 I'm talking about welcome to the Subcommittee on Land Management of the Amherst Conservation Commission. It is 1205. And this is Alex Horst speaking. Bruce Steadman is with us. Michelle Lobb, Aaron Jock, and Dave Zomak. And we have an agenda on the web, which we're going to proceed with. If we have any members of the public present, Aaron, I can't see them. So would you let me know? Absolutely. Yeah, we have we do have one member of the public. But if they raise their hand, I'll let you know. OK, good. So hello, Dave. Hello, everybody. Yeah. So what I wanted to do this morning is postpone talking about priorities and do justice to those who have done some work in the past that we haven't had time to cover. So Michelle did has done some work. I think Bruce has done some work. I've done some work. And if we could cover those items, start to get caught up. I really don't want to assign people doing new work without covering what they've already done. And frankly, adding the should we have more question adds a layer of complexity that takes some time and be interesting to see how we're doing there. So I'd like to start if I could just because I have it handy with the forestry section. Which I modified and that went out on September 28. I can share my screen and bring it up. And also if I could, we'll finish up on part of the garden community that has to do with the rules. I talked to Angela this morning. They don't have any rules posted. And they're expecting to change them. So I don't know whether what we're doing is useful to them or not. So I feel like we should probably get done with that and move it on. They're going to open up registration for the community garden in 2024 in February, or first part of February. Is that OK with everybody? And frankly, I couldn't find, I wasn't sure that I was looking at Bruce's most recent work or Michelle's most recent work. So when we get to that, you'll have to help me out. And you share my screen or can I share my screen, Erin? You should be able to share if you have trouble. Let me know. Yeah, OK, I can see the share. Good, so I have open what I want to share. Can you see that? Yes. You could say forest management at the top. And then when I submitted it, so with your indulgence, I'll quickly go down through what I did here and highlight what I think is the biggest change that's worthy of some discussion. The rest of it is editorial type stuff. So I'm not going to read it. I'm just going to go through the points that I changed. And that begins in the second line with five purposes. And saying that the Commission implements forest management for five purposes, salvage and ecological restoration. And I'll be honest, I'm not quite sure what ecological restoration is. Wildlife management, climate resilience was added. I'm not quite sure what climate resilience is. And I didn't try and define it. Education and recreation. Then I added a line saying harvesting standing trees for firewood and timber is not a Commission purpose for forest management. And that takes a different slant. And that is the one change that I think is worthy of discussion. And we'll come back to it. My reason is pretty simple, but I'll come back to it. The rest of it, the few word changes, individual word changes aren't really worth going through. It does say that we will prepare appropriate forest cutting plans profiling with the state to allow for a salvage of trees downed by high wind events and for harvesting trees to enhance wildlife habitat on conservation land. And that will get wrapped into our discussion about the sentence up there about commercial harvest not being a purpose. There is a section in here that was already written that says that we will not sell carbon credits. I didn't write that. I don't know the background. I left it. If you want to talk about it, we can. Since I changed, set this out where it says because of the ecological value of wildlife, the commission will one favor and promote trees and shrubs of produce mast, hard mast, and soft mast. I wrote legacy trees, meaning big trees. And then I realized later that we're not going to be planting trees as part of forest management in people's names. And I didn't realize that that's a meaning for legacy trees. So today I crossed it out. Large white pines, they're really important for bears. And large stands of unbroken canopies, which are important for certain species of birds, which I didn't go into, but that's the reason that's there. And leaving, standing, going to change here. Leaving standing dead trees that do not pose a safety risk to people or property. Dead trees are really good for wildlife. Lots of things live in them. Lots of things depend on the critters that live in them. So unless a tree is on a trail and going to cause a safety risk for people walking by, I just wrote that we would favor leaving them. And the commission will maintain an inventory and map for the forest land. I don't know if there is an inventory now. Dave can probably shed some light on that. But I would like to see us inventory our forest. And then I listed giving a minimum of acreage stand type composition and the size of the stand with unbroken canopies. That's it. Those are, that's all I did to that. And so I'd like to go back for