One central goal of the Living Land Project is the creation of an Ecological and Cultural Field Guide to the Habitats of Columbia County, NY. Our hope is that this guide and related materials will stimulate public exploration of our landscape and provide useful information for land-owners and land-use planners.
As part of assembling this guide, we have shared different versions of our initial draft chapters at public events, both to start feeding back the information we have accumulated during our project and as a way to garner input on the design of the guide. We are now getting down to brass tacks and trying to create the book. It’s a long row to hoe but step-by-step we seem to be getting closer.
In this spirit, this page is a ‘virtual workshop’ not in the sense of a workshop presentation, but rather in the sense of a machine-cluttered, saw-dust carpeted, blue-print wallpapered, fly-spotted skylight-lit workshop where we are in the midst of trying to assemble something.
If some of the information you find here is useful to you, great, please let us know; if some of it seems confusing or wrong, please, please let us know. If you’re missing something, i.e., if there is information that you would hope to find in a guide like this but which doesn’t yet seem to be part of our plans, also let us know. Email us or ring us (518 672 7994) with any corrections or comments.
PLEASE REALIZE THAT ALL THE MATERIAL HERE IS IN DRAFT FORM – THIS IS THE BETA OF THE BETA RELEASE.
If you plan to use this information in any way, we would recommend you contact us – some of it might be out of date, lacking in appropriate interpretation or just plain wrong!
Files describing the field guide:
Draft Table of Contents (August 2019)
Draft key to habitats (10/30/2015; we’ve haven’t gotten back to this recently, but it’s a planned part of the book)
Draft habitat descriptions: We’ve now got a designer and a publisher. While these drafts are not finalized and there are still some place-holders, the book is starting to take shape!
- Red Cedar Forest (August 2019)
- Hemlock Forest (August 2019)
- Northern Hardwood Forest (August 2019)
- Oak-Maple Forest (August 2019)
- Dry Oak Forest (August 2019)
- Wet Meadow (August 2019)
Slideshows (in pdf format) describing the project:
- Intro. to the Living Land Project and the ecology of exciting Columbia County habitats.
- Intro. to the cultural work associated with the Living Land Project.
- A guide to the guide.
The web pages of our collaborators and funders:
Hudsonia, Ltd. (a key collaborator in the field and at the writing desk)
Columbia Land Conservancy (an important institutional collaborator helping us to hone and share a useful field guide)
Hudson River Estuary Program (while not an official collaborator on this project, this Program has funded our consultative round of outreach and provides much regional information on biodiversity and conservation)
Kalliopeia Foundation (a major funder of the initial years of the Living Land Project)