Inventorying Shelburne's Trees

This past week the LANDS crew has been busy finishing up some last bits of work on Pease and completing a new project, inventorying the trees of Shelburne.

The week began similar to how the previous one ended with the crew spread out across Pease Mountain. One last time we made an attempt to mark the boundaries, this time only with flagging. Groups were able to find the corners with relative ease but we still encountered difficulties finding old blazes whilst attempting to follow the bearings on the maps we had available. After a long day bushwacking along the boundaries, we stopped at a local shop in Charlotte for smoothies and creemees.

        Creemees and Smoothies in Charlotte






                               Goodbye Pease

For the remainder of the week we worked with Elise Schadler and her intern Leslie Hendricks completing an inventory of the public trees in the town of Shelburne. We split into four teams (Maple, Oak, Ash and Beech) based on the names of the iPads we  used to collect data. After one day we had a fairly significant chunk of the town inventoried but, in an attempt to push to get as much done as possible, we made use of some of our smartphones along with the collector app to have more ways to collect data than just the iPads. With this infusion of technology to our already strong array we were able to complete almost the entire village including Shelburne beach! We found a variety of tree species and sizes within the ROW or right of way of the villages roadways including Maples, Ash, Oaks, Elms, Spruce and various others which ranged in size from over 42" diameter of the oldest Silver Maples found to less than three inches for many of the newly planted saplings. Overall it was a wonderful project with wonderful weather that accompanied us throughout and as we finish writing the report today we are excited looking forward to our presentation to the select board of Shelburne next month and of course the next projects that awaits us!

See you next week,
The LANDS Crew                                                                       Written By: Travis Hart

Tree ID Before Shelburne Inventory