[CT Birds] History of the [Connecticut] Forest

[COMINS, Patrick]

Steve:
        Thanks for this insight.  David Foster is a great mind and I highly recommend seeing him give a talk if you ever have an opportunity.  You can watch a streaming video of a presentation he gave at Connecticut College last year in an event that Audubon and other CT environmental groups helped the College put together:
http://www.conncoll.edu/ccrec/greennet/ccbes/bio-diversity/Foster.html

(also a great talk on Piping Plovers by Scott Hecker, Audubon's former director of costal waterbird conservation and a talk on forest block size by Mark Anderson of TNC and many other great presentations available on-line).

Speaking of Dr. Foster, a great project that they are working on in Mass is the Mass Wildlands and Woodlands Project.  A brochure on the project can be found here, along with a graph that shows the amount of forested land over time in each of the New England states.  Note that the overall amount of forest has been in decline in CT, MA and RI since ~1950.
http://harvardforest.fas.harvard.edu/wandw/HF_wandw.pdf (graph is Figure 1 on page 3).

Another great resource on forest trends in Connecticut is the Center for Landuse Education and Research at UCONN:
http://clear.uconn.edu/projects/landscape/forest_frag.htm

Of great concern to me and others is the rapid loss of forest interior habitat in the state over the last ~20 years.  Sorry if I sound like a broken record here, but the loss of forest interior habitat has greatly outpaced the overall loss of forested habitat.  James Hurd Jr. did an analysis recently (and the results greatly depend on how you define forest interior habitat), but in the period of 1985-2002, Connecticut has lost
1 forest interior block in excess of 5000 acres (6 down to 5).
5 forest interior blocks in the 2,500-5,000 acre range (30-25).
Over 100 forest interior blocks in the 500-2,500 acre range (511-408).
It is not until you get into the <100 acre class that the number of forest blocks have increased.

This all translates to a 13.25% loss of forest interior habitat over this time period and 245 square miles of forest interior habitat converted to other forest classes in just 17 years.  Of course again this really depends on how you define "forest interior", but no matter how you define it, it is still pretty ugly in all of the analysis I have seen.



Patrick Comins, Meriden.