The Hudson Hills and Highlands – A Living Landscape

Teatown has coined the phrase Hudson Hills and Highlands to describe the portion of the Hudson Valley that results by combining the spectacularly scenic Hudson Highlands with the watershed of the lower Hudson River. The resulting 936 square mile area encompasses most of New York’s Westchester and Putnam counties, and parts of Dutchess, Rockland, and Orange counties. It is home to 785,000 people living in 37 municipalities, that on average are located 38 miles from New York City. The Hudson Hills and Highlands is twice the size of New York’s more widely known Catskill Park, and nearly five times larger than the nearby 100,000-acre Palisades Interstate Park. Teatown Lake Reservation, located just south of the geographic center of the Hudson Hills and Highlands, focuses its conservation efforts on saving nature and inspiring sustainable living throughout this ecologically significant bioregion.

Looking south from Breakneck Ridge, Putnam County, NY (Photo by F. Koontz)

Unknown to many local residents, the Hudson Hills and Highlands contains significant natural areas and provides habitat for both nationally and globally rare plants and animals. A unique mixture of New England, Mid-Atlantic, and Mid-West flora and fauna live here. The region contains the widest and deepest part of the Hudson River, and is home to a rich variety of aquatic life found only in estuaries, brackish waters where rivers meet the sea.

The number of species living in  the Hudson Hills and Highlands, includes: 1,300 plants; 250 birds; 150 fish; 45 mammals; 20 reptiles; 20 amphibians; 100 dragonflies and damselflies; many hundreds of other insects and invertebrates; and thousands of kinds of algae, bacteria, and fungi. Many people are surprised to learn that the region is home to black bears, bobcats, coyotes, foxes, fishers, timber rattlesnakes, turkeys, bald eagles, barred owls, and other species usually associated with American wilderness. This species diversity is especially surprising considering our proximity to New York City and its 12 million inhabitants. Also, poorly appreciated are the ecological services that our rich biodiversity provides; the air, water, food, and the natural materials that both fuels our economies and provides for our health and well-being, ultimately come from nature.

Thinking of our Region as a Living System

The protected natural areas of the Hudson Hills and Highlands, about 20% of the region, are located within a much larger matrix of human-developed environments (residential, business, transportation, and government areas). Our hope at Teatown is for the region to thrive as one healthy system. We envision a mosaic of natural and human-use areas proactively managed as one functioning ecosystem that allows people to benefit from nature’s ecological benefits. Such  holistic ecosystems are called “social-ecological systems” by academics, and they especially emphasize in their explanations that humans and other species are all part of the same system. In other words, humans are part of nature, not separate from her.

A growing number of ecological health proponents are promoting this social-ecological conceptual framework as an educational prerequisite for inspiring the public to create sustainable communities. By “sustainable,” we mean using our environmental resources to meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. At Teatown, we use the terms “living landscape” or “bioscape” to convey the same idea — that is, that our region, when taken as a whole, is a complex social-ecological system best thought of as one living entity.

Protecting the Living Landscape for Sustainability and Resilience

While nature in the Hudson Hills and Highlands is relatively healthy, it is facing increasing threat from: (1) habitat loss from land development; (2) non-native, invasive species and emerging diseases; (3) overabundant species (e.g. deer and geese); (4) pollution; (5) climate change; and (6) human population pressures. Poorly designed development within the context of climate change is especially important. Between 2006 and 2015, the Hudson Hills and Highlands is expected to have 65,000 new residents living in 20,000 additional households. That equates to an additional 70 persons per square mile in addition to the current 839 already living here. Imagine 25,000 more cars traveling our roadways each morning and needing 1,000 additional classrooms in our schools.

Two new Hudson Hills and Highlands programs at Teatown with a living landscape focus are the  Environmental Leaders Learning Alliance (ELLA) and Community Trails Program. ELLA (www.ellahhh.net) is a group of >120 town-appointed environmental commission members from 34 regional towns and villages, who meet quarterly at workshops, and more frequently through the Internet, to discuss environmental issues, share lessons learned, and formulate regional solutions for sustainability. The Community Trails Program is a joint effort with the New York-New Jersey Trail Conference (www.nynjtc.org) to facilitate volunteer-led stewardship of recreational trails in Westchester and Putnam counties. This effort includes building new trails, especially longer distance trails that connect protected lands, effectively creating biotic corridors across the landscape. This fall, for example, we are building a 4-mile connector trail between Teatown and Kitchawan Park with the help of trail volunteers. 

A living landscapes approach to sustainable living requires all of us to be more mindful of our actions, including how we care for nature “between the parks,” on our own properties. To protect our region’s quality of life, we need much greater adult and youth involvement in protecting nature. To meet this need, Teatown is guiding residents toward a fuller understanding of the role that nature plays in sustainable living by facilitating dialogue, delivering education, promoting habitat protection, and providing biodiversity conservation services to local municipalities. Our immediate intent is to empower individuals and communities to participate in nature conservation for sustainable living. Our longer-term goal is to help residents of the Hudson Hills and Highlands design and manage a sustainable bioregion — as a social-ecological system with the resilience to adapt to the changing environmental and social conditions that the future will inevitably bring. 

Together we can make a difference!

 Fred

Note:  This article first appeared  in Teatown Lake Reservation’s Fall 2009 Trails Newsletter. 

Monarch’s Incredible Migration About to Begin!

Male Monarch, Cape May, NJ (by Fred Koontz).

Each year, between August and November, we need only look skyward to witness one of nature’s most incredible migrations. Tens of millions of Monarch butterflies that spend the summer east of the Rocky Mountains fly to Central Mexico. Here, about 70 miles west of Mexico City, Monarchs survive the winter in 12  mountaintop fir forests at 10,000 feet elevation.

