 On behalf of the two committees, House Natural and Senate Natural, where it's a joint meeting, and we're here to welcome Dr. Mark Anderson to speak with us today. So it's great news that he's been willing to travel up here and provide presentation to help us look at climate issues on a planning level. And particularly when we have a lot of work to do across a broad landscape. So I thought we would start with introductions from committee members. So how about if we could? Good morning. I am Jim Macaulay. I represent the brave little hamlet of Willis. And I am served on House Natural by the way. I'm Matt Hill. I'm from the Willis II, which is out of Johnson High Park, Wilcox and Belvedere. I'm also a natural resources. I'm William Morian. I represent Grand Island County and the western portion of Milton, which is in Chittenden County. And I'm on natural resources mission wildlife also. Amy Sheldon. I represent Middlebury and I chair the House Natural Resources Committee. Chris Bray. I represent the Addison Senate District and chair natural resources on the Senate side. Good morning, Barron Campion, State Senator for Bennington County and the town of Wilmington. Corey Pernan, State Senator for Franklin County and Albert. So, can I say a little something before we go? I don't actually need to say too much, so I think we could get started and introduce Heather Furman, who's the State Director here in Vermont for the Nature Conservancy. Welcome, Heather. Chair Bray and Chair Keltos-Sheldon, thank you so much for co-hosting this presentation with us. And thank you to all the committee members and our friends and partners who are in the room and for taking the time to be here. I also want to take this moment to thank you all for your support of the Vermont Housing Conservation Board and the funding that is so critical to the work that we do every day. We had a full state house yesterday. It speaks volumes about how deeply Vermonters care about our natural resources and all of the benefits that they provide. So, before I dive in and introduce Dr. Mark Anderson to you, let me share a little bit about the Nature Conservancy for those of you who don't know. The Nature Conservancy is currently the largest environmental organization in the world. We are in 79 countries and in all 50 states here in Vermont. Our little Vermont chapter has been at it for 60 years. We're celebrating our 60th anniversary this year. We have helped to conserve over 300,000 acres in the state of Vermont and have protected some of our most iconic natural areas including Green River Reservoir and Campbell's Homes State Park. We've also contributed thousands of acres to our wildlife management areas and for all Vermonters to enjoy. But today, the Nature Conservancy is really laser focused on solving some of our biggest environmental challenges and what drives us and what gets me up every day is our science and the ways in which our science informs our on the ground protection and drives our policies that can lead to greater change. So, I don't need to tell anyone in this room about the demands that the public have for our leaders to take action on climate change, to take action on water quality and to help our communities become more resilient. So this morning, Mark is going to present a body of work that is more than just science. It's for us a roadmap and a vision that I think that we desperately need in this state for securing a network of protected and connected climate resilient lands that give Nature a fighting chance to move and adapt as the climate changes and continue to provide all of the services that we need from Nature. The science is absolutely clear. Those lands that are intact, biologically diverse and connected for wildlife are also those lands that provide the services that we need in purifying our air and water, storing carbon and absorbing our floodwaters. So, let me just introduce by way of background Dr. Mark Anderson. He is currently the Nature Conservancy's Director of Conservation Science for the Eastern United States. He's worked as an ecologist for over 30 years, 27 of those proudly with the Nature Conservancy. He holds a PhD in ecology from the University of New Hampshire and publishes regularly on climate change, large landscape conservation by the University of the Forest Dynamics. He received the Conservancy's Distinguished Conservation Achievement Award in 2017. He serves on the board of the Northeast Wilderness Trust, and he manages an amazing team of scientists in our Austin office. A few years ago, as Mark's work began to be shaped, he was asked to replicate this science for the entire United States. And with the support of the George Duke Chairman Foundation, he has just recently completed the map that you will see today of our resilience analysis for the entire U.S. Later this year, we will be rolling this out to our partners, and we are working closely with government agencies. So, you're really among the first to see this ground-breaking science, and it's been just wonderful to watch Mark's work evolve within the Conservancy and with our partners. And so, I am absolutely delighted to introduce Dr. Mark Anderson. Thank you. Heather, for that nice introduction. Thank you for having me come up. I'm really excited to be here and present this. As Heather said, the whole U.S. part is hot off the press, so we're just getting used to it. But what I'd really like you to see is the concepts we've been working on for about over a decade, really, and how Vermont really fits into the picture. So, I'm going to emphasize that. I'm not going to say, I want you to know that we have been, we started this project 12 years ago, we never envisioned it going national, but over the course of the 12 years, we've had over 150 scientists engaged and working on this in steering committees across the country, and they're both TNC scientists and outside scientists. And I really want to highlight, too, there's two women who are on my staff who are just amazing spatial analysts who've done a lot of the mapping you'll see. And I'm not going to say much more crediting to people. I'm going to bomb through this so that you get the big picture, and I'm not going to give all the credits where everything's due. So, I just want you to know that there's a lot of people working on this, and it's been. We have 11 peer-reviewed papers out, we have reports out, so we've really been trying to keep this very transparent and public and built on the soundest science we could come up with. So, I'll start with the bad news is, you know, we are clearly in the middle of a climate crisis and an abundance crisis. Last year, the news was very, a global report came out from IUCN documenting the severe decline of animals and plants around the world. And it was followed in September by an article in Science that looked at North America and documented a decline in our birds, 29% decline, 3 billion less birds in the country than in 1970. There was one very interesting piece of this article that I want to point out. These are all the declining habitats. If there was one habitat where birds have actually been increasing, and that was our wetlands, and the reason for the increase is due to two things. Better regulations on harvesting and management of waterfowl and billions of dollars spent on restoration and protection. So, one of the take-home messages is restoration and protection really works to reverse this kind of trend. That got us thinking a lot. However, restoration and protection is a little different now because under a climate change our natural world is moving and rearranging our own government FIA of forest inventory and analysis has shown that our tree populations, trees, the distribution of them have shifted on average about 10 miles northward per decade and 11 miles west per decade. And those shifts are due to changes in moisture and temperature. So things that were limited, it was too dry or too cold, they're now establishing young trees into those areas and maybe in other parts of their range they're dying out where it's gotten too hot or too wet. So how do you do conservation? All of our conservation previously was sort of based on where things are now. We didn't think a lot about where they're going to be in the future or how they're going to move and that's really been a lot of the work that we've been focusing on. So as Heather said in the Nature Conservancy we've reinvested in conserving land and water. It's come roaring back as a strategy that is central to conserving diversity