Meeting transcript
Conservation Commission - Regular Meeting
April 27, 2021 · Watch on YouTube · All meetings
We can get this. Okay, so just so folks are aware we're officially recording the presentation part of this session. Let me we already made the introductions. Let me give a just a quick overview before I turn it over to Olivia or to Giuliana The I think as folks remember that this project, the vertical mapping project is really a joint initiative between the Inland Wetland Commission and the Conservation Commission was originally brought to our attention by Megan Lolly on the Inland Wetland Commission and then we contacted Juliana and Bruce and had some good meetings and and through that put together the the plan that's that's that you'll hear about tonight, the project that you'll hear about tonight.
It's so that it is a direct partnership between the Town Of Andover's commissions and the University of Connecticut's climate core municipal assistance program. You'll hear briefly about those as that program as well. But I do want to remind folks that this is also a project that it's not a standalone, it is part of a larger natural resource inventory and mapping project that the Conservation Commission is undertaking to map its resources to guides conservation planning, leading up to the revision of our 2025 plan of conservation and development, of which we're sort of well on the way to now. So with that, I'm going to turn turn the mic over to Juliana to say a few words about the climate corps program. Great. Thank you, Hank. So as Hank said,
Bruce and I co teach the climate core at Yukon. It is set up to be, it's a fall semester traditional academic course so students learn about the indicators, impacts of climate change. We try to bring it down to the local level, what's going on in Connecticut. We talk about how municipal government works and sort of, you know, try to provide an overview of climate change here in the state. And then the students have the option to participate in a second semester independent study where they work with either on a research project or with a community partner to sort of apply all that knowledge that they've learned in the first semester and help communities in Connecticut move forward on climate change adaptation. We're part of a bigger program which is the UConn Environment Corps
which includes a stormwater corps and a brownfield corps which work exactly the same way in terms of having an academic course followed by an independent study. So keep us in mind, website is there, know, thinking about more climate related projects, stormwater projects or a brownfield project and you can work with students again. So one thing, so Tao is going to speak next. Tao has been our teaching assistant and just done a phenomenal job with all the students this semester and I just wanted to give a huge shout out to Hank and thank him. He has met with the students every week
which is above and beyond what anyone else has ever done in terms of being our community partner. So thank you Hank and with that I'll pass it on to Tao.
Okay. Thank you, Juliana, for your introduction. And I'm the teaching assistant of this course. And I would like to give, I'm just to provide the technical support for this course, and I would like to give a brief introduction to ArcGIS online it's a very simple and a very powerful tool to connect the people location the data together and work together remotely. For whole this semester we use ArcGIS online to create the interactive maps and find the authoritative data. Like I did this map very quickly. You can see the, you can find any layers you want, tons of layers online, like the cities, the data, and you can create your own features, some points, polygons, you can analyze them, monitor them. And the most important thing is to collaborate with each other. So through all this semester, we collaborate together and we work on the same map or work individually and combine them together. So it's very powerful work in powerful software to let us work remotely and efficiently. Okay, I'm gonna hand it to Olivia. Thanks.
Hi everyone. So before we start jumping into the project, just wanted to do some quick introductions. So my name is Olivia Lemieux. I'm currently a junior here at UConn studying environmental science and ecology and evolutionary biology. And in terms of future career interests, I'm not entirely settled yet. I do plan on going to grad school, but my main interests include plant ecology and how that could be related to environmental solutions. So I'd love to be doing research in that field. And I wanted to get involved with this project first off, because I wanted to expand upon the knowledge I gained in Climate Core. I really enjoyed that class and wanted to take it further. And I also wanted to see what it could be like to pursue a career, what it's like to work in the environmental field. And then I just think the ecology of vernal pools is fascinating. So that was definitely a bonus. Thank you.
