 Good afternoon and welcome to the House Committee on Environments and Energy. This afternoon we are going to hear more about climate change and resilience and we're going to kick it off with Naomi Heindel from the North Branch Nature Center who knows a lot about wildfire ecology. Welcome, Ms. Heindel. Thank you. Hi, everyone. I'm Naomi Heindel, Executive Director at North Branch Nature Center just up on the street a couple miles. So thanks for inviting me here today. And thank you to all of you for your role on this committee and for all you do for Vermont's landscapes and communities. So I live in Worcester and grew up in North Ferrisburg. It's a real honor to be here today to talk to you about forest ecology, wildfire, climate change, and how those things intersect for us here in Vermont. So to dive in. Nope. How do I... There we go. To dive in, let's go back to this summer. Remember when all the headlines were pictures of New York City looking smoky, Vermont was smoky too, even into August. And media outlets like Vermont Public where this photo comes from were also really focused on the smoke. In fact, it was kind of hard to find anything about the wildfires themselves. So today I want to take you under the smoke to where these fires were burning. At least here in the east, a lot of the smoke came from fires burning in Quebec. And specifically in a part of northern Quebec that is very familiar to me. So let's zoom in on this map. This is from mid September. It's my head in the way for... Okay. This is one of the largest areas that have burned. So that... Out of the way. That right there is Loch Nostocene. That is the largest freshwater lake in Quebec by surface area. It's almost twice as large as Lake Champlain. So let's just say that if you're canoeing, you'll wait till a really glassy calm day to cross Loch Nostocene. So for many of you, the lake might not be quite as familiar territory as they are for me. So for some context, we'll head together from Montpelier to the boreal forest. So drive north from Montpelier about nine hours, and you'll reach Shabugamou, an old mining town at the southern edge of this region of northern Quebec. First you pass over the border, then you drive up through the Laurentides, then through the broad dairy farming valley of Loch St. John, right there. Then you're about halfway there. Further north, the maps run out. Often there's just an arrow pointing north to Shabugamou. You pass through the French speaking region, and if you go far enough north, the language largely switches back to English. English and Cree, that is, because at about hour 12, you'll enter the territory of the James Bay Cree, our First Nations neighbors. So now we've had a bit more orientation back to this wildfire, this wildfire map. These are the four canoe routes that I've paddled on this map, the Rupert River heading to James Bay, and the Mestassaby Nord Est River, the Mestassaby River, and the Mestassaby River, all of three of which head south and drain into Loch St. John. I headed north to these rivers, and others in Quebec and Labrador first as a teenager and canoe camper, and then later as a canoe trip leader. So I've spent a lot of time staring at maps of this region, and I've spent a lot of time in canoes paddling. That means that I've spent a lot of time portaging through the burned areas left by wildfires. The Boreal Forest is a fire dependent ecosystem, and I can tell you for sure that you and your canoe feel that the most when you're portaging. It's impossible to travel through this landscape without coming into very close contact with the realities of wildfire. A bit of Boreal Forest ecology first. In terms of trees, we're talking about black spruce, balsam fir, jack pine, white birch, poplar trees. Those deciduous trees are pretty rare though, so mostly we're talking about miles and miles of tall, skinny black spruce. In terms of geography, picture a post-glacial landscape of escorts, rivers, bogs, boulder fields, another portaging favorite, ponds, lakes, sandy beaches, and low rolling mountains. Zooming in on some details, there's lots and lots of sphagnum moss and caribou moss. That white in the middle there is caribou moss. It's actually a lichen. The only lichen I know that doubles as toilet paper. There's Labrador tea, mountain laurel, blueberries, wild irises, fireweed, alders, and the understory where there is an understory. Usually that's where fire has made an opening or a longer river or a lake shore. Wildlife includes a very good supply of bugs and also moose, one of the world's largest concentrations of woodland caribou, wolverine, lynx, golden eagle, geese, beaver, and plentiful, plentiful fish. And as I said, this is a fire dependent ecosystem. Natural fire cycles in the boreal forest range from 50 to 400 years. The dead snags that I've navigated my canoe through on portages, the dense fireweed, Labrador tea, blueberries, birch, and poplar that grow up after a disturbance as early successional plants. The serotonous jackfines that actually require wildfire to disperse and germinate. These hallmarks of the boreal forest are all there because of fire. Fire is part of what makes the boreal forest the diverse, resilient, important ecosystem that it is, Earth's lungs as they say, meaning that fire plays an integral role in the functioning, not just of the Northern Quebec river systems and forests, but of the entire planet. 25% of the world's natural forests are in Canada, and 30% of the world's boreal forest grows there. The boreal forest cleans and recycles much of the Earth's fresh water and drives seasonal changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. So truly all we need to do to be connected to the boreal forest is breathe. Fire plays many roles in ecosystems. It's important for providing wildlife habitat, for nutrient cycling, for plant diversity, for broader landscape heterogeneity and health. It lets in light that many species need to take hold. It offers up nutrient rich mineral soil for seeds to germinate in. It's hard to remember under all the smoke here in Vermont that fire is an important part of ecosystem health. But ecologists have long ago moved beyond the idea of a climax community or an end game ideal forest to a disturbance model and a recognition that disturbance like fire is actually really critical in creating and maintaining healthy ecosystems. Usually this quote from Aldo Leopold about keeping every cog and wheel in the natural world is used to talk about the Endangered Species Act and applied to keeping every organism, every butterfly, every bird, every top predator. But abiotic forces like fire are also cogs and wheels of ecosystem functioning and need to be kept in, even if they make challenging portage trails. So that's a semester's worth of fire ecology in two minutes for you. Now let's head back to the map of the summer's wildfires because there's actually a lot more going on here. These eight blue dots represent the eight James Bay Cree communities. As I mentioned, the James Bay Cree are 20,000 or so First Nations people who live in this region of northern Quebec and who have been paddling these rivers and stewarding these forests and dealing with forest fire in these woods for thousands of years. Several of these communities, especially the Sissini, Ujabugamu and WSwanipi experienced a summer like no other this year. So we truly can't talk about this landscape without the Cree being front and center to our story. I was lucky to start building that understanding on my early canoe trips and then later in college and graduate school as a researcher. I've had the privilege of spending a lot of time on Cree land in Cree bush camps and in Cree forest management offices. Given all of this paddling and portaging and researching, I've spent a lot of fourth of July's in northern Quebec, usually hunkered down in some extremely cold rainstorm. And yet here is what this path past fourth of July looks like here. This is a shown here in this NASA image. And here is what July fourth looked like in Ujabugamu, one of the James Bay Cree communities, and one of the many community communities that had to evacuate. All told, 150,000 people had to evacuate Quebec fires this summer and many more than once. Quebec firefighters spot fires near these communities and near non-native towns too, near other infrastructure, meaning that in addition to towns, they protected dams, power lines, roads, bridges. So that means thankfully that the Cree communities are safe and standing. But the firefighters could not or did not protect the rest of the land. The thousands of miles of boreal forest, hunting grounds, protected natural areas, cabins and bush camps that cover the rest of the James Bay, this region of James Bay. Even though the Cree mostly live in those eight communities, their traditional hunting territory originally 400,000 square miles, just larger than the state of Texas, is necessarily vast because the animals that they hunt require large habitats to survive the harsh realities of the boreal forest. So while Cree communities didn't burn this summer, Cree land and livelihoods certainly did. So what is actually under all that smoke? It's all of that land. Those original 400,000 square miles of traditional territory, it's family camps and hunting grounds, multi-generational spots on lakes and rivers that hold thousands of years of Cree culture and stewardship practices in them. This is the Flax Smith family camp just north of Shibugamu where 10 cabins were lost in the fire this summer. According to Alan Saganash, a natural resource manager who's been working in forestry issues in the Cree community of Waswanipi for decades, it'll be years before the forests become productive again. Most blueberry patches have burned, Alan told me, and that's significant because that's an important source of food. That's picking blueberries with your grandparents in the late summer and processing the berries in your bush camp and sharing the jam you make across the community and bringing the berries to a celebratory feast and annual community gathering up the lake. And you can keep going, blueberry patches mean bear habitat too, and everything that comes from a successful bear hunt. So when Alan says most blueberry patches have burned, there's a lot to that. And that's just the ecological and cultural significance of one plant. So let's extrapolate that across the landscape and you can start to see the impacts of these widespread fires. In Waswanipi alone, 28 Cree camps were lost. Several Cree families lost 75 to 100% of their hunting territories to fire. Many non-native camps burned too. Alan told me that people lost camps and equipment like boats, motors, four-wheelers, guns, and other essential equipment used for hunting, fishing and trapping. Camps and cultural businesses were burned because they were so isolated. So that's a huge loss of cultural and traditional landmarks, places of birth, ceremonial spots, bear dens. It's also a loss of language because on the land, Cree language is different than it is in the communities. The more the land is impacted, the less of that special land-based language is used and retained and passed on from generation to generation. So they lose words, phrases, entire ideas. And here is one important clincher and where things get a level more complicated. There is a sneaky loophole in all of the political and natural resource use agreements between the Cree communities and the non-native logging companies and the Quebec government that allows logging companies to salvage burned wood, up to 70% of burned wood, without that wood adding towards their yearly quota. So that yearly quota sets the maximum that logging companies can take from certain categories of Cree land, but burned wood, the wood they can salvage after these fires, does not count towards that maximum. And when these non-native logging companies salvage that wood and build roads and bridges to get to those burned stands, they add immeasurably to the environmental and social impacts that led to these fires in the first place, and they prevent the nutrient cycling and natural regrowth that I was going on about back in our fire ecology lesson. Alan Saganash reported that these salvage logging operations had already started going in at the end of the summer, even before all the fires had gone out or been properly mapped. Now hold that thought about logging's role in all of this for a minute because first we need to talk about climate change. This year, more than 45 million acres burned in Canada. That's an area the size of North Dakota. And 12.8 million acres burned in Quebec alone, more than any other province. That's 26 times the annual average for Quebec. And it released across Canada an estimated 2 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. That's more than three times what the rest of the country produced in all of 2023. So there's no doubt that climate change is a big player here. Native June was the warmest two month period in Canada since records began in 1940. The consensus seems to be that fires of this size are unprecedented in Canada, but are no longer going to be unusual. A theme that sounds familiar to many in the western US. So a similar pattern is happening in the US. A fire like the landmark 1988 fire in Yellowstone National Park used to be an anomaly in terms of size. Now it's becoming the norm. In general, climate scenarios predict larger fires, more large fires, a shorter fire return interval, and all of the forest changes that go along with those shifts. So let's break that down for a minute because all of those mean slightly different things. Larger fires, okay, that one's easy. For some frame of reference this year's fires in Quebec combined were 16 times the size of the 1988 Yellowstone National Park fire. So that's just more, that's just larger fires. Then there's more large fires. That means that the number of fires greater than say a thousand acres is also increasing as time goes on. And because fire drives disturbance ecology, it matters if the areas being reset to early successional stages are increasing in size. And if it's becoming more and more common for those areas to be big and not small. So that's a difference in landscape heterogeneity and will drive shifts in plant and animal species in stewardship and putting practices. So then the next is a shorter fire return interval. Well, that should feel familiar to us if we think about a flood return interval. If a landscape is used to a 50 to 400 year fire return interval, what happens when the interval shortens to every 100 years, every 50 years, every 10 years through the black spruce trees that currently dominate the boreal forest grow back. So these climate scenarios bring with them a whole host of forest changes from changes to nutrient cycling to seed storage and soil to what types of trees and forests regrow to how much water is retained in these forests to what balance of animal species lives there. But blaming these fires on climate change alone does not tell the whole story here. Even if you can't find much of that other story in the media. I did find this one throwaway line in media coverage in late August, but other than that the impact of logging across James Bay was largely ignored in the coverage and the analysis of the fires. And so were the First Nations people and their knowledge and experience and livelihoods. So some of you might be more familiar with the impacts of hydroelectric dams in Northern Quebec from the activism over these dams and the flooding and environmental and health impacts that they caused in the 1980s. Because of hydrocrobats far Northern reservoirs and generating stations and thousands of miles of these high voltage power lines, New England and New York are powered by Northern Quebec. More than 25% of Vermont's power comes from hydrocoback. And if you count all the energy credits that Vermont buys from hydrocoback to meet its renewable energy quota, that number swells to 50%. While the impact of the hydro power development of past decades are perhaps better known more recently, really since the 1990s, the southern portion of create territory has become a landscape threatened by absolutely massive clear cuts. We're talking 1000 acres cut at a time and a 600 foot buffer than another 1000 acres over and over again. So the hydrocoback is the is the wood belt. Canada leads the world in lumber and pulp and paper exports. Two by fours toilet paper is a good chance it came from Quebec. In the early 2000s in the heyday of all of this, one Quebec sawmill alone had an annually yield of 200 million board feet. That's more than the entire state of Vermont's annual yield coming from one sawmill. Logging like this, it's a lot of the newer provisions put in place to reduce these clear cuts, leaves the land without the ability to retain snow or water, removes that dense layer of moss from the ground, and it generally dries things out so much that the landscape after logging is like a tinderbox, ready to ignite. The scale of these logging operations is hard to convey in pictures. Just remember that this is not supposed to look like the moors that we saw in the early 2000s. This shot taken from the front steps of a creek camp is supposed to be a boreal forest of thick, tall, black, black spruce stands. They didn't leave the land steward any trees was the joke my Cree friend cracked while we were standing there, the Cree are endlessly optimistic and pretty much always joking, but truly the scale and intensity of the logging is not a joking matter. Of course, the impact of this logging is enormous on the water streams, water quality, forest regeneration, or lack