these other things, by either hemlock ridges or spruce ridges, something like that. I don't know exactly what they are in this photo. And so that's sort of the most common natural community in Vermont. But my colleagues were generous enough to let me talk about rich places, places that are enriched. And we were really pleased with this new geological map. It's a map that, we had a version of this in the first edition of the book, but thanks to Gus Goodwin, who's here. Thanks Gus and Dan Farrell and Margie Gale. We've got this new ecological classification of Vermont-Betherock. And anything that's in blue on this is calcareous. So the whole Champlain Valley western part of the state and much of the eastern part of the state. And the Browns are generally not calcareous. So we ecologists and botanists, we tend to gravitate to the blue places because they're just, just have more diversity. And in the process of doing this work over the years, we've come to realize that Vermont has a disproportionately large amount of calcareous bedrock. And so we feel that we have sort of a responsibility to preserve it. So still in the Northern Hardwood Forest formation, I'm gonna talk just briefly about rich northern hardwood forests, which are one of my favorite natural communities. This is Bob Zeno's slide. Beautiful place with big trees, in this case trees grow really quickly in these places and well. Rich northern hardwood forest is a place where it's often at the base of the slope, like a cove where soil accumulates at the base of the slope. And this is a class that Cathy Parris and I teach at the University of Vermont. And on the first day of the class, we go to a kind of a standard northern hardwood forest. And on the second day of class, we go to a region of the hardwood forest. And so we make them safe, we've been stuck for the second day. But you can see in this, in this photo, there's a wood nettle, some goldies fern in the background, which is a plant that grows in rich northern hardwood forests. But these are the students digging a soil pit and studying the soils in rich northern hardwood forest. Blue Kohosh is one of the plants that occurs in rich northern hardwood forest. And here, this is an illustration by Betsy Grigam, whose illustrations, many of you whose illustrations are, and go up there, lovely illustrations. Large flower millwork, one of my favorite sedges, wide-leafed or plantain-leafed sedge, native hair fern. And this is something that I learned in the course of doing this book, which I didn't know before, but Eric taught this to us. Or he learned this from somebody else. But anyway, this West Virginia White is a butterfly that is obligate on tooth work. It's now, in this picture, it's sitting on another plant. Dicentra. I don't know which one. But anyway, it's obligate on tooth work for part of its life cycle, so that's pretty cool. Okay, now in the warmer climate areas from the Oak Pine northern hardwood forest formation. Again, some of my favorites, limestone bluff cedar pine forest, just hugging the shores of the bluffs on Lake Champlain. Beautiful places. Who can't love these places? It's just amazing how the trees kind of cling to the rocks. And these trees can get to be quite old. You've found trees more than 300 years old, right? These cedar, northern white cedar trees, just amazing. Some of the typical plants, made in here is spleenwort, liver, honeysuckle, and my actual favorite sedge, carrots ebernia, which is, some people call it ebony sedge, but more, other people call it fivesry sedge, because that's what ebernia actually means. And there's a lot of rare and uncommon plants associated with this natural community. And for each of the natural communities, we have lists like this, rare and uncommon plants, rare and uncommon animals, in addition to commonly associated plants and animals. Ramps had ladies slipper, there's a basket with photo, beautiful photo, is one of the plants found in these places. This is just a range map of northern white cedar, and the reason I'm showing this is because northern white cedar actually does occur way down, people don't think that it's occurring that far south. We think of ourselves as being at the southern end of its range, and that's not quite true. It does occur in the southern Appalachians, in places that are like our limestone and glove cedar pine forests, and gullies and rocky places. And it makes me think, I don't know why I'm jumping to this, but it makes us think that possibly, these are like refugia, and maybe our limestone glove cedar pine forests are gonna be refugia as the climate warms that northern white cedar might still cling to those places and be able to survive there, as it does here. Dry up, make a limestone forest is a community that often occurs landward of the limestone glove cedar pine forest, and this is a new natural community in this edition. It was a subtype before, so it's a new natural community, and I had the pleasure of sitting in the woods at the Kent Bay State Park with Libby Gaines, and while she drafted this illustration, it's really fun to do. So it's on there with my laptop, what, my international community description, she's doing something quite a bit more artistic. Some of the plants that occur here, blood root, hepatica, early meadow root, leatherwood, and bubblet bladder firm, and this is another cool thing I learned about. Does anybody know what this thing is? The American giant millipede, and this is a species that occurs in Calcareous areas. This photo was taken in the Kent Bay State Park, and these things take up calcium from their environment and incorporate it into their exoskeletons to protect them from desiccation and predation, so