Hello my name is Gregory Roberts. I'm also a junior at UConn and I'm studying environmental engineering. My future career and interests are water and or pollution management, either municipalities or working for the overall government. Then I sought out this experience because I believe that conservation is helpful and key to us living co with the other species on this planet. And I also think that it will help me figure out how working in an environmental field will be later in life. So for our project we mapped vernal pools in Andover through ArcGIS. And so we used satellite imagery for it. Those were available through the layers that we found on through the search bar. And then we also ran analysis of buffer zones of 100 foot and seven fifty foot through each pool that we mapped. And then this is only phase one of a two phase rental pool identification and conservation program spearheaded by Hank Gruner. The process based on Vernal Pool Best Development Practices guidebook for Vernal Pool Conservation Planning was written by Doctor. Calhoun, faculty member of University of Maine and a member of Maine Audubon Society, and doctor Clemens, founder of the Metropolitan Conservation Alliance and former senior conservationists at the Wildlife Conservation Society.
All right, so what you're looking at right now on the right is an image from ArcGIS Online of Andover, Connecticut. And what's on top of that right now is known as the CT, National Wetlands Inventory, Wetland Functions Map from 2010. So in simple terms, this is just a map from 2010 of all the wetland features throughout Andover. And you can tell first off, you probably knew this already, but there are many different wetland types in Andover. The two main ones that you can see on this map are the freshwater forest and shrub wetlands, and then the lakes. So these are really important when you're actually mapping the vernal pools. We'll get into that a little bit more later.
But the other thing you can get from this map is that vernal pools aren't a feature available on it. So this is a publicly available layer, and no publicly available layers in Andover have vernal pools as a feature. And this is a really big issue because vernal pools are critical habitat that requires protection. But without having it mapped, you can't really use any protection methods. So that's kind of why we are doing what we're doing. So just to get more into some of the specific wetland features we were working around in Andover. So we were mapping an open space corridors and the three open space corridors were in Southwest Andover, East Andover, and then Central. So in the Southwest Andover corridor, you have Bishop Swamp and Andover Lake, and then East Andover, have Bear Swamp. And then in Central Andover, have the Hop River. So these were really important when we're actually doing the mapping or identifying potential vernal pools because you tend to get aggregations of potential vernal pools where you have other wetland features. And this makes sense because then you have the wet soils and you have the flooding that could lead to the formations.
But it was also helpful when we were trying to see if we were making good calls. So you're not always certain when you're mapping potential vernal pools, if it's actually a vernal pool, because there are other things on the map that can look like that. So it was really helpful when you're also looking at wetland features to say, okay, it would make sense for a vernal pool to be here.
As well as the wetlands, we also looked looked at lowlands and forests. To find the lowlands in Andover through the satellite imagery, we used a layer called CT contours, which is also public available. And through this, we found lowlands because water tends to reach the lowest point in a area. And then forests were also used for identification because most fernal pools are towards forested areas, as well as the forest is a critical habitat for those species that would live in the forest, to provide cover from desiccation prey or predators, they're the prey. And then it would also be helpful for buffer analysis later on to see land use in the area. So we found that vernal pools are in high concentrations when all of these three are present, the lowlands of forest and wetland features. So for this picture, we use the CT hydrography layer and the CT contour layer.
And then this one portion is in the Southeast Of Andover, and it's along the Hop River Basin and it is a wetland. It has lowland and then there's also forest all around.
So All right so now that we've covered some of the background we can hop into the actual process. So basically the first step we had to take we were new to this process as well. So we needed to learn how to use ArcGIS Online to actually identify the potential vernal pools. This involved using satellite imagery that's available through ArcGIS Online. So when we were looking at the satellite imagery, what we're looking for is dark spots. And then if these dark spots have other indications that it could be water. So the branching patterns that you can kind of see in the figure on the left are good indications that that's water flowing, indicating water. Another one that's not shown here is ice. So this map actually was taken at a time when there was ice on some of them. So you could see that, okay, this isn't just a dark spot, there's some water present.
So once you kind of establish this might be a potential vernal pool, then we use Google Earth imagery in tandem with that to kind of see, okay, is something consistently there from looking at other years? So you can see that in spring of two thousand and eight, it was also present. So that's a good indication that something is going on there. And then also double checking that it is seasonal because again, vernal pools are seasonal habitat. So if it is filled year round, then it's not going to be considered a vernal pool. So then once we felt good about those calls, what you can see on the left, that little red dot is what we used to initially mark our potential vernal pools. And when we added this feature, it also connected to an attribute table where we could add in the longitude and latitude, as well as a unique identification number, is which going to help later on in the phase two, which we'll talk about a bit. And this attribute table also has the ability to have other things added to it. So again, in phase two, you can add some of the biological data as well, which is really important about this map because it is able to be updated.