thereof, given that we're talking about an area with a very short, small growing season. And the seedlings the logging companies plant don't tend to do very well. There are shifts to undergrowth and tree makeup, shifts in wildlife populations and massive impacts on the roads, massive impacts of the roads that are built to access all of these areas. Caribou populations are dwindling, for example, because of the fact that the roads are really wide birth and because the patchwork of forest that has resulted from the logging has driven moose populations up and caribou populations down. There are also huge cultural impacts. These hands belong to Alan Saganash from WSWANAPI. He's meeting to the places where he and his wife were born, circa 1950. His wife, Laura's birthplace is inside of this protected area. So it is protected from logging, at least under current rules, but Alan's birthplace here is just outside of the boundaries of the protected area, meaning that it, like so many other important spots on Kree land, could someday be clear cut. Here is Isaac Shikapio on Cold Water Lake, his family's hunting ground and the start of a beautiful rocky, mossy portage trail, well-worn by thousands of years of Kree portagers crossing from Cold Water Lake to the headwaters of the Mestosini River, a trail I first walked when I was 15. Now a logging road bisects that ancient portage trail, cutting close to Isaac's family camp and making it almost impossible to find that old trail. So I've been thinking about it this way. It was clear when Lahaina on Maui burned that part of the devastation was the loss of so much of Hawaii's pre-colonial history and culture, from artifacts and museums to historic buildings to an ancient and particularly beautiful and important tree. The same is true here when James Bay forests burn at a scale unseen in human history. If we learn to see the culture of James Bay in photos like these in an ancient portage trail like this, and if we learn to see that that culture is so wrapped up in boreal forest ecology, we'll see the true impact of these wildfires and of the complicated mix of logging and climate change that caused them. A recent study has shown that logging has removed more than 35 million acres of boreal forest in Quebec and Ontario since 1976. That's an area roughly the size of the state of New York. Making the land more susceptible to wildfire at the exact same time that climate change is also driving increased wildfire intensity and at the exact same time that we need the boreal forest more than ever. The world's boreal forest holds more than 700 gigatons of carbon in the trees and soil. That's almost twice as much as the world's tropical forests. It's a critical part of our ability to achieve any kind of climate resilience and so are its First Nations stewards. I said earlier that the Cree are endlessly optimistic. In my time up north, I've learned that hope in the land is essential and never goes away. The Cree won't ever give up on their rivers and forests, they can't actually. And we shouldn't either. We can all use the smoke last summer and all the smoke coming again this summer as a reminder that climate change is here, that we need the boreal forest to keep breathing for us and that forest management and wildfire management at home and afar really matter right now. So let's bring this home back to Vermont and to climate resilience here. First, I suspect that smoky skies are here to stay in Vermont. When they do return, we should go under the smoke and understand the places that are burning and the people and politics involved. We cannot be bystanders in this. And Vermonters need to know about air quality indexes. Businesses and organizations and families need to be prepared. Right now, my staff back at the Nature Center, my education staff are creating policies for smoky days so that next summer we are better prepared to keep our campers safe. We should all be doing this and not just those organizations with executive directors who think a lot about wildfire and climate change. Second, we should think carefully about where our wood comes from and where our energy comes from. In my opinion, the more of these natural resources that come from here, manage sustainably and carefully and not from Quebec, the better. Third, do Vermont town forests, state forests and national forests have fire management plans? Are they updated? What do they say? Are they proactive and set up to use wildfire as a tool towards an ecologically sustainable future? Would we be ready for an annual wildfire season here? I don't think our forests are as susceptible as the boreal forest, though I think that'd be a very good question to ask some forest ecologists in the coming years. But we should be thinking about how we prepare our forests for similar changes. Fire is a natural part of our landscape too. And as I hope you now see, that's important and good. And perhaps means we should have more fire and proactively burn in some places. It also means we should pay extra attention to climate change. Fourth, it's often easy to think of Canada as a model of environmental and social policies. This is not true when it comes to logging. And it's certainly not true when it comes to its first nations. We can and should do better by our forests and by our working landscapes and by our land stewards. We need careful action to build climate resilience for all types of Vermont landscapes and for all the different communities that depend on them. We need only to look north or to breathe in to see the climate changes here and to see how vulnerable our forests, conservation efforts and land-based economy and culture could be. And very finally, if you want a longer version of this presentation with more canoe stories, though just as many references to toilet paper, come in a couple of weeks to North Branch Nature Center where I'll be part of our annual speaker series this year, it's all focused on climate resilience. Thank you. When is that talk at the North Branch? January 26th, postponed from tonight because of the storm. And what time? 7, 6, 30, 6, 30 p.m. Thank you so much for your presentation. Representative Smith. Very interesting. Thank you. Thank you, Madam Chair. Spruce needles don't work very well with toilet paper. Do you believe that the fires up in Canada were human error or natural? It sounds like it was a mix, but it sounds like most of it was natural. More lightning strikes. We fished pit macaun last year in the year before that. We went through the wildfire area and it's pretty devastating. But I'm thinking that the fires up there are probably much more susceptible than they are down here. Primarily because it's all softwood and when softwood dries, you know, you could look at it and it'll start fire versus a hardwood stand. I do think there's a big difference as you had from material forest into that mixed hardwood and coniferous forest like we have, but I also should, I think we should remember that the northern extent of Vermont bumps right up against it. And then we have climate change changing our forests. So I think that's where a forest ecologist could do some really good work to look at what is happening to our forests and how is our forest, how is our fire interval changing? Do you have ideas as to how you could prevent these major fires in Quebec? Oh boy. I mean, I think that the first and easiest, not easy, the first trigger that I would pull would be the annual yield that these logging companies are taking. I think that the overlap of the logging with the wildfire is just devastating. So that's the first thing that I think, and they have been reducing that over time. As I mentioned, there have been more regulations, but it's clearly still happening. And then I think that climate forcing is the next thing. Like, I mean, there's already a lot of, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere now. We're still going to be seeing warming that we haven't even seen now that's given, but I think the best that we can do to mitigate that and reduce that, turn that trend. And I heard you say that you believe the smoke is here to stay. I would think so, maybe not every summer. Hopefully not every summer, right? But I imagine that we are going to be, I imagine that Canada is going to be having a fire. Season now. And we are, you know, downwind and they're going to be receiving. I hope you're wrong. End of that. I hope so too. Thank you. Yeah. Representative Clifford. Thank you. Thank you for your presentations. A lot of good information. The question I have is you mentioned the St. James Bay fire. How long ago was that? The Yellowstone fire. That was 1988. Okay. Yeah. That was just one that I picked off. I used to live. In the greater Yellowstone ecosystem. So I knew that one well. So just sort of a representative. Right. That sort of sticks in the public memory as a big fire. And that was 16 times smaller than these fires. And put back this year. Yeah. Representative. Yeah. I just sort of touched on a few things that just made me want to ask the question. I mean, it's clear from what you're saying that. The land itself is more susceptible to the fires because of climate change as well as human activity, whether they're cutting or whatever. But, and then you just mentioned lightning strikes. And my question was, okay. What. Is there anything else besides lightning strikes that, that actually triggers fires to start. Besides someone lighting a match, you know, kind of know this. So it is lightning strikes. And the land is more susceptible to the lightning strikes. Or a lightning strikes happening more. They're happening anyway, right? They're happening anyway. They're probably happening more frequently as we get, you know, more precipitation events, more. We all learned about this after the flood, right? More precipitation events, more intense precipitation events. We were certainly getting the hurricane season, all that kind of stuff, which I know less about. But yes. I think increased lightning. And then when the lightning does strike. It's not hitting, you know, rich lush boreal forest with this great moss cover. It's hitting it. So it's not human activity. It's not. That actually triggers the fire to start. Just makes it a whole lot more susceptible. Right. Okay. Thank you. Representative Sackowitz. So it sounds like. Historical fires. The question hasn't really played much role in this fire. It hasn't. That's what makes Canada a very different case study than the U.S. In the U.S. When you look at increased fire over time, you have to play it against the fact that we suppressed fires, completely put them out for decades and decades and decades. So yes, climate change is leading to increased fires in the U.S. But so is the fact that we're not suppressing them in that way. Canada that doesn't is not analogous to that. It doesn't have that same history. Like in the U.S. In the early 1900s, we just started putting them all out. To save our timber. Basically. Canada is such a different geography population all down by the border. Huge vast amount of territory. So they don't have that same pattern. So many ecologists see it as kind of like this blank template. Of like. This isn't human activity. This is just climate change. I think Quebec. Isn't totally that same story, though, because of climate change. So that's where I was getting frustrated with the media. Not talking about logging at all. Because it's, it is. It's a double. It's a double whammy, basically. But no, there's not the same history of suppression. So. So in terms of. Damage to the ecosystem overall, it's easy to see how logging is. The forest fires together. A terrible combination, but you seem to be suggesting that the logging itself is contributing to. Am I reading you right? Right. So the, the logging makes the land more susceptible to the wildfire. Because of what it does to the ecosystem because of the way that it dries it out. Because of the way that the trees are not regenerating. Because of the way that it. Yeah, it's really just the way that it changes what that ecosystem is. It's not, it's not growing back up to be boreal forest. It's growing up to be a much more wildlife susceptible. Ecosystem. Yeah. So I guess, I guess what's. There's a difference between like something being fire dependent as the boreal forest is, meaning it needs fire. That's different from it. Just going up in flames. Being fire susceptibles being susceptible to it. You know, if that distinction is making sense. Yeah. I think it's a matter of scale. A lightning strike might have started a state fire. And then not spread. When the moisture content was higher in that forest. Exactly. And now it hits that logging. And it just. It just runs. And as these cuts are so big, but that's pretty significant. Representative Sibilia. Thanks for your testimony. So I just want to make sure that I'm clear. On scale here. So you're not suggesting that logging in and of itself. Is what's contributing to this. Not logging. Generally, but clear cutting this type of forest. Yeah. Is creating. Yeah. And I use those terms interchangeably because in this area of Quebec, that's all that there is. Right. That's, that's, that's just what it is. They have changed some of their policies. Some of the cuts are smaller these days, but it's, it's some. It is. Yeah. One in the same. In that area. Logging that I've seen sustainable logging that I've seen in Vermont is a very different thing. But I do think that this. You know, maybe a number, maybe bullet point number five on here is think about what this means for our logging. And timber operations in Vermont and ways to do those. And thinking about climate change. And fire. So thank you. That's really helpful. And I appreciate that. Learning about this. This is a topic. So when, when we're taking testimony in here, for instance. You know, I was a waitress for 20 years. So you are at the expert. Here. And we, you know, shorthand sometimes can be really problematic. And so. I appreciate that additional information and advice that you can give. When thinking about this, because legislators aren't always, I mean, our chairs. We have others here, but legislators are not all scientists. So I appreciate that additional clarity. And as you're working with us. Keeping that in mind. Yeah, it's always helpful. Yeah. Thank you for that. I am, I went to forestry school for graduate school. And we live in wooden houses. And so I appreciate that additional information and advice that you can give us when thinking about this. And we live in wooden houses and sit at wooden desks. And I, yeah, it's a big part of, I burn a lot of wood in my wood stove. So, so cutting down trees is an important part of our life in Vermont. The clear cutting forest industry as it stands in Quebec is really, really dangerous to our boreal forests. And I would hope that in our. Forest management plants in Vermont, where they include logging, they wouldn't replicate any of those sorts of things and would, would consider climate change would consider wildfire in our sustainable forestry plans. I'm curious, what do you, what do you know about the value of the burned wood that you said they can go in and salvage? What are they using that for? How burned is it? Is it just. Is it. Yeah, that's a good question. But often it is, it is like scarred on the outside. Like it's fully black. These like black hardened log. You probably saw these as you were fishing. They're like these fire hardened spears on those. And on the inside and they make great fire with two on the inside, they can be still, there's still wood in there. The Quebec sawmills that I'm talking about our state of the art highest technology, they run these things through and they scan them every way possible and they take out, they will get out, they will get out of two by four out of that. And that's pretty much all you can get out of a black spruce tree is like two by four, which is also kind of mind boggling that the industry is, if you're lucky or not, it's going to go towards, towards paper or paper. So there must be enough in there. That it's useful. I, you know, the Cree also think that. Even if it's not. Useful wood and in that for those particular trees. It's this loophole. It's this access. They get to build the road. They get to build the bridges. There aren't roads and bridges to these places. So they build them. And so that then gives them a further and further leg in. I don't know if that's necessarily true. None of the, none of the forestry industry folks I talked to in Quebec seem nefarious. They're, they're trying to make 11 to two. I think they're doing the wrong way, but whatever. But that's what the Cree think is that they're just kind of using that as a leg hold in as well. Representative Smith. Thank you. I think clear cutting up in Canada means. 