Robert Zaino, a biologist with the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department, uses the BioFinder mapping platform in Barnet on Wednesday, May 1, 2024. BioFinder allows people to see connections between land that allow plants and animals to migrate as climate change continues. “High priority” wildlife road crossings are shown in dark purple. Photo by Glenn Russell/VTDigger
On a recent weekday morning, two Vermont Fish & Wildlife Department staff members pulled to the side of a dirt road in Barnet.
The road was typical for the state: Its sides were lined with fields and trees, and a small house and barn lay ahead. But Jens Hawkins-Hilke and Robert Zaino — who navigated to the spot for the first time via a small map on Zaino’s cellphone — had their eyes fixed on a 100-foot section of road bordered on both sides by dense forest.
“Ooh yeah, this makes me happy,” said Hawkins-Hilke, conservation planner for the department, as he exited the car.
Moments later, Hawkins-Hilke and Zaino spotted a faint trail running into the forest on both sides of the road. On one side of the animal path, a deer print was visible.
Bingo.
The pair had come to the small town just south of St. Johnsbury to see if mapping data collected by low-flying airplanes and fed into a computer model had accurately labeled places where wildlife crosses the road en route from one ideal piece of habitat to the next.
“(Wildlife road crossings) are our best hope for nature’s climate resilience — all things being able to move freely across the landscape,” said Zaino, natural community ecologist with the department.
The small map on their phones was BioFinder, the Agency of Natural Resources’ publicly accessible mapping database, which shows layers of data including the shape and location of every block of interior forest, wetland, specific natural community and vernal pool in the state.
Earlier this spring, the database underwent a major update that made the outlines of those habitat blocks 3,600 times more accurate. Fish & Wildlife staff say the new data will transform their efforts to support species’ abilities to move across the state: the everyday movements to find food or a mate and the larger migration afoot as species react to climate change.
‘One of the world’s greatest remaining forests’
The data layers were created as part of Vermont Conservation Design, a project led by Fish & Wildlife that began in 2011.
Hawkins-Hilke and Zaino — both of whom have been involved with Vermont Conservation Design since its infancy — said the project was sparked by the department’s mission: the conservation of all species of fish, wildlife, and plants and their habitats for the people of Vermont. It’s a tall order.
Robert Zaino, left, and Jens Hawkins-Hilke of the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department look for signs of animals crossing a road in Barnet on Wednesday, May 1, 2024. They chose the crossing spot with BioFinder, a land conservation mapping platform. On some roads, animals all use the same path, while others do not have a specific pinch point. Photo by Glenn Russell/VTDigger
“We know (about) things like bear and deer and birds and even vascular plants that we see out there all the time, but there are estimates that Vermont has 20,000 to 40,000 different species,” Zaino said. “We can’t know everything about all those species, and we can’t think about their conservation one by one. If we’re going to achieve that mission of protecting all those species and their habitats, we need to think bigger.”
So the department — along with scientists from The Nature Conservancy, Northeast Wilderness Trust, Vermont Land Trust and the University of Vermont — created Vermont Conservation Design. They mapped and assigned priority ranking to all types of habitats, waterways, geological features, rare species and more.
Then, all those features and their rankings were stacked on top of each other — just like in the real world — and combined into a mapping dataset that shows exactly which pieces of land are most important to conserve, versus which are more suitable for development.
“When you stack all that up, we can say we have high confidence that those things, all together, maintain ecological function and the many, many species that we have in Vermont,” Zaino said.
(Vermont Conservation Design is often mentioned in the Legislature in relation to an extensive 2018 state document that laid out a science-based conservation “vision” for the state, including target percentages of specific habitats to leave undeveloped or to restore. However, the project consists of both that “vision” and the prioritized data layers available in BioFinder.)
Zaino explained that by getting all of those big things right — the network of habitat blocks, making sure they’re connected, making sure they represent lots of different natural communities, soils and geologies and landforms — they are giving species the best shot to do what they need to do.
“We can’t, we don’t know all the species,” he said. “We know what we know, and we have to hope that we can give nature as much room to let the things we don’t know about adapt.”
Looking at the entire state on BioFinder can be overwhelming: It almost looks like all of Vermont is designated as priority forest blocks. In fact, 70% of the state is classified as “high priority.” It’s still a functioning ecosystem.
“I think the map of forest blocks just really drives home the fact that we live in one of the world’s greatest remaining forests,” said Gus Goodwin, senior conservation planner for The Nature Conservancy in Vermont. “We get so used to it, just having all these trees around, it’s easy to forget: It’s an overwhelming and wonderful landscape that we live in.
‘A whole range of conservation tools’
As well as leading the charge on Vermont Conservation Design and BioFinder, Hawkins-Hilke and Zaino assist municipalities and landowners, respectively, in understanding and making thoughtful choices about the priority layers crossing their locales.
“If you’re a conspiracy theorist (you might say), ‘you’re coming after my land,’” Hawkins-Hilke said. “Well, no, that’s not what we’re saying. Green doesn’t mean ‘no go.’ It could. In some places it absolutely does. But it doesn’t intrinsically mean that.”
