Harvard Forest:

Harvard may be rooted in Cambridge, but it has a lot more roots in the small north-central Massachusetts town of Petersham.

That’s where you’ll find the woods, streams, and fields of the Harvard
Forest, a 3,500-acre research and teaching facility that’s been part of
the University for more than a century. Having been closely monitored
since 1907 — and with a provenance dating to a Colonial farm
established in the mid 1700s — the history of this tract is likely
better-documented than that of any other forest in the United States.

New England’s forests have a centuries-long history of destruction
and resurrection, with a landscape that has veered from thickly wooded
in the 18th century to mostly farmland in the 19th century and back to
substantially wooded today. The much-researched Harvard Forest helps
scientists apply the lessons of the region’s forest history to the
environmental challenges faced by forests today.

“Overall, this forest offers a very positive message for New England
about the resilience of our forests,” says David R. Foster, the
forest’s director and a senior lecturer on biology in the Faculty of
Arts and Sciences (FAS). “The Harvard Forest can teach us much about
the history and diversity of natural landscapes.”

Since becoming director of the forest in 1990, Foster has worked
assiduously to knit together what had been isolated islands of
conservation land in north-central Massachusetts into a more coherent
block, the better to support research and maintain native flora and
fauna. Today, the map of this area at the head of the Quabbin Reservoir
— the body of water that supplies much of metropolitan Boston’s
drinking water — is a patchwork of land owned not only by Harvard but
also by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the Trustees of
Reservations, MassAudubon, and other conservation-oriented organizations.

Since 2005, Foster and colleagues have led an initiative called
“Wildlands and Woodlands: A Vision for the Forests of Massachusetts,”
endeavoring to protect 1.5 million new acres of Bay State forestland.
When combined with the existing 1 million acres of protected land in
the commonwealth, the cumulative acreage would total roughly half the
area of Massachusetts.

“We’ve already seen Massachusetts emerge as a leader in reclaiming
the Northeast’s fragmented landscape,” Foster says. “We hope ‘Wildlands
and Woodlands’ will spur new conservation finance tools to safeguard
the economic, ecosystem, and quality-of-life benefits of forests.”

The Harvard Forest’s 45 permanent employees — ranging from
ecologists to a sawyer who runs a Depression-era sawmill and cuts wood
to heat the forest’s buildings — are continually supplemented by a
steady stream of visiting scientists from New England and beyond. At
any given time, upward of 100 scientists — many from Harvard but most
from elsewhere — may be conducting research. The researchers are drawn
to Petersham, population 1,180, by these woods, wetlands, and Harvard
Pond. Collectively, the scientists form the Harvard Forest Long Term
Ecological Research Program, part of the largest ecology research
effort funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF).

It’s not just professional scientists at Harvard Forest, which plays
host each summer to some 25 undergraduate researchers, most of whom
hail from other universities. A dozen of these junior scientists are
supported for 12 weeks apiece by NSF’s Research Experience for
Undergraduates (REU) program. The Harvard Forest’s REU program, in
operation continuously since 1986, is not only one of the
longest-running nationwide but also among the most extensive in the
biological sciences at a single site.

With so many scientists around, the forest’s facilities are abuzz with research projects.

On a recent day, visiting scientists Wyatt Oswald of Emerson College,
and Matts Lindbladh of Sweden, were in a lab sampling from an 8-meter
core of mud extracted from the bottom of Little Willey Pond in
Strafford, N.H. This core, representing some 12,000 to 13,000 years of
pond deposition, will be studied for pollen, minerals, and organic
matter to reconstruct New England’s forest history, providing evidence
of climate change, human activity, and disturbances such as fires or
hurricanes.

Out in the woods, Emery Boose, the forest’s information manager,
pointed out another research project, launched this spring. A tract of
red pine planted in the 1930s — and starting to suffer natural decline
owing to its age — has been clear-cut and outfitted with two different
types of enclosures to exclude deer and moose. The project will study
the effects of grazing by both species on forest regrowth.

Deeper into the forest, staff scientist Julian Hadley was manning
air-monitoring equipment mounted atop a 70-foot metal structure known
as Hemlock Tower. These experiments, intended to measure and track the
output of water and carbon dioxide by the surrounding grove of
200-year-old conifers, illuminate the important role of forests in
maintaining the Earth’s carbon cycle.

Nearby is an apparatus placed by a Bridgewater State College
professor who makes snowfall predictions and uses cameras to monitor
from afar the accumulation of snow in the forest. Other measurements
are being taken at streams that feed into the Quabbin, so scientists
can examine how precipitation and transpiration affect water flow and
water chemistry.

Researchers with the University of Massachusetts have outfitted 25
area moose with GPS collars to track the gangly woodland dwellers,
whose numbers have grown steadily in northern Massachusetts. The
Harvard Forest is even seeing signs of resettlement by bears, which not
long ago were found only in the most remote areas of far northern New
England.

With all this data gathering, the Harvard Forest is intensively
wired to relay data back to scientists in Cambridge or even thousands
of miles away. Backed by ample computing power, automated equipment
gathers and archives climate data five times a second, making it
available internationally in real time.

With so many people monitoring his woods from afar, one of Foster’s
current priorities is making the Harvard Forest wireless, eliminating
the trouble-prone wiring running beneath dirt paths throughout the
woods. Rodents and other critters, it seems, like to gnaw on the wires.