Berkshire Taconic Landscape Program - Berkshire Taconic Landscape Program of The Nature Conservancy

Welcome to the
Berkshire Taconic Landscape


Schenob Brook	Mount Everett	Sage's Ravine

Why the Conservancy Selected This Site
Along the borders of Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New York lies one of the most significant landscapes of the northeastern United States. Known as the Berkshire Taconic landscape, it boasts a remarkable forest plateau and globally significant wetlands, and is home to many rare plants, animals, and natural communities.

It is a place where roaming mammals such as black bear, mink, bobcat, and fisher can continue to survive and migratory songbirds can still safely breed.The human communities embedded within this landscape depend on it for exceptionally clean water and a resource-dependant economic base, and local residents and businesses are especially active in protecting and living gently in this unique environment. This landscape remains relatively undisturbed, despite the fact that it is situated in the heart of the urban Northeast, facing ever-increasing development pressures.

The Nature Conservancy is committed to overcoming state boundaries and working together with the many public and private organizations and individuals dedicated to this landscape, to conserve it and its biodiversity The Berkshire Taconic Landscape program is a joint program of the Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Eastern New York Chapters of The Nature Conservancy. Each the three state chapters of have been working in their respective portions of the Berkshire Taconic landscape for decades. An office created in 1993 in Sheffield, Massachusetts became the base of our work when the three chapters decide to combine their efforts and create the three-state initiative in 1998. All three state chapter offices support the work of the Program, which is carried out by local staff on the ground. The Berkshire Taconic Landscape Program is made possible through the financial support of Conservancy members, individual donors, and many private and public grant programs.

Massachusetts Chapter Homepage
Connecticut Chapter Homepage
Eastern New York Chapter Homepage

Threats
• Residential Development: The exponential increase in second home development represents one of the chief pressures on the Berkshire Taconic landscape, threatening all conservation targets except pitch pine-scrub oak communities. Land prices for large mountain parcels now exceed $4,000 per acre. Development threatens the matrix forest, the wetlands, and the countless endangered species that depend on both.
• Invasive Species: Present in approximately 53% of the forest block and more than 40% of the calcareous wetlands in the project area, invasive species jeopardize the integrity of natural communities by altering fundamental ecosystem processes. Invasive species threaten all conservation targets except pitch pine-scrub oak communities.
• Other Threats: Global Climate Change, Fragmentation of nature habitat from development, Road Construction, Poaching, Mining, Fire Exclusion, Recreational Overuse, and Incompatible Logging Practices

Plants
Hundreds of species of plants grow natively in the Berkshire Taconic Landscape; humans have cultivated many more. These plants appear in more than 40 different groupings, known as natural communities. The plants and plant communities that blanket our landscape are complex, dynamic, and always changing. That is, plant communities constantly adapt to the environment, the climate, and human and natural disturbance. The Berkshire Taconic Landscape, for example was once an arctic tundra, but now harbors gentle temperate forest species. Even today, the plants that make up our familiar landscape are shifting and changing in response to human changes, weather, diseases, invasions, and all sorts of other factors.

Animals
High concentrations of imperiled animals, including reptiles, turtles and amphibians are among the important animals found in this unique ecosystem.

Our Conservation Strategy
• Land Protection - The Conservancy works with landowners to protect key land parcels identified as critical for support of conservation targets. Whenever possible, it also works to conserve the working landscape (forestry land and farms).
• Ecological Restoration - Our key tool for managing lands once they are protected. Much of our ecological restoration work focuses on invasive plant management.
• Applied Conservation Science - with a focus on hydrologic research, population assessment, and fen analysis.
• Collaborative land management with partners - The Conservancy works with state agencies, private land management organizations, and individual landowners to help them meet their land management needs as well as build consensus behind protection of key conservation targets and abatement of threats on the lands they own.
• Working with local communities - to address their needs and ensure a place for conservation in their futures. This means increasing awareness and support in local communities of the important role of conservation in protecting the ecological and cultural integrity of the region. A key element of success is identifying and supporting economic growth that is compatible with the environment and consistent with community goals.

What TNC Has Done/ Is Doing
• Stewardship of Land - Just because land is purchased and protected from development forever doesn’t mean that it will always be a safe harbor for the plants and animals that depend upon it. Often land managers need to repair ecological damage or manage threats that land protection alone cannot protect against. Stewardship, or ecological management and restoration of land, is our key tool for ensuring plants and animals we are working to protect can survive, and it is an increasingly important part of our conservation strategy.
• Invasive Plant Management - A key focus of our stewardship work is management of non-native, invasive plants, the second greatest threat to the conservation targets in this landscape. Through a five year federal funded Weed-It-Now (WIN) program the Berkshire Taconic Landscape Program has become a leader in invasive plant control and management.
• Prescribed Fire - Another threat to a number of our conservation targets is suppression of fire. We are therefore applying prescribed fire to maintain and expand rare natural communities like calcareous fens.

Preserves in the Berkshire Taconic Landscape:
Some of the lands we protect are accessible to the public, and we welcome your visits!
Please keep in mind, these preserves protect some of our region's most threatened plants, animals and natural communities, and we ask that you use care and common sense when visiting them. Please stay on boardwalks and trails, especially in wetlands. These areas are extremely sensitive. (Sorry, dogs are not allowed.) Thank you!

Roger and Virginia Drury Preserve
Tatkon House Preserve