it's kinda cool. Okay, now I've got two minutes, so I'm gonna go to the swamps, and this is a new natural community as well. So this is that same group of people that I showed at the beginning, this is what they were doing that day, that were looking at seepage forests and trying to share information and just trying to better understand seepage forests. So in that photo at the beginning, Hannah Phillips was one of the people in the photo, and I wanna really acknowledge her work in helping us to, she did a project for the Vermont Land Trust on the Atlas Timberlands and the forest land that we have in Northern Vermont in that project, throughout that process, really learned a lot, and Gus also, others contributed to this, but Hannah really sort of gave us the raw materials with which to write the description of Northern parts of the forest, so thank you. These forests can be kind of closed canopy forests, or they can be quite open like this, and they have wet soils, and this is actually, just look hard at this for a second. It's actually video. Do you see the water coming out? Yeah. So this is a organic soil over hard pan, and the water is sitting on top of the hard pan, and when Hannah, this is a soil pit that Hannah dug, you can actually see the water coming out. Trees are shallow rooted. These are important areas for black bears because they bring up first in the spring. Some of the plants, and I'm just gonna just skip over this, and this is, it's final thing is just one little fun story about some inventory, Eric and Bob will both talk more about inventory and the process of natural beauty's inventory, but we learned, in 1985 I was driving around with Peter Zika, who was a botanist, and we had known that there was an occurrence, a record of this rare plant, sticky false asphodel on the White River in Sharon, and we didn't know where, but we're driving down Route 14, and we look across the river, and there's this kind of cool looking place, so we put on our bathing suits, and we swam across the river. We curled up on the bank, and lo and behold, we found this very rare plant, sticky false asphodel, and along with some other things, combs, lobelia, rare garter's sedge, rare capillary beak brush, and this is classified as wet shore, one of our rarest natural communities, calcareous riverside seep, and now I'm gonna turn it over to Bob. All right. Sorry, you put it in a bit. Do you want it now? Well, thanks, it's a real privilege for me to be here. I just co-operate with Brooklyn in speaking with Liz and Eric, and we're a little intimidating. I think Liz was very generous in her description of what I asked, is that fruit? She's neglecting to mention all the times I asked, is that fruit? And it turns out there's a lot of things about ecology that I thought I knew and didn't actually know, and really got that all straightened out during the course of writing this book. I wanna take us to a little different thing here and go to some cold places, which fits with today. This is not Vermont, this is the boreal forest up in Canada. The boreal forest is an area that's always kind of intrigued me, it's I think the world's largest ecosystem, although I may be mistaken about that, but it's circumpolar, you can see it on that map, and you can see this star down here is Vermont, and Vermont is not in the boreal forest ecosystem, but we have natural communities that have a really strong affinity to these northern places, and I think it's really neat to see the parallels, and I wanted to show you some of the parallels between things we have here, very close by, that are really strongly connected to these more remote regions. And I wanted to start keeping with this theme of calcium rich places and talk about boreal calcareous cliffs. So on our chart here we're in upland natural communities and open uplands and out there in cliffs and talus. So there's other types of cliffs and talus communities in Vermont, this is just one. These communities are, or this community is mostly found in the northeastern part of the state. A lot of it is on that blue part of the map that Liz was showing, but not all of it. Some of it is in areas where we don't think of the rock as being particularly rich in calcium. And the place I want to talk about, there's a lot of nice examples of boreal calcareous cliffs, places like Lake Willoughby. But I want to talk about my favorite, which is in Smuggler's Notch. And I'm guessing many of you have been to Smuggler's Notch or no Smuggler's Notch. It's this steep walled mountain pass. And the cliffs, you can be on the road and you can look up and you can see that there's lots of exposed rock in these big cliffs. And when you get up close, they look like this and you can see water dripping off the cliffs. There are thin bands of calcium rich rock in these cliffs and because there's so much rain and snow and fog and the cliffs are often wet and dripping and seepy, that calcium gets moved over the cliff face and you get plants growing on these cliffs that really don't grow anywhere else in Vermont. Species like butterwort, which is carnivorous. You can see some legs in there, I think. Purple mountain saxophrage. This photo is by Matt Peters who's here. White mountain saxophrage, which is a mountain saxophrage. It's not named after the white mountains in New Hampshire. It's just a white mountain saxophrage. Liz, she went through it quickly, but this is a species that also grows in those riverside seeps, but you can find it up in the mountains clinging to the sides of the cliffs. So, showing how that calcium can really bring plants to different places. Fragrant front, this is a plant that grows in Vermont only in shaded overhangs