discussion on the sentence that I, if you have any questions other than the sentence about commercial harvest, please, I'll stop so you can proceed, Michelle. Thanks. I'm good with the not commercial harvest as part of our intent. I just had a question about salvage. That can get sort of tricky sometimes. And in some cases abused, I'm not saying we're at great risk at that. But salvage can be like, well, say there's a bunch of downed trees, do we want to leave them down as habitat? Because downed wood is also very important for the ecology of forest. Or is there going an insect outbreak? Sometimes there's a big jump to salvage those trees under the assumption that it's going to stop an insect outbreak, and almost that never is the case, as in it doesn't stop the insect outbreak. But I guess on the West Coast, we're really careful about saying salvage because it can just lead to maybe things without ecological intent and more of taking the trees away. So it's just like kind of a trigger word for me. And I wanted to make sure that we're, what do we mean by salvage and what are the right circumstances to do it? Yeah. Anybody else have any comments on that? I'll respond. But anybody else got any comments on that topic? I have a question. Go ahead. By do you mean that the trees are still standing or that they fell over in one of these events? I envisioned falling over. Yeah. I think I did mention causes for high wind events where we've got a tangle of trees. So I think, yeah, this is a good little discussion. I think I hear you, Michelle, given the small nature, I mean, the number of acres we have. I mean, we're not talking thousands of acres here. We're not talking millions of acres. I think the commission, the town, would have a whole lot more control over what, you know, what the purpose of a forest cut might be. I don't, I agree with you, Michelle. I don't see a lot of room for abuse, if you will. The one thing, one example I could think of was like, we do have a fair number of red pine stands on conservation land. So they are subject, and I'm not going to get it because I wasn't thinking of this. What is the root? They get a root. I believe it's an insect. I'm so, so like. Can I get a pine bark beetle? Yeah, something like that. So like I could see where you could say, oh, that entire stand is dying because it spreads via roots, right? So do we, for safety purposes, do we take down, I'm actually thinking of, I would actually behind my house in South Amherst. There's conservation land with red pine on it. So do we take down a decent amount? Do we salvage the red pine, get it out of there because it's going to become a safety issue, you know, and fall down on the trail and potentially hurt somebody? Something like that, I don't know. I'm just shooting from the hip here. I wasn't really thinking through this much, but you know, that might be kind of a, oh, you know, we need to think about how much of this, let's not just take down five, let's take down, you know, 45 and be done with it because we have a contractor in there or something like that. So I don't know if that really fits where you were going, Michelle, or your concern. Yeah, I mean, I feel like red pine sort of a different story because those are all, I don't know if they're non-native, but they're like planted and yeah. So yeah, I guess it's just salvage also entails like some monetary, I think that word means some like monetary outcome. So that was just my concern. I don't really have a big problem with it. I just wanted to make sure that we're all on the same page. Gotcha, okay. That to me, the salvage means that the trees would not have been cut but for some event. And there's lots of room for a decision and management of it. So none of these purposes are defined. And like salvage is not defined, none of them are defined. The following sentence, put some sideboards on salvage where the town is not gonna have timber sales. I don't think that the reason I put that in there is we have so little forest that the timber industry in Western Massachusetts is by no means dependent on nor is it influenced by whatever the town of Amherst can contribute. And our forest looks pretty much like any other neighboring forest. And I think we have an opportunity to do something else with our forest land, which is probably not happening on neighboring forests. So that's why I wrote that. I think Bruce, you have your hand up there too. And I'm sorry, Bruce, go ahead. No worries. Unless I missed it towards the end, I wonder if sometime down the road, we're gonna wanna look at the question of the balance about standing forest versus solar arrays. I've tried to start looking into it. I've read at least part of the report that Mass Audubon did with the Harvard Forest team. I'm trying to get my head around all the different pieces of a pretty thorny question. And I don't know whether adding a section to this is a good idea or it should just be a whole separate thing. I also wondered if there was an opportunity by what mechanism, Dave and Aaron, could we have a conversation with our colleague who is on the Solar By-Loc Committee and might be able to help us think about this without it being something where it's, the open meeting law is problematic in some way. So. What is the question you're trying to address there, Bruce? Trying to figure out if there's something in those land use policy that should talk about the link between forest cutting and solar arrays. So, and maybe it's not the right place for it, but we have a town committee and is trying to write a Solar By-Loc. I don't feel like I know anything about where they are or what they've done. And we have a conservation commissioner who goes to is part of that committee. So I was just trying to learn more before I suggest that we do something. I have a thought on that, but I know Aaron's hand is up. So why don't you jump in there and if that's okay with you, Alex? Yeah, I just had a couple of comments. There was a wild lands and woodlands report which recently came out. It's a regional report from the former director of the Harvard forest. And it's a major push on public lands for, it's basically advocating for wild lands. So a sort of minimal management strategies on public space, public open space. So I just thought that might be an interesting thing for commissioners to refer to. I was involved with the June 6th, 2011 tornado when I worked in Sturbridge and there was a huge salvage free for all that happened after that tornado hit where by state agencies went in and basically clear cut all of the trees that came down during the tornado. And I think it was a little bit overboard, but I will say one comment relative to that is that sometimes during those storm events it does impact the flow of streams or the movement of water which can cause flooding and impact neighbors. And so just to keep that in mind and or if we wanted to have a policy relative to if an incident impacted water flow that that would be considered an emergency because in some cases it can flood roads or cause problems with washouts and things. To Bruce's question as far as solar on conservation lands I don't think that's gonna be much of an issue because typically structures are not permitted on conservation lands. So like lands that are acquired through article 97 or conservation through CPA they're not gonna be permitted to have structures on them under under state law. So I just wanted to mention that and that's all. Go ahead and make a follow up to Aaron's just. So that helps me think about this document and this committee. Does that mean that we're only talking about forest policy on lands that the conservation commission has jurisdiction over? That's our turn. And that goes to the sideboards. Okay, thank you. And that's if I could, Alex that's kind of where I was going prior to Aaron jumping in there is Bruce saying I was kind of distinguishing between what the commission's policy regarding lands they have authority over versus the broader should we be cutting forests on private land in Amherst that's something the commission certainly could weigh in on relative to the solar bylaw working groups draft bylaw which is coming out it should be if it's not out in the public yet it should be out in the public arena before the after Thanksgiving. So certainly the commission could weigh in on that and I might encourage the commission to look at that. So is that policy hit all Bachman's desk yet? I don't know if it has yet or not but it is soon if not it will soon be turned over to Paul. So could I make two other quick comments on anything related to forest cutting and harvesting? I just wanted to put it out there that in the past one thing we have done not extensively but there have been situations where we have actually felled trees on Amherst conservation land and milled them and use them for bridges and boardwalks on Amherst conservation land which I actually think is a really frankly a good use of this is a very small we didn't do a zillion board feet or anything but I just wanted to put it out there that I do think that wood for boardwalks comes from somewhere, right? It has to be shipped. You buy a piece of wood at Home Depot in all likelihood it could have been milled in the U.S. shipped to China and then shipped all the way back with the incredible markup and you buy it again at Home Depot. So I do think this policy should allow for some flexibility there for some sort of modest harvesting by the town to use that timber. I'm thinking of like white oak, particularly white oak, red oak can be very good for boardwalks and things like that. The other thing I just wanted to put out there not to complicate our lives but we do have the black walnut trees at the Fort River Farm that were that I negotiated with the previous owner to leave at the Fort River Farm and someday we have been gently managing those black walnut trees and at some point down the future, in the future they will be worth a decent amount of money and I think we ought to keep that, the opportunity to harvest those black walnut trees as a possibility for income for the town and or the department. Yeah, given the size of those, I've just seen them from a distance. Yep. I doubt you'll be harvesting them in your lifetime. Well, you never know, I have longevity in my family, I'll explain. No, you're talking, yeah, you're probably 25 years from now they could be worth a whole lot of money for the town. I just wanted to put that out there. The other thing is I noticed, I guess