News

The Flora of Columbia County (Part 1): Introduction and Some Spring-flowering Plant Families is the most recent installment of presentations about the plants and animals that share the landscape with us. Botanist Claudia Knab-Vispo reviews some helpful botanical concepts and then introduces spring-flowering plants of five plant families that are found wild-growing in Columbia County.

Past presentations include An Introduction to Butterflies and Their Natural History by Dylan Cipkowski and The Butterflies of Various Habitats in Columbia County by Conrad Vispo.

Are you interested in learning more about butterflies in our region, including rare habitat specialist species?

If so, consider watching Conrad and Dylan’s two part presentation on Columbia County butterflies.

The first part of the presentation by Dylan Cipkowski gives an introduction to butterflies and their natural history.

The second part of the presentation by Conrad Vispo introduces a variety of Columbia County habitats and some of the butterflies that live in each.

You may also enjoy browsing our Butterfly webpage which offers additional regionally-relevant resources, including information about the new Butterfly Atlas Project and how to participate.

Because we are currently unable to offer any guided ecology walks in person, we are providing some new online resources to help guide your explorations of the natural world in Columbia County during this time of physical distancing.

Monday through Saturday, our staff takes turns posting daily photographic essays entitled “Farmscape Wonder Wanders” both on Facebook and in our blog Progress of the Seasons Journal. In these essays, we share what we see, learn, and find interesting during our own explorations of natural areas here in the County. We invite you to “come for a walk” with us and then also to share your own discoveries. The Sunday posts are a potpourri of select seasonal observations contributed by the community. They also contain a brief comparison of this year’s seasonal events with historical events recorded from our area for the same calendar week in the period between 1826-1875.

We also have created a new webpage “Spring Flora of Columbia County,” where—from now until the end of May 2020—we will assemble weekly a virtual bouquet (really, just a pdf poster) of the flowers currently seen in the County. These “What is in bloom?” posters (see example for the week of 21-28 March 2020) have links to species descriptions of each flower to facilitate learning more about them.

We hope these small offerings from the natural world will enrich your days, entice you to experience nature yourself, and bring a little bit of peace into this turbulent time.

Well, we’ve done it again – completed another season of work and decided to write about it.

You can find our 2019 Year in Review (.pdf) here.

Questions welcome!

“Much has happened at the Hawthorne Valley Farmscape Ecology Program, which is
currently composed of biologist Dylan Cipkowski, anthropologist Anna Duhon,
technician Kendrick Fowler, botanist Claudia Knab-Vispo and wildlife ecologist Conrad
Vispo.  

In addition to the research and outreach described below, we have taken first steps
towards converting the Creekhouse into an eventual “field station,” which will serve not
only as a continued base for our research and educational programs, but also as a space
that attracts visitors through intriguing, stimulating exhibits and workshops. The Vispo
family has moved out of the building and the upper floor is now dedicated to office/lab
space for our growing staff and collections. Throughout the year, we have gone on
several learning journeys to a variety of museums, and consulted with groups and
individuals to begin envisioning the kind of public space, activities, and exhibits most
appropriate for the space available and for the audience we hope to serve. We decided to
focus our efforts in the coming year on the creation of a butterfly house, on a 3D
topographic model of Columbia County onto which we can project stories, and on
making the native plant garden more accessible.”

If you want to learn more, please download our report (.pdf).

Newly available aerial images (LiDAR=Light Detection and Ranging), which “look through vegetation” and depict the underlying topography, have opened a new window onto forest history in Columbia County. On this new website, Conrad tells the fascinating story of charcoaling in our forests, shares the location of remotely mapped charcoal pits (much of the mapping was done by Otter Vispo), and invites your participation in verifying the charcoal pits in your neighborhood.

Lucas Braun, who is working on his Masters in Geospatial Technologies in Germany, took this a step further and kindly created a zoomable version of the charcoal pit map. With his coaching, we also created a web app that can help you find and comment on pits in the field. Thank you, Lucas, for your spontaneous contribution to this project!

We are looking back on a year full of interesting projects and wonderful encounters, and–as a natural evolution of our program–hope to embark on an exciting new adventure in the coming year. Our Year in Review shares some of the highlights of 2018 and gives a taste of things to come… 

Click on the links below to read more about our work:

• Creation and Monitoring of Beneficial On-Farm Habitats
• Applied Farmscape Ecology Research at the Hudson Valley Farm Hub
• Multi-farm Applied Farmscape Ecology Research
• Progress of the Seasons Project
• Biodiversity/Natural Resource Inventories
• Ecological and Cultural Field Guide to the Habitats of Columbia County
• Outreach Programming
• Staff Developments
• Looking Ahead
• Acknowledgements