Now available! Maps showing conservation lands and how these are managed (wild, recreational, for timber, etc.) for all six New England states, upstate New York and the Canadian regions of Quebec, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island.
Several studies in the western U.S. and in the Berkshires of Massachusetts revealed a pattern of land conservation located in high elevation mountainous terrain. Conservation science indicates that we need to protect a full complement of community types and species along an elevational gradient, in areas large enough to be ecologically meaningful given migration, natural disturbance, climate change and other factors. SWT sought to look at conservation in northern New England to ascertain whether land conservation here adequately protects species richness in the richer soils and milder climates of the mid and lower elevations.
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In 1999, SWT worked with The Nature Conservancy and the Spatial Analysis Laboratory of the University of Vermont to explore whether this biased pattern of habitat protection—protecting mountain tops more than other elevations—occurred in Vermont and New Hampshire as well. We also wanted to look at species distribution according to elevation. We compared known element occurrences (rare species or natural communities as a quantifiable way to look at species richness) and the % of land protected by elevation. From the results, it appears that this pattern—of conservation in high elevations, resource extraction in mid-elevations, and higher-density human development and habitat fragmentation in low elevations—does indeed occur in New Hampshire and Vermont.
The graph above illustrates the inverse relationship between the numbers of species and the amount of protected land by elevation. The idea of using a mountain to illustrate this relationship was adopted from the Berkshires chart in Our Irreplaceable Heritage, Protecting Biodiversity in Massachusetts; Barbour, Simmons, Swain and Woolsey; 1998.
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