this is a question for whoever wrote this or edited this. We haven't talked at all about carbon credits and I noticed there's that one liner in there. Yeah. Put somebody comment on carbon credits and the pros and cons. I wanna get back to Dave's first question. Oh yeah, I like that idea back to the harvesting for onsite, so that's just my two cents real quick because it has a sustainability element to it. The carbon thing and I think Erin was on the concom when this came up first, I think it was Fletcher and Laura who wanted to add this and I don't really know enough about it but they were very cautious about considering this and seemed like it's a very fast developing market that isn't well-regulated all the time and anyway, they had a lot of caution, advise a lot of caution and I think maybe one of them put it in there but Erin, is that what you remember? Yeah, they brought it up and then I did some research on the back end after the question was raised and apparently what a lot of companies will do who need carbon credits, they'll contact cities and towns that have lands that are already preserved and try to purchase the carbon credits from them and the concern there is that it's not really, they're not really purchasing the carbon credits because technically if they're purchasing the carbon credits they should be purchasing the land that's associated with the carbon credits so it's kind of like a almost like a double dipping type situation and I guess a lot of companies are capitalizing on that so that's kind of the back story of how it came up and some of the research I did on it led to that conclusion. I just think we should do, I hear you on that but I think we should do a little more research on that. I'm cautious, very cautious about them but what I have heard is that for instance, municipalities, land trusts have sold carbon credits to companies and then put that money back into land acquisition or a land trust or municipalities so I think that achieves the goal, part of the goal is to protect more land and so anyway, I just like to look into carbon credits a little bit more, I'm very cautious about them, don't get me wrong, I've heard and read some of the very same things as you Erin and others so I know it, yeah. I support maybe reconsidering that if we can put boundaries on it, like it needs to be used for additional land acquisition because we're already saying here that we're not gonna cut our forests so it would seem like double dipping so anyway, that's just where I stand. Gotcha. Thank you, Bruce. We're gonna look into them more so nevermind. Okay, a comment about carbon credits and selling them. When I was working dealing with mitigation, we didn't favor people preserving land that already had good habitat on it because it already exists and they wanted to buy that land which had no threat and call it mitigation, we didn't like that and in terms of buying carbon credits that forest is already storing carbon and by selling the carbon credit allows somebody else to pollute so if we're gonna reconsider it let's consider what it actually does. Yeah, that was a lot of the backstory that I read as well. So going back to the white oak tree or the red oak tree for planks, there is a, in the up in the beginning second sentence it has the word recreation. So you could say that we manage conservation land parcels to meet the objectives one of which is recreation so you could probably work your way into cutting a tree to build a bridge but to get equipment in there to harvest the tree. I mean, I looked into cutting trees on my own property to build my own cabin because of the romance and glamor of the idea and by the time I tried to do that it was cheaper to buy it but if you're gonna go in and cut trees to saw them up from planks on a bridge you have to have access, you have to get it to the mill and so all of that, getting to the tree, getting it out is part of the impact of cutting and if you're gonna do that all of that should go into whether or not to cut those trees to build bridges or saw planks. So what is the, what's the zone of influence? So that trees right next to an existing road and you're gonna take it out anyway, great. But no sense in building a quarter mile access road to get a few trees to help build bridges. No, we would never do that but I'm thinking of Lawrence Swamp is where we did this and there are many, there's a whole myriad of woods roads that are already in Lawrence Swamp but what we did actually in one case was we did, we did saw some timber and some planks but we also, we just felt, I think we felt some maples and we actually built a bridge, a simple bridge over a small stream with the trees themselves. We didn't even cut them, we didn't even saw them up. We harvested them right where they stood and then we basically dragged them and lifted them to the stream and installed a very simple crossing there. So those are the kinds of situations. I would just, I always like to add the word passive recreation into these. Does anybody have a problem with that? Because I just know future generations and current generations, when they read recreation in any conservation related thing, I interpret that as, could be active recreation. So I always like to passive to me says