where calcium seeps out of a crack in the cliff. So, talking about being very specific in habitat. Pale-painted cup, a relative of the western Indian pink brush. And then this is not a plant, but I think it is. Not to point out arrogant falcon, which I think is one of the most charismatic critters of boreal calcareous cliffs. He's soaring high above smog or snot. So, getting into finding these species is not like going to most natural communities. It's a little different. And I've been lucky over the past few years in my free time and a little bit from my work to get to go to these places and see this. Just, we know about many of the species that are in these cliffs. They've been, they've attracted botanists for many years, I think going back to the previous two centuries. But most people don't get up on cliffs like this and when we do, we find that these plants are much more abundant and widespread maybe than I think people really realized. And it's neat to see that they're all over these rockfaces in these hard to access places where they're really mostly free from human disturbance except for those crazy people up there on ropes. You know, I think that inventory matters. In my work with the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department, I'm out on lands owned by the Fish and Wildlife Department by Forest Parks and Recreation out on our state parks and state forests doing inventory of natural communities to help ensure that the management of these lands is considering all these many different species that are out there and that we can use and enjoy the landscape and also protect all the plants and animals that are out there in all of the different natural communities. That's about 20,000 to 40,000 different species, by the way. We can't talk about cold boreal affinity communities without thinking about winter. And winter's pretty harsh on boreal calcareous cliffs. I think that kind of speaks for itself. The species have some surprising adaptations. This is that white mountain saxophore age again. And you can see these little white dots on the leaf edge. Those are calcium crystals. So it's taking that calcium out of the rock in the water and exuding it on the leaf edges. And those dots, there's recent research showing that those dots actually help focus the light coming in, limited light that these plants get because they're often shaded on cliffs or little crevices. And it helps improve its efficiency of photosynthesis. I don't think to understand any physics of all that, but it's a pretty amazing adaptation I think. And this plant will also photosynthesize anytime in winter that the temperature is up above freezing and there's sunlight. So like in this photo, I bet it was photosynthesizing. And that little extra bit of energy is maybe what helps these plants persist in these tough places. Talking about connections to the north, these species, you can go hundreds of miles north into the boreal forest to find a cliff like this. And it's almost entirely the same species. So we have little pieces of that right here. Surrounding boreal calcareous cliffs is often a community that's much more familiar to people than montane spruce spore forests. On the chart, we're back up in the upland forest in Woodlands and spruce forward northern Harwood. You probably might be familiar with these red spruce, balsam fir, lush mossy places, including species like this, night's bloom moss. Forests that are exposed to wind and wind throw is a common natural disturbance. So here's a little patch of forest that's regenerating after disturbance. And you can see, or here, some really neat birds up there like the blackbird, green warbler or the thicknose thrush, which only lives on mountaintops in New York, New England and adjacent Canada. Working our way up the alpine zone is a place that has attracted people for a long time. I found this photo from, oh, photo, from 1858. This is the ridge on Mount Mansfield. That's the chin. It's a little dramatic. Libby Davidson actually has almost exactly the same perspective on Mount Mansfield for one of her community drawings, showing sub-alpine crumples and alpine meadow, just with a little more realism to it, which I think doesn't take away any of the drama of this amazing place. So those are two communities in the alpine zone, but I want to talk about the third alpine community, which is the alpine peatlands, which is very, very small pockets in the alpine zone that most people probably don't pay a lot of attention to. So we're in a wetland community now, open and shrub wetlands and open peatlands. Peatlands are wetlands with deep soils of organic material. In the alpine zone, those soils aren't actually that deep, but they accumulate there. These communities can be really wet and fenn-like with water moving through the ground. You can see that in this photo. Where they can be bog-like, and it's a little hard to tell here, but this is actually a bog on a ridge of bedrock right on top of the Mount Mansfield ridge, and nutrients can't really get to the center of that, so these plants are living in a very nutrient-poor environment and it's spongy and would be almost dry if you would walk right through the middle of it, which you shouldn't do in the alpine zone. You can look close in these places and find evidence of the different plants and sphagnum mosses and one of the animals that's up there, snowshoe bear. And then drawing this back to the north again, alpine peatlands make up just tiny little pockets in our alpine zone. Square feet is how we would measure the area we have in Vermont. Finding something the size of this room would be, I think, I don't even know if there is any wetland up there as big