This winter the Adirondack Land Trust is hosting an online discussion and a field trip showcasing the Northern Forest Atlas, a collection of graphic tools for naturalists of all abilities.

At 10 a.m. Tuesday, Feb. 9, Northern Forest Atlas Director Jerry Jenkins will present a virtual introduction to the atlas’s free online resources, including photographs, videos and other digital tools. Jenkins will also give a brief botany lesson from northernforestatlas.org.

To learn more and to register for the online event, see adirondacklandtrust.org/events.

At 10 a.m. Saturday, Feb. 20, Adirondack Land Trust staff and two Northern Forest Atlas volunteers will lead winter botany field trips at a 600-acre property the land trust protects in the town of Jay. Botanists Ray Curran and Dan Spada will apply atlas lessons on short hikes. Field trip groups will be kept small as a COVID-19 precaution.

To learn more and to register for the field trip, see adirondacklandtrust.org/Field-Trips.

About the atlas

The Northern Forest of northeastern North America extends from Maine and the Maritimes to the edge of prairies in Minnesota and Manitoba. It is large, diverse, surprisingly continuous and increasingly significant in a world where much forest has been lost or damaged.

The Northern Forest Atlas is a print and digital project created in 2011 by Ed McNeil and Jerry Jenkins to document the region’s current biology and to provide tools for the next generation to study and protect it.

Jenkins leads fieldwork, photography, writing and graphics for the atlas. He is a former staff scientist with the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Adirondack Program. Trained in physics and philosophy, Jenkins has 50 years of field experience as a botanist and ecologist in the Northern Forest. He is the author of Climate Change in the Adirondacks, and co-author of Adirondack Atlas and Acid Rain in the Adirondacks, and recipient of the Harold K. Hochschild Award from the Adirondack Experience and the W. S. Cooper award from the Ecological Society of America.

Ed McNeil, president of the atlas project and a past chair of the Adirondack Land Trust, will introduce the program. Ed flew throughout the Adirondack Park for a nitrogen deposition study using an airplane he built especially for the project, and then built another for filming videos for the atlas website.

To learn more, visit adirondacklandtrust.org or contact info@adirondacklandtrust.org, (518) 576-2400.

Image provided: One of the publications of the Northern Forest Atlas

Photo: A winter field trip © Erika Bailey/Adirondack Land Trust