So what Greg and I did to kind of work on this together, we split Andover into an upper and lower half, and we each mapped the potential vernal pools in our half. Then Tau was so helpful by combining them into a single layer for us so we could do further analysis later. Although this process sounds like it should be pretty smooth, I've kind of referenced that you want to make sure you're making good calls on the vernal pools and that's because there's a lot of things that can cause dark spots on maps and make something look like a potential vernal pool. Two of the biggest things that do that are hemlock and conifer trees. Their shadows look exactly like vernal pools. And
this is an issue because obviously don't want to be making in the later analysis, we had to make a lot of buffers and polygons. And that takes a lot of time if you have a ton of things that are misidentified. And then in the field, also having people go to a ton of trees is not going to be very beneficial. So Greg has a quick activity to kind of show some examples of these challenges.
So what we have here are two possible vernal pools that we found early in the process. So I pose the question, left or right, which one do you guys think is a vernal pool? So if you want, you could raise your hand for left. Yeah. I can.
Alright. And then the right? Okay. Well, unfortunately, you guys are both wrong. The one on the left is a trampoline, and the one on the right is a pond near a farmland. So we have another here. Those that say for the left and then those for the right. Oh, boy.
So the right is actually the rental pool. We could tell this by the snow cover, and then the shadows are on the snow. So then you could tell that it is. And on the left, it's actually a conifer tree or hemlock. Yeah. It's one of the two. But it does have a cylindrical shape, so it looks like a pool, so it could be easily mistaken for one. And then we have one last one. Those I think for the left and then those for the right. So the right is actually one and the left partially. So on the right, the pool is right down here. And then on the left, the pools are right here, here, and here. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Those three. This one is just a large body of water in the wetland. And then so when we first mapped all the pools and it was very early on, we mapped 386. We didn't really refine the process all too much. So the uncalled one is 386,
which was combined through the efforts of Tau and Olivia together. And then afterwards, Hank helped us cull the the, points for ones that aren't vernal pools or and he also added some to those that are vernal pools. The ones that he added would be the orange ones, but these are only potential ones because then we would have to go out in the field later next year, I believe, to then count for egg masses or indicator species, which I'll talk about later on. And then we ended up with 191 pools afterwards.
So we wanted to wait to do all of our later analysis until our initial points went through that refinement process. And this is important because we wanted to make sure first off we weren't missing any vernal pools And then secondly, that we weren't identifying too many things that weren't vernal pools, because again, that can cause a lot of wasted time in the later process. So once we did go through all this refinement and our data was combined, then we started moving on to the mapping of critical zones of the vernal pools. So as we kind of mentioned before, we based a lot of our process on the best development practices guidebook that was outlined by Doctor. Calhoun and Doctor. Clemons.
And the three critical zones we are mapping through this are what they identified as the depression envelope and critical terrestrial habitat. And I'll explain those in a second but also you can just see on the right this is the cover page for the best development practices document we used which was really helpful throughout this process. Okay, so first off how we actually did this through ArcGIS Online, because again, this process was huge. You can see on the left the actual depression that's mapped and this was done by hand on ArcGIS Online. And then what you see in the middle and on the right are buffer zones that were created using the buffer analysis tool on ArcGIS. So getting more into the actual meaning of each of these zones now. So
the depression, which you see on the left in blue, is the actual vernal pool, what's what you think of as a vernal pool. So this is the seasonally filled wetland and this is what serves as the breeding habitat for species that use the vernal pool, so the amphibians and crustaceans. And this habitat is obviously the most critical for conservation priority. So this area, if it is a vernal pool that's identified for conservation, is recommended to remain completely undeveloped undisturbed. You should have no pesticides, nothing coming in. It's really important that the vegetation, the actual shape of the basin and the wallater quality remain undisturbed so that this can remain a high quality habitat for breeding to be successful. And then what you see in the center in that red is a 100 foot border from the edge of the depression of the vernal pool, and this is known as the envelope. And this is essentially the critical habitat for breeding amphibians during the spring, and then it becomes critical habitat for their emerging juveniles during the fall. So this area is really important also as a water quality buffer. So if you have forest around the pool, that's going to prevent a lot of pollution from being able to enter the pool and then alter its ability to serve as successful breeding habitat.