5,000 acres at a time, but they don't, they don't. Select cut like we do it down the side of the border. But wouldn't. And correct me if I'm wrong, but I could be. Wouldn't you think that creating a buffer with 5,000 acres. That's not going to burn after you have. In the event of a fire. And it should be kind of like a fire. Wall of sorts. The buffers are so tiny. The buffers that I've seen are kind of laughable. They're so thin, like 600 feet. That wind ends up just knocking down all the trees. It won't do it. It really won't do it. So a huge problem is the size of the buffers. Around like between the cuts. And also around. You know, river corals. Do you do this for a living up there? Did I do you? No, no. I envy you if you did. That'd be a fun life, I think. It's wonderful up there. It is. But if you don't mind, what was your research in? Yeah, as an undergraduate, my research was a remote sensing analysis of this. Exact issue. I won't bore you with the remote sensing. Details. But you can essentially tell using moisture index. You can tell what's happening as forest first. And regrows. So that was a Dartmouth college as a geology. Undergrad. And then I was at the Yale school of forestry environmental studies, which is now called the Yale school of the environment. And took a more of a social science perspective to this topic. And did a lot of research in the James, in these Cree communities sitting in. These really intense conversations in these forestry offices between Cree hunters. French Canadian logging company representatives Quebec ministry of natural resource representatives and then someone. From the Cree government sort of working as a liaison. Tri-lingual. Very tense, very interesting stuff. So I was getting into a lot of research. So I was getting a look into what's going on in these conversations. How's, how are these rules being managed on the ground? Great. Thank you so much for sharing. Very helpful. Members. I'm. Started away. We will take a 10 minute break and see if Liz Thompson can join us at five minutes. Before the hour. We are calling our meeting back to order and welcoming. Liz Thompson, who is here representing Wildlands, Woodlands, farmlands and communities. Thank you for joining us and welcome. Thank you. Thank you, chair Sheldon. Thank you everyone for members of the committee for inviting me to come in. Thank you. Thank you chair Sheldon. Thank you everyone for members of the committee for inviting me to come in. I'm really glad to be here. Right at this particular minute because that. Talked by Naomi. Naomi Heindel. Really is a cautionary tale and a really good. Lead into what I have to say, which is quite different from, from what she talked about. I'll start by saying I'm Liz Thompson. I reside in Williston and retired from the Vermont land trust working independently now and I'm working very closely with Wildlands, Woodlands, farmlands and communities. Regional partnership. Conservation partnership, which I'll talk about. And so that's, that's what I'm representing here today. So I'm going to talk about the work, the Wildlands, Woodlands, farmlands and communities vision. And, and the partners that are involved in the vision include these, Northeast Wilderness Trust, Food Solutions, New England, Harvard Forest, Alpine, which is an academic group of academics, the host organization is us while it's we Wildlands, Woodlands, farmlands and communities, New England Forestry Foundation, Lincoln Institute, the RCP Regional Conservation Partnership Network and UMass. So just some background. I just want to give a little context. This is a fuzzy slide. I apologize, but a little bit of context. And this is, this is really a good follow up from what Naomi Heindel just spoke about. You can see this is a map of North America with showing forest cover and the darker the color, the denser the forest cover. And we in New England are really in the middle of the Appalachian region, which is one of the, the most, it's a globally significant temperate forest. It's one of the largest forested areas in most intact forested areas in North America and indeed in the world surprisingly. So here is a map of the northern of the Appalachians region from the Nature Conservancy, which shows another view of this. And the Nature Conservancy in this region, the Appalachian region of which we are a part occupies 8% of the land area of the United States and some of Canada. And it holds 25% of the carbon in the United States. So this is really, that's 8% of the land, 25% of the carbon. So it's a big, huge carbon sink, the forests that make up the Appalachians and particularly the forests of New England. This, the region's history is such a fascinating one and it's worth telling a little bit about it. In 1995, I was introduced to this article by Bill McKibben in the Atlantic, an explosion of green in which he talked about the reforestation of the eastern United States that having been, the region having been abandoned as relatively, it was the first place where people were doing agriculture, where non-indigenous people were doing agriculture in North America, it became when the Midwest opened up and people moved to better lands to the West, New England became a forested over a number of decades, became a forested region again. And this, what this does is presents us with an immense and a huge opportunity, a conservation opportunity. So here we are in the 1880s, same exact landscape on the right, completely forested again. Different kind of forest, the forest is very different, but nevertheless it gives us a second chance to do conservation in the region. And showing this chart from our report, the Wildlands, Woodlands, Farmlands and Communities report shows the trajectory of forest cover in New England. And then the dotted line at the bottom is New England's population rising up from not exactly 0 and 1600 of course, but on the scale of this rising up dramatically and the forest cover dropping down to a minimum in the mid-1800s and then rising back up as time has gone on. And in these charts, you can see the different states have different trajectories, but Vermont is quite about 75, 76% forested now. Common with that is our changes in wildlife populations. Some wildlife populations have changed. Beaver were just about gone by 1700 and have recovered dramatically. Turkey were just about gone and have been reintroduced and risen dramatically. Again, same with several other species. Some species that have been lost, wolves and mountain lions have not returned. So this is just in passenger pigeon simply has gone extinct as far as we know. So this is an opportunity, it's an amazing opportunity, but there are threats. So we feel that we need to take advantage of this opportunity to conserve the landscape now while we can before these threats become larger. And so the threats include on the right, just fragmentation. This is a second home development. Lower left, heavy logging, heavy clearing, clear cutting as was discussed in the previous presentation. And then siding for energy facilities. And that's a topic that you'll hear from others about. And so I just interjected actually while Naomi was talking I went and added a couple slides to this talk because I wanted to point out that this article in the New York Times came out just a couple of them, maybe a week ago, January 4th. Canada's logging industry devours forest crucial to fighting climate change. And this may refer to one of the studies that Naomi talked about. And this is a beautiful image here of the boreal forest as it looks in its natural state. But this paper describes some of the real devastation that has happened to the forest in Canada and the wildfires that in part have resulted from that. So here is a map of Canada showing the orange and I don't have a legend on this, but the orange shows places that have been heavily logged. So the forest is just the squareness of this. This is the study area. It's not all the forest, but this is their study area outlined in blue. And then the orange within it is places that have been heavily logged. Loch Nostacity is visible, I think, in this image if you can pick that out. And here's an example of that kind of devastation, that kind of heavy, heavy logging. And the reason that I bring this up and bring this in to our conversation about New England is because in New England this is a problem too. And it's kind of an invisible problem. We don't think about it too much. We don't think about this real kind of heavy, heavy logging forest, really forest degradation as being a problem in New England, but in Northern Maine it is. And this is one of the things that we at Wildlands, Woodlands, Farmlands and Communities are trying to elevate into the consciousness, into the conversation and trying to support research on this and invite conversation. So this is all, you know, in the forest, the forest cover, the amount of forest that we have is directly related to it is, the forest is a climate solution. Having a heavily forested region and keeping forests as forests, keeping forests as healthy forests is critical in adapting to climate change. This is the July flooding in Montpelier, thanks to Brian Pfeiffer for this image. So this is going to continue to happen. These extreme weather events are going to continue to happen and will continue to have flooding like this. But what, you know, what can conservation, how can conservation help? How can conservation help with this problem? And it may be that protecting Montpelier is going to be a challenge. But we can do our conservation work, can contribute some to climate adaptation. This, here's another image of the July flooding and this is of the lower Winooski. This is in the area of Pine Island in Colchester. Interestingly, in this photograph, so this, in this picture, these are commercial agricultural fields that flood a lot. But in the July flooding, they flooded, you know, really quite seriously. But over on the right in this image is an area that has been recently purchased by the Fish and Wildlife Department as being let go back to natural flood plain forest with an understanding that some of these areas are just best as natural flood plain forest and that the agricultural lands perhaps should be somewhere else. Well, okay, so what is our vision? The vision of a Wildlands, Woodlands, Farmlands and communities is, it is a conservation vision and it's about conservation. And when we say conservation, we have a pretty specific meaning of that. And the vision is that at least 70% of the New England landscape should be conserved as forest land and that's about 30 million acres. That 80 to 90% of those lands should be managed as Woodlands, meaning forests that are managed sustainably for the production of the resources that we need and that we use but with care for the ecology of the forest. And 10% to 20% of these lands should be managed as large Wildlands as places where nature is the manager. So where nature, the natural ecological processes are allowed to function fully. Then we have a goal of 7% of New England being conserved as farmland, three million acres. And then finally, smart growth in concentrated areas to complement this forest and farm that says conversion. It means it's supposed to be conservation. That's a typographical error, I apologize. So this is what it looks like graphically. This on the right is a map of what it looks like now and the colors match the chart here. So in this graph, you can see that there's a line in the middle is where we were at in 2010 when this vision was first articulated by the Wildlands, Woodlands, Farmlands, and Communities and where we want to be by 2060. So you can see that we really want to see a real ramping up of conservation, particularly in forest lands but also in farmlands. We understand there will be needs to be an increase in developed land and at the top there's water in wetland which we hope will not change. We hope that will simply stay the same. But on the lower, that lower wedge, the Wildlands, we want that to occupy 7% of the region which is about 10% of the forest of the region. And there's a little bit of a closer look just to help you visualize it some more. And when you see that sort of comb thing in the farmland part over on the right, I'll talk a little bit more about that in a second but what that indicates is that 7% protected as farmland would sort of maintain the status quo but if we want to actually increase our food production, we will need to increase that number. So the four pieces of this, Wildlands, Woodlands, Farmlands, and Communities, I'll go through them one by one. And the efforts of this organization in each area, Wildlands has been a big focus of the group over the last couple of years, three years. We recently produced a report, Wildlands in New England Past, Present, and Future. This was a very large effort of research and data gathering on the part of the organization, the group of partners involved, looking at conservation practices throughout the region, conservation easements, ownership, and really doing a deep, deep dive into understanding where the Wildlands are in New England, where protected Wildlands are, for example, the top of Mount Mansfield and Camelshump, two places less small as Colchester Bog. It is, we believe, the first U.S. study to map and characterize all permanently conserved lands in one region that are managed to be forever wild. So it provides a baseline and a path forward, and the four organizations most involved in this were Wildlands, Woodlands, Farmlands, and Communities, Harvard Forest, who did a lot of the technical work, Northeast Wilderness Trust regional organization, but that's based right in Montpelier and the Highstead Foundation. And why we did this, why do we need Wildlands? So you might be saying, well, would you come up with that 10% number? What's that all about? Why is that? Well, Wildlands have intrinsic value because basically Wildlands were the natural cover of New England prior to a little over 400 years ago. That was the natural land cover. There were humans here using this land, but their use of the land was much lighter and more dispersed than what it is today. So they have intrinsic value simply because that is the natural state of the New England landscape. They provide immense biodiversity value, certain species that need wild forests, need older forests. They offer incredible value in carbon storage. Old forests, old growth forests hold more carbon. Store more carbon than younger forests. And there's a whole science in that. There's a whole, you could get somebody in to talk to you for an hour about that. But it is known that older forests and wild forests hold more carbon than younger forests. Ecological resiliency, as I was saying, old forests, wild forests provide resiliency in the face of climate change and other stressors in many, many ways. They provide complex structure which keeps water on the land, for example. Old forests, wild forests are less actually, Naomi talked about fire in New England and our forests. New England forests are less susceptible to fire certainly than Quebec or then the Canadian boreal forests that she was talking about. But wild, old forests with their moist soils and mossy logs on the ground are certainly less prone to burn than younger forests. They provide places for humans to go and reflect and actually there's many human health benefits that have been documented by people going into old forests. They provide baselines to research and they contribute to our global, regional and statewide conservation goals such as 30 by 30 and 50 by 50. What are wild lands? They're tracks of any size and condition permanently protected from development and that permanent is a key word in which management is explicitly intended to allow natural processes to prevail with free will and minimal human interference. And it's understood, as I said, that humans have been part of nature for millennia and can coexist within wild lands. The criteria that we use to designate wild lands are an intent to keep the land as wild, actual management on the ground for an untrammeled or wild condition and permanent protection usually in the form of some legal document. And our findings, we know this, 81% of New England is forest and here's a map of that and only 3.3% of New England is currently designated as wild lands. So the largest one is Baxter State Park in Maine as you can see and then we have some areas on the spine of the Green Mountains. You can pick out the Appalachian Trail in there and there are some smaller areas throughout the region. And here's a different look at that. Those two maps are on the far left and far right in the center is a map that shows the forest land and light green, protected land in middle green and wild lands in darker green. So there's a lot of conserved land that is not wild land. Woodlands. Woodlands are lands that are managed for timber production and we have not, we've been involved in a lot of different activities regarding forest management, but we have not done the same level of, we haven't done a huge report on woodlands but we're doing a lot of different activities regarding forest management, sustainable forest management. And our research team is deeply involved in this topic in many, many different ways. We are involved in research, communications and collaboration. Research for example, I mean it's just one little, one example, this is not little, but Jonathan Thompson is a researcher at Harvard Forest and he and his colleagues recently published a paper asking the question, do working forest easements actually work for conservation? And if you can picture that image of Maine that I showed, they were looking mostly at large forest easements in northern Maine and some in northern Vermont and asking the question, do they actually conserve the land? And the answer is, it's not necessarily yes. It may be that the answer is no, not entirely that forest easements don't entirely protect land from degradation. They may protect the land from conversion to other uses, but they don't protect the land from ecological degradation. And so this is a piece of research that we've been following and in this publication that we have just started, this is an online publication from the ground up that we have just launched and started in this publication, one of our founders, key members, David Foster, has written a review of that Jonathan Thompson et al. article and brings this topic up. And we will have in our next issue, we're gonna have a response to