as this room. If you go further north, alpine peatlands are actually the matrix natural community places and you can walk for long distances with your feet just getting wet constantly and it looks like this here and dry up on zones is unusual. So we have these little pockets again that connect to these early north places. And maybe just to note here, we're at the southern edge of the range of these things and it's worrying to think about what climate change means for these places that are in our coldest and harshest environments and if the climate continues to change and we have warmer conditions, but we still have these connections to these places and we still have those special species here. I think it's an open question what's gonna happen, but it's troubling. The last community that I wanna talk about is one of the new natural communities. These aren't new and they've appeared. You know, we just didn't recognize them fully. And boreal flumpline forest occurs only in the northeast part of the state. This actually probably exaggerates the range of this community. I think it's mostly up in the cold basins up in the, like the Nalhegan Basin, some of the rivers that flow north into the McMurphy Magog and maybe a little bit down into Calus and maybe into the Groton area. Flumplines are wetland natural communities and they're forested, so we're in the floodplain forests section of the book. Most of the floodplains in Vermont are tall sugar, silver maple trees, open canopy, fern understory, sorry, open midstory and fern understory, but this boreal community is really different. It can be dense spruce, it can be white spruce, balsam fern, black ash, northern white cedar, a really neat mix of trees that we don't often see together. And then there's shrubby and grassy areas along the river that I think are there because of ice scour every year. And so trees can't get established. There's just another shot. This is a very dark picture of the Nalhegan River, but you can see that those open areas there. American Elm was probably part of this community too, but we've lost most of those times to Dutch Elm disease. There's efforts to reintroduce that species back into our floodplains in Vermont. Some other species in these places are specklewalder, wood turtles, and maybe if you're lucky boreal birds like the Canada Jay or Gray Jay, they just changed the name to Canada Jay. So I'll leave you with one final picture of the North. This is Labrador and maybe the species start to be a little different up there, but you can see that it's the same pattern. It's those conifer dominated forests along the river and the ice scour zone in the foreground here. And it's the same processes and patterns right here in our state that connect to that northern landscape. So maybe you're not as enthusiastic about these northern places as I am, but I think it's neat to take our communities and think about what we can find in them and learn from them, not just about here, but two other places you might go out there. And so with that, I'm gonna turn it over to you, Farron. Still there, slow wait. And I just want to say how good it is to be here too and how proud I am to work with Bob and Liz on this, I want to tell one more story about Liz before I put up a picture. This is the place I was talking about. There's another swimming store of Liz. This was quite a while ago and I wasn't there, but I've heard tell about it a couple of times. Island pond, people went to Island Pond. There's an island in Island Pond. You might picture that. It has a red pond on it. And I think this worked out that Liz saw a red pond out there. This was probably in the 80s sometimes and said I've got to get there and so she just swam out. So there are different ways of getting about it. So I'm gonna cover a few things again. It's great work with Liz and Bob and with Liz on this. I just wanted to say again, how much we appreciate Liz's sort of dedication to getting this book in beautiful form. So I'm gonna talk about Oki Forests. I want to talk about the new bio-physical region. Again, new in the sense that we just recognized this there. I want to talk about animals and how we fit them into the book more. And about two types of swamps and how we decided to split things. Just some examples of how we split things. So first I'm gonna talk about the pine forest up in that part of the classification. And this is just a picture of Ball Mountain Dam on the West River. People get on the West River. It's a beautiful, beautiful river and in these photos taken in October, the oak still hasn't lost their leaves. So if you fly that time of the year you can pick out the oaks perfectly. And the only other thing that holds us leaves like that are young beech that can sort of confuse things but flying around is part of looking at inventories like this but I just wanted to talk a little bit about why we do those inventories. And I'm seven with the Fish and Wildlife Department for I can't remember, 27 years. And most of my work has been conducting inventories around the state. And those inventories are of generally a natural community groups. And the idea is that we can go out and look at a whole group or a set of say softwood swamps or cedars swamps or montane forests. We can get a better sense of how the individual types fit together and we can work on classification. We can work on sorting out how the classification works. But we can also find best examples. Here's Brett Engstrom and Ian Warley. I spent quite a bit of time in Ian's plane for this inventory and others. And what we do is we identify sites, all the red dots on here are places we wanted to get to and then the color loopy loops are places that we