The Monarch is the only butterfly that migrates north and south very long distances as many birds do. This unique annual pilgrimage was only recently discovered, in 1975. Conservationists have worked ever since to protect this natural spectacle of evolution and adaptation, which depends both on protecting ecological health in the USA and conserving the relatively small land area in Mexico where all  of our eastern Monarchs spend the winter (except for a small additional population in Florida).

The Monarch’s journey is even more amazing when you understand the details of their “multi-generation” migration cycle. Unlike migratory birds, no single Monarch makes the entire round trip because their normal eight-week lifespan is too short. The Monarchs that overwinter in Mexico do not reproduce until after they start heading north, usually reaching Texas and Oklahoma, sometime in February and March. Their offspring (“second generation”) continue heading north throughout their two month life, as do the third and fourth generations, each generation making it further north until they reach northern USA and Canada. Millions and millions of Monarchs are produced along the journey north.  As fall and cold weather approaches, the last generation of the summer enters into a special non-reproductive phase, which allows these individuals to live seven months, or more. It is these longer living, fourth generation Monarchs that return to Mexico to repeat the cycle. The mystery to scientists is how do these butterflies separated by three generations know how to return to the same 12 mountaintops in Mexico! 

The female Monarchs lay their eggs on a variety of milkweeds, whose leaves the caterpillars feed on for two weeks after hatching from a four-day incubation period. Next, after a two-week pupal stage, the adult emerges from its chrysalis. The adults feed on nectar from milkweeds, butterfly weed, golden rods, and other plants.  If you wish to attract Monarchs to your property planting milkweeds is the best idea, as it feeds both adults and caterpillars.  You can easily learn to recognize the eggs, caterpillars, and chrysalis on the milkweed plants. Look for them!

Of the 142 species of butterflies that live in New York State, the Monarch is my favorite. So, it is disappointing to me that there seems to be very few this summer at Teatown or in the Hudson Hills and Highlands?  Leave a comment below if you have noticed the same paucity of Monarchs this summer and share your observations about  migrating Monarchs. Who will be the first to spot a migrating Monarch this season?

Now that August is here, I will be keeping an eye to the sky for Monarchs. You can tell when they are migrating (as opposed to flying for nectar or mating), because they seem to be moving in a purposeful straight path.  Also, if you follow a migrating Monarch toward sunset  – and if you are lucky – you might discover a roosting tree with dozens, even hundreds, of resting butterflies. If you want to learn more about Monarchs and follow a citizen-scientist project to track their migration visit the Journey North and Monarch Watch websites.  Better yet, take your family on a trip to Cape May, New Jersey, in September and October to witness thousands of these winged jewels heading south. Enjoy the Monarch migration — it is a miracle that unfolds each year right before our eyes!

Cheers,

Fred

Why is Biodiversity Important to Human Well-being?

 

Teatown member Margaret Lloyd recently reminded me, “It is all about the connections!”  She should know, it was Margaret’s uncle, John Storer, who in his 1953 book The Web of Life made the case for how all living things from bacteria to people fit into a pattern of life that depend upon each other and the physical world around them for their existence. Yet, more than 50 years after the book’s publication, most people still don’t get it: people are connected to the physical and natural systems that makes life on Earth possible. We are intimately linked to all nature’s species and our summed actions matter by affecting the whole.

Environmental educators in recent decades answered the question of why biodiversity is important to humans by discussing quality of life issues like scenic beauty and outdoor recreation. Since the 1970’s, conservation biologists similarly focused on creating new parks for our enjoyment and saving charismatic endangered species like Bald Eagles and Florida Manatees. These are certainly worthy endeavors, but in recent years a shift has occurred among scientists and a few policy analysts as to why we should value other species and protect them.

Scientists now understand that biodiversity is key to human well-being for its role in ecosystems and its essential links to human health. An ecosystem is a network of biodiversity and non-living elements that interact to produce benefits essential for the on-going workings of the system. These benefits are called “ecosystem services.” Earth consists of a mosaic of ecosystems – e.g. forests, grasslands, wetlands, streams, estuaries, and oceans – whose services provide materials and processes that sustain life. Ecosystem services can be divided into four categories: provisioning services, regulating services, supporting services, and cultural services. It is these services that enable our communities and economies to prosper, and provide the foundation for our well-being.

Ecosystem Services (adapted from Chivian, E. and Bernstein, A. 2008. Sustaining Life: How Human Health Depends on Biodiversity. Oxford University Press, New York).

The economic value of ecosystem services is greatly underappreciate. A 2008 study commissioned by the European Union concluded that the global economy is losing more money from the disappearance of forests than from the banking crisis. The annual cost of forest loss is between $2 trillion and $5 trillion! This calculation comes from adding the value of forest services such as providing clean water, preventing soil erosion, and absorbing carbon dioxide. The point is that as forests decline nature stops providing services, and the human economy either has to provide them at great cost or do without.

In the last two decades, ecologists and physicians working together have discovered a strong relationship between healthy ecosystems and healthy people. Especially important are recent discoveries that reveal how biodiversity helps moderate or prevent infectious disease outbreaks. Lyme’s Disease, for example, is reduced in areas that have a high diversity of small mammals. This association is called the “biodiversity dilution effect” – as the disease causing organism is diluting by being spread among a diversity of small mammal species. It also is worth remembering that many medicines come from nature, and that biomedical research depends on many kinds of animals and microbes, a number of which regrettably are threatened with extinction.

The take home lesson is that it is clear that our health and human well-being depends on biodiversity and functioning ecosystems. Do you know of other connections between biodiversity and human well-being?  If so, post a comment!

Cheers,

Fred