that review to the article. So there's a lot of conversation going back and forth. Are these conservation easements actually helpful or not? So this is an example of both research and communication about this topic. And then collaboration, one of the, just one example of all the collaborations that we're involved with and that some of you are involved with and you know about is the Regional Conservation Partnership Network. And this is a network of organizations, some of them totally volunteer led from the ground up, big, really, really grassroots organizations that are working to protect land in regions that they have identified. And recently there was a meeting, a conference of all these groups in which they were there to share information about how they do it. So that's one of the things that we're involved with is just talking with other people. And I can't say anything without talking about Vermont Conservation Design and the work that we've done here in Vermont to identify wildlands and woodlands that are important for an ecologically functional landscape. So I just wanted to mention that and here is the map of the ecologically functional landscape in Vermont. This is all tied closely in to Act 59 and we are just thrilled that these things are so closely tied together. Farmlands, the group that, Wildlands, Woodlands, Farmlands and Communities, one of the partners is Food Solutions New England. And they have produced this document, a New England food vision, which is goals of healthy food for all, sustainable farming and fishing, and thriving communities. Their goal is that by 2030, 30% of the food consumed in New England it will be produced or harvested or caught within New England. The collective effort is going to focus on expanding and fortifying the region's food supply and distribution systems in an equitable and inclusive way that ensures the availability of adequate, affordable, socially and culturally appropriate products under a variety of rapidly changing climate, environmental and public health conditions. And here's a report, recent report from New England feeding New England. This is a summary of the approach and here is actually some of the data that has come out of it and what is needed. So here's one of the results that in order to meet this goal, if you see on the top, to achieve 30% of the regional production available for consumption, 400,000 acres of existing underutilized cropland and they need 590,000 acres of new cropland needs to be brought into production and I'm just going to zoom in on that a little bit. So you can see the top is what's existing and what the bottom, what needs to happen if we want to meet this goal. So you might be wondering, okay, so what does that mean for the forests? And the short answer is that some forest would have, yes, would have to be cleared in order to meet this agricultural goal. So the question is where would that forest be? What would that look like? Does that undermine the goals for forest conservation? And that's something that the group is deeply involved in looking at the research crunching numbers and trying to figure out how this balance is achieved. As for communities, we are engaging with many different kinds of people and having these conversations about conservation. Here's a group of people at the Pine Island Community Farm in Colchester. These are people that we're engaged with but lots of other people in lots of other communities. That's just one example. The pathways to achieving this vision, this is from the Wildlands, Woodlands, Farmlands and Communities website. So lots of different ways. And this is the active work. These are not just sort of lofty goals but things that we're really doing. As I said, we have this new publication and this is an important communications tool. We've got this dashboard that shows where we're at with tracking the vision for land protection. So on the right you can see the whole of New England that about 25% of New England is currently protected from development that is conserved. And our goal is that 80% of it would be conserved by 2060. So that's a pretty big goal. And then in Vermont, you can see what on the left, what it looks like now at the top current and then moving toward achieving the goals. And there it is closer. So that's all I have and I will, I think I will stop sharing my screen and take some questions. Thank you so much for your presentation. And for doing a relatively short notice and pinch hitting for one of the directors. I really appreciate it. And members, I just thought it was really important to learn about this organization that overlaps very closely with what we're doing in this committee and introduce you and familiarize you with the website so that we can continue to utilize it as the project grows and adds content under the different headings. But thank you so much. Do members have questions? Representative Sakowitz. Thank you. The first question is about the goals for Percentage Wildlands. On one of the charts, you showed a goal of ending up at 7%. But in a previous slide, you had talked about a goal of somewhere between 10 and 20%. And so I was a little confused about the discrepancy, but also the bigger question about, which actually you raised, but didn't answer about where that number actually comes from to begin with as like, how did you choose that as a goal? Two good questions. So the first one is easier to answer than the second one. The first one of the discrepancy in numbers is the 7% is 7% of the total landscape, and the 10% is 10% of the forested part of the landscape. So that gets confusing. There's a similar confusion when you look at Vermont Conservation Design and its numerical goals. It gets a little confusing. So the 10% matches up with the 7%, but the 10 to 20%, we've begun thinking that is 10% enough. Is 10% of the forest enough? And really beginning to look at and ask questions about whether it might be increased to closer to 20%. So what is the origin of that number and what's the, it's frankly, it is a compromise between what we feel. So it all comes down to this. Okay, let me just back up a second and tell you about a research paper that is in the works that will be coming out soon. And that I would love for you to see when it does. It's called the illusion of preservation. And it has to do with this. It has to do with hydro in Canada. It has to do with the forests in Canada. It has to do with our use of the forest. And the point is that we use resources. As Naomi was saying, I live in a wooden house and sit at a wooden desk and we use resources. And so we need to account for that. We cannot simply look at, it's tempting to sort of look at the pre-settlement condition and try to emulate that. And that would be something that isn't achievable because we live here now and we use the resources. So it's a balance of finding ways to produce the resources here in New England that we use here in New England and balancing that with the wild lands conservation goals. So it is really sort of, it's a shell game or a numbers game. It's not a magic number derived by science, but it is practicality of figuring out, well it is science, figuring out how much we need, what do we need in terms of forest products? What do we need in terms of agricultural land? What do we need in terms of developed land for humans to live in? And we do need some wild lands and how much of that can we, what is the balance there and how much wild lands can we have? We believe that 10 to 20% of the region as wild lands or 10 to 20% of the forest as wild lands gives us some very, very significant natural areas, wild lands, resilient lands that will really contribute significantly to biodiversity. If they are large enough and if they are connected and these things are really important and if the waters within them are also adequately protected. Thank you, Representative Sackwitz. Go ahead, we have a follow up and then another question. And so it sounds like the goal for the wild lands is the long-term goal would be to create a stable situation for preserving our ecological systems as a whole. And so do we have any science to know how much we need to preserve in order to maintain these systems? First to get them back to where we'd like them to be really and then to maintain them stably over long periods of time. Yeah, there's lots of different literature in the, there's a lot of different studies in the conservation biology literature over the years that can help us. One thing that is that the Nature Conservancy did a bunch of research a few years back to look at the size, the proper size of ecological reserves for them to be entirely and fully functional for all of the ecological processes such as windstorms, fire, flooding to be able to occur and really have their full effect. And those numbers are in the tens of thousands of acres. So we need large areas up to 25,000 or more more acres of wild lands to have them be fully functional in terms of those ecological functions including wildlife habitat and habitat for the wildlife that either inhabit them now or that we'd like to have inhabiting them in the future. So we need large areas and that it contributes to the number. We also need distribution across the landscape across geophysical settings. In other words, we have lots of wild land at high elevation, wilderness areas within the National Forest, for example, but we don't have much in the lowlands. And those are places that have completely different species composition, different sets of species, different ecological processes. And we believe that those need to be part of the picture too. So we're in the process right now of evaluating that, of actually doing a region wide assessment to see what the gaps are in terms of representation across geophysical settings to see what's missing and to be more proactive about protecting those places that need that protection. So there's a lot of, then there are, there are lots of different studies on particular species and what particular species need. So there's a lot of different pieces to kind of put together as far as like figuring out what that number is, but it's not, there's no like magic number out there. I don't think it's a lot of different considerations and we're trying to balance them all. Thank you, that's very helpful. Representative Tory. Thank you. I was wondering about the regional population estimates, the human population, how that factors into these research projects that you're doing. Is it a, do you have a sense of a relatively limited population growth in New England over time? Yeah, and that's an area that I'm not deeply knowledgeable about myself, Representative Tory, I'm sorry to say, but we, our research team is that's one of the things that they are bringing into the research, looking at population projections and it's really interesting work. I mean, you probably know as much about it as I do, but it's just very interesting to look at projections and what has gone on over the last few years in terms of COVID and climate refugees, people moving here, for example, for certain reasons and how that's going to change New England overall, how it will change in Vermont. So we're, yeah, that is playing into it and it is playing into the research that our colleagues are doing on this food work partly too. I guess I'd point you to one of our researchers, Brian Donahue, retired from Brandeis University, is doing part of this work, some of the work on the illusion of preservation and also the food systems work and he has written a pretty good article in our first issue from the ground up about the integrated approach. And I'm not saying that that article covers this topic, it doesn't, but it's one of the pieces that he and his colleagues are bringing into the research about the illusion of preservation. What is it that we're going to need in the region? What is it that we're going to need in terms of resources as the population grows? Thanks. Representative Sakwit. Yeah, in one of your slides, you showed a goal of 80% conserved lands and in our 30 by 30, 50 by 50 statute, we are obviously well below that. And I'm wondering if a lot of that accounts, I guess my question is, is there a difference in your definition of conservation from what we have in our bill or is that just a more ambitious target? It is, I think the answer is that it is simply a more ambitious target. And I think 30 by 30 and 50 by 50 are 50 by 50 is a lofty goal and 80 by 60 is really a lofty goal because by conservation, we do mean legal conservation. So either ownership by a conservation organization, protection with a conservation easement, those kinds of conservation. So yeah, so it's simply a more ambitious goal. Sure. And my other question is about the amount of land area that we need for agriculture. And you showed the possibility of us needing to increase the percentage from about 7% to maybe 14%, acknowledging that that might require some clearing of forested lands to attain that amount of space. And I'm wondering if in your projections, you considered the kinds of food that we're growing because some forms of agriculture require vastly more acreage than others and how we allocate our food supply in that realm will really affect how much land we need. Yeah, great question. And let me send a link to that report because it does address that, which is that all of this takes into account changing the way actually changing the way we eat and changing the way we farm in addition. So if we were to continue farming the way that we do, the number would be vastly greater. It simply is to, yeah, there's a lot of different pieces to that, but it's partly changing our diets somewhat, which is, that's a tall order, but that's part of it and just looking at what are the most efficient uses of land in terms of producing food for us. So it's not business as usual in terms of agriculture for sure. Thank you. Great. Thank you again for your presentation. Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you members of the committee. Thank you so much for having me. All right. Take care. And so with that, we will take a 10 minute break. Okay. We're reconvening our meeting and we are going to hear from Jonathan Thompson, the research director and senior ecologist at the Harvard forest. On a report that he was part of called growing solar protecting nature and it focuses on Massachusetts renewable energy sighting. Welcome, Mr. Thompson. Thank you. I really appreciate the opportunity to be here. I don't know, I confessed to, I don't know who all is in the room. Probably okay. I also don't know what's of most interest to you. So the slides I've prepared generally describe. This report that. My lab wrote in conjunction with mass autobahn and evolved energy. But I, you know, I would enjoy this to be a conversation as much as a presentation. One problem I have is that I can't see anything except my slides. And so if you have a question for me or a comment, speak up so that I can hear you. If that's, let's see the room. It's a zoom issue that when you're sharing your screen. It makes it small. We can go, we're having to go around the room and introduce ourselves if that would help. That would be nice if you don't mind. Representative. Sure. Representative Christie wars are from the town of Springfield. Larry south goods from Randolph. From Manchester. Amy Sheldon from Middlebury. Laura Sibelio from Dover. I'm Brian Smith. I live in Derby. I'm territory live in more town. I'm Pat from Worcester and I represent more, a large part of LaMoyle County, as well as Worcester and Woodburn. And there are a few other members of the public joining us. And I don't know Peter, we want to introduce yourself. I'm Bob Galvin. I'm with the animal wellness action. Okay. And I don't want to overlook our committee assistant. We're doing introductions. Yeah, thank you. Will Marlier. I'm the committee assistant. And we have the local access. Cable television person here too. That's everyone in the room. Thank you. I appreciate that. So it's, it's okay with you. I'll start plugging along. Please stop me anytime and ask questions. And I want this to be as useful as it can be, given that it was done in Massachusetts and not from up. But I think we have learned some things that it will be. More generally applicable. Maybe as a quick introduction to how this study came to be. I'll explain that up before I got involved in this, one of the projects I was working on was writing the land sector report for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. As part of the decarbonization roadmap. And we worked on that. Throughout the year 2020. And when it came time to hand it in, it was one of these big efforts that I commend everybody for getting it done, but we didn't do a great job talking across sectors. And so when it came time to hand it in, the energy sector was saying, Hey, we need up to potentially 100,000 acres of land. We need up to potentially 100,000 acres for, to have room for solar at ground mount solar. And I had done the whole land sector analysis where I was doing projections of future land cover changed based on past patterns in the recent history. And it didn't include very much solar at all. And so I was sort of lamenting that we didn't get to include that. And to my colleagues at mass autobahn, and they thought, well, we should really do that. And so they. Got my lab on board and then went to evolved energy, which was the energy consultant that had written was sort of my contemporary on the energy sector. And so when we decided to do this report to look at alternative scenarios for solar in Massachusetts, we were able to use the same data and the same models and everything