flew to take a look at the sites that we've selected to see which ones are good. I have to say out of these sort of positive negative views of Ian's plane I picture it and I can picture the red leather inside and the smell of aviation fuel and all the great notes I took and pictures I took but also getting totally green from doing these loopy loop solvers. This was a pretty easy inventory, this open inventory because they're big places. We also did inventories on things like fence and they're tiny places and you see one and Ian will go, oh, there's one and we zoom down and do multiple loops around. So anyway, great time, good memories and a little green. Probably the best part of my job I haven't done much in the last few years is I have to go to places like this. This is North Pollock Bills and if you haven't been there, the Nature Conservancy has a wonderful preserve there and there's another preserve at Haystack Mountain. Just an incredible place with all different kinds of oak forests and natural oak things like this. This is with Bob Zeno and Bob Hopp and Charlie Holm. The part of the inventory that this is is getting on the field, collecting information, collecting information so we can map the area and document the plants and animals there. So in those oak forests, I just want to run through a few of what those are like and how the inventory works. This is a drive kicker, how corn being forced has this cool savanna-like character, an understory of woodland-setched carrots, Pennsylvania and oaks and hickories and sometimes some white pine. But it looks like this some places and it looks like this other places. And you might say, well, it's a different community but if you look at the characteristic species, they're all there and it takes different forms. So it's being able to see many examples of these that gives us the ability to say this is one type. Then there are other types like this. This is a photo of Bob Hopp's of some of the communities that we need to manage to keep them in a state like this. This is, you know, prescribed burn and coal chester. I want to spend a few minutes on this community for our red oak white pine forest which is a new one in this edition and probably one of my favorites, a favorite partly because it's really simple. It doesn't have many species in it. It's also a place where red oak sort of reaches its northern extent in Vermont. If you drive along I-89 and look north, all those little knobs where you see rock and trees, that's this community. And it tends to be in river valleys as you go north and on these southern exposures on hills. And it's red oak and white pine. Some places like this at Jamaica State Park down on the West River, it's almost all white pine. But there are always places, bits of bedrock outpour like that. Or some places it's almost more open. A place that I think will change maybe dramatically with climate change. One of the climate change features we expect is more precipitation but also extended drips in the summer. And if you have a three week drive in the summer or a four week drive, it can be enough to change to expand these open areas and kill more of the trees. Expanding openings. They have sometimes soil like this, often very shallow soil over bedrock. And just some common plants there. Maple leaf, viburnum. Rack. Rack and brick. Thank you. Blue stem, golden rod, blue sweet blueberry, and pink lady slipper. And in many pine forests or public forests with tall pines. Species like this, pine worklet. An early migrant. I wanted to say something about Libby. This is Libby at a site down in South Eastern format. I forgot where we were actually. But she's in the middle of a swamp. And like Liz said, when she was typing on her laptop, we just brought Libby to these places. And she would start off by taking a few pictures and then do some sketches in her notebook. An early sketch might look like this. The next sketch with my rude notes all over it saying what was wrong or what I thought could change and how she developed it into a part of the community. And a lot of that was, well, can you add another tree here? Can you change this? Can you put it down a lot here? And then she'd come up with a final illustration of this. And what's cool about this is if you take a picture, you never get everything you want. But if you've got an illustrator, you can make it just the way you want it to be. These are biophysical regions. And I just wanted to say a little bit about this new biophysical region, Champlain Hills, they're on the top. And as you can see, it was broken out from the Champlain Valley and the Northern Green Mountains. And it's an intermediary between those two. It's, this is an illustration by Libby. But most of the illustrations on biophysical regions of the book are by Darian McElvain. It's a place with lots of hills, low hills, three major rivers going through it, the Missistoy, the Lamoyle, and the Lewinowski. Lots of dissected valleys like that. It's a place where it is cooler than the Champlain Valley, warmer than the Green Mountains and also intermediate in terms of rainfall. We have up to 79, 80 inches of precipitation in the Green Mountains and more like 30 in the Champlain Valley. But the West Village winds flowing across the hills as they rise, they cool and they drop moisture. So the Champlain Hills has somewhere around 40 inches of precipitation per year. Places like this Armstrong Hill in Fletcher, the dominant forest is Northern Herbert Forest, but you can see patches of hemlock. And again, these are one of my oak photos. So little bits of oak, but very little oak there. And this hill, I'm gonna forget what it's called now, along the Lamoyle River. But