The New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services awarded Aquatic Resource Mitigation grants to three local projects last week.
All three local projects are aimed at purchasing and preserving land with high quality wildlife habitat in areas of the Merrimack Watershed that are susceptible to house lot subdivisions.
The Northeast Wilderness Trust received $233,700 to purchase the 130-acre Campbell Hill Preserve off Campbell Hill Road in Francestown, the Francestown Land Trust received $104,108 to purchase 10 acres along the South Branch of the Piscataquog off Cross Road in Francestown, and the Piscataquog Land Conservancy received $500,000 towards the purchase of a 274 acre parcel off Abbott Hill Road along the Nissitissit River in Mason.
“Our criteria for funding projects is that they’re in good locations with high aquatic resources, diverse habitats, and are connected to other conserved lands,” said Lori Sommer of the New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services. “By maintaining connections in the landscape, you’re preparing it better for the future,” she said, as well as facilitating the movement of aquatic and terrestrial species.
She said that native Eastern brook trout live on the South Branch of the Piscataquog, and endangered and threatened species including the wood turtle, spotted turtle, and the Blanding’s turtle have been found near both sites in Francestown.
The Campbell Hill Preserve property encompasses a section of Brennan Brook and over nine acres of “really intact” wetland, a section large enough that it shows up on the National Wetland Inventory, according to John Leibowitz, the executive director of the Northeast Wilderness Trust. The property encompasses a diversity of terrain, he said, from the summit of Campbell Hill “all the way down to these lower elevation wetlands.”
The Northeast Wilderness Trust is exclusively focused on land conservation and management consistent with federal designated wilderness standards, he said, which means that land they manage remains “untrammeled,” with no logging, or motorized or mechanized access. Leibowitz said the landowner had specifically been seeking a “forever wild outcome” for the parcel, and he expected the Trust to officially purchase the property during the second quarter of 2020, after which their management would be as simple as posting the property and making sure that wilderness standards remain upheld.
He said he’s excited to be working in Francestown, and thinks the project will compliment the “great mosaic of conserved lands” already in the area, including the adjacent Brennan Falls Preserve, which is managed by the Francestown Land Trust.
“Any time you conserve what is really wilderness, self-willed land … you’re creating really important core habitat for the surrounding landscape,” he said.
“We also know that wild and unmanaged forests are unparalleled in their ability to store and sequester carbon and ecological conditions in wilderness areas can serve as a baseline of conditions to compare to surrounding managed land,” he said.
The Northeast Wilderness Trust owns or holds conservation easements to 13,000 acres across New Hampshire, including the Binny Hill Preserve in New Ipswich is a good example of the spectrum of projects his organization works on. He said that the public would be allowed on the Campbell Hill Preserve once it’s purchased, but, unlike the Binny Hill Preserve, there would be no hunting permitted, and no plans to establish hiking trails.
Francestown Land Trust’s Barry Wicklow wrote the grant application to purchase ten acres of land along the South Branch of the Piscataquog. “The parcel that we’re in the process of purchasing was up for development as a house lot,” he said, adding that it’s much harder for a riparian area’s ecology to recover after it’s developed or paved than, say, farmland that reverts to woodland.
Wicklow teaches aquatic ecology and conservation biology at Saint Anselm College, and conducted water tests and surveys of the insects in the stream with his students over the last two years. Each insect present in a stream corresponds to a water quality index that runs from 0 to 10, he said, where insects with a tolerance value of 0 are intolerant of any kind of pollution, while insects with a tolerance of 10 could survive in very polluted waters. He said the most common insect they found was a caddisfly, which has a tolerance value of 0. There were “quite a few” other low-tolerance species, he said, indicating high quality water at the site. He said the South Branch is also classified as a wild trout stream.
He said the Francestown Land Trust’s interest in the parcel was part of their Headwaters South Branch Initiative.
“We’re trying to make all these pieces fit together so they’re all together, instead of having missing puzzle pieces that fragment the habitat,” he said.”When there’s an area on the river that’s available, we try to either get a conservation easement on that property, or we can acquire it.”
“What we’re trying to do is protect the river in uplands so that the water quality remains high, not only for wildlife, but for people,” Wicklow said. “Forested uplands … provide a buffer for the river, and absorb like a sponge the pollutants and nutrients that can harm aquatic life.”
He said that the parcel was recently logged, so they will allow the forest to grow back. ”Like all our lands, this will be open to the public for passive recreation,” he said.
The Piscataquog Land Conservancy’s initiative to purchase a 274-acre parcel in Mason began in October. The property abuts the town’s Spaulding Brook Conservation Area, and the water and land provides high-quality wildlife habitat, including 25 acres of wetlands, 10 confirmed vernal pools, and 9,600 feet of perennial and intermittent streams. It covers a substantial section of the headwaters to the Nissitissitt River, a National Wild & Scenic River.
Now that the grants have been announced, Sommer said grantees will be conducting surveys, appraisals, and deeds in order to complete the grants in the 18-month window. In addition to the Francestown and Mason projects, three other ARM grants were also awarded in this round to projects in New Boston, Auburn and Candia, and Plaistow.