and people under climate change. And we've set a vision that we call conserving resilient land and water to conserve a network of resilient sites and connecting corridors that will allow nature to adapt to climate change and thrive. And we have this map, spatial map, and I'm going to walk you through sort of the concepts of how we got to this map and then we'll look at how Vermont fits in. There's three key ingredients and I'll just talk about them one by one but so you see how they fit. Resilient sites, a permeable connected landscape and then resilient species and systems on those sites. So the first thing is because there's so much change one good approach to looking at conservation planning is to think about the factors that create biodiversity patterns in the first place and a lot of those are physical factors that don't really change with climate. Things like geology, soils, topography, hydrology and so what we've done is we've planned out this is a map of showing you there are many many species that are restricted to certain geology types such as limestone or shale or high elevation granite or certainty and those we think those areas will continue to be important for species that are restricted to those so we can plan out using physical properties of a conservation plan that represents all the physical diversity of the world thinking that that will retain the biological diversity in the future and this approach is called conserving nature stage and it's gotten a lot of press in the last few years because it really seems to work but there's a lot of stages out there you know if you're thinking about physical stages so the next question we dove into is can we actually identify places that will be more resilient to climate change that will sustain diversity longer than another place maybe of the same soil type and we found that there are some interesting ways to look at that and it has to do with microclimates and connectedness microclimates you probably already know you notice areas where the snow is on one side of the slope you know on the north side and the other side is sunny and hot so what you can do is you can find landscapes that have a lot of climate variation built into the landscape from the topography and this is often 10 or 15 degrees of temperature differences and moisture differences even larger from you know the dry upper press down to the basin where water collects and if you can find places that have a lot of climate variation species that live in those areas can actually move around on the site to find their climates as the regional climate changes this allows them to be buffered from climate change and persist longer maybe not forever but much longer than places that don't have microclimates so we spent years trying to map microclimates but here's here is a map of areas with high microclimates and on this map green is above average yellow is average and brown is below average so brown with the very flat regions that don't have a lot of microclimates and what you can see here first of all is Vermont has lots of microclimates built into its landscape which makes Vermont a more resilient state than some of other states that we've been looking at so for this whole microclimate idea to really work species also have to be able to move around and access those microclimates and there are things that fragment the landscape and prevent that kind of movement so to get at that we've developed maps of we called it a resistance grid like how much resistance is there to moving and in those maps we have all sorts of development mining roads major and minor roads transmission lines pipelines railroads industrial agriculture hay pasture industrial forestry energy oil and gas i mean there's millions of things that actually fragment the landscape and create resistance and our model was to find where are the places that are actually very locally connected and also have the microclimates here's the picture for Vermont of areas that are highly connected locally in green again yellow is average and brown is below average in terms of so the brown areas have many more of those fragment and features creating resistance and then our mapping of resilient land is essentially mapping of the areas that have both lots of microclimates in a very connected landscape and once again i really want to point out Vermont has a lot of resilient lands and have lots of places where you have both microclimates and they are very well connected and again those places are places where species will be buffered from the effects of the regional climate maybe not forever but for a long time and the transitions will slow down allowing things to recover and move at a more sane pace here's the micro here's the resilience map for the whole country i just have to show it off because it's so fun to see it you can see Vermont up in the corner but there's places all across the country again you're seeing the places across the country that have more microclimates and are more connected now lastly if we did this right i'm going to show you what is underneath the green in Vermont and if we did this right we represent all the different physical habitats so here limestone is in yellow, sedimentary rock is in tan, these granitic areas are in gray, what you can see is that you have a very diverse landscape full of lots of different geological types and you have resilient examples of those you know i won't play this up today but much more than your neighbor you know the granite state would sort of die for that incredible limestone rich resilient limestone rich area that that really creates a diversity Vermont has hundreds of more species than New Hampshire and it's coming from your it's coming from that physical diversity an example of how this works you know you can zoom into the maps the resilient maps you can overlay and parcel that you know and you can see okay this is limestone and a little sedimentary it's got lots of microclimates you know this is equinox highlands you know one great example of a resilient area and you can see how Vermont fits into our whole eastern map when we finished this map you know it was really interesting to see all the different areas that come up and most of them we already knew about but there's lots of new things in here too so again now we have this map for the whole east and the whole country of showing you where where there's different areas are in microclimates and global connectedness all right so if you're with me this is this is about that's about finding these resilient sites places where we can do tangible long-term conservation and we feel good about our investments because we know those sites have those characteristics that make them more resilient but if there's species on there and they're thriving and they're reproducing and they have offspring that are dispersing we've got to think about how those sites connect together and even we have to think about things might eventually be leaving those sites and looking for the next piece of limestone or the next piece of granite so that gets us into this how do we maintain a permeable landscape that allows those kind of dynamics so this is a map that's created for the country on on the movements and flows that might happen if species are moving and following their climate envelopes and what you can see in this map is there's areas like here so the pink is mammals blue is birds yellow is reptiles and amphibians and you can see that there's places where a lot of flow is likely to go through an area but it's very diffuse and spread out and then you also see places like the Appalachian chain where all sorts of movement and flow as populations change and move are going to go through small areas and we wanted to take this kind of technology that created this map and drive it down to a very fine scale that you could actually do conservation planning on and so what we did is we took we took the software that measures flow and we ran it through the resistance grid that I just showed you and we get this map of the east and on this map the dark blue areas are where tons of flow is predicted to go through and that flow is the slow movement of populations over time in response to climate change and we even split it out here between diffuse flow in blue a lot of that in Vermont and then highly channelized flow in orange where these are going to have a lot of things going through a very small area so I just want to zoom in on this Vermont piece for you because I find it fascinating here we go I added these