So this area as like the depression needs a lot of maintenance in terms of remaining undisturbed vegetation on the understory as well as the canopy should be completely maintained. And And this is also really important because the leaf litter that's created by the canopy and the understory is really important for making sure that when you have those newly emerging juveniles, especially salamanders, they're not going to be desiccated from lack of shade. So this is a high priority conservation zone as well. And then this last zone you're looking at in yellow is what's known as the critical terrestrial habitat. And this is a seven fifty foot border that's mapped from the edge of the Vernal Pool Depression.
And essentially this is the upland habitat for species when it's not the breeding season. And it also shows the metapopulation aspects of vernal pools because you don't have species just using single vernal pools, you can have movement between them. And this is really important to ensuring the success because if one pool doesn't end up successful, there's chances for breeding in other pools. So as much as this area isn't as high conservation priority, it's still recommended that 75% of it remain undisturbed and unfragmented. And this is to make sure that you still have this corridor ability for it and that you have the habitat necessary to maintain the populations that are using the vernal pools. So yeah those are the three main areas we were focusing on for later conservation analyses.
And then so for our completed map outcomes and totals, we ended with a 191 potential vernal pools, their potential because we haven't actually gone out and witnessed them in person. And then also, the greatest clustering is along the Hop River, so right along here. And then other high concentration areas are where freshwater forests and shrub wetlands are. Those would be right over here, here, here, and I believe right here as well. Those we got from the CT and WI wetland functions layer. And then for the zone outcomes, the zones that Olivia just mentioned, we got three seventy five acres within the 100 foot buffer as well as 4,373 acres within the seven fifty foot buffer. As Olivia said, the 100 foot buffer is more of a critical conservation area. It would need more conservation efforts to sustain the vernal pools for the long run, and the seven fifty foot buffer requires about 75% conservation and maintenance due to the metapopulation possibility of species moving in between pools to then repopulate or populate the pool. And then on the left, we have the land use map layer as well as our potential pools
and their buffer zones. And then for the next steps, so phase two, we have the landowner contact and permission. Also, phase two would be also spearheaded by Hank as well. So the landowner contact and permission, because most of these pools ended up or some of the pools ended up on landowners' properties, so we would need to contact them to gain permission to go look and investigate them. And then we would go into the volunteer recruitment and training. That would be the training to actually scout out the pools to know what to look for, and one of the possible assignment sheets or assessment sheets would be on the left over here.
So to confirm the pools, we would need a 25 egg mass count, and if it's less, it's not a functional pool, but if it's more, then it is a functional pool, and or the indicator species. Those indicator species in Andover are the spotted salamander. They have a long developmental period so they will be in the pools for a little bit longer as well as the pools that they are in need to last longer so they could stay and breed. The marbled salamander, they actually breed in the fall and not the spring and they are restricted to certain parts of Andover. The wood frog has a short developmental time so they will use they can inhabit all of the pools, but some of the pools that they would be in will have a shorter lifespan and as well as the fairy shrimp, which is also restricted to certain areas of Andover. And then after that, after the data is collected, we would review, edit, and add to the attribute tables to the layer that we created in phase one. This would either be adding pools, the ones that people might find just scouting around or taking away pools that weren't actually pools, they might have been a tree. And then after that, there would be the start up to the start to set up conservation plans for the pools. Most most towns usually have a upland review area to regulate projects within a certain distance of a wetland or water course, but there is no such thing in Andover at the moment to regular areas around vernal pools as much.
The vernal pools usually do occur around wetlands so there's somewhat of upland review that would help the rental pools there, but those that aren't around wetlands would not be protected as much. And then to bring it all together and then show what each commission can actually use this layer for. So the wetland commission could use it to the layer and the data to evaluate open areas and apply development practices to them and the pools, as well as help with applications for permits and all that around the pools. The Conservation Commission can use it to plan for areas with high conservation value with the vernal pools and also other natural resource factors. And then that is it. Do we have any questions?
