Understanding New Hampshire's Natural Heritage

Pete Bowman of the NH Natural Heritage Bureau, checks for rare plants in Nottingham

Pete Bowman, a Conservancy ecologist with the N.H. Natural
Heritage Bureau, checks for rare plants in a Nottingham wetland.
Ben Kimball photo.

n one day, an ecologist for the N.H. Natural Heritage Bureau might be crawling across boulder-strewn talus slopes, searching for rare alpine wildflowers. Another day might find one deep in the forest, counting stems of small whorled pogonia, a federally endangered orchid; or wading through a marsh, studying and documenting the natural communities found there.

And now that field season is pretty much over, the bureau’s ecologists will hunker down, pore through the field notes they’ve taken over the past few months, enter and analyze data and, write reports about New Hampshire’s biodiversity.

As state agencies go, the N.H. Natural Heritage Bureau is small and relatively little known. But in New Hampshire, it plays a vital role in The Nature Conservancy’s mission of protecting nature and preserving the full diversity of life.

“Protecting life on earth is impossible if you don’t know what species to pay attention to, or where they live, and how they’re doing over time,” says Doug Bechtel, the Conservancy’s director of conservation science and a former ecologist with the Bureau. “Heritage Bureau ecologists provide essential science, upon which we build our priorities and strategies. Without heritage data and expertise, it would be like trying to build a house without bricks or wood.”

Part of a Larger Network
The N.H. Natural Heritage Bureau is part of a much larger network of 74 similar programs in every state and now in Latin America and Canada. Launched by The Nature Conservancy in the 1970s, the programs were established to be an objective, science-based clearinghouse for collecting, assessing, and tracking information on the location and condition of rare species and exemplary natural communities. These programs collectively feed natural heritage data to NatureServe, a non-profit organization that manages and interprets this information. This network approach lets heritage data users understand the rarity and status of biodiversity within their state, across the country and beyond.

The Nature Conservancy and the N.H. Office of State Planning proposed the creation of a natural heritage program in 1981. Five years later, the program was established in the Department of Resources and Economic Development and was initially administered with help from a committee of several agencies and conservation organizations. When the N.H. Native Plant Protection Act was passed in 1987, the program assumed responsibility for its mandates and began formally developing a database of rare plant, rare animal, and exemplary natural community occurrences throughout the state.

“The Natural Heritage Bureau serves a vital role in documenting an inventory of our flora and fauna, and providing information to agencies, landowners and conservation groups to help them make well-informed decisions,” says Philip Bryce, director of the N.H. Division of Forests and Lands. The bureau, which is part of the Division of Forests and Lands “has a tremendous amount of knowledge and experience that serves top-notch information about the state’s ecological resources.”

Compared with other states’ heritage programs, New Hampshire’s is a relative rarity in that its ecologists (five of the program’s eight employees) are TNC employees. That arrangement is spelled out in a contract between the state and the Conservancy.

All the Flora and Fauna
“The bread and butter of our work includes ecological surveys and inventories, evaluating natural communities and interpreting those areas to users,” says Dan Sperduto, who’s been a bureau ecologist for the bureau for the past 18 years. Field surveys are conducted on private land – only with landowner permission – in addition to local, state and federal lands.

To complete these surveys, Sperduto and others at the Natural Heritage Bureau visit some of the most remote, obscure places in the state. “We’re not often on a trail or a road. We’re often in the backwoods, sometimes in some pretty nasty terrain, sometimes in some very nice places,” he says.

Over the past two years, the bureau has conducted field surveys and completed 20 reports for imperiled species (such as northern blazing star and northeastern bulrush), natural communities (such as enriched wetlands), and geographic areas or properties (such as Ossipee Lake, Fall Mountain State Forest, and private lands in the Alstead area). The bureau also recently was a major partner in helping the Fish and Game Department complete the state’s Wildlife Action Plan, a project that involved extensive data management, mapping analysis, writing habitat profiles, and modeling habitat.

Advancing Conservation
The bureau’s database is the state’s definitive resource for rare plant, rare animal, and exemplary natural community occurrences. And it’s not static, reflecting an evolving state of knowledge. In the past two years, the database grew by 505 records, bringing the total number of known occurrences to more than 5,800.
This information is vital in guiding conservation priorities. In 2001, International Paper announced its intended sale of 171,500 acres in New Hampshire’s North Country. The bureau’s rapid and thorough on-the-ground survey helped the Conservancy and the state define boundaries of what would later become known as the 25,000-acre Connecticut Lakes Headwaters Natural Area. It also identified special management areas on the 145,000 acre Connecticut Lakes Working Forest.

Because science drives the Conservancy’s work, most of the conservation areas where The Nature Conservancy has protected land and water in New Hampshire were identified, thanks to information provided by the Natural Heritage Bureau.

“The Nature Conservancy has a mission of preserving plants, animals and natural and natural communities,” says Phil Bryce of the Division of Forests and Lands. “And the state, through the clear will of the Legislature, understands the need to document and conserve New Hampshire’s native plants, wildlife, and natural communities. So, there’s a significant overlap through the Natural Heritage Bureau, and that’s taken a step further with the public/private partnership between the state and TNC.”

Visiting New Hampshire’s Biodiversity
The best way to understand the breadth and scope of New Hampshire’s biodiversity is to go there and see it. The N.H. Natural Heritage Bureau has made it easy to find and visit these places with a series of a dozen brochures.

Produced with help from New Hampshire’s moose conservation license plate grant program, the guides describe such places as the rich mesic forest of Moose Brook State Park, the talus ravine at Devil’s Hopyard, and the Atlantic white cedar swamp at TNC’s Manchester Cedar Swamp Preserve.
You can find more examples of New Hampshire’s biodiversity on www.dred.state.nh.us/divisions/forestandlands/bureaus/naturalheritage.

Additionally, the bureau is completing a new book that will be available at bookstores to help you understand the nature of New Hampshire. Look for “An Illustrated Guide to the Natural Communities of New Hampshire” sometime next year.