trails and hiking and running and not soccer fields and playgrounds and jungle gyms but maybe that's my own background. comments, Michelle, Bruce, Michelle. Bruce is first, go ahead. Just I want to remind all ourselves this is a policy document and we can, we should have language and simply says that a commission would have to authorize any cutting plan for the conservation land that they have to be a full report outlining all the details of the stuff we've mentioned in this conversation and try to keep it so we're not adding too much detail to the document. Michelle. I just wanted to say that can we add passive recreation to our word list or glossary? And Karen, are you taking notes on this or should I write that down or what's our process? I do think we should specify it but also just say what exactly it is. I don't have a problem with adding passive next to recreation, but we don't describe education. We don't describe habitat management. We don't describe anything. There aren't any adjective. Well, we've got ecological restoration. I don't have a problem with putting passive in and I'd like the idea of putting in the glossary and I can add a regulatory type sentence but I noticed that we're at 36 minutes past the hour and I do want to give time to Michelle and Bruce and I'm happy to move this along if we can make the changes and come back that might save time during this meeting. Any comments? I feel like Alex has done really good work. We should have a clean version for the next time that has only the remaining questions that are in his mind still undecided. I do think we should add a terms, defined terms page to the document but I think we should wait until the end and maybe go through and highlight those and add them one at a time but I'm completely fine with adding those and I do kind of take notes during these meetings as well. Yeah, okay. I favor doing it as they come up, that way you don't forget but that's a small point. I can clean version. This version came out in August. You'll notice that it has a date in the front. I wanted to have a discussion on file naming because frankly, I had trouble finding this and I had to go back to the email that I sent it to Aaron and were to find it but that's a whole nother topic and I'm getting lost in the various versions. So, so far we have all comments, all changes preserved in what we're working on and what Bruce has suggested is having a clean version to work from. I need- It feels like we've gotten far enough along on this one that we're ready for that to me. Okay, so your comment was about forest management. For this section. Yeah, okay, I'm fine with that. Okay, if we're done with that, I want, we're halfway through and Michelle hasn't had a chance to say anything about her work nor is Bruce. So, I'm gonna cut off here and hand it over to either one who wants to go next. You can go ahead, Bruce. Okay, can I, am I able to share my screen? You should be able to, Bruce. Yeah, there we go. Okay, we worked on this in a previous meeting. So, this is general rules and regulations. I took, prior to the time we actually looked at it this way, I took the old one, I reorganized it and then I let what I felt like I left a few questions. You can see that there's a, in this case, I had a comment about what Michelle had done and I wasn't sure what it meant. And I'm just gonna scroll down to show the structure. And then Alex and Erin made a comment about designated trails. We talked about having an appending, the map and the appendix. In this section right here about watercraft, there was a modestly long discussion and this is my understanding of where we ended up, except for the mispronouncing of, that's wrong. The news, sorry about that. And then I think the only other thing that is still in here that we had last time for some reason in my notes, I underlined this and I don't know why I did that, but if someone can say whether they just like it or like it or we'll go from there. But that's sort of where we ended up. So I believe we're pretty close to a revised version of this section that could be incorporated into a complete version that the commission could look at once we solve some of these little things. Yeah, there was also comments about hunting. Hunting, let's see, where is the hunting part? It's up above. Worth is hunting, fishing and hunting. Fishing and hunting, yeah. So I made a comment, you might recall that given our definition of our mission, first word is protect and hunting doesn't protect anything. So, and I also looked at where people can hunt. It's on the mass, the Amherst website identifies all kinds of places people can hunt and there's a whole discussion to be had on where the boundaries are for Lawrence Swamp and how does somebody know they're on one parcel and another. But anyways, my basic point was that hunting appears to be contrary to the mission that we state very early in this document. Remember, we talked about catch and release fishing and then Aaron commented that they'd have to, we'd have to post all the land where hunting is not permitted but not all conservation land allows hunting only certain parcels. And I don't know if the parcels where no hunting is allowed are posted. So you can go to the town website and look up where