Community Outreach

HBRF is committed to promoting the understanding and stewardship of ecosystems through scientific research, long-term monitoring and education, as well as to developing new initiatives that link ecosystem science with public policy. Our work with the community at large is integral to achieving these goals. We interact with the general public via tours and various applied projects, as described below.

Tours

In addition to our major, student-focused efforts, the site conducts numerous tours and interpretations for visiting general and professional audiences.  In the last year these have included:  The New Hampshire Fisheries Council; The New England Forestry Foundation, The New England-St. Lawrence Valley Geography meeting (Nestval), and a group of regional silviculturists. Please contact Jackie Wilson (jwilson@hbresearchfoundation.org) if interested. If you are interested in bringing a student group for a tour, please visit our Student Tourspage.

Poultney Woodshed Project

The Poultney Woodshed Project is a collaborative effort between HBRF and Green Mountain College to develop a plan to fuel the College’s new biomass facility from local sources of sustainably harvested woodchips. The partners will seek to secure woodchips harvested from privately owned forestlands located relatively close to Poultney, Vermont. If successful, this project will produce carbon savings resulting from lower transportation distances for woodchips and support the local economy by engaging traditional stewards of the forest: landowners, foresters, loggers, chippers and truckers.

“HBRF is looking to implement over 50 years of information on climate change and forestry sustainability in collaboration with a biomass facility that burns woodchips for heat and electricity,” said David Sleeper, executive director, who called it “a demonstration project.” Read full article here.

HBRF’s involvement came out of a 2009 Hubbard Brook Roundtable that sought to create a blueprint for a thriving wood fuel marketplace at the local scale in the Northern Forest Region, that helps increase the efficient use of low-quality wood for fuel, while also promoting sustainable forestry practices. Follow this link to read Carbon and Communities white paper, a white paper published on the meeting’s findings.

Northern Forest Watershed Services Project (NFWS)

In recent years, many academic economists and ecologists have focused on ecosystem services: services provided by functioning ecosystems that benefit humans and human societies, such as the provision of clean air, clean water, clean soil, and nourishing food. The economic value of ecosystem services has been estimated at trillions of dollars annually. Payment for ecosystem services schemes, while still experimental in nature, are considered by many to be the next generation of powerful incentive tools in the conservation finance toolkit, offering landowners a new suite of options for generating additional revenue for their land while at the same time providing a critical service to the community – services that heretofore have been provided for free.

With this is mind, HBRF, in association with four other non-profit organizations, has developed an initiative to create an innovative and replicable market-based model to incentivize private forest landowners to restore, enhance, and protect aquatic resources in critical watersheds in the Connecticut River Valley of New Hampshire and Vermont. This effort is intended as a three-year demonstration project that will be evaluated for possible continuation and/or expansion to other parts of the Northern Forest region.

Of the multitude of services forests provide – including wood products, wildlife habitat, carbon sequestration, recreational and aesthetic resources – watershed services are widely recognized as the most critical. Clean, reliable water is becoming increasingly scarce in many parts of the country because of climate change and development pressures that affect water quantity and quality. Now more than ever, new strategies to protect water sources and services are needed. The main goals of the NFWS initiative are 1) to identify and prioritize key watershed services in the region; 2) to use watershed research conducted at the Hubbard Brook Ecosystem Study and other sites to develop sound management practices for the targeted services; and 3) to develop market-based approaches to ensure these resources are available for future generationsC