“It was never this idea that the government will buy all that land or that we’ll have regulations that cover all that land,” he explained. “The goal of Vermont Conservation Design is: These places function. They provide benefits to plants and animals and to people. Let’s maintain those functions in those people.”
Jens Hawkins-Hilke, conservation planner for the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department in Barnet on Wednesday, May 1, 2024. Photo by Glenn Russell/VTDigger
“That can be a whole range of conservation tools,” Hawkins-Hilke said, noting that 80% of the state is privately owned land. “Yes, it can be buying land by the government or conservation organizations. That is a tool. It can be the use value appraisal program, where landowners get a lower tax rate because they’re maintaining the land rather than developing it. But it can also be a landowner just making good, thoughtful choices about their own place and how they can contribute to ecological function. Those are all ways we can maintain this landscape, and it’s going to take all of that.”
Act 171, which took effect in 2018, instructs municipalities to identify their forest blocks and habitat connectors and place them in their town plan. Conservation and planning commissions are then using that information to address development and conservation more thoroughly, such as what human uses are best for the ecological functions of a specific area.
Vermont Conservation Design has also been written into a law relating to energy siting, the goal to conserve 30% of all land in Vermont by 2030 and proposed revisions to Act 250.
Conservation organizations such as The Nature Conservancy also use BioFinder frequently to assess pieces of property, prioritize where to spend field resources and manage land in a more ecologically thoughtful manner.
Shelby Perry, wildlands ecology director for the Northeast Wilderness Trust, works on conservation projects across six states.
“All of the states have useful data, but Vermont is the only one with a comprehensive conservation design aimed at maintaining an ecologically functioning landscape,” she said in an email.
Connectivity is key
An important feature of that ecologically functioning landscape is that the pieces are connected: Species travel varying distances for their daily or seasonal activities, utilizing multiple habitat blocks. For example, bobcats have a home range of 27 square miles and salamanders travel 600 feet on average in the spring and the fall.
However, another kind of movement is happening, slowly but surely. According to The Nature Conservancy, species in North America are moving an average of 11 miles north and 36 feet higher in elevation each decade to adapt to climate change. And that’s not just animals that move — it’s the trout lily seeds carried by ants, burs catching onto fur as a mammal walks by, and more.
When species migrate out West, it can look like huge herds galloping together. In Vermont, Hawkins-Hilke explained, this looks more like one animal at a time making its way over hill and dale.
“We need to maintain this pattern of connected forest and waters to allow for all these different types of movements,” he said.
A data layer within BioFinder underscores this need: Connectivity blocks are a network of habitat blocks that link all regions within Vermont, as well as adjoining states and Québec. (While you cannot see outside of the state in BioFinder, the habitats of bordering states are built into the connectivity layer.)
Goodwin, who was part of the core team leading the recent BioFinder update, said that Vermont has an outsize role to play in supporting species redistribution through the entire northern Appalachians in a rapidly changing climate: linking the Taconics and Berkshires to the Green Mountains and then over to the Sutton Mountains in Québec or the White Mountains or the Blue Mountains in Maine. And they get there by crossing roads — a lot of them. (Goodwin notes that even hedgerows can be really important for wildlife).
As Hawkins-Hilke and Zaino explained, that dirt road crossing in Barnet is a small but crucial piece allowing wildlife to cross from the larger patches of habitat in Groton State Forest up to Victory State Forest and then the Silvio O. Conte National Wildlife Refuge.
Jewett Brook Road in the Roy Mountain Wildlife Management Area in Barnet on Wednesday, May 1, 2024. Narrow dirt roads like this one have much less of an impact on wildlife’s propensity to cross, according to Hawkins-Hilke and Zaino. Photo by Glenn Russell/VTDigger
“We don’t have a magic ball to know exactly what’s going to happen,” Zaino said. “But if we can give (species) enough room … then it’s likely that they can (adapt their ranges). The alternative is we’re gonna have to go and move these things on our own, and we’re going to get it wrong, and it’s just not gonna work because we can’t do it anyway; it’s just not feasible.
“This is our strategy for adapting nature to climate change,” he added. “In doing so, that’s conserving all the benefits that people get from nature; functioning nature gives us so many benefits. And if we lose that function because species can’t move on their own, we lose the benefits like clean air, clean water, opportunities to produce our food and fiber from crop pollination to the production of timber and outdoor recreation opportunities — we lose that landscape that gives us so much.”
According to Zaino, the ability to connect specific things to the big picture — for example, how trees by the road help wildlife move from the Adirondacks to the Gaspé Peninsula — is what makes BioFinder so powerful.
“That’s why I think this has been so successful and why we’ve been able to really engage people, because it shows how something small is actually contributing,” he said. “It’s the sort of thing where you can take someone out to their small property and say, ‘Look! Did you know that you’re part of this?’”