green I added these green arrows but what you can see here is there's this flow line that goes up Vermont's like this little crossroads where things move this way out into the Adirondacks upward in the greens or over into Maine you know and really sort of that divergence and flow is running right through your state here's the national map and just so you get some idea this incredible diffuse flow in the west that all these channels of flow going in the central part of the country and then that mixture in the east where we are so now hopefully you're thinking how do we keep resilient sites and how do we maintain that flow pattern and can we put those two things together to start to develop a network and that's what we've done but we added one more piece if we wanted the network to really work we wanted to make sure that it was full of high quality biodiversity now you know intact habitats viable populations of species and so we wanted to add that last piece in so fortunately that's that's the piece that most of us have been working on for our careers you know where are the intact habitats where so we went back for this we went back to the nature conservancies eco regional planning that came up with portfolios of sites for all the different eco regions in the country and those portfolios of sites were based on where the high quality communities were natural communities intact habitats viable species populations and then we also went to the states and we looked at have the states done their own assessment you know of where the quality communities are or the viable species population and you know the Vermont conservation design is a model of really terrific work you know that has looked at those questions about where is diversity now you know where is the high quality diversity and the cool thing is if you take the model design from the Vermont conservation design and you overlay it on the network that we've come up with they sync up very nicely the main difference really is our network is is a subset it's a little more precise than this you can see that here and we can get into that I'm just going to keep going but for us that means great so Vermont has the opportunity of resilient sites a lot of flow and high quality diversity all matching up I really wish I could say that to every state that's why it's so fun to be here here's the here's the map for the whole country of the high quality diversity sites which we're calling recognized conservation value and to get to this final network here you know it's really taking the resilient sites and prioritizing them if they have high quality diversity or if they're in the flow to match that up to create a network and hopefully you can start to see how this network now which is designed to have resilient areas with high quality diversity but also to allow things to flow and move and find new sites how this network could start to sustain diversity you know over time as the climate changes here's what it looks like a few things about it one it's it's ambitious it's a third of the country in the east it's about a quarter of the country and then it's got more in the west but it has resilient examples of all the physical habitats all types of geology soils topography it's all packed into there and then it's got over 250,000 occurrences of known high quality biodiversity intact habitats and species populations and then it's arranged to sort of maximize that flow so that things will really be able to change and move if we if we could actually conserve this all so can we actually conserve it all I don't know TNC cannot conserve that alone I mean we have a very impressive record proud of that record we're nowhere near at this scale this this can only be done really by a collaborative effort of land trust conservation organizations agencies really starting to work together to sort of commit to that and here's a great slide from the land trust alliance rally in November where we first unveiled the map and this is Andrew Bowman the CEO showing the map and challenging there are a thousand land trusts in this you know challenging the land trust community can we actually start to collaborate to achieve a larger impact you know so we don't end up with a fragmented world now the other thing and the important thing for me is I know you know I'm an ecologist I love nature I love intact habitat but I know that that's not what the world is focused on right now so the next thing we've done is we've started to calculate what are all the co-benefits of a network like this so here's the network for that east it measures exactly 23 percent of the landscape but if you look at the carbon in this it's 56 percent of all the above ground carbon in the east you know and more when you get into Vermont we'll look down so it's got a huge carbon impact for people and as we'll talk about in a second you know conserving our existing forests or or keeping forests as forest is one of the most it's the cheapest most cost-effective way to get carbon out of the atmosphere it's also got 75 percent of all the high-value source water areas you know because most of our source water is actually in areas that are relatively intact and have lots of microclimates so it's full of good clean water it provides oxygen for 1.8 billion people every year it mitigates roughly 1.3 million tons of pollution which has a huge benefit in health you know health cost savings and it's got this number of we're less sure of you know something around 25 billion in recreational you know potential recreational economy so when you start to look at these figures you know this is designed to have resilient areas that sustain wildlife but it's also got incredible you know benefits for people if we could actually conserve this okay so lastly I just want to do a little bit of a deeper dive on carbon because I really think that carbon is the way that we're going to get to this kind of scale are we on time okay okay so let's start by just thinking about carbon I know you know you all learned about photosynthesis in elementary school you know and you probably get a little stick to your stomach when you hear the word but just think about it so the leads of a planet are full of chlorophyll they extract carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere they split it and they release the oxygen and then they store the carbon as carbohydrates and sugars and build biomass out of that we love that because we breathe the oxygen and then we eat the carbohydrates and sugars so it's great for us but this carbon really puzzled scientists for a long time and there's brand new science on it which but think about it back in the 1800s the scientists were like they had a pot full of dirt you know they'd weigh it and then they put some they put a seed in it and they let a little sapling grow for like two years then they take the sapling out and they weigh the pot again and the pot weighed exactly the same and they're like where did this tree come from because it didn't come out of the pot you know and eventually they realize this must be coming out of the air you know and it took a while to figure out that that tree is coming out of the air it's not coming out of the soil you know and after a while they realize wow there's there's elements in the air that are being extracted so when you see a forest outside you know it's easy to think that that forest came up out of the ground but it didn't it came out of the air it's carbon that was in the air that is now materialized into into wood and biomass you know and even the roots underground are coming out of the air and coming growing down so that is the carbon storage and that went on for so many years you know that eventually the atmosphere our atmosphere got had much lower carbon you know and the whole fossil fuel thing is about you know coal is just old bearing swamps that are being you know re-release back into the air carbon that was stored in bearing petroleum is old bearing marine algae that is compressed you know so so there's nothing really like a forest for just extracting carbon now what's really been clear what's changed and become clear in the science is the importance of older trees so for a while we thought starting in the 60s we thought young fast-growing trees must be collecting the most carbon because you can see it appearing you know but in fact carbon think about it carbon how much carbon of course has to do with how much leaf area there it is because that's where all the carbon is being extracted so when you have a lot of leaf