Documenting Five Years of Change to a Forest Preserve in Southwestern CT
The use of permanent vegetation plots to understand long-term changes to forests wrought by disturbances such as climate change, mammalian herbivory, and the spread of non-native plants and forest pathogens, is one of the simplest, most powerful, and yet under-utilized tools for documenting environmental change. Long-term data on forest change is extremely valuable for conservation, management, and policy decisions at a local and regional scale.
Highstead, a 150 acre woodland preserve in southwestern CT established and sampled a grid of permanent forest plots across its preserve in 2004 and will resample them in the summer of 2009. During this 5 year span, deer browsing has been intensive, the ash decline has been afflicting overstory white ash trees, and a suite of invasive plant species have continued to abound across a large area of the preserve. However, it is unclear how extensive and rapid the mortality of ash has been, how much more abundant or widespread invasive plants have become, or whether declines in biodiversity have occurred as a result of deer grazing. Two summer interns will gain extensive experience with plant identification and the sampling of herbaceous and woody vegetation in a wide range of forest types and have the opportunity to examine changes that have taken place over the 5 year span.