Zaino and Hawkins-Hilke note that there is great interest in supporting connectivity across the region and into Canada. They’ve spent time speaking about Vermont Conservation Design and BioFinder in various places, as well as working with organizations such as the Staying Connected Initiative, which focuses on habitat connectivity from New Jersey to the Canadian Maritimes.
‘Like putting on a pair of glasses’
The first edition of BioFinder, released in 2013, relied on interpretations of aerial photos that produced rough and pixelated edges for each habitat block, only accurate to about 100 feet.
The update to the project’s base data completed earlier this spring made the boundaries of forest blocks accurate to up to 1½ feet, which department staff have likened to “putting on a pair of glasses and finally seeing the world clearly.”
Before the update, the system had a limited ability to detect wildlife road crossings — places where priority habitat runs right up to both sides of the street and wildlife are most likely to try to go across — due to the imprecision of the base data. Now, that data layer is much more complete and accurate: the site that Hawkins-Hilke and Zaino visited in Barnet is one of many not recognized in BioFinder as a wildlife road crossing until the recent update.
A northern white cedar swamp in the Roy Mountain Wildlife Management Area in Barnet on Wednesday, May 1, 2024. Photo by Glenn Russell/VTDigger
“Roads are one of the largest fragmenting features between blocks of intact forest,” said Goodwin. “They can be both a source of mortality for wildlife as they move between the blocks of habitat that they need, and they can also become a deterrent or just an outright total barrier at a certain traffic threshold.”
“We can look to other places and see what happens if you lose that (connectivity),” said Zaino. “If you lose those connected, functioning ecosystems, things change.”
An example Hawkins-Hilke points to is the Eastern Newt: one of the most common species in Eastern North America, including Vermont. However, in Rhode Island, the amphibian (known there as the “Red-spotted Newt”) is listed as a “Species of Greatest Conservation Need.”
In Rhode Island, the greatest threat to woodlands is land development and sprawl, which fragments habitats and causes species like the aforementioned newt to cross an increasing number of roads during the migration throughout their life cycle.
In Vermont, the much more accurate and comprehensive map of useful wildlife road crossings allows Fish and Wildlife, The Nature Conservancy and other organizations to focus conservation work around road infrastructure — bridge sizes to road classes to culverts — to keep the landscape hanging together for wildlife.
“I work closely with the Agency of Transportation,” said Hawkins-Hilke. “Our new hydrologic standards allow for bigger structures than ever — for climate resilience, to allow floodwaters to pass. But that also allows for wildlife movement at regular flow levels.”
An artist’s rendering of a state project to create new wildlife corridor beneath Interstate 89 in western Waterbury, which has received federal funding for design. Credit: Vermont Department of Transportation / Vermont Department of Transportation
One such example is in Waterbury, where a 5-foot-wide and 300-foot-long culvert runs under both Interstate 89 and Route 2, separating two large forested blocks along the spine of the Green Mountains. In December, the state received a $1.6 million federal grant to kickstart a project that would replace the culvert with a 100-foot span bridge to allow for floodwater and wildlife movement.
“With these updates, Vermont Conservation Design is ready to help us meet the conservation challenges of the coming decade,” Goodwin said in a statement.
How will the ‘chocolate chips’ make it?
Within Vermont’s forested landscape lie small, specific natural communities and rare species (which Hawkins-Hilke and Zaino refer to as the “chocolate chips” in the “cookie” that is Vermont) that also need to migrate to adapt to climate change: alpine tundra, old-growth forests and specific wetlands and grasslands. On that same weekday morning in Barnet, the group also visited a northern white cedar swamp — uncommon in the state and usually smaller than 40 acres where they do occur.
Cedar swamps are full of unique species: black ash, all types of mosses, rare sedges and orchids all growing on a thick layer of decomposed plants known as peat. Sometimes that layer can reach 20 feet or more deep, and scientists have found buried pollen in the “peat record” that shows how species have changed and moved over time.
“It’s not like this cedar swamp packs up and everything moves across the landscape as a unit,” Zaino said. “Each species has got to go find the right combination of site and climate that’s going to work in whatever the new normal is going to be.”
Robert Zaino of the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department, speaks about the diversity of species found in northern white cedar swamps like this one in Barnet on Wednesday, May 1, 2024. He also explains how the BioFinder mapping platform can be used for land conservation and understand the effects of climate change. Photo by Glenn Russell/VTDigger
“We don’t know what’s going to be here in 300 years,” he said. “But by conserving good examples of all those different (natural communities) that show diversity now — and they’re diverse because of their physical context, the way the water and the land formed — those places are always likely to have different species (than the rest of the landscape) in the future.”
“We may not have all the same species in the future, but we want room for whatever is going to be here; we want nature to be able to adapt,” Zaino said. “And if we have this intact, connected and diverse landscape with all these pieces, it provides room and opportunity for nature to adapt to climate change: species can move and find where they need to be in the future.”
Read the story on VTDigger here: Mapping Vermont’s wildlife highway: how advanced data is helping species one road at a time.