also, again, a place with hemlock, mostly in a little bit of oak. At the northern end of this biophysical region, there are a lot of peatlands like this Franklin Bog, which is a preserve owned by the Nature Conservancy. A really nice example of what we're finding. Just the last thing I wanted to talk about in terms of communities are some of the swamps and how we've gone about refining those over time. In 2000, we had a community called Red Maple Block Agile Swamp. That was it. And it included any hardwood swamp with those species in it. With the new addition, and actually this happened as a result of those inventories that we carried out, we've split that into these two types. One that's a seepage swamp and one that's a basin swamp. And that's a pattern that we've seen repeatedly through inventory work. And it's aligned with what all the other northern states have done. When you have ground water seepage coming out into the edge of a wetland, it enriches the flora, provides calcium mostly for a much greater species diversity. As compared to these basin swamps, which tend to be small watersheds, often don't even have an inlet or outlet stream. And they can have deep peat, but they're much poorer in species. So of the issues are Red Maple Block Agile seepage swamp, big block ash, that's one of the larger block ash I know, probably diameter like that. Block ash are one of the ones that are most in trouble with their own ash for it sounds like green ash too. White ash just starting to see resistance now, which is encouraging. So seepage on the forest floor, often water just kind of flowing through. Species like this that are indicators of enrichment on swamp saxophage. And this moss, which is, I always liked the name, I always try to convince my wife to call our kids Rigi Diadelfus. But she never wrote for it. It's called shaggy moss. Hemlock swamp, in 2000 described all those swamps that are dominated by hemlock. We split those again into seepage swamps and basin swamps. Here's the basin swamp. This is one down in Wells. It's just almost a pure carpet of several different species describing them. Carrick's trisperma, three seeded sedge, which is kind of a swamp and four of forest species. I want to stop and talk about wildlife and animals. This was sort of a big deal to the changes in the book. And Liz made it sound like I did it and I didn't. I wrote a lot of the sections, but it's from talking to the experts that we've got around the state, some folks here like Brian. But many people in the Fish and Wildlife Department who are experts in wildlife, and we've tried to sort of merge the ideas of natural communities where we've focused on plants in the past, which are how we define them most of the plants are static. But if you think about Vermont, and it's the natural landscape, you can classify all of it to a natural community type other than the parts that are heavily altered. And that pattern of natural communities across the state are the wildlife habitats for the state. And some species, like deer, move across the landscape, but then they focus on a place like the hemlock forest for deer-wintering animals. So they may be brought into distribution for parts of their life cycle and narrowing others. And some species are really specific to particular natural communities or particular settings. So it's been a really fun thing to add, and I hope folks enjoy it. Here's a elfin skimmer, which is closely associated with peatlands. Here's a poor fan. Most of the, I think most of these dragonflies that like peatlands like the open water parts then. But also, some are closely associated with skydiving. Species like this wood turtle that are closely associated, not just with alluvial shrub swamps, but with riparian areas. And sometimes openings in riparian areas where they feed. Cobblestone tiger beetle. Surprise, surprise, it likes river-short cobble shores. But pretty specific to these kind of open shores. So there are lots of associations like that, and some of them are pretty tight, and some of them are kind of general. Here's one that's more general. This little gem in the forest likes mixed forest and conifer forests, and often in the top of tall conifers. So it's a more widespread species. That's it, I just wanted to end by reading a short section from the book, I didn't find it. Our vision for the future. Our vision for Vermont's future is of a place where humans in nature coexist and both are healthy. 100 years from now and beyond, we envision a Vermont with large areas of contiguous, unfragmented forests with natural lakes, streams, wetlands, cliffs, and ridge tops. We envision these communities providing habitat for all the species that naturally occur here. We envision repairing and upper habitat corridors connecting these large areas of contiguous forests, allowing unhindered movement of animals and plants. We envision a Vermont where both humans and nature are resilient. Even as unprecedented climate change stresses our world, we envision ecosystems still shaped by natural processes such as species migration, adaptation, and selection, and natural disturbances. We see possibilities of new communities unknown to any biologist today, where innumerable plants and animals continue to live, reproduce, and thrive. Key to realizing this vision is a renewed and strengthened human commitment to the natural world. We envision a system of conserved lands that encompasses the full array of Vermont's physical features, from lowland swamps to alpine peaks, supporting multiple, viable examples of all of Vermont's natural communities. We also envision private and public landowners practicing thoughtful stewardship and sustainable management of