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Track: Field Trip
Stacy McNulty
Adirondack Ecological Center, SUNY ESF Adirondack Ecological Center
Newcomb, NY, USA
The theme of this trip is The Great Experiment in Conservation. We will take you deep into the heart of the 2.4-million-hectare Adirondack Park in Upstate New York on historically Abenaki and Haudenosaunee homeland. The park is a blended landscape of public and private lands, protected wild space, industry, recreation centers and villages. Although wolves and cougars were extirpated, moose have naturally recolonized the Adirondacks, and predators like fisher, marten and coyote abound. The trip purpose is to explore lessons in ecosystem resilience, wilderness management, conservation, and long-term scientific study of forest, wetland and climate change.
The Adirondack Ecological Center (AEC) at Huntington Wildlife Forest (HWF) is a mountainous, 6,000 ha field research station. Our purpose is to explore HWF at the center of the largest intact wild space east of the Rockies. HWF contains natural and managed forested watersheds and supports a century of scientific observation and experimentation.
On our virtual tour we’ll walk through an unmanaged, old-growth forest to look for mosses, invertebrate and fungal symbioses. We’ll dive beneath the surface of a vernal pool, where amphibians race to develop as the water draws down. We’ll paddle a pristine lake amid the echoing calls of loons. We’ll visit a harvested forest where black bears seek out raspberries amid new growth in research plots. We’ll talk to scientists about land management, planning and policy and the interconnections of people and place.
HWF is operated by the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry.