The Vermont Monitoring Cooperative held its “final” conference as the VMC on December 2, 2016 at the University of Vermont (UVM) Davis Center. VMC announced that after 26 years serving Vermont, the Cooperative is becoming a regional collaborative, expanding to include New York and northern New England. The new collaborative is called the Forest Ecosystem Monitoring Cooperative (FEMC).

Some of the new regional partners attended the conference to present information on best practices in forest and watershed management as well as the latest research and monitoring results from cooperators and members of our professional community. The conference will continue to be a great opportunity for multidisciplinary networking among ecosystem scientists, policy makers, land managers, and others interested in a healthy and productive forest landscape.

The expansion from a Vermont-centric to a regional monitoring network has been ongoing for the past couple of years. 2016 marked the first year of regional incentive funds designed to support state partners around a forest health project of their choice. The 2016 conference became the logical place to let our community know about the regionalization of the Cooperative.

"Because we understand that the challenges facing our forested ecosystems are not confined by political boundaries, VMC staff and cooperators have fully embraced this move to regionalization," said VMC Director Jennifer Ponitus of the UVM Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources. "The expanded FEMC collaborative fills a critical gap by facilitating collaboration and data sharing among the many organizations working to sustain our forested ecosystems across the region."   

To understand ecosystem processes across the region, the area monitored ideally fits the ecosystem, in this case northern temperate forests. Other organizations exist that may have similar interests in forest ecosystem health but either do not know of each other or have no infrastructure for data archiving, sharing, or synthesis. Many long-term records of environmental variables may be “rescued” from paper records or research studies. Aggregation of these datasets from disparate sources such as universities, experimental forests, and state agencies in the region can extend the life of data beyond the original project, converting research data into discoverable, usable monitoring data. Finally, the expanded Cooperative can bring a sharp focus on the many forest stressors of concern in this region, from fragmentation to invasive pests to climate change.

For these and other reasons, the VMC has worked with its Steering Committee to reach out to other state agencies and organizations to participate in the Cooperative, developing new partnerships and pilot projects to show how VMC can expand the Cooperative model to the region. VMC has also expanded its archive to include dozens of new regional datasets and started opening up its data access portal to allow more users to contribute data from around the region. Some of the partner projects initiated during the Cooperative's regionalization include: a data archive and integration with Massachusetts; a birch species health data synthesis with New Hampshire; a forest disturbance data retrieval and archive with New York; and a forest health monitoring network by Vermont.

The FEMC will be guided by a regional steering committee that will retain some members of the current VMC steering committee while welcoming new members from each of the cooperating states. In addition, each of the participating states (Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, New York, and Vermont) will convene State Partnership Committees to target in-state priorities and to meet annually with other states to identify regional needs. Specialists from our existing advisory committee aided by specialists in the surrounding states will continue to provide scientific and technical support to state sub-committees and the entire regional Cooperative.

"The VMC continues to play a significant role in archiving and maintaining critical data sets that document long term environmental change," said Nancy Mathews, Dean of the Rubenstein School and member of the VMC Steering Committee. "Maintaining high quality data, in an accessible format, has never been more critical than now. With its new name, and expanded mission, the Cooperative now signals a growing sense of responsibility to the region to enhance long term research and monitoring through data sharing."

The Vermont Monitoring Cooperative will officially change its name to the Forest Ecosystem Monitoring Cooperative on May 8, 2017 and will launch a new website. As always, FEMC will host an annual conference in December 2017, showcasing the expanded work of the Cooperative and welcoming new members to the group. Please attend and help us launch the new, regional Forest Ecosystem Monitoring Cooperative!