area like in a tree like this you know or when you get a canopy with like understory structure all of that leaf area it's all absorbing carbon and transferring it to a tree and then you instead of instead of growing fast in growth rate it's kind of like us you know after your growth rate slows down it's all falling so the trees are growing in volume and that's where the biomass you know that's where the biomass is getting stored so people thought so people thought wow so now we now we see there was a study done where they looked at 600,000 trees they looked at all these studies that had already been done and they synthesized them together 600,000 trees and they saw yeah carbon carbon accumulation increases with age and tree size continuously you know and this they had a great line in the in the abstract a single big tree can add the same amount of carbon to a forest within a year as it's contained in an entire medium sized tree yeah it's all that leaf area so so these intact trees are just storing this carbon that we we want to keep them on the ground because this is fast okay but it's it's even it's even cooler so so now that we're so interested in carbon scientists have started to label the carbon as it gets absorbed and trace it to figure out where it is all the carbon actually going in store because that will help us figure out carbon storage so uh in 2016 Tamara Klein labeled carbon in a bunch of trees traced where it went and the results of where that carbon went were amazing so first of all within a matter of hours you know and days much most of that carbon had transferred to the roots it's gone down and what was even more amazing you see this it was being shared with the other trees around it so the carbon was being transferred to the roots and shared up to 40 percent of the carbon being absorbed by a single tree was actually being shared with the surrounding trees in the forest whoa and what was causing or what was facilitating that sharing was this intact mycorrhizal fungi network that you know you see when you kick up duff and you see all that white stringy stuff in the duff that's the mycorrhizal fungal network and that works with the roots to share carbon across the trees and it's kind of a tricky thing because it's a good situation because the trees actually feed the mycorrhizal network so another place the carbon was going was to feed all the underground fungi and then the fungi helps it helps trees extract nutrients so they were getting nutrients and they were feeding that so here's the carbon going it's being shared among the trees I won't go into detail but I'll tell you one more thing because now now the scientists are really all over this and they're trying to map it this woman Susan Seymart has mapped it you know where the carbon goes and what she found she calls this largest trees in the forest she called mother trees they're extracting most of the carbon sharing it with the surrounding trees and probably the coolest thing here or the most surprising thing here was that they are the most surprising thing is that the mother trees are preferentially sharing carbon with their own offspring so they're recognizing their own offspring and giving them a little extra sugar a familiar strategy from my point of view okay so what's the result of this I'll wrap this up you know the result of this is that we we've now sort of very clear on the difference between sequestration and storage and just to make this clear to everyone sequestration is the amount of carbon taken out of the atmosphere every year you know so as the forest becomes full of leaves and full of understory at some point you know at some point this levels up because it's extracting all the carbon you can get from the light in that acre and that and it does it annually and that's you know a lot of our forest management is about trying to get sequestration up you know so that we're getting sequestering but that's different than storage because it accumulates over time in an intact forest so every year it sequesters so much and then it stores it and then over time you start having these massive carbon storage capacity of your forest a lot like putting money in your bank account you know you first you try and get your annual deposit up as high as you can and then eventually you want to just keep it going over years to really build up so our existing forests are at least huge safes of carbon and there's been great meta studies now done on this that show existing forests are big carbon sinks you know so what are the implications you know the big implications of this is the fastest cheapest way to get carbon out of the atmosphere is to keep forests as forests you know and there's two you know as you know there's two ways to do that you know the biggest one that we're investing in is forest management improving forest management so it's carbon friendly and that that can be delaying the harvest for a while you know that can be making sure we retain large trees harvesting and clusters so you keep your phone network fed you know you don't want it there's lots of strategies now about how to manage forest better and our carbon market is based on the idea of better forest management for carbon and we like this carbon market because you can also get money for doing this you know the other thing you can do is just let the forest grow you know you don't really even have to manage it just let it be a forest and it will store carbon for you so conservation you know at that level is also great for carbon and a friend of mine from Britska really calculated how much of a difference can this you know so well first of all what he meant he looked at so reforestation which is not really applicable to Vermont really you know that's sort of the way we could get the most carbon but that that's putting forests that's re regrowing forests where there are no forests you know and that's great the issue with that is it's slower it takes a while for those trees to get out to where they're really storing carbon and it's fairly expensive you know avoiding forest conversion that's the one that has huge potential this is this is low cost this dark bar that's the one you know just keeping forest is forest is the one that really has the highest potential for the cheapest cost and then really improving our natural forest management also has very high potential and pretty low cost so big strategies and their estimate here you know in the next 10 years if we really did that we could we could meet about half of the car we could store and sequester about half of the carbon needed to sort of stabilize the climate I don't want to be too over optimistic because you'll see what happens is after a while you know if we don't get our other act together our policies and you know clean energy and all that that there's less of an ability for nature to actually store it but over the next 10 or 20 years nature can be half of the solution which is really mind-boggling works in works in grasslands too all right so back to this you know in my mind this will likely I don't really want it to boil down into the car it's going to boil down I think conservation too conserving diversity you know changing that abundance price reversing that abundance crisis and storing the maximum amount of carbon you know and water for people I think that's going to be our where conservation really starts to focus but now I hope you can see how significant it is when I said this is 56 percent of the above ground part of the piece all right I want to end with this I've sort of highlighted Vermont in a couple of different ways and I just want to point it out because you know I work at a much larger scale in the state but it's hard not to see the importance of Vermont when I look at all this I'll start with this is the carbon map for the network this dark blue this is the maximum amount of carbon and I just want you to see the Vermont parts of the adorondacks up here in more New Hampshire than Maine but you know that is sort of the center of one of the carbon stocks in the east so big and that's from the existing forest that's already there you know also so we talked about you know it's got diverse limestone and a whole diversity so it's got a rich diversity of physical properties and it's got some of the most resilient areas in the east for those for those areas and then it's got this incredible importance in terms of connectivity because it's in the middle it's in the intersection of all these flows that are going to be having these terrestrial