you can hunt. Holyoke range, well, it's not the entire range. It's only Amherst conservation area that we're talking about and so on. So that's a fairly complicated issue and something that warrants some discussion, I think before we go back to the best of the body. Okay, is that so for you, do you wanna put that on the agenda for the next time as a concentrated 15 minute discussion? Sure. Okay, I'm fine with that. Michelle? I think there's another thing that we should probably take some time with which is the dogs, the rules around dogs. I don't know if we reviewed it or if we kicked the can on that one. I kind of feel like we- Thanks a lot. Yeah, just my comment is that we might wanna spend a little time on this section. I don't know, yeah, the hunting is, anyway, that was kind of my own, I don't know where you wanna start with it, but ready. Dave's comment when we brought that up is do we really wanna bring that topic up? Can I jump in, Alex? I think the dog conversation and the hunting conversation, I think in my mind, this is the time, this is the group and this is the time to bring these up and wrestle with them in depth because as you mentioned, is that gonna go, Alex? But you said before we bring it to the larger body. So I think this is the group, this is the arena, this is the space we need to really dig into these issues, have robust conversations, agree, agree to disagree, because I think once we bring them to the larger body, because ultimately this policy needs to come to a vote, that's when the proverbial rubber hits the road or whatever. So, and dogs and hunting are really hot button issues in this town, but also in this valley. So I agree, we should dig a little deeper on both of these. I would just add, I agree with the Alex, looking at hunting and fishing, there's some interesting complexities there, frankly, you couldn't even be consistent with fishing unless you made it all catch and release, right? You can't have a put and take fishery as we do, for instance, at Puffer's pond, we'd have to change that to put and, excuse me, catch and release. But on dogs, I quickly skimmed this and one thing that came to mind, the last bullet, dog handlers must bag and pick up their dog's feces, blah, blah, blah. It occurred to me that I'd like to have a deeper conversation. I'm not sure why we allow dog walkers and dog handlers, they're essentially profiting by using this public space. And so I don't know, that's an intriguing dog walkers, we have some of the most intense and consistent problems with dog walkers on down conservation land. So it occurs to me like, I'd love to have that conversation in a deeper way. Anyway, I'll stop there, but I agree with Michelle. And I suggest that we have an entire hour on dogs and we'll probably eat up a better part of an hour on hunting. And Dave, just so that you know, I did get on the web and looked up the maps for every single place where hunting is allowed. And I don't know if the boundaries are flagged in the woods, whether I would know when I'm on swamp land or those categories of forests that are right next to it. And you know, if somebody is gonna, there's a, from a public standpoint, there's a huge difference between somebody bow hunting, which is quiet and somebody using a black powder rifle, which is allowed in Massachusetts, within 500 feet of a residence, I think people would go ballistic if they had somebody in a deer stand within 500 feet of their house blasting away at dawn. So that's just part of that discussion. Yeah, it's complex, we should spend an hour on it. Yeah, I don't wanna, I wanna, I've done enough for this for right now, I think. And let's go to Michelle so that we know by the end of the hour, where we all are. We're catching up, we're catching up. We're gonna- Can I just ask a question back to Watercraft? Cause I got confused reading this, but just to clarify, Bruce, do you think you could just scroll up to it? Is motorized boats allowed anywhere? Like I'm just wondering why we're specifying two places. Like it kind of leads me to be like, well, where can I bring a motorized boat? Should we just have a period there, or are there actual places where you could have a motorized boat, motorized waterfront? Well, this is just where we ended up after the last conversation. Well, if you wanna scratch the places, it might just, as long as that's actually what we mean. Well, I'll just leave it in for now, we'll come back like that and then we'll come back to it. Okay, and I think, Dave, to your point about the professional dog walkers, I've seen like limits on number of dogs and if they are over that, maybe sometimes they need a permit or it's just not allowed, but I can maybe just do some Googling and see what other places do. That sounds good. Yeah, it just struck me that you have a commercial venture using our, and we generally frown on commercial ventures using public land. So. Do we have professional dog walkers in town? Yes, we do. There's a lot of dogs in this town. They actually come to Amherst Conservation Land from other towns as far away as Brattleboro, Vermont. Wow. There is one dog walker who lives in Brattleboro, but their business is Amherst based and they have been observed walking five to seven dogs at once off and