Vermont's forests and other lands provide timber, food, water, and other natural resources that we need. We envision Vermonters living in harmony with the natural world and enjoying and expanding well into the future. We hope that others share this vision and that this book will help us all achieve it. Thanks very much. Thank you very much. I have a few questions, and I think are there still books to sell? Is there some books to sell too? And we can stick around and sign them if you want to. Any questions? Yeah. You mentioned oak. Red oak, white oak, birr oak, and you mentioned yellow oak, which I don't wear up. Where do they grow in Vermont? Where do they have to be readily found in the wild? Yellow oak is one that is in those places that Liz described mostly. Landscapes, either bluff forests and those dry, warm, shallow bedrock criteria there is right behind me. So, dry bedrock setters. Is it yellow? I don't know why they call it yellow, do you know this? I don't either. Does anybody else know why they call it yellow? Do they get to be large? They're quite large. Yeah. I think the artists here probably understand just because we're there in the main part of the range, but they're good sites too. And each of the oaks has a really different habit, the birr oak and the strong white oak and red oak and black oak and white oak. And the colors might refer to the wood. Yeah. Have you considered any thought to which communities would be most affected by dye up of ash? Does that happen? Yes, and the state's kind of working on some of that too. I mean, forests and parks and personal wildlife are working on what we do in state lands for these things too. The ones that we think are most likely to be affected are the forest weapons. There's evidence now from Minnesota. Tony DeMito, that's a professor at UVM, worked out there too. But there's evidence that especially those forest weapons that are heavily dominated by ash, if the ash are all killed, it changes the apple transpiration in the swamp. And you can end up going from a forest assistance to a system that's really marshy because the water isn't removed. And other communities, like which one are the forest, I think we kind of expect other trees to just kind of fill in. I mean, anything else? Just one thing else about that, about ash and enroute ash for, is we're trying to, collectively, conservation people are trying to really encourage people to see hope for ash in the future and to act as if there's hope. In other words, to not cut down all your ash, but instead to manage for ash and keep your eye out for resisted trees, particularly, as Eric said, white ash, which there seems to be some resistance. There's still some uncertainty, too, where there's little spots, like that place where I got that big ash, big black ash. Where there's some spots that have kind of jumped over. One ash tree, they zoom in on a smell or a chemical that tells them where it is, so maybe they'll miss something. Can you say a little bit something about what you've added for conservation? I was looking at that. That's a hard question. I think there's two parts to it. One is, we've tried to, in the introductory sections, to really talk about what conservation means in a time of climate change when the natural communities that are described in this book are probably not going to be static when we start thinking about the next, I don't know, century, hopefully at least that long. But at some point, they'll change and species will move around. And so what does it mean to conserve when things are changing? So that's one thing that we've tried to touch upon. There's no easy answer, so I won't even attempt to explain it here. But there's hope that, by conserving natural communities now, we'll maintain the stage for biological diversity in the future. And then in each of the community profiles, we have revisited the conservation and management recommendations, trying to use our collective experience and what we've learned from others to describe how we best maintain the particular drivers and qualities of each of those particular communities. And I just want to reiterate one thing about that. It's really important. We talk about communities changing with climate. And we go out and find best examples and I want to say this is a place that needs to be conserved. And if that place changes and isn't that community in the future, because I mean it's not worthwhile anymore. And I think the point is that if we find these cool places now, they're there because of that physical setting. And something different will be there. But it's likely to be something equally important because it's going to reflect us at that physical set. Even in these pictures, the top of Hamilton is always going to have something interesting and unusual in Vermont, regardless of how vegetation changes. So back on the ash, kind of that crazy question I have about it. If we cut along the right-of-way of the town highways and things like that, and leave above the stress, do you cover the ash? Do you cover the ash? Thanks. I've read, I think, where ash, if there was left to roll, would only travel a mile a year. Importing that is what's spread. Right. I don't think I have a good answer for that. There are some recommendations coming out for the landowners from Forest Apartments. I think most of it is, what this set is, don't take it all. Plan for the future that some of it might survive and that we don't know all that's going to happen. If you've got a sick tree, shake it. The stuff near the road is really important because once ash dies, it's a really dangerous tree to cut. It tends to fracture and break. And I think there's a really important safety issue there.