flows and then lastly it's not only resilient but it's also got a terrific state plan already there you know that's really focused on the existing biodiversity and to the extent that those things match up very nicely you've got sort of the tools in place to really make a huge difference you know for people in nature in Vermont you know and last of all you've got a community that values nature is about the most important ingredient to the whole mix so I'll stop here thank you very much for a very thoughtful eye-opening presentation I'm sure there are a lot of questions and I'll kick us off with one um can you characterize something about so Vermont's forests what where are we in the scale of having sort of maximized our ability to serve as a carbonson can you just that is it like a reservoir that fills and then that's it or and or can we keep on adding significant amounts of carbon even with the with the forest we currently have great I'll take us down to that then I might pass it to Jim this thought specifically about that question for Vermont the great thing about carbon you you max it keeps it keeps growing so you can maximize your potential to sequester carbon every year so you can by by restoring your forest and managing well you can increase the amount that gets sequestered every year but but if you do that every year year after year it just keeps growing so your accumulation just keeps growing and it you're essentially doing the most that you can possibly do but it doesn't stop it just keeps growing does that and jim you yeah jim shell for the record of conservation director and yes you know our forest uh the senator are still in a young age we have a kind of a medium age forest right now as they've recovered from past forestation that went on in the state and so there's a lot of room to grow there because they get older you know those trees still they're just starting to reach maturity and so there's more room to grow great there's also studies out there that show that improved forest management could probably add you know 10 to 50 percent more carbon to that natural growth ring so things were done right we focused on the right type of practices we could kind of choose that a little bit more great see a couple hands uh so senator mcdonald senator campion and senator rogers i haven't seen any hands move over so you mentioned uh reforestation and um we have yet to have a discussion in the legislature about what's going to happen the next 10 20 years as the ash trees die off and how it's going to affect our economy foresters except for do is there time should we have a reforestation policy in place of what to plant on the ash trees so before they just go my answer is yes i i want to i want to add uh toss that again to the vermont team who knows the situation in the state yeah sir mcdonald um there we should be thinking about reforestation in the right places um whether or not we need to think about an aggressive reforestation around emerald ash board and imagine i think that's still an open question i think we can address some of that through management there's some study out there the resources begin to show that the younger ash trees are a little bit more resistant or the bugs don't quite quite aren't quite attractive for those so don't die last right but there's also a reason that shows that dentures uh communities of ash are more resilient to the bugs as well so i i think there's a lot that we need to learn there so i think it's more about management not necessarily thinking about what you have to go out to plant a lot of stuff that said we have a lot of opportunities what we do need to do reforestation our riparian areas uh you know that if we can do more reforestation in those sites they'll be benefits that are not only from carbon but also from uh improving the flow of our rivers and keeping floods from you know destroying our communities and everything so yes reforestation but reforestation in a place where we give maximum benefit for other values and where's that being worked on today or tomorrow thank you right thank you senator that's that's a very good question to apply here thinking about that senator camping i'd like you to say something about regenerative soil and agriculture for for everyone i mean we've talked about this in the legislature there are some farms i know in my district in prep estate that are are starting these no-till practices that also will request carbon i'm wondering if you'd like to say a word and maybe even comment other parts of the country where people are seeing some success in this regard yeah i'd love to let me put that let me put this up because that's sort of on my bottom picture here and i'm a forest ecologist center so grassland but the the revolutions in science about how forests extract and share carbon with their neighbors are equally true in grassland systems and in agriculture you know in our current agriculture practices have not been really developed to store to essentially uh feed the microorganisms and the micro-risal and store carbon in the soil but so that is an area where we have an opportunity to really increase carbon storage in soils and no-till has become you know it's being demonstrated to be as productive sometimes more productive as you know till agriculture and it and it seems to be really taking forward so okay thank you senator roger uh i just like to make a couple points and then uh question i'm sorry i didn't get here in time for the whole thing but senator mcgullo's point about the ash we have to be careful about just cutting all the ash because as with uh beach and alam trees do have the natural ability to adapt and hopefully we'll build resilience so we we've got a hope that the young ash do um adjust one of the things that you did talk about was private ownership and as a owner of a fair amount of private forest we just purchased the family farm that's been in our family from the early 1800s one of the biggest problems in vermont is the tax burden in the cost of carrying that farm and until vermont owners recognize and pay for the ecosystem services you're going to see people continue to sell off pieces and develop that land because we can't afford to hang on to it my tax bill is going to be 20 000 this year um which it's just most farmers and forest landowners cannot afford to keep it so we as vermont owners have to develop a system we've got the current use program which i won't get too deeply into that you should not have to sign up for a government program to be taxed fairly on your property that's what we have to do now um and then the other point i would like to make would like to comment about this is as a as a forester um we do harvest i've got a harvest going on right now wood the prices on wood are ridiculous we were getting more for it 20 years ago um but the one thing that you didn't mention was how if we do i know the big trees are grabbing more carbon and storing more carbon but at some point we have to let the under story come and if we sell those big trees to lumber for houses and and um nice lumber for furniture then that carbon's also locked up and i've just like you to talk a little about proper management and lock in that forest product already well and so thank you back from senator and i agree with your first two points strongly so this is being worked on you know so wood products are part of the carbon solution because wood products are still carbon you know and if we can retain those products there's some problems with losses you know in the along the way as it goes from a broad tree to a good product but if we can retain those products that also keeps carbon on the landscape the the old tree i'm not sure of the answer to that question this science that i just showed you is within the last five years so it's very new science i would say it looks like those old trees play a disproportionate role in in continuing to accumulate carbon at levels that the young replacement trees will take a long time to get to that same level so i think there's probably some balance of when you want to make that shift you know and i think as we work as you know as the forest community really the forest management community really works with that that issue i think we'll start to figure out where that balance is you know well and i think as i said before i think people were paid for their ecosystem services they may be able to do that but currently because of the cost to hold in that forest land we're all looking at at the bottom line and we have to cut that wood to