that was part of the original decarbon roadmap. And so it was a nice way to sort of gap fill a gap that became apparent in the decarbon plan for Massachusetts. And so that's, that's how we came to work together. The report called growing solar protecting nature. And so it was intended to do two things. One was to take a look at the solar sighting patterns that have occurred in Massachusetts over the past decade and a half and make some quantification of the ecological impacts of past solar development. And then look at alternative scenarios to the future and the current sighting pattern to some alternative scenarios that were more restrictive in terms of the protections they placed on natural and working lines. So I will just dig into it from there. What we see here is a map of all the solar that was installed between 2010 and 2020. And you can see this accounts for about 1.4 gigawatts of the total 4.2 gigawatts of solar production that's in the state. The both the state clean energy and climate plan as well as the IRA have really incentivized a large build out of ground mount solar in years to come. Indeed, the estimate from the decarbon roadmap was that it would need upwards of 27 gigawatts more solar to meet the demand and the net zero obligations that Massachusetts has committed themselves to. The solar that has been built about 60% of it has been built on forests and another 15% of it on agricultural lands. And more than 10% of the total solar was on what we call biomap to core habitat biomap is Massachusetts assessment of ecological resources in the state and an important habitat. So core habitat is a designated status of important unfragmented lands and you can see that quite a substantial amount of past solar was affecting that. So you can see some aerial photos of the town of Wareham where they've had 240 acres in that town of forest converted to ground mount solar in the state it was about under 4,000 acres of forest converted. The equivalent carbon emissions for that would be equal to about 112,000 cars annually in terms of the forest biomass, the carbon within the forest biomass. There's been a particular concentration. You can see it in this map in the southeast just, I don't know if you can see my mouse, but this area just west of the Cape. And these areas are particularly important from a biodiversity perspective with over 200 state listed species and that due to patterns of interconnects and demand and politics has been one of the concentrated areas. And so we've seen substantial losses to biodiversity associated with ground mount solar in that area. So, you know, if I were to characterize, you know, even just looking at these numbers here, about 60% of Massachusetts is forest and about 60% of the solar built in Massachusetts was on forest, about 10% of Massachusetts is agriculture and more than 10% was the solar was built on agriculture. And, you know, less than 10% was development which is consistent with if we were just citing the solar by throwing darts, this would be the distribution you would expect. It's roughly happening randomly on the landscape in terms of the types of land covers that are being impacted by ground mount solar. We have a question from Representative Smith. Thank you. I apologize that I can't see you. Just as well probably. I guess you're saying how many acres of solar panels are there in Massachusetts right now? There are about 10,000 acres of ground mount solar. Okay. Would all of the land that these acres are taking up, could all of those panels have been placed on the east and between the east and west bound lands of 90 or the south north to south bound lands of interstate 91 and not taking up forest space? I don't have any idea what the acreages are associated with those corridors, but those are exactly the type of lands that we think are more, you know, are a better place to site solar. But I'd be just pulling numbers out of the air if I even guessed it, what the median strip acreage is. Okay, I guess. Sorry, that's a pretty specific number. I could calculate it for you and get back to you. I just don't have it at my finger. May I ask one more question? One more question. The power that's generated by these existing solar panels, is that enough power to handle an electric grid to charge electric vehicles? Not currently, no. I mean, the where we are headed, the 27 gigawatts of solar combined with the other renewables is designed exactly to do that. I mean, the path to net zero for the state of Massachusetts assumes electrification of the grid and including virtually all of the transportation sector and much of the home heating sector. And so the, that's why we're concerned about how siting will roll out since it needs to be really aggressive. We need to go from four gigawatts to 27 gigawatts in about 30 years. So we're anticipating a lot of solar being cited on the landscape and the motivation for, and that's the motivation for this study. And so we looked at a, you know, comparing the current siting scenario, this is the, so I'll pivot this as both an answer and my return to the slides here is what we're going to look at is the solar potential if we do things as we've been doing them, versus if we look at these two protecting nature scenarios, which also seek to meet the same renewable energy build out goals, at least within the economic models, we say you need to decarbonize the economy here. And so find all the solar you can, but in the first scenario, we allow all the land that's technically or legally viable to be eligible to the economic model in the, what I'll call the mid impact scenario, the one that one says, yeah, find all the areas you can, but don't look on prime farmland. Don't look on essential biodiversity or wildlife habitat, which is that bio map core habitat, which I spoke about a second ago. Don't go to the highest forest carbon sites. That is the, the top 75% were excluded from eligibility within the mid impact scenario. And the lands cited by the nature conservancy as most valuable, the top 10% of lands for climate resilience. We also screened those out. And then we looked at another scenario. Why won't they look at it lowest impact? I want to look at interstate corridors. So in a interstate corridors are included those so that those aren't prime farmland essential biodiversity. So they would be eligible. And indeed that's where we'll put them. And I'll show you some maps in a second. Thank you. Then we had this low impact scenario where we said basically no forest are, are eligible to be converted when then we all, you know, everything in the mid plus no flood plains or high hurricane zones, no historic places and no, you know, areas that are designated open space with even limited protection. The next thing we had to do to examine these scenarios is we had to map all the roof tops and all the parking lots in the state. Massachusetts has 56,000 acres of parking lots. I doubt Vermont has that many parking lots. But we looked at those as for their potential for canopy solar where they're built above the parking lots. And then we look at the rooftop potential, right? This for the rooftop, we use the NREL numbers. So we didn't have to calculate that ourselves. So that incorporates just the solar eligible rooftops. So it doesn't like old roofs aren't included or roofs that are highly shaded aren't included. But even look at, so looking at where the technical potential for solar is viable. There's still more than 20 gigawatts. Now they're more expensive. So this when it's really important to kind of realize where I'm talking about technical potential and economically viable. There's a big difference between those two. But in all three of these scenarios, we gave the model the ability to go for this amount of parking lots and this amount of rooftop. And then we started focusing on the ground map. So when we look at the current siting scenario, the green area that you see here, those are all areas that are technically viable for ground mount solar, which is to say the slope is less than 8%. They, there's, they're not protected through any sort of conservation or other restriction that would keep them. But then, and I'm just kind of bundling the model, the results and the methods here of that million acres of green that you see, 51,000 are economically viable, according to Evolved Energy's economic model. And so this is under the current siting scenario. So that is an important number because the state was concerned that this could reach as much as 100,000. But we say that there's only 50,000 that make economic sense. And that has to do among other things with their proximity to interconnects, which we acknowledge the interconnects were going to have to change as the grid gets built out. So this number is a little bit dependent on the current status of the grid. The mid impact scenario where we excluded all the high carbon areas and the biodiverse areas came up with 94,000 acres that are viable, but 41 that are technically viable and 41,000 that are economically viable. Right. And so here, all the areas that you see essentially look brown because the technical and economically viable have to overlap a lot more. And the low impact scenario with even more screens that were down to 18,000 acres that are economically viable. So what does that mean? If we look at these pie charts on the right, you can see the current siting scenario, this green area, this is the, you know, 65% of that would be in forest area. Whereas, and then the rest split up in the, in the scenarios that protect nature, you can see significantly more developed open space. These are the highway corridors that you were just mentioning among other things. These are the filled landfills. These are large residential backyards that exceed an acre, we said would be viable for ground mount solar. And in the low impact that is the vast majority is this class of developed open space. And if I were to sum up today, it's that we need to shift putting ground mount solar from putting it on forest where it's cheapest and easiest to putting it on developed open space so that we don't need to think of this as a tradeoff. When we do that, we are able to make considerable conservation gains. You can see we, we move from emitting just under six million metric tons of forest carbon down to one just over a million in the mid impact and under a million in the low impact. And we do it while sacrificing zero of the highest natural landscape. These are the bio map corridors, the bio map core areas, and we can serve all our prime form farmland. So what does this cost us in terms of our ability to produce solar. So here we have the three scenarios broken up by decade in the current siting scenario. The, the bottom dark red, I'm not great with colors. I apologize if that's not dark red to you is rooftop solar and you'll see that's held the same through each one, how these scenarios differ is in the availability of ground mount. So protecting all the nature, we, in the mid scenario, it does mean that we lose the ability to produce four gigawatts and the basically what this says, because the model is forced to meet the renewable energy demand is that the remaining comes from wind or hydro, right, that there's no that only 21 gigawatts are economically affected by 2050, and that within the, the highly restrictive low scenario sorry I didn't mean to do that. We were down at 15, but we still are able to cite 13 gigawatts worth of ground mount solar and do it on developed open spaces that land is available. And we can do it for a relatively modest cost. And this, what this shows is the, the blue line is the cost of the high impact or the current trends, citing scenario, and the yellow on top is how much more is expensive it is for a megawatt hour of electricity. If you cite more responsibly so it's a dollar or two in the first couple of decades and then the IRA incentives expire. That's why you see this sort of difference between the two. And the difference in citing gets just marginally more expensive, but the cost, to me is fairly small. This is the same graph, but with the current trends compared to the low impact scenario. Right, so we're still able to meet our demands, but it's slightly higher cost. If we think about that cost in terms of the Massachusetts net zero plan, we can see that by 2050, we are relying on the forest. So what this graph shows is the current emissions by energy by emissions sector, right, and how they're declined to near zero by 2050, but by 2050, we're able to use forest to sequester up to 10, up to 15%, sorry, of 1990 level emissions. So had we used the current trends citing scenario, for example, we would then have to look to buy carbon offsets because we wouldn't have as much forest as we do now. If you assume which is the current social cost of carbon, which is estimated at $200 per millimeter tons, then the cost of replacing the last forest carbon is about $900 million, which is approximately the cost, the incremental increase we have by using the more restrictive scenarios, which is to say the cost of replacing the carbon that we would cut down offsets the gains we have under net zero. So we do have a question for you. Okay. And honestly, I'm going to stop so that I can, I feel like I ran through a bunch of information. I can put the slides back up easily, but I wanted to stop and talk now. Okay, great. The whole bit. Okay. Thank you for that. I'm hopeful that you will, it looks like we got an early slide deck and that you've decided to add some slides and that we could. That might have happened, sorry. That's fine. I can share these with you right now if you want. I added a few because when I practiced walking through this, which I hadn't done since October, I thought the story was incomplete given my earlier slide. Yeah, no, it's great. I look forward to getting those when you get a chance to send them. Representative Sebelia has a question. Yeah. Good afternoon. Thank you for your testimony. The slide that you just showed maybe two slides, three slides back with current status, low impact, medium impact. Nope. Back. I think it was three. This one. Nope. One more. This one. Yeah. And so here's my question for you. You suggested that we would replace the renewable energy here. With wind or hydro. Yes. So it's, I'm sorry that it's confusing because what I'm trying to explain is the model has is told that it needs to purchase energy to reach 27 gigawatts of renewable energy to meet the net zero goal. And it does that by buying electricity at the cheapest price. It's an economic model. It assumes we're all rational. And so in the current siting scenario, it can, it can economically get. 25 of the 27 gigawatts from solar before it goes out and. Searches for renewable energy from wind or hydro. And then the mid one, it gets to 21 before it needs to look outside of solar. Is that makes sense? It does. So currently we don't have to look to hydro or wind. And. Okay. And when we're protecting nature, low, which. Low impact, maybe not the most intuitive name. Yeah. So in that scenario, we would have to make up with wind and. Hydro. Correct. Okay. And so then my question for you is. So do you, do you see those as better for biodiversity? Yeah, like those, if those are mean, these protecting nature. Scenarios, are they better for biodiversity? Yes. Hugely much, much better. So. Are you a testifying test that's. Hydro. And wind. Renewable energy. Are better for biodiversity than solar. No, I'm not, I'm not saying that and I lack the expertise to say that. I'm a terrestrial ecologist and don't know a heck of a lot. But I think wind impacts on marine biodiversity and so wouldn't. Wouldn't feel comfortable saying, saying that at all, but one way or the other. So then. Kind of a big picture gal. So I'm a little worried here that we aren't, that we are just kind of pulling one piece. Out and thinking terrestrially and not. About, or just about solar and not about the impacts of wind. And hydro. So I, I, I, that makes a lot of sense to me. I would offer that the alternative is that you could incentivize. The solar to make it more economic. In which case, what I would like to see happen right now, this rooftop solar number is just what's economic. If that were incentivized. We showed earlier that we have capacity, technical capacity to produce 20 gigawatts of solar on rooftops. Only nine of it right now is economic, but that the economics could change with policy incentives. This number could go up to 20. So I would not need as much ground mount or wind or hyper. Okay. I, but I don't know that that was one of the options that you said, or maybe I did not. No, I didn't say that before. I'm not trying to restate. I just, but maybe I'm a little too pickled in these data. So one thing I noticed when I look at this is. You say here, I show here green is canopy solar. Why don't I see any green on this map? Well, that's because it's not economic to build canopy solar. It's about 150% as expensive as a rooftop because you got to hold those things up and it's a lot of steel and all the reasons yet. While it's not economic. While I drive around, I see a lot of canopy solar. And so I know that there are opportunities that people don't always act perfectly rationally as this model would assume. That there are opportunities to build canopy solar and rooftop solar. They could boost these numbers. All these numbers show is what is economic under a pure rational model. Thank you. And there may be other benefits to canopy solar. Yeah, it keeps your car cool and snow free and. Yeah. Representative Pat. This is either a question or a clarification. When we're talking about when, how are we defining it? Because