Located in picturesque Petersham, Massachusetts, the Harvard Forest has served as Harvard University’s rural laboratory and classroom for ecology and conservation since 1907. The Forest is comprised of 3,750 acres of forests, ponds, streams, wetlands, and agricultural fields providing diverse natural ecosystems and cultural landscapes for study and enjoyment, and is one of the country’s oldest intensively researched landscapes.
The Forest is protected from development and operates under a long-term management plan designating specific areas for active forest management, long-term scientific experiments, and reserves. Since the Forest’s founding, its researchers have been pioneers in applying the lessons from human and natural history to the interpretation, conservation, and stewardship of landscapes. Harvard Forest scholars collaborate with conservation organizations and state and federal agencies to protect land locally, regionally, and globally. The Forest is home to the fisher Museum, which contains the world-renowned dioramas depicting the history of landscape changes in New England since colonial settlement.
On Thursday, April 10, from 11 – 2, the Ecological Landscape Alliance will conduct a tour of the Harvard Forest. After exploring the dioramas in the Fisher Museum, you will go on a 1.5 mile hike to explore mixed deciduous forests, a pre-colonial hemlock stand and black gum swamp, with nearly 300 years of well-documented human land-use. You will see a long-term deer and moose browsing experiment in a recently harvested red pine plantation, hydrology weirs that monitor headwater streams leading to the Quabbin Reservoir, a 90′ research tower that continuously measures carbon exchange between the atmosphere and the Forest, a 20 year old soil warming experiment that shows how warming the soil by just 5 degrees greatly impacts the Forest ecosystem, and the “mega-plot,” an 85 acre plot within a global array of tropical and temperate forests in the Smithsonian Global Earth Observatory, in which every tree over 1cm in diameter is mapped, tagged, and measured at 5-year intervals.
The tour will be led by Audrey Barker-Plotkin, licensed forester, and by Clarisse Hart, education manager. Both guides are also ecologists by training. $20 ELA members, $25 nonmembers. Register online at https://www.eventville.com/catalog/eventregistration1.asp?eventid=1010955 or call 617-436-5838.