be able to hang on right to the woodland um and then the one other point that i find very interesting is um supposedly what some of those new research they're saying the mycelium actually allows for trees to communicate which extremely useful i agree i didn't know that that is fascinating that is fascinating research about how trees are actually communicable in each other thank you yeah thank you for bringing that the i wanted to talk about this we've laid out a lot of natural challenges for us to be looking at how about climate in terms of population uh movement i mean one of the things that's come up but we haven't talked about much as um is if there if climate change is as severe as it's forecast to be and oceans rise and coastal populations move um are you looking at how people may move and what kind of impacts and pressures that will bring to places like Vermont and the rest of New England it's a great question we had an interesting discussion of that last night and i i also will fund it i'll i'll give it you know the sea level rise issues are really big and right now they look sort of intractable there are you know there are communities out there along the coast that are there's some energy uh places in Alabama where they have hundreds of thousands of repetitive flooding claims that are not getting filled you know they're just they're getting flooded every year sometimes every month and they're putting claims eventually they're gonna have to move you know so it's really how long can our coastal communities exist before we start to back away and can we actually do it in some sort of planned way the movement to Vermont i don't know enough about it i my only thought is there's a lot of people that that 50 below winters have scared away from Vermont and i don't know if you had doesn't think you had that this year and if it's going to get warmer and more attractive that might start bringing people over do any of the Vermont staff have thought about this yeah i mean i have kind of two thoughts about this i mean just like your model is it's dynamic dependent on where we're able to conserve land and see species move over time in the same way you presented on resistance as well the the kind of resistant feature on the landscape and those resistant features are going to impact where we're able to conserve land and as people move those resistant places are going to shift as well so that's kind of my first thought and then my second thought is that we've we have people who are now i know i know people personally who have moved here to say we're moving away from the coast moving away from fires we don't want to be in florida to experience what's happening there and so we're starting to see that shift happening and we need to take that into account as we're planning for uh protecting this this resilient system i mean we right now we we're always hearing about the Vermont's challenging demographics and that we're barely sort of holding our own in population but if you there's a great report the castle report back in 1987 if you look in that it looks at the 20 years prior and 125,000 people moved to Vermont so it's conceivable that we'd have a large population swing in a 20-year period again representative shell thank you um thank you so much this is incredibly edifying and i appreciate your work i'm um wondering about your model and how much of it is driven by current land use practices and so the species migration routes that you identify are they just an anachronism of of what we've left for species to use or are they actually what species might be using if there were other habitats available and related to that how does your plan identify underrepresented underrepresented types of habitat that we also need to be protecting uh great question to think about that uh to a large extent the movement models are a reflection of how we've already built out the landscape and what is left for nature to move through mixed mixed with climatic gradients that are going to be important for nature and those climatic gradients are more topographical based so it's a mixture of those two but it's mostly how we've already built it out the underrepresented settings uh is part of the you know is part of the analysis and certainly some of the richest settings like limestone regions you know are the least protected because they are some of our best farmlands you know so conservation is very if you look at how conservation is distributed across the physical world it's very much targeted on very poor soils and high elevations and things that were really not that beneficial for people so trying to balance more representation of other settings is also going to be sort of tricky and expensive work right there was and mccullough so dr you you're likely are aware and i and i'm very sure our bomb contingent conservancy is aware that in act 250 we've got language around forest blocks protection and connectivity protection and and what what i what i think i pulled from your major connectivity common denominator through the whole theme here is that while we have in our legislation connectivity for wildlife to get from perhaps uh chitlin county to franklin county um or from one side of room 100 to the other the forest blocks themselves as a greater area serve as connectivity um and and is would you say that or is that your yes that is various student comments are you clearly got the message that that is i think that the message of the need under under climate change for those forest blocks to allow many other things to be moving and have those dynamics thank you yeah thank you thank you for that act and questions we have up in burlington uv of the gun institute and for a decade it's been at least a decade since they first came to the building and presented a model of payments related to ecosystem services so a decade ago it was more along the co-benefits you were talking about clean air clean water but lately because of climate i think you know people are much carbons come to the floor are so i'm wondering if you've seen successful models so even though there was a good case made people understood it because we were getting it for free in essence i don't think people have not yet lashed on the same but we're going to pay for something we've been calling for getting for free have you seen models so the ecosystem services see and any jurisdictions well you know we've certainly seen an explosion of the carbon markets you know that has probably powered an explosion in land management and protection in the last five or ten years you know so those carbon markets are set up in a way that you can if you change your management practices so that you store more carbon than you would have in your existing practice you can receive payments for that and that has really been very powerful building well i'd love to add something too but i wonder if jim do you want to add anything more on the forest carbon market side yeah you have a report that a summer study created addressing this very issue about how our forests play a role in carbon sequestration storage and the opportunities that are out there for using payment for ecosystem services to help out forest landowners like senator rogers to get paid for the carbon they're storing i encourage all of you to take a look at that report there's a companion bill that's been introduced it's in your committee right now as 280 i know you're uh senator you've been looking at trying to get some focusing to talk about that i uh urge you to get the members of that committee in and we can give you the full education use carbon as a payment for ecosystem services because it is the one market that is the most mature in this country for paying people for that ecosystem services california has proven that this works the voluntary markets are proving that it works worldwide it's working so if you want to get on the game and play in carbon for ecosystem services it's laid out for you there it's ready to go right all right we'll see you next week could i could i just add a follow-up to that or the payment for ecosystem services is a bit helpful uh phil hoppin director of government relations and policy for the major conservancy here in vermont so i wanted just to touch on the agricultural side of things and payment for ecosystem services work that's not going here in vermont as some of you may know there was another study group that was authorized by the legislature last spring to look into creating a payment for ecosystem services framework particularly for the