from some of the comments and sound like we're talking about. When water ocean based, you know, when when projects as opposed to projects that might be conceivably built in Vermont would not be. There's a huge difference between the environmental impact on the ground. So to speak between between those two. So I just want to be clear what we're talking about when we say when. So. Because our purposes were to examine the impacts of ground mount solar. We use the. The renewable energy estimates for wind as. Just one coefficient in the model for is what is the price per gigawatt of wind production and it's agnostic as to the source of wind. It's basically averaged overall. Wind both offshore and onshore we weren't specific to that. And even when we say hydro, I assume we're talking about hydro Quebec because that's the only viable hydro, but it isn't specific. I couldn't point to you the exact place that the hydro is produced hydro and wind both have estimated production curves for the future so that we could compare them to solar. And that's what our model includes. Yeah. That's your model for solar. Does it assume present day technology for solar. Being the consistent level of. That we're going to that you would see up until 2050, or do you make allowances for the improvement of the technology potentially during that time. So we, we use. I'm trying to, I think I threw this. Extra slide and to answer this question. So here's what we assume for solar capital in terms of cost there. And, and so whether you think of the improvements in technology on the, on the cost side or the area, they sort of. Offset each other, but what you can see, I'm sorry, these lines are very jumbled. The blue is the cost per kilowatt of. Canopy solar and you can see over time the cost comes down as the technology improves. Similarly, the. Sorry, folks. Do you see that graph again, I apologize. Yeah, thank you. So these are the assumptions about technological change and as far as the cost per kilowatt into the future. In particular, the, the, the, the delta between. The residential rooftop, the green and the two ground mounts. One is the, the, I know it's hard to read the blue is large ground mount and the yellow. I hope my color blind eyes see this as you do the yellow ground mount. The green gets closer over time as the cost of residential roof cop. Rooftop comes down. Right now the big expense in residential rooftop, as I understand it, and again, I'm a forest ecologist, not a solar installer of any kind, but that it's the real differences in soft costs and policy. And so the way to bring that down is to make, to put solar on the rooftop. It isn't so much the technology of the panels changing. What is, when did your study come out? October 23. And is the state of Massachusetts integrating it? Do you know into their conversations right now? Very much so. Yes. Chief climate chief Hoffers was a strong advocate of this and the. The department of energy resources put out a technical potential study in about a month before we published this, and we largely agree on the technical potential of solar. Our, our report just went further to look beyond the technical potential and to look at both the economic potential and the ecological potential of, of solar. And so we've been working closely. I continue to work as the land sector lead for the state of Massachusetts and I'm doing the forest modeling, looking at alternative forest management scenarios. I mentioned the will that I could present on that stuff today. And he said, maybe they'd like to hear about that in the future, but right now we're talking about solar. So I didn't prepare any of my information on how Massachusetts is looking at forest management and development scenarios. But in that work, I am integrating this Audubon solar studies as we look at the forest work as well. And if you ever want to have me back, I'd be happy to talk about the, the forest work as well. Yeah, we, we likely will do that. I guess I'm curious about your comment on soft costs and policy, but what's making rooftop more expensive. And if they're looking at policies that will. Bring those costs down or make it more possible. Yeah, I, again, this is not my area. So what I'm, what I'm relaying to you is things that I've heard and not studies that I've conducted. I just want to be clear that I'm just being anecdotal, but some of the policies I've heard is there's questions about whether an elect licensed electrician needs to install a panel or could just inspect them because the age of licensed electrician is increasing and the number of them who want to climb on roofs as they age is going down, yet the installation of the panels themselves maybe doesn't require the level of technical proficiency and are there ways to loosen up the regulations on that. So that's the type of example that I hear that would bring down a permitting and, and other soft costs that there's always the reference made to Australia who is like sweepingly permitted the whole country for rooftop solar to try to streamline that because just speaking now as a consumer, I have a net zero home that I put 15 kilowatts of solar on and it took me about eight months to get the inspection done and have it turned on. Wow. And that's not my study. That's just me as a consumer. And it's just, there's a big backlog for these things. And so that, that feels like a big day. It took me no time to do mine. I don't know the differences. So there's, I should say it was right in the middle of COVID. And so, you know, that probably had something to do with it. Yeah. So further questions from members. All right. I'm not seeing any. Thank you so much for this. It's really interesting for us to just hear what Massachusetts is up to. And we really appreciate your, your coming in today. Yeah, the full report, you know, use Google and write growing solar protecting nature and all the figures you saw today are in that report. I'll send you an update of the slides, but every figure I showed is in the published report, which is online and so you can find them there as well. I really appreciate the opportunity to have this conversation. Thanks. All right. Great. Thanks. All right. Members with that, we will, we have time for another time and a break. They're coming fast today. We are going to continue conversations about climate resilience and. We have a couple of questions here about the ecology from a layer diamond colleges at the Vermont land trust. Welcome a layer. Thank you. Can everybody hear me? You can hear you. And we have a little square up in the corner. Okay. Well, good. Hopefully you can see the landscape is a lot bigger than me on the, on the screen. Well, thanks for inviting me. I, I. I just come with very kind of short notice. So I've, I hope you'll forgive just me having a very short presentation. Luckily, there's a lot of just great images and I, I just was thinking with the time that we have that we could spend some time just looking at those really. I'm interested in talking more about the impact that beavers have on the landscape less about kind of them as animals. That's just not my area of expertise. So I can give a little introduction to myself, but I, I'm also just would love to hear kind of what you are interested in learning about or hearing about or talking about today too. So why don't I start? I'll just introduce myself and then maybe before I launch into the slides, we can, I can hear a little bit about what you would love to hear about. So my name is a layer diamond diamond ecologist at Vermont land trust. I have been working at the land trust for about 12 years and I lead our ecology and restoration programs. And so we do a lot of ecological assessments and also restoration projects within the context of land conservation. So for those of you who don't maybe know as much about Vermont land trust, I guess, am I seeing everybody in the room that's that's there? Maybe raise your hand if you know about Vermont land trust or have worked with us or. We're all pretty familiar. Okay. And I saw that Liz Thompson was, was with you earlier today. And so she and I used to work together until she retired from BLT last year. But yeah, so I think what I love to just share about Vermont land trust is that I think a lot of you may, may understand our work as conservation easements protecting land. But we also do a lot of caring for land in terms of the ecological restoration work that I primarily focus on is one way that we care for land. We also have an outreach and education and engagement component where we connect people to the land as well, whether it's like on the ground activities, events, talks or publications, webinars and that kind of thing. So if you have any questions about Vermont land trust, I'd love to, you know, be able to answer those two. So, but I'm here today just was invited to talk about beavers and beaver ecology is an area of particular interest of mine that I've been developing over the last couple of years. And I guess can I just ask you before I share what I've brought just what your questions are, interest is or how you would like this information to connect with your work as a committee. Sure. Well, I'm, I'm increasingly aware and knowledgeable and watching the beavers in my own neighborhood and learning more about them and appreciate the work that they're doing to manage the landscape and make it climate resilient. And I just wanted to have someone share that information with the committee and talk about all of the benefits that they're providing to us as they work the landscape. Awesome. That's great. Representative Tori. Yeah, I'll just add to that. But, you know, we're also curious in this committee, what kinds of. Agency collaborations and things could be supportive. You know, optimizing the thing, the role of beavers. In our communities. Okay. That's helpful. Thank you. Representative Smith. Something to that. I live in Derby and beavers are a nuisance animal. They're very nice. They're fun to watch in the water. But they've cost a ton of Derby. They've cost thousands of dollars in road repairs. And we do at times have to send someone out to eliminate them. I guess they're okay in their place. But I'd like to hear from you and where you might think that place is correct to be. Yeah. That's a great question and a really, really pertinent topic for us in Vermont. I'll definitely talk about that. Thank you. Thanks. I think that's doing it. Okay. Great. Well, like I said, I've just had a little bit of time to prepare some things for you. So I really just hoping to kind of talk through some of these images. I've got some maps and I have some, a couple snippets from recent research on beavers. And that really relates to climate resilience in the way that I see that. Impacting us here in Vermont. This is an image of conserve land in Cambridge. And I just want to start with one of those images. These are images from the first year upland conservation trust that I just received these images last week from some drone imagery that was taken in the fall. And I just wanted to start with it because as soon as I saw this picture, I just couldn't stop looking at it. It's just so beautiful. So just to orient folks. This is a beaver wetland complex in the foreground. There are two, two dams. You can't really see the dance, There's a damn sort of a smile shaped thing in the lower central part of the picture. And then there's another one just on the downstream end of this other little pond. And I love this picture because it shows this beaver complex over to the right is a farm, an active agricultural area. And then there's a whole series of the forest and there's not Mansfield in the background. So this is just our typical kind of Vermont landscape of wetland and farmland and mountains and woodland. And it all kind of fits together. And I love it because it really just shows how beavers are just such an integral part of our landscapes and they help to create them. So this is a wetland complex that without the presence of beavers would be a single stream flowing through sort of a low flat area. And beavers as I think many of you know and a couple of you referred to this kind of in your when you were sharing why you were interested in learning about beavers that they have been part of our landscape for hundreds of thousands of years and have really created a lot of the, they've settled in these low valleys and created these wetland complexes that then have so many connections in terms of diversity, biodiversity but also hydrological impacts beyond the wetlands themselves. And when Vermont was settled as an area by white settlers, I think this is the next picture I have really shows a little bit, let's see. Yeah, when Vermont was settled it was settled at a time, you know, early 1700s when white trappers had already been like passing through the state for a hundred or so years trapping beavers just really intensively removing all beavers that they could for the fur trade. And so when the first settlers came to Vermont started to settle some of the towns and villages that we live in and just think of as part of our state today, they were doing it in a place that was actually like falsely didn't have any beavers in it because the beavers had been trapped out and had not yet returned. So the landscape that they had been creating over hundreds of thousands of years had really been altered in the hundred years or so since trappers arrived and then sort of the farmers and there's just the other white settlers came behind them and really started to settle our towns. And I love this picture from Rockingham area, Saxons River, it's on Pleasant Valley Road, if anyone's familiar with that area. This is an area near where I grew up and so I used to drive by this all the time. Pleasant Valley Road here is going south, here's the village of Saxons River and here's the Saxons River and the lower part of the photo. And this is an image from 1962 that just shows this area as farmland with a line down the middle of it. So that's an agricultural ditch. It's actually a stream that has been channelized into a straight line by the different farmers that lived in that valley. And that was in the 1960s, you can see that there's, it's just a pretty open agricultural area. But when I was a kid and now when I go by, I just see beaver dam after beaver dam after beaver dam. And so a couple of years ago, I went and looked at some recent aerial imagery and just saw that all of these areas here are beaver dams. They've been, you can still see some of the lines connecting them in between, but those, I don't know exactly what happened with the farmers and how they agreed to sort of stop maintaining those ditches. But what you see here is just a series of, I don't forget the number, I've counted them before 10 or so, beaver dams that are now filling that valley instead of this straight pipe. And so I love this image and I love comparing these because it really shows like the difference between sort of an earlier way of thinking about how we manage water in our landscapes, which was kind of this left hand thing of like, get all the obstacles out of the way, let the water flow as quickly as it can and the straightest line that it possibly can, as fast as it can, get it off the landscape down to the river so we can farm and do whatever else. And then we all know the impact of that. It's like treating our landscapes like sort of a plumbing system is just results in some really dramatic flooding. And the Saxons River has been the recipient of a lot of flood damage over the last few years versus a watershed where beavers are allowed to just do their thing. They're allowed to build dams. These dams are probably all built by beavers that are somewhat related to each other. So as beaver families grow, the younger males really will go out and do, they'll try to establish new dams and new lodges further up the watershed. They will try to stay close to where they grew up or where they were born, but when they need to, they will go further as well. A lot of the times when you see beavers that have been hit by cars, those are the younger males that have been, I think they're usually like two year old males that are then needing to go and disperse out and find their own places to be. So in this case, there's a really robust setup of beaver dams. And I just think it's like so obvious in this picture, like all this bluish black is water. That's all water that's not just rushing down into the Saxons River. It's staying on the land longer. It's creating more wetlands behind it. And it's, when there's a flood or a large rain event, water is gonna flow through that system with all those natural dams a lot more slowly and it's not going to have as much impact downstream. And so I just think this is a great illustration of sort of how we used to think about the, the 1962 is a little bit like what the landscape used to look like. Obviously the 100, 200 years before that, 1862, 1762, there would have been like no trees on this landscape at all. 1962 though, we still have that kind of old vision of like how we manage water. Now there's more beaver dams that are able to just make that valley a little more flood resilient. And I thought next, oh yeah, sorry, at any point. If you have questions. We have a question from Representative Smith. Thank you. Are all of those beaver dams still working? Beaver dams? As far as I know, I mean, that image was taken in 1918, or sorry, 2018. So yeah, so every year is a really interesting question. They change every single year. So those... Yeah, go ahead. That being said, there are beaver dams that are hundreds of years old when it's a good place. And like think about like if you were a beaver where you'd build a dam, it would probably be in a narrow constriction of a valley. So those kind of like prime spots are maintained over time. And there are some beaver dams that have been seen. They've been documented by like early explorers in parts of Canada and the US and then they're still there today. They were mapped by some of the earliest white surveyors. So they can persist over a long period of time. They can also be built and destroyed very quickly. And I think I have a picture later in here of one that I observed near my house in Jericho that was built on the Browns River that got destroyed like two weeks later when there was a big rainstorm. So, but those dams and along that Saxons River tributary have been there for a long time. And the bigger ones at least are much more persistent. Thank you. Yeah, you're welcome. I wanted to just share there's very interesting research happening right now. Not so much of it in Vermont, but it's very applicable to Vermont. So I just wanted to share two different pieces of research with you or from two researchers. One of them is by a geographer named Alan Pudduck who's in the UK. He's at the University of Exeter. And he did some really interesting research about like, you know, what I just showed you was sort of, it's very intuitive, right? You see a straight line versus you see a bunch of dams. You can think, oh, the water's going more slowly. Floods are going to be less impactful in the area with the beaver dams. He actually quantified that and showed that, yes, beaver dam complexes do mitigate the impacts of floods. And so he studied an area in England. This image up on the left is just the overview of his work. An area that was, did not have beavers. And then beavers, I think, I believe were actually introduced and then they started to build dams. So you can see this image on the left, upper left is the first one is from 2011. And then this bottom picture is from 2014 and these black lines that kind of weave through each one of those as a dam. So in the first image, there's no beaver dams in the last one, there's like, yeah, 10 or 11. And he studied with a variety of gauges and so forth. He studied over all of the rain events that happened over several years. In this slide was after he looked at 70 rain events, but that was from 2017. And now he's still studying the same site and there's been over 1,000 rain events that just show the impact of how the water moves through those systems. So the same amount of water ultimately will move through, I guess there will be some that may just stay as wetland, but overall water will move through. If you have a big rainstorm, it's going to go over the dam at some point. But what he showed is that those spikes of the flow were a lot lower in the systems where beaver dams were. So this is really general and this is obviously not my research. And I just wanted to show you, I think this is a really telling graphic where, and this is a slide from a presentation that he did, that he's showing that above the beaver dams, the flood spikes would be like these very dramatic, see this blue line here that's going spiking up, this is just one example from one rain event, spiking up and then dropping down really quickly. And so imagine like we have a big rainstorm, there's a giant flood pulse that brings just a massive amount of water very quickly and it quickly moves out. Whereas in the system with where beavers are present, that pulse is a lot more attenuated or spread out. And so you can imagine that the impact of it's moving more slowly, it's spreading out over time, the flow of the water is spreading out over time, you're not going to have those massive spikes. Flood levels are not going to get as high there and it's not going to be as damaging. And then this is like, I will share these slides with you. I know this is, we don't need to read this. This is an image on the right of that dam on the Browns River that was there for like two weeks. And then immediately got washed away, but even though it got washed away, there was still a lot of wood in that system from the dam, that was great. But basically this abstract from his 2021 paper about the same site, he's got a couple of really important pieces in here. They're saying that he analyzed 1,000 storm events across four different sites, showing an overall trend of reduced total storm flow, increased peak rainfall to peak flow lag times and reduced peak flows, all suggesting flow attenuation. So spreading out that flow after the beavers were in those systems. And then there's statistically significant. And then the final statement is just this research indicates that beavers could play a role in delivering natural flood management. And I think those of you who are observed beaver systems, I think this again is pretty intuitive that you have these systems where water is able to slow down, it's able to spread out, it goes further out in the valley than just straight down it like a pipe. That's all going to help when we have large rain events. And I wanted to just do a quick exploration through a tool that we've developed at Vermont Land Trust called our Restoration Viewer. And again, I'll share this link with you if you wanna do this yourself. But I wanna just explore it with you like live. This is an online ArcMap map viewer. And starting just before I jump into it, this is an aerial image of the Charlotte Park and Wildlife Refuge, which is a conserved piece of land in Charlotte open to the public, has a great network of trails. There's some really interesting wildlife restoration work there that I've been working on with that local committee and a really beautiful beaver dam complex. And just to give you some context, this is Green Bush Road, this road here that's going through the middle of the photo of the beyond, you see the lake. So we're really close to the lake. There's the Adirondacks beyond. And this beaver complex is the one that I'm gonna show you a couple different years of what it looks like when beavers were less active and then when they've become more active, just so you can see some of the impacts of what they do. And I'm going to need to jump out of this and move to my web viewer. So this viewer is showing that site. That site. So this is the oriented north to south. This is Green Bush Road over here on the left. This is the railroad kind of crossing Green Bush Road right by the property. And we have old black and white imagery from like 2011 underneath. And then I have some really high resolution, more recent imagery from 2021. And I also have some from 22, but we'll just work on 21 right now. So to zoom in on this, this is a beaver wetland or a wetland that has had beavers in the past, but in this image from 2011, you can see just a blue line and also just the actual black kind of line of the stream winding through. There's a little trail. This is one of the boardwalks from the walking paths across the system and going through here. And it just kind of winds around. It's in the middle of a big wetland complex. But you don't see a lot of evidence of beavers. Imagining when there is a big storm event, there is going to be some flood storage in this system just because it is a wetland, but in general, water will just move through that stream and just move right out, go under the railroad tracks, under the road and off toward the lake. But by 2021, the reason that I got involved with this project is that the town committee was really seeing a lot of beavers being active here and they wanted to talk about that. So I went out and visited the site and then we got this imagery. And I'm just swiping back and forth here. So what you're seeing is just the 2021 imagery kind of coming overtop of the 2011 imagery. See the difference here is that a large beaver dam has been constructed right here on the left side of the picture where my cursor is and we can zoom in and actually see the sticks of it and stuff, but I'm going to give you the overview first ponding a bunch of water behind it. Water is still flowing down below it before it goes under the railroad tracks. And then as we go upstream, there's just a number of smaller beaver dams. And so the system has become less of just like a big kind of grassland and more of a really interesting diverse wetland system that has areas of open water, areas of grasses, areas of shrubs and then connecting all of it to the forest alongside of it. The forest obviously being a source of wood for those beaver dams. So I'm going to zoom in a little bit and let you see a little bit more of kind of what I'm talking about as the resolution kind of catches up with me. I think that it's just, I am always marveling at these images because you can even see like branches of the trees and like fallen trunks that are in the water. But here's that beaver dam. And then as we kind of wind our way up this main channel, you quickly come to another small beaver dam right here. There's another one right here that's kind of shaped like a U. There's another one right over here. So what's interesting is that as the beavers are starting to damp, and this is a very small stream, you could jump across it in a couple of steps. As they're starting to dam the main part of the stream, water is obviously still flowing through. And so it's ponding behind, but then sometimes it's also flowing around, which creates just a really interesting wetland complex that has multiple channels. The water isn't just confined to one kind of one channel. That also helps to slow the water down, also helps to create habitat for more, you know, macroinvertebrates, amphibians, birds. There's a ton of really interesting migratory birds that use this site. And this is another project I'm working on with these guys. Beavers are really creating this system. This would not be this way without them. So again, I'll just like, let me just close, like go back to 2011. And again, still a wetland, but just a lot less, to me, a lot less interesting, a lot less diverse before the Beavers return to it. And the cool thing about this site is that it's not a place that has any kind of conflict with people because it's a wildlife refuge. The valley is totally contained within the site. So it's not that, you know, that the Beaver damming is not getting into anyone's yard or a driveway or anything like that. And it just continues on up if you, if I kind of go a little bit further upstream in the valley, I can see there's a trail that crosses again. You can see a series of other small dams here. There's one, here's a larger one that they built. And one thing that I find really interesting about Beavers, and I just learned this recently, is that we all, I think, are familiar with the dams. We've seen them, we kind of marvel at them or we're frustrated by them, but depending on where they are and what our sort of outlook is. But I have just recently learned more about, you know, why Beavers build dams and what are the associated construction methods that they use. So obviously they're building dams to impound water. And they're doing that in part because the food that they prefer to eat. So willows mostly, just fast growing shrubs that actually respond really well. You know, they have multiple stems. When a Beaver comes in and chews down three or four of the eight stems on a plant, that plant will just respond by growing five more. So, you know, they're copicing the term for when a plant has multiple stems. Willows are naturally copicing plants and then Beavers have co-evolved with them. And so they're just, they're copicing again once Beavers are doing that. Often I've seen, the other thing about Willow is that you can cut a stem of Willow and just stick it in wet ground and it'll just grow. It'll root and produce leaves and turn into another plant. The cool thing that I've seen about Beaver dams is sometimes when Beavers are using fresh Willow to build their dam, it will have contact with the mud and the sediments on the bottom of the wetland and it will take root and then grow a new plant. And so you're having this like very cool, they're like literally planting their own food or they're creating the conditions for their food to grow. And they're building dams not just out of like dead sticks that are sort of just like a construction material but actually a living material that then grows into a plant that has roots and that is more stable and it's going to just have all the ecological impacts of something that's alive versus just like a dead construction material. I find that really interesting as well. But I was talking about the impact, the other things that Beavers do, they not only build dams, but they also, they're very awkward in terms of how they move on land. If you've ever seen one try to walk on land, I mean, I've never, I don't think I've ever seen a Beaver walking on land because they just aren't really good at it. They don't like to do it. It takes a lot of energy for them. They actually prefer to swim and move around in the water. So they also excavate these canals. And so like right here on this image behind this dam, here's the dam, but then here's this little channel that goes to the edge of the wetland. That's a canal. And so for every dam that they build, they will probably build multiple times that length of canal behind the dam. And that helps them get to the edges of the wetland to access wood, more trees that they took out down. And also just to move around more easily and to have some shelter from predators and so forth. So, and again, as we start to like look through this image a little bit more, some of these things start to pop. This, you know, like here's a little Beaver dam here and you can trace like this is where the original like larger stream kind of flows through, kind of winds around here and comes over here and then goes down over here. There's a canal there. There's also like a little bit of a canal over here that they've built to like connect these places. There's some channels out here that have been excavated. So they're just, it's just cool how they kind of like, and all of those canals can also be used by other organisms. So it's very interesting how they're just building these very, very complex, very ecologically rich wetlands. I should say too, in terms of when they're creating spaces for plants like willows to just continue to grow and then get kind of harvested for their own food or their own building materials. That's obviously plant material taking up carbon, storing carbon as well. So, yeah, one other thing I wanted to zoom out here to show you on this site is the way that people have been trying to coexist with Beavers. So here's some really good canals here. So downstream there's some ones that are just going off to the sides of the complex. Yeah, somebody mentioned that Beavers can be pretty challenging when they're not in a place that has enough space for them. And when we think about our state and when it was settled by people who arrived when Beavers weren't even here at all, we are those first white settlers really settled in places that if Beavers had been here, maybe people wouldn't have settled in those spots. Lowland areas, river valleys, very fertile areas, fertile because of the legacy of the Beavers who had been kind of maintaining wetlands there. So it's not a surprise that a lot of times the places that are human settlements also conflict with Beavers because they're kind of looking for the same thing like low, lowland areas, access to water, fertile soils, that kind of thing. And we can talk more about that. But what I wanted to show is, so here's the main dam and the main pond and then as the water kind of flows over here, it takes a couple of paths down and then it goes underneath the railroad. And that's like quite a big culvert. Like I think it's a really old kind of concrete culvert that's there. The Beaver activity had been, I think undermining some of that railroad grade. So a few years ago, the Charlotte Park and Wildlife Refuge Committee worked to install something called a Beaver deceiver. Has anyone heard of this? Beaver deceiver or a Beaver flow device? This is something that's... Flow, yeah. Yeah, so it's essentially like a fenced structure around a culvert that prevents Beavers from damming that culvert and undermining it essentially, causing erosion around it. So they're all unique. Every single site is different. So when a Beaver deceiver is installed or a Beaver flow device is installed, the person doing it has to really look at the site and figure out exactly how to do it well. So in this case, it's a two-stage structure. And this was done before I visited the site but I did get to look at it once it was installed. So you can see just really kind of a sketchy outline here of like a wooden kind of cage kind of thing here that's right next to the culvert. And so it's covering up the culvert so Beavers can't get in there and dam it. And then upstream there is... And then here is a like a plastic culvert pipe that is part of the Beaver flow device. And then this is another structure that's just upstream that's protecting the inlet of that culvert. So Beavers can't go and then dam that. So the idea here is that water can continue to flow through the culvert or through the system. Beavers can continue to do their thing. They're upstream and they can have that work in that whole wetland. They're not gonna dam the culvert and they can stay and the culvert won't get damaged and they don't need to be killed or trapped. So this is an adaptation strategy that people are using in a lot of different places. I think we have a lack of people in Vermont who are able to install these. There's always