Attendance: Jim Murphy, David Leff, Richard Hyde, Nancy Murray, Stacey Kingsbury, Steve Broderick, Charlotte Pyle, Kent Holsinger, Eric Schultz, Chris Maier, Dave Wagner, Les Mehrhoff, Ken Metzler, Juliana Barrett, Judy Preston, John Scull, Peter Patton
Next Step Recommendations:
Beginning List of Needs List of Needs
Atlas/Inventory Work - A statewide census of a group at a particular point in time Information needs: temporal, habitat, distribution
Need better understanding of the role of peripheral populations in biodiversity conservation in Connecticut. Monitoring peripheral populations is key, and this needs to be site specific. This is a resource allocation issue. Need to know what percentage of the Connecticut species list represents peripheral populations (For plants, the % is fairly high, representing species at their northern or southern limits).
Still need to answer: What endpoint are we aiming for? Pre-settlement, etc. Need landscape perspective - pre and post settlement. A diversity of habitat types may be best (keep a little bit of everything). Importance of regional perspective to conservation of species. State legislation dictates a state emphasis.
How might we add homeowners to the list of participants of this group? Three quarters of a million acres in Connecticut in private ownership - need to get information (interpreted) about rare species/communities to a larger audience. There's a value/need for understandable community classification work.
GIS - presentation by John Scull, DEP Natural Resources Center, concerning state Natural Resources Mapping project being done in conjunction with EPA. Gave overview of state's objectives and capabilities. This project is finite, but has applications elsewhere. Point was made that municipalities increasingly using GIS -- what efforts are being made to consolidate this information? There is a question of scale; municipal open space inventories are available, however these are not detailed enough for natural community work. GIS can be an ideal tool for identification of unfragmented land in the state, particularly as it relates to forest interior birds and some larger mammals.
We know what to protect (for the most part); we need to grapple with some of the tougher questions, such as peripheral populations, management issues (phragmites as example), education/outreach. Need for more information exists, but cannot be paralyzed to act. Management is key.
Importance of "process" protection - large areas, landscape types for migratory amphibians, wood turtles, spotted turtles, forest birds, goshawks, for example. Early successional species, in particular are disappearing most rapidly. Prairie species need mosaic types (variety of management/successional stages). Need for a large enough area to allow process. Advocacy of landscape protection to preserve full community of forest stages. Need 500 acres or more to encompass process -- is it worth it? What do we do about size in Connecticut? Perhaps rarest element in Connecticut is large, unfragmented tracts. Have to do both - look at small habitats and species as well. If you use insects as barometers, large unfragmented areas are not important. Variation is what's important; a mosaic. Beaver Pond Club Tail (dragonfly) needs beaver ponds -- appeared in state for the first time in 1995. Large scale land protection means don't have to be as concerned by environmental change (such as beavers); it allows flexibility.
There was consensus that this gathering could provide advice to any organization or agency that requests it on issues concerning biodiversity conservation in the state. It should be formalized, with a list of participants and representative groups. This group should be named, and available (to the state legislature, for example) to provide recommendations on issues concerning biological diversity in the state of Connecticut and as an advisory group that can be referenced in research proposals.
Potential roles for this Biodiversity group include:
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