How long did you actually work on this? This looks like a big big job. It took all semester, sir. Wow. I
had a question on with the map. So how large are those pools? Because I see a lot of little pools in the woods, but they're maybe just five feet across. How big are those ones you could spot on the maps?
They can tend to be five to 10 feet across or so to upwards of probably 30 feet. Map didn't really zoom in all too close. At one point, it just goes blank because the satellite imagery wasn't the best but it worked for what we were doing. So there might be also other pools lying around in other areas.
Yeah there's a really huge diversity of sizes for the vernal pools as well as shapes so that was also kind of difficult when you were going between trying to map them and say well would this make sense for size. It wasn't really helpful because they could be almost any size. I mean a certain large size couldn't be acceptable because then you'd expect that it would be filled year round. You could check that with the Google Earth data but yeah there was a lot of variation in size that we found.
The next thing is to find out what we can do with the Conservation Commission. I don't know how we're going to locate these. Can see where the general vicinity is, but we have to go about protecting them somehow. Have to look at them before you could start the protection, you know?
Yeah, definitely. So one of the great things about ArcGIS Online is that it allows you to add attribute tables with the features you map. So we're able to actually calculate and insert the latitude and longitude for every single one of the verna pools we've plotted so that if you have some type of coordinate measurement tool with you, you can find these very easily in the field. And then you can also add data in to that attribute table, so that should be helpful in the actual in field process, which is cool. Because we're under time constraints too. By summer, these pools will probably dry up, right?
So we'd have to do it in segments, I guess, to to find them. I don't know. That's what we'll have to work on next as a Yeah. You're
you're exactly right. The next part of the next role of the conservation commission really be now that we have this information this that the, you know, these potential pools mapped the phase two that Olivia and Greg were referring to is, you know, we need to to confirm them as pools. We need to be able to send out volunteers to actually look at them in the spring during the breeding season like now. Doctor. Yeah. And confirm whether there's egg masses of any of those species there or larvae or tadpoles and collect some of that data that would then verify that it's a vernal pool and not a hemlock tree or a trampoline. It would also give us some biological data that would now allow us to be able to get a better sense of the conservation value of those. So, in order to do that, the steps that we'll need to undertake are to start to reach out to landowners. Know, You some of the pools will be able to go to because they're on town land or they're on state land or they're on various lands where we have access to, but other pools on private land, we will need to reach out to landowners to see to try to get permission to to do those assessments. Once we have identified all of that, which I anticipate would be over this summer, the course of the summer, we would likely try to do that into the fall. Once we have that information, then we will need to be able to train, you know, recruit volunteers from the town to be able to that would be interested in doing the surveys. And hopefully, these will be members of our commissions,
and hopefully, will be members, families, and residents of the town that would be interested in contributing sort of like a citizen science project. And then we would conduct some training sessions in the field of how to actually find the pool, how to fill out that data sheet, you know, how to identify a spotted salamander egg mass. And Carrie and I actually spent a little time this spring looking at potential training sites and we identified a very good area on the town land on the floodplain of the Hop River over by the ball fields, where there are a series of vertical pools that, by the way, the students Greg and Olivia did catch and mapped where we found pools that had one pool and correct me if I I miss any of this Carrie one pool had spotted salamanders and wood frogs. Pool in in, you know, moderate numbers One pool only had was very ephemeral and only had wood frogs and then a third one had spotted salamanders, wood frogs and marbled salamanders. That is exactly the way I remember it. Good, yeah, my memory is holding up. So
close proximity all within an area that's easily accessible off of the trails with adequate parking. So I think we have our area to do the training. So we just need to do some some work to, you know, to recruit and get some permissions and then do some training and collect that data, which can be a fun which also can be an educational opportunity for both our Commission's as well as Doctor. Matthew Residents into the town about what these resources are and then all of that information goes into the database that we're using in the maps that we're using that we've already looked at as part of the Conservation Commission, you know, where we mapped core forest and prime farmland and early successional habitat and a variety of other natural resource features that we start to look at parcels that are important and we start to move toward conservation plans that can be put in the plan of conservation and development.
