Connecting the forest dots to make a whole

Think big.

The woods around your house, the state forest or nature preserve up the road, aren’t single entities.

They’re part of one of the great forests of the world — the mixed hardwood-and-evergreen forest of the eastern United States which covers 926,000 square miles. It’s as important as the great forests of the American West.

“It’s like the Yellowstone-to-Yukon forest,” said Tim Abbott, director of regional land conservation for the Housatonic Valley Association based in Cornwall. “That’s not hyperbole.”

“It’s the Appalachian landscape,” said Bill Labich, senior conservationist at the Highstead Arboretum in Redding.

But in the northeast, it’s in pieces — core forests of 250 acres or more, public and privately owned woods and the corridors that run between them. In places like the Danbury-New York border, the corridor narrows, then widens to the north.

Because of climate change, it’s more important than ever to protect this land from fragmentation and over-development.

“What helps buffer the land and prevent erosion… trees,” said Lynn Werner, executive director of the Housatonic Valley Association. “What do we need for carbon sequestration… trees. What do we need to allow wildlife to move….trees.”

The association is now part of a coordinated effort by many land conservation groups in the northeast to preserve not only the big plots of woodlands, but also the links that connect them.

Called Follow the Forest, it is trying to create a protected swath of forested land of nearly 5 million acres, running from Westchester County in New York north through Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to Canada.

To help this effort the John and Jane Weiderhold Foundation — part of the Northwest Connecticut Community Foundation — awarded the association a $60,000 grant this month.

Werner said the grant will help spread the word about Follow the Forest. To read more about the initiative, go the association’s website at www.hvatoday.org and scroll down to Follow the Forest.

H John Voorhees III / Hearst Connecticut Media file photo The Housatonic Valley Association hosted its annual Still River Day to teach Danbury middle and elementary school students about the environment in an outdoor classroom setting next to the Still River in 2017.