sort of a backlog in the situations I've heard of. There's just never enough people who can put those in. But hopefully that'll change in the future. And I'm gonna go back to my presentation here. I guess I'll stop and see if anyone has questions just about this site or about anything that we just talked about. Is it possible for you to zoom in a little bit closer on the Beaver deceiver? I can, I don't think, I think this might be as clear as it gets but I do have a picture of one that we installed last fall that I think might be, will be better. But yeah, can you see, is that better? It is better, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I know it's not great. This is the other limitation of the imagery. It's really good imagery but when it gets down to like a two by four, it's kind of falls apart. But yeah, you can see that there's, they always have this general structure, like a thing right by the big culvert that you're trying to protect, the one that goes under the road or the railroad or whatever, a plastic pipe that goes out behind it and then another fenced in thing that's around that. And so these wooden fence pieces are like wrapped in some kind of wire so that Beavers can't get in and it's very, it's like, you have to figure out the right type of wire that isn't going to allow Beavers to get in, but it's not too fine that it's gonna catch every single little leaf and piece of grass that comes floating down the stream because that would clog it as well. So there's a whole like design theory around this. And again, it's a really interesting technical line of work that I think we need more people doing in the state because these kind of Beaver human conflicts are in every town. I think there are individual people have them as well and there are some resources out there for people to get trained in some like established techniques for building these, but they do need to be built right. They need to be pretty carefully designed and use robust materials. If you use like chicken wire, imagine that like one big storm in the fall that's bringing a bunch of leaves is just going to just hammer that out of shape. Any other questions before I jump back to the last couple of slides? I don't see any. Okay, great. Looks like I went back to the beginning here. Yeah, I wanted to share just again, this is just like the title slide of another presentation but I will get you this link when I share my slides here. Just that we've been talking about flood resilience, just the physical movement of water, slowing it down, keeping it higher on the landscape. Beaver wetlands are an amazing way to do this but they also have been shown in a pretty interesting ways in many different locations to impact water quality as well. So we've been talking about water quantity and flow and response to floods but Beaverdams have also been shown to really like limit water temperature, keep water colder, which is great in terms of fish habitat. They retain sediment, they retain phosphorus and this I really encourage you if you're interested in this to follow this link when you get these slides from me. Katie Holzer is an engineer and a watershed scientist in Gresham, Oregon, which is a part of Portland. I think it's like a sort of a suburb of Portland, Oregon and just has some really, really interesting findings. They had built like an engineered stormwater system there that Beaver's just found and Beaver's moved in and people initially were like, ah, this is not gonna work. You know, we have, this is in the middle of an industrial area in a city. Beaver's can't really be here and by the team there just decided to study it and see what happened and found that they had initially engineered like a sort of a way for water to move through the stormwater system in a very like convoluted path, hoping that it would be dropping pollutants, toxins, sediment and so forth as it flowed through. Beaver's came in and just like interrupted that by building a couple of dams that slowed the water but it also didn't, it gave it a more direct path but it had to flow through the dams. They, the Beaver's were initially trapped and removed from the site, but then they came back. Other Beaver's came back and the team studied this and found that, yeah, the water was colder, the water didn't have as much phosphorus, the sediment had dropped out, other pollutants had dropped out and so essentially these, the Beaver's coming into this already engineered system were making it even better, cleaning the water even more. So there's a lot of evidence for that and there's people working on this in different parts of the country. So I definitely encourage you to check out this slideshow, ask me some questions if you are interested in it and just use that as a jumping off point to learn more. So these are a couple photos of the Beaver deceiver that we installed in Cambridge. This is the same site of that beautiful photo that I started with. The pond is a little further downstream for those two Beaver dams that we started looking at. So this is Skip Lyle, who has developed a design for the Beaver deceiver. He is kind of, if he lives in Vermont, he's considered like a mentor to a lot of people who do this work in other places too. But so this, it's actually a man-made dam that you can see in the lower right has a couple of big culverts and Beaver's have been continually going there and damming them and that's causing some issues for like a farm operation that's nearby. So we decided to put in the Beaver deceiver partly because it's also a really great place for people to come and like look and see it. And it's right by a road and a great place to have events and education. So yeah, it's a similar idea. So this is a plastic culvert, two of them actually kind of attached together. There's a wire cage with wood that's going out into the pond and it actually sits on the bottom of the pond and this photo on the left is actually Skip like in the process, he flips, he flipped the whole thing over. So it's got wood now it's sitting with what you're seeing on the top is now sitting on the bottom of the pond wood on the top of that it's weighted down with a bunch of like concrete blocks. And then that is allowing water to just flow in without alerting Beaver's to the way that to the fact that water's flowing. And then the culvert goes in this lower part of this picture, the lower picture, the culverts going into the big culvert water is moving through but the whole thing is fenced out so Beavers can't get in there and dam that. I should mention there's really interesting research that shows that Beavers are attracted to a very specific, very small window of like flow rate of water. So this kind of makes probably makes sense to all of you intuitively their Beavers are not going to go and dam the Connecticut River. They're also not gonna dam like the tiniest little trickle of water that's like flowing out of someone's garden. There's a certain flow rate that they respond to. This culvert happened to be in that rate because Beavers were always going there. So this is why it became an issue and we decided to do this to install this. And this is one of a couple of different types of coexistence strategies for humans and Beavers to coexist with each other so that they don't have to be killed because when they're killed, they're obviously not going to be doing all the amazing things that they do. I should say like to stop here and just say just because this image is interesting, it shows a man made dam and Beaver activity. And this is to me, this is a work in progress because part of the work that I'm doing for my land trust is I'm also really interested in removing man made dams, but I'm very interested in encouraging Beavers to build their dams. And so I think sometimes people will hear that and be like, well, I have removed one type of dam and build another type. I think that the research that I just showed that those kind of tidbits of research that I just shared show that Beaver dams are really structurally very different than a man made dam. Again, think about it. It's like something that's made of a bunch of sticks. It's porous versus a man made dam made out of concrete or rocks or something like that that's very solid. And that's just holding water and keeping it pretty stagnant behind the man made dam. With a Beaver dam, you're having water is still able to go through but it's filtered. Colder water is able to stay at the bottom of that flow column versus just like sitting on the bottom of a pond behind a man made dam, which then warms up and then the water flowing over the top of a man made dam actually ends up being warmer than the water flowing through a Beaver dam. So yeah, and they also of course, Beaver dams are associated with just all of the really interesting and complicated and ecologically diverse wetlands that form upstream from them. So just wanted to mention that because I think it's an interesting duality. Just to end, and I'm not sure if this is part of what you were interested in learning about today, but just wanted to share it since it's part of my work at Vermont Land Trust. We are involved in different lands that we've conserved or lands that we own and have conserved in doing stream restoration that's actually meant to mimic Beavers. So in this case, these are some students from the University of Vermont building what's called a Beaver dam analog in a very small headwater stream in Colchester. They're using buckthorn posts, so invasive buckthorn that had been cut the year before, hammered into the ground and then weaving willows between them to make a small Beaver dam looking thing. And this has actually been really effective in terms of slowing down water when we've had big rainstorms and letting it go out onto the small flood plain that's next to that stream. So that is just another piece. And I think I maybe, yeah, that's all I had for prepared slides, but getting back to this picture again, just hopefully you all can have a little bit more of an understanding and appreciation of the amazing ways that Beavers impact our landscape and can help us move towards solutions for things like water quality and flood response. But happy to talk about anything that you're interested in, questions. Yeah, I'm interested to hear your own experiences or share more about what we're doing, if that's of interest. Thank you so much for your presentation and for helping us out on short notice. It's really great. I am wondering about other climate benefits of Beavers. If you know about the carbon sequestration and their role in that. Yeah, that is very, all I can say with certainty is that it's complicated. So wetlands in general are, they could sequester a lot of carbon, but they also can release carbon. So it depends on the wetland in terms of what the net is, whether it's really a sinker or a source of carbon. With Beavers, I mean, I really think about the way that they are continuing to harvest wood material and then, and they're creating space for woody wetlands to form. So I think it's, obviously it's interesting when you think about what they're doing. This image on the right, and this is a different site than that one that we were looking at in Charlotte, but look how the Beaver dam is the, you know, it's open water and then it's kind of some herbaceous stuff right behind it. But then this whole area between that one and the next one is all shrubs. So that's all wood. And as we know, wood is a great place where a carbon is stored and sequestered. It's actively growing, sequestering more carbon as it grows and it's actively being eaten by the Beavers. And so they're cutting it down, it's growing again. And so it's just like taking up more and more and more. It's a lot more, woody plants in general, my understanding is that they are better at sequestering carbon than herbaceous plants. I do not quote me on that necessarily, but obviously they're bigger, they're more robust, there's more structure there, more carbon to take up. That's the kind of, those are the kinds of systems that Beavers create because like I was saying, that's what they like to eat. That's what provides shelter, provides their building material for their lodges and so forth. But yeah, in terms of like an individual wetland, like getting more detailed about the carbon benefits, it's hard for me to say anything really with certainty there. And I'm, that's partly just because I don't, I'm not doing that research, but I would say even the people that are doing the research would probably say something similar. Thanks. And then also they're just overall role in biodiversity, touched on it some, but they're really creating a lot of habitat for a lot of different plants and animals out there. Absolutely. Yeah, incredible contributors to like, well they're creating ecosystems. And so they're creating complicated ecosystems. And so all of those places are places where you're going to have a diverse suite of animals, plants, fungi developing. And there's some cool studies, like there was one that I had seen a while ago and I can't put my finger on like who it was, but I can try to dig it up. Just talking about some of the ways that Beaver, the cycles of Beaver dance being created and falling apart. You know, if Beavers are moving on it's actually very similar in terms of a timeframe to the cycles of some amphibians that need vernal pool type habitat. And so there's, you know, you think about like a spotted salamander or a wood frog. Those are species of amphibians that really depend on vernal pools, isolated pools that are not, you know, different from a Beaver system, but they, those two species are also present in Beaver complexes. And they're sort of like a cycle at which those pools like in a Beaver system may be present or may, or when the dam gets breached they drain and then there's not a pool for a while. It's actually really similar to how vernal pools can behave and up in the woods where some years they're full of water and the amphibians can breed and mature. Some years they don't and they're just, they're dynamic and they're, yeah, they're just unpredictable. But there's some kind of tie in with like the lifespan of a vernal pool versus the lifespan of a Beaver wetland and some things about the life cycles of those amphibians as well. That's one thing. I mean, migratory bird habitat, they're creating this incredible shrub lands full of alders and willows that provide just amazing native places for migratory birds to nest. There's a lot of birds, especially some of the warblers that are threatened declining in population that really depend on shrubs with trees nearby. So like the golden winged orbler and the blue winged orbler are two that I've worked on with the Audubon Society. Places like this where you have shrub land, you have water nearby and you have trees nearby provide kind of this like perfect system for like, the shrubs provide the places for the nests to be. The trees provide places for perching and finding food. These are insects, eating birds, the water obviously provides needed water. And so it's just, they just really support a whole suite of migratory birds. And you can think about other mammals too that are really dependent on these systems in terms of the water availability that they create. A lot of times when I am seeing like seepage wetlands, so a lot of beaver wetlands are in high in the headwaters, they're fed the initial source of water, aside from just like surface water that's coming from rain or snowmelt is seeps in groundwater. Those are places where the water emerges to the surface and it's a pretty similar temperature all year round. It doesn't freeze because it's so deep in the ground. Those are places that green up really early in the spring. And so you see animals coming out of hibernation, like bears and so forth, they are preferentially coming to those places. They're coming to the edge of beaver wetlands to feed. And so it's like that first feeding that's so important for them. Come to a place like this before food is available elsewhere. I could go, I mean, there's so much more but those are just a few examples that pop in to my head. Do other members have questions? So I have spent some time with lots of beaver fans this summer and one person is Beverly Soichek. She's from Monkdon and she's really demonstrated how towns can save money with beaver deceivers and year over year they're saving thousands of dollars managing beavers differently there where they can. So we may have time at some point to hear about some of that. And then there's a professor at Melbury College who Alexis Michaelaw who's doing paleoecology work looking at some of what Alara shared with us, like what did the landscape look like before European settlers came in and she's going back and using actually historic preservation test pits to recreate places where the beavers were. So hopefully at some point we'll get a chance to hear from her, she's doing very interesting research on that. Thank you so much again for coming in and sharing your passion for and interest in and knowledge on beavers with us today. You're welcome. And please reach out if anyone has any questions AlaraVLT.org is happy to follow up. And I'll get those links to you too so you can have the slides and the links in them. That'd be great. Thank you. Great. Thank you. Members have any comments or questions or anything? So tomorrow we're going to start hearing back from some of the many obsession works that will inform our work for the session, the studies. And then Thursday we'll be taking up looking at the renewable understanding of working group and what they've done. So with that we'll adjourn for the day.