agricultural sector that's been led by the agency of agriculture food markets deputy secretary alison eastman has been chairing that the house conservation board gets you over our vice chair that work that group has done great work over the course of the fall it's early winter came out with a report a couple of weeks ago it's really complicated there are not established markets to the same degree that there are forest art and yet in the agricultural side of things but i think there's a lot of a lot of opportunity and well worth exploring we've been a part of that conversation with the major conservancy career to continue to be a part of it with a whole host of other players from the agricultural community the agency farmers other interests the focus of that group at to this point and i think it's pretty stable going forward is to look at soil health as sort of the umbrella with that provides a number of different ecosystem services so carbon absorption being one of those but also increased productivity for the agricultural products that the aglomins are focused on to improve the infiltration of water to help slow down flooding other sorts of benefits like that there's improved biological diversity in the soil if you're managing more for soil health than the some of the things that mark already touched on so that the trick is figuring out where the revenue sources may come from to help to support that sort of a system but it's something that we're i think there's a lot of hope at least we'll see big things still to figure out there is also a lot of work that's going on on this nationally and really around the world it's a not that a lot of people are trying to figure out how to crack in our hope is that we can bring in some of that learning from other parts of the country in the world to help inform what we're doing here in Vermont and also potentially help to provide some learning from here that can inform efforts elsewhere well i hope that we find our way forward to start treating soil as in calling it and recognizing it as an ecosystem senator you have a follow-up on this for thank you good and good morning i have a two separate questions my first question is in regards to your list of co-benefits and i appreciate that i think it's important for us to to recognize when we we try to when we make investments to maximize those co-benefits but in recognition of a state that actually receives a significant amount of impact related to our climate crisis in the form of extreme weather we we see for example anywhere in Vermont we experience a flood of a significant magnitude somewhere in the state and so the role of of one co-benefit you i don't think you identify but is i think real and i would appreciate your comment on it is the importance of forest and the healthy the health of our forest soils and being able to hold water we often think of for flood resilience we think of just the flood plain or the river corridor when in fact the health of that watershed to retain and absorb that water is critical because otherwise if you channelize all that rain right into the receiving water hence you get flooding in the valley bottoms so i appreciate you identifying or commenting on that because i noticed that it wasn't necessarily identified in your list and i'll go to my second question after that well first of all thank you for bringing that up so you said it very well yourself you know forest you know they intercept water and then it sort of goes slowly down the trunks and into the soil and then the soil becomes a storage source that releases water slowly over time and really helps mitigate flooding the only reason we don't have it up there is we just haven't figured out how to measure that and put a number to it yet but i think that's a really critical service so thank you okay and it's a point that i know our commissioner at forest parks and recreation often mentions is the the role of forests in flood mitigation uh my second point is a follow-up from senator roger's comment in recognition of 80 percent of our more or less uh vermont is privately owned and that when people have and part of their livelihood investment in forests i would argue that a healthy well managed forest it holds more carbon even though you're actively managing it than a land that has converted into a sub develop development for example and um and so because of the that number of of lands in private ownership some of which and much of which are managed actively really interested to hear about the opportunity for greater education with this information and in the and in particular how do we integrate or are we and how can we help facilitate the integration of this information into forest management plans so that we can help maximize the values you just described well at the same time recognize that um forest healthy forest managed forest can also be enhanced to to provide for multiple benefits well that is a great question so in fact i think our whole strategy you know our whole strategy for how we want to roll this out is really about how do we how do we find channels for getting this information out in a way that can be taken up and by organizations agencies individuals and integrated into their own planning so that so that you know forest management which is already improving you know can continue to improve so that we can really start to get our management completely synced up with the science and storing the carbon how can we get our children to be learning about these services so that they're thinking about it so i don't have that answer to that but i think you hit on exactly the challenge ahead is how do we actually feed this out in a way that it can be taken out and used for you know better i don't see more i could talk about this subject all day and i just want to get on a few things that i don't think we talked about unless i missed them before they came in number one is invasive species which both invasive plants and animals or the ash for for instance are greatly affecting our forest and grasslands wetlands everything is being impacted by the basics even the water they remember everyone um population growth and that's something i think two people talk about is worldwide population growth and i personally think there's too many people on this rock and so when we talked about bringing more people to vermont you know it's kind of a double-edged sword do we want more people in vermont if we have more people we have more housing we have more subdivisions we have more forest tracks broken up and how an activity is lost and in my virtual opinion is that we should be working on a sustainable um environment and sustainable economy and that's something that no industrialized nation has ever done they always build everything on a pyramid scheme of growth right right so what is it when you figure all this and how much forest we need to add to store the carbon that we need to store is it taken into account the dramatic increase in population around the world which is driving much of the carbon being produced um and then my last point is that the one thing that frustrates me very much with the carbon market is we have a whole bunch of folks out there who don't want to change their lifestyle because they have the money to write out a check and just because you're writing out a check to the carbon market does not mean you're doing the earth good if you're still jumping on an airplane everybody can fly in here and fly in there your check is not made up for the damage you're doing in in producing carbon i'm not sure those are questions you put on population and if that has been taken into account and also on the market in the fact that people have to change their lifestyle if we're really going to turn things out yeah so i i mean i would the way i would answer that i mean vermont alone you know can't get us anywhere near where we have to get and you're right it is a global problem and the same activity we're talking about here you know need to be replicated in other countries you know how we make that i'd say the one thing i have to believe is if we can do it here you know then hopefully that will start rather than say well we're not going to do it because nobody else is you know if we can start solving these problems here you know hopefully we could start building that network that will expand globally like you are right they in his these are global issues welcome to the senate natural resources senator rogers and i are not going to talk all day but this being the weekend of the 10 offensive