Strategic Plan 2014-2018

Goals of the Vermont Monitoring Cooperative

Figure 7. FPR Commissioner, Michael Snyder, speaking at the 2013 VMC Annual Conference.

Figure 8. Audience listening to keynote speaker, Jon Erickson’s, presentation at the 2013 VMC Annual Conference.

For 25 years the VMC has filled an essential niche by providing long-term, reliable and professional coordination of monitoring and research activities in Vermont across federal, state and private-sector agencies, organizations and institutions. No other entity in Vermont has shown the commitment and desire or has maintained the necessary funding to perform this service over so many years. In today’s funding environment it is more important than ever to minimize duplication and try to leverage available funding to provide the data and information necessary to inform policy and management decisions affecting Vermont’s forested landscape. Through its annual meeting, website, workshops, newsletters and other information outlets, VMC consistently provides important information about Vermont’s forested landscape to land/resource managers, decision-makers, cooperators/researchers and the public.

Figure 9. VMC data are available for reference, reuse or incorporation into new research and monitoring activities.

Figure 10. Working with partners, key data are archived beyond the life of individual projects.

Our cooperators and stakeholders alike have universally said that post-collection data analyses, synthesis and reporting are value-added services that the VMC might provide that would allow them to do their jobs better. Local NA State and Private Forestry partners have echoed these sentiments as a way to demonstrate the need and value of continuing federal funding for the VMC. It was also suggested that comparing VMC data to other sites in the region (i.e. Hubbard Brook, Harvard Forest, etc.) would give a broader context and application to VMC data and at the same time possibly help raise regional and national visibility for the organization.

The VMC has periodically produced integrated data summaries or synthesis reports, including a Data Integration Pilot Project (Martin et al., 1994), an Ecological Data Integration (Martin, 1998) project, a study of atmospheric mercury in Vermont and New England (Burkins et al., 2009), and a synthesis of the first 20 years of VMC monitoring data (VMC, 2009). However, VMC has not been consistent in allocating staff time and resources for these ventures.

The 2009 Vermont’s Changing Forests (VMC, 2009) report may present an effective model for producing some future reports. During this endeavor the VMC acted as the coordinating organization that brought together like-minded cooperators interested in working on the report, and paid for some of their time to do data analyses and integration, and actual writing of chapters for the report.

Figure 10. Meteorological monitoring equipment installed on Diamond Island in Lake Champlain.

Figure 12. Measuring the diameter of trees on permanent forest health monitoring plots.

The Vermont Monitoring Cooperative was founded on the premise that a commitment to long-term environmental monitoring and research is essential to collecting baseline data needed to detect changes in conditions and trends and help identify new threats to our forested ecosystems. Long-term environmental monitoring has been a hallmark of the VMC for the past 25 years. No other environmental entity or organization in Vermont has made the commitment to or had the history and continued funding to support monitoring and research projects over this duration.

These long-term data records have allowed our cooperators to detect changes in trends for bird, amphibian and reptile populations, changes is forest tree species distributions and growth rates and to track changes in water chemistry of our lakes and streams. From these data researchers were able to show that much of Vermont’s air pollution (sulfate, nitrate and mercury) was transported to Vermont on air masses originating in the mid-west and south, and these pollutants could even be traced back to specific sources at mid-western coal-fired electrical generating plants.

It is imperative that these long-term records continue, and without an LTER or major Experimental Forest in VT, the VMC and its infrastructure are the logical choice to provide support for and coordination of these important data collections and also provide secure archiving and widespread distribution of the data.

Connections to Partnering Organizations

The Vermont Monitoring Cooperative is designed to service the needs of a wide array of partners, and the table below (summarize how each activity meets the various goals and objectives of major partners and contributors to the VMC. The partnering organization’s strategies, goals and activities are identified by numbers or letters, and are defined in Appendix D.