The good news is we have till 2025 to do that, But as we all know, if we don't keep moving on it, 2025 will dawn on us very quickly and we'll be behind the eight ball. So this gives us plenty of good time to get this done and I'm so pleased that we were able to do the rural pool piece because I knew that this would be a challenge because we didn't have GIS in town and it would be a quite an activity to undertake and to have this one under our belt, we're in pretty good shape with our mapping. In fact, the only mapping that we need for resources now are more historical and archaeological information, and then I think we'll be pretty complete with our mapping, and we can start to move forward on some analysis and preliminary analysis and then some data collection once with the Vernal pools.
So I think we're in pretty good shape. So we can go through the summer? These things won't dry up through the summer?
Well, the timing that we would want to do for the field collection would be from March through probably mid May. Okay. Because that's the window when you can find evidence, either egg masses or tadpoles or larvae of the organisms that would be breeding in the pool. Yeah. So that would be the timetable that we would focus the field work on, but that won't occur until we won't do that until Gazelka: next spring. That's when we would launch the actual field data collection. In the meantime, we would get permissions and train volunteers to be ready for that. That. So we have some time. So that's the work that we'll need to do as a commission is how do you know, how do we want to reach out to landowners? And we'll need to talk with, you know, Eric and the folks in town to, you know, what's our mechanisms? How do we reach folks? Do we want to put some posters up? We Do want to, you know, do some social media? How do we want to go about this to reach the folks? So there's some administrative work that needs to be done to lead up to that. The training I'm not too worried about because we have some templates for that. I have led trainings before on this, so we do have the templates for the training, so that doesn't have to be developed.
And now we have a site, so it's really getting permissions and then getting, you know, teams of folks together for the spring of twenty twenty two to go out and collect the data. And hopefully Olivia and Greg will come back and join us so they could see some of their pools in the action.
Yeah, that's, that'll be nice, really nice. This is very helpful. I'm glad we got the right guys on this thing to get it done. Now we've a lot of work ahead of us, so we can identify all of these
and get trained on how to do it. I bet that there'll be a lot of people that want to chip in and do this with us too, you know? Doctor. Yeah, I hope so. And I know I hope there's members of the different commissions that get involved too, because it's very informative to the commission members, whether it's planning and zoning or wetlands or conservation to sort of see these, because when an application comes into wetlands, for example, for review, no longer will we have to rely on an applications consultant to tell us whether there's vertical pools potentially on that site, but we will have maps that give us indications of whether there are, and in fact data that guide that will guide us. So we won't, you know, if we do this, we see this through, we won't need to rely on an applicant's consultants. Matthew To provide that information, which is actually a bonus to the applicants too because they don't necessarily need to pay consultants to go out and collect this data because we'll have some information there. Doctor. So there's a lot of benefits to having it from a site review by the Wetlands Commission to a, to also a planning as a, as a natural resource inventory for the Conservation Commission to sort of recommend open space corridors and key parcels for conservation easements and things like that. Know, that's the work yet to be done. Yeah, that's a giant step forward, isn't it? Yeah. We're building an infrastructure in a way to be more effective with conservation planning as we drive toward 2025.
Yeah, I'm sure some of the wetlands people will want to join us on this.
Yeah, believe George Elliott's on the line. I don't see the full list of folks, but George is the chair of the Inland Wetlands Commission of which you know the Conservation Commission has a very solid working relationship with. Yeah
well thank you guys very much, very much. Thank you. Well done guys. Yes, thank you. Thank you so much. This is wonderful. Thank you.
Were happy to do it and thank you all for giving us time at this meeting tonight.
Well, our pleasure. We're here to learn. You guys are the teachers now, you know.
Very nice presentation. Thank you. Thank you. All right. Well, we're going to continue with the meeting. You guys can go on and have a good evening And then I'll follow-up with the verbal team with an email on the next day or so just to sort of, you know, closed loop on things and you know, Giuliana, if there's anything else you need from me, we can chat and you know if there's any other feedback or stuff like that. We'll we'll wrap it all up. Okay? Okay, thank you. Thank
you so much. Have a good night. Have a good one. You too. Bye. Bye now.