on leash. So yeah, very consistently. So yeah, more on that. Okay. Well, we'll have a. I'm withdrawing my sharing. Yeah, Michelle, let's hear about the work that you did if you're ready. You're on mute. I don't have anything ready to put on my screen. Do you have a version with my edits that you could put up? That would have to be Aaron. Okay. I can look. I think it was their research on public lands. Yeah. I think you've covered that before. Okay. Well, then I don't know. It's been a while since we revisited this. Was there somebody going to cover agriculture? Bruce, was that you? No, I haven't started. Okay. That's been a couple of weeks. And then Michelle, you had another topic. Yeah. So I could ask questions for guidance because that is something I wanted to do. So my big topic was like managing like for climate change and sustainability. And I had a couple of ideas. So one is I found a list in the open space and management plan of all of our properties. And I've asked some biologists for advice on how to approach this, but I think having some kind of, not necessarily a database, but just a table of what habitats we have and what species are present might be useful and sort of guiding where our efforts could be. And then like for sensitive species, looking into their recommended, like state recommended climate management criteria or habitat management criteria. So that was my idea. And before I dove down into it, which I could do this Thanksgiving break, I just wanted to know if that's a worthwhile thing. And if so, like what kind of columns would you guys think would be useful to have on this table with the associated properties that Amherst holds? Are you talking plants? Hold on, Bruce. Are you talking plants? I'm like more like forest, early successional grassland. And maybe, you know, like is it mode? Or like, you know, it doesn't have public trails. Is it what's the purpose? Is it for wetland? There's no public access. I mean, watershed, is there no public access? Like some basic criteria to sort of get a sense of what we're even talking about managing. Cause that's something I feel like I need to see before I dive down, like what to do. Okay. Bruce. I went through all my remarks earlier. I have a whole agricultural thing that's gone through a couple of meetings and I could show it now or save it to the next time. Okay. Dave. I'm just commenting, responding to Michelle and I'm curious if Erin wanted to weigh in. So I guess my first response, Michelle, is yes. I think we need, we have never had that in my tenure nor the tenure of the previous conservation director. Have we really had that level of detailed approach to land management clearly 20, 30, 40 years ago climate change was not where it is today on our horizon and one of our layers of consideration. But as you were speaking, I was thinking, now again, cost, time, resources are everybody's concern here. We don't have unlimited resources. So how do we get to that level of information that we need to guide us moving forward? So I started to think about, well, what are those, what is the natural heritage information that we have on Amherst and the land that we manage and adjacent land? So rare and endangered species information, obviously with that climate resiliency lens, you mentioned the habitat types that we currently manage for. And really, we don't do any forest management to speak of. So it's mainly early successional habitat. And then thinking of like other layers that we can mine from bio map, what is it, caps, right? You know, Scott Jackson's work and all of that to really say, okay, where are those special places in Amherst? Cause it's not all special, right? Alex, you said this earlier. A lot of it is just, hey, we got a lot of that. We got a lot of that. It's kind of like that, you know? But there are rare and endangered species in Amherst and many of them may be the first ones to be in trouble. Maybe they already are. I'm thinking terrestrial turtles has a great example. Where are they? Where are those, where are our box turtles? Where are our wood turtles, roughly speaking, you know? And how are we managing those fields and forests where those two species occur? Because they are terrestrial, they are impacted by trails, other activity, mowing and all that. And again, there's many other species besides terrestrial turtles and our plants, et cetera. So anyway, I think it's a great way to go and I would welcome your investigation with folks in the field. Sure, I can start that. And one other idea I had about tying into this is if we knew some kind of acreage or general acreage for what is mowed, there's definitely ways to sort of figure out carbon emissions from certain like vehicles mowers. And you could get a very rough idea of what is happening right now and how much we could dial it back and sort of like get a carbon emission savings just from small changes in the management regime for certain fields and stuff. So that's... We can do that on GIS. We can figure out how many fields we mow. We don't mow them all annually, but we know how many we are trying to mow. And then we can tease out, like you said, the carbon usage on diesel and gas. Yeah, it would be kind of a cool contribution to the town's climate initiatives and