Lincoln, Vermont

The National Community Forestry Center, Northern Forest Region provided facilitation assistance and funds to hire a local research coordinator, enabling  the Commission to spend a year organizing forest walks, conducting interviews, and hosting public events to get a diverse response to their research question: 

“What are Lincoln residents most interested in and/or concerned about in regard to our 3 municipal forests?” 

The information they gathered was presented with recommendations in a report to the Lincoln Selectboard in the Spring of 2003. Lincoln’s research coordinator chronicled his experiences and provided a timeline that the NCFCNFR has published as a guide for other communities faced with planning for municipal forestland. Click here to download this report, Engaging Residents in Planning for Municipal Forests: A Case Study of Lincoln, Vermont, on our website. 

Besides this case study report, a series of workshops, also came out of Lincoln's project and its Colby Hill Forest. One workshop was entitled, Conducting a Biological Inventory in Your Family Forest: A Case Study of Lincoln's Colby Hill Town Forest, and it and the project is supported by the Colby Hill Fund, Vermont Community Foundation. Using Lincoln’s Colby Hill Town Forest as a case study, ecologist Marc Lapin, herpetologist Jim Andrews, and mammologist Jan Decher showed participants how biodiversity can be assessed by conducting a Rapid Ecological Assessment. Participants learned how private landowners can conduct similar inventories of their own lands, how such surveys inform forest management, and what the implications are for the broader landscape. Another workshop recently held was entitled Bird Habitat Stewardship in the Family Forest and was also part of the Biodiversity Workshop Series. In this workshop, participants identified birds, learned about their habitat needs, and found out how to manage their land to maintain or enhance these habitat conditions.