i'm here to clear the truth um i have a question last witness uh let um representative adolan who talked about order treatment etc etc and we hear people talking about bars and carbon sequestration and we have two scientific groups and a lobby in together but they never come in and lobby together for a precious resource does the thing that representatives talked about when you talked about do they do both those things do they complement one another and are you getting two things for the same money if you choose to spend money in those two areas carbon and water is that yes as the representative uh pointed out you know conserving forest that store carbon is also an incredibly good prospect for storing water and filtering you know filtering water so you get cleaner water this water is stored and then released to help prevent flooding so forest and fresh water you know in alaska you know they call their forests salmon forests because salmon depends so much on intact forest it's a great analogy on just those two things are so interconnected check they shouldn't even be lobbying separately really if they're lobbying separately they're this isn't a scientific question any more asking you to comment on political in my opinion they should be lobbying together some handcuffs so thank you here one of my favorite job your quote is that when you talk about anything in nature you find it pitch to the rest of the universe um today my my silly clear clear word just how what some of those connections are so before we move on to the corner I'd like to recognize that hannison for his work and thank you very much for your presentation so just to wrap up uh we want to thank you all uh chair gray chair sheldon the members of the committee and for all of you who are able to be here today for the opportunity to share mark's work and it's and mark and his team's work I think is he acknowledged early on it's a full host of folks some of whom are in this room in fact who've been involved in helping with the science partners close colleagues of ours uh from neighboring organizations as well as from inside TNC I hope that this has been helpful informative interesting and food for thought on a lot of different fronts I wanted to just touch on a couple of things we've we've gotten to a lot of things already that I think tie right into policy issues and initiatives and whatnot that are in front of your committees and other ones in this building and the administration is working on and we and our partners in the non-governmental sector are working on as well I just wanted to try to tie a few things together very quickly before we wrap up I think you know first and foremost that one of the key messages obviously from what mark has said is about the importance of keeping forests as forests and wetlands as weapons and natural systems as natural systems for to help nature adapt and respond to the change that's already happening so rapidly but also to help all of us as individuals our communities as a state to respond to the climate change that's already underway we need to sustain our natural systems for the benefits that they provide for all of us we depend on them we can look at this body of science and as it intertwines so closely as Mark was indicating with Vermont conservation design but look at it as a sort of a blueprint for where and how we focus our investments in conservation so as Margaret touched on the Resilient and Connected Network for the Northeast is about 23 percent of the land areas so you can sort of translate that down to Vermont it's a that's a significant area a bunch of it the good news is a bunch that's already conserved in public lands federal state municipal and also by nonprofits private organizations and whatnot so it's not we're not starting from zero we need to get to 23 to conserve the whole Resilient Connected Network but we have a lot of room to grow on there so we need to be thinking about how we can use this science to help inform how we're targeting our conservation investments on this ties back to the conversation that many of us were a part of yesterday with Vermont Housing Conservation Board investments on the conservation side it ties into land use planning and regulation the act 250 dialogue trying to represent what color was pointing out about the provisions that are under consideration to help sustain forest blocks and landscape connectors for the critical value that those provide for nature but also again all the benefits that will provide the people also the importance of providing strong protection for area corridors and wetlands other things that are under consideration of an intertwined with not only act 250 but also land use regulation and planning at the local level regional level and our partners from A&R and others are working on so much with our communities that are in regional planning conditions around the state forest management obviously a really important part of all of this a great opportunity it intertwines with the forest carbon market potential opportunities to secure revenues for forest landowners to help them keep their lands as forest which i think the vast majority of forest landowners in this state want to do but it's a challenge it's just trying to figure out how to help them deal with the financial challenges that senator rogers was pointing to their ways that this all intertwines and the science can help inform where and how we're going about that the importance of reforestation less of an opportunity for that here in vermont than there is in other places that have taken out more of their forest than we have forest and we're nearly 80 percent forest in here in vermont but there are targeted areas mark mentioned riparian corners in particular that's a place where the flood plain forests of vermont that used to be prevalent are pretty limited at this point and they provide tremendous values for nature and for people in all sorts of ways with water quality protection and reduce vulnerability from flooding things like that so we should be looking for targeted opportunities for forest restoration there's the whole soil health and payment free ecosystem services potential in the ag sector there as well that i touched on a few minutes ago so those are oh and i guess one of the one that i wanted to mention that was a point that mark touched on in one of his first slides and i think the one about the abundance crisis and about if you remember there was the the graph showing most sort of groups of species have declined significantly the one where there's been some good news is around forest and sorry wetland birds and that the reason that that's better than it might be is in part as mark said it's both because of that practices restraining harvesting of weapons and birds but it's also very much about the strength in regulation protection regulation of weapon systems around the country that has happened and this is obviously ties right into policy dialogue that many of you have been a part of that again came out of the last legislative session about what should we be doing around here in vermont around our weapons statute and regulations and i think the message for mark's work in part is that we need to be doing everything we can to maintain strong protections for existing weapons and be doing everything that we can to try to accelerate the restoration of degraded weapons which we have lots of around the state so those are the there's probably more those are the ones that i'm sort of scrolling down in my notes of the conversation was unfolding i hope those resonate and i think i'll leave it there but again we want to thank you all for the opportunity to share this body of work with you all hope it helps to inform your understanding and your thinking as you go forward in the policy dialogue and we at the age of instruments really look forward to continuing to work with you on it so thanks very much thank you phil and thank you again dr anerson and heather the uh to everyone in the room i know that we have the strength of most of the good work that gets done in vermont is that we have many many different partners some are more formal summer at the volunteer level but it's the broad network of people that we have that care about issue after issue in the state that really help us get a lot more done than government could ever account for so thank you to everyone in the room thanks for turning out right and early this morning um and for the senate side we'll be reconvening in our community room at 945 so thank you all