goals I thought. But anyway, I just wanted to open this up if you guys had any ideas about what components to include in this kind of summary. So there's my idea. So just the general comment, hold on Bruce, I'll get right to you. But if you're gonna... I asked you, are you talking plants as opposed to plants and animals? If you're gonna do plants and animals, you will never finish. Well, I'm not gonna do plants, just habitat types. So early successional or young meadow wetlands, like general standard habitat types. Okay, Bruce. And special status plants and animals. That's it. That's how I would do it. Because yes, it would have to be manageable for sure. So something to look into, maybe it would be helpful. I know that the University of New Hampshire has a sustainability internship program where people, someone might want to be able to come and gather all this information for us by working with the town databases and such. But we can look into that offline. Michelle, would you, in the forestry thing, the last sentence has to do with creating an inventory. And I don't know if there's any kind of an inventory for habitat types now. I suspect not. But could that be done with just off of GIS, Dave? I would defer to Erin and Michelle on that. Yeah, I can do that. It's a rough, you know, I don't know what the resolution is, but that's not too difficult. Well, I shouldn't say that. It's always more difficult than I think it's, yeah. Everything takes three times longer than you think. I guess it's, yeah, I could talk to Erin about it. It's basically like what kind of data is available to work with, like if we have polygons of all of the properties and I mean, yeah, I'd have to put some thought in it. But in theory, I'd like to have some sense of what the habitats are and how many acres we have to manage or hold, like how much forest do we actually have? And like, what does that represent Amherst? And that's sort of the vague outline. And maybe, you know, if I get this done, I could send sort of a draft so you can see what I'm talking about, just maybe do a couple of properties and I can have a sense of what the undertaking is and maybe what useful components it would be. So the GIS folks can probably put the layers on to isolate conservation land and help you out in defining those properties and do it fairly quickly. We already have all the properties defined and Erin is a GIS expert. So Erin, do you wanna weigh in? Yeah, I mean, I don't know how like sort of granular you wanna get with this. I've sort of envisioned that you're talking more landscape scale, but like, I think what would be really helpful is for example, Michelle, if you wanted to like sift through the mass GIS layers and say these are the layers that I think would provide the most necessary information to do this analysis. And then I can check in. We have a GIS coordinator for the town. So, you know, there's the potential that we could get those layers downloaded and actually like clip those layers to our conservation lands so that we could get, I mean, there are ways to do this that are not manual, right? There, you know, we can use the existing data to sort of extract what we're looking for. And if we did that, then it would be something that maybe Mike Warner, our GIS coordinator could do. I just wanna, like I would love for the, Michelle, if you wanna take it on, absolutely. If you have limited time and you want like some backup support, that's also an option. So I just wanna make sure that you know that we're here to, you know, provide that backup support if there are ways you can guide what you're looking for just let me know and we can try to get that together for you. Great, that's awesome. Yeah, I guess I just wanted to bring it to the group and then I'm gonna like do something very quickly to get a sense of what it would take and what Erin says is what kind of data layers I want. And then maybe I'll just come back with a better understanding next time of what this is and something to show you. I do have to go though, but. Yeah, well, don't let the perfect get in the way of the good. Try, still hasn't used it. So we're out of time and Erin, can you tell us when our next meeting is? Yes, and then before we go, I just wanna have an idea of what we're gonna do. We've got several suggestions on how to use time and we've got items that we've all worked on that haven't been finished in terms of our review. Well, so we would ordinarily be on for the 5th and 19th of December, but I have them whiteed out on my calendar for some reason, which I don't know if we had previously canceled those or decided not to meet in December or. I can do them. Okay. I do have to go, so is there a way that I can go? Can we do the 5th? Yeah. Yes. Okay, so we're gonna meet on the 5th and just real quick, I would like to get caught up on things that people have already worked on before we dive into dogs and before we dive into... I'll have agriculture. Okay. Okay, talk agriculture. So agriculture, we're gonna hear from Michelle with something and we'll get back to community gardens. Okay. Great. All right, nice to see you guys. Thank you, Alex. Thank you. Thank you. Bye-bye. Happy Thanksgiving. Yes. You too. Thank you. Feel better, Michelle. Bye-bye. Bye, everyone.