The Waterman Fund is pleased to announce its 2005 recipients for alpine stewardship grants. This year's recipients represent a broad geographic range and a diversity of projects.


Acadia National Park received funding for the 2007 Northeastern Alpine Stewardship Gathering. Organized and hosted by different organizations every two to three years, the goal of the Gathering is to share and improve the knowledge and management of the alpine areas of the Northeastern U.S. Land managers, researchers, educators, nonprofit partners, trail consultants and maintainers, and volunteer stewards are among the many interests that will be represented.

The 2007 Gathering will be hosted by Acadia National Park and held at the Schoodic Education and Research Center in cooperation with Acadia Partners for Science and Learning. This year's gathering will be an applied workshop channeling the knowledge and enthusiasm of attendees on Cadillac Mountain, the focus of much of research and management attention by Acadia National Park in recent years. Cadillac Mountain is the icon attraction site in Acadia National Park and presents many management challenges.

Highlights will include Recreation Ecologist Dr. Jeff Marion (Virginia Tech) and Social Scientists Dr. Robert Manning (Univ. of Vermont) and Dr. Steve Lawson (Virginia Tech) presenting the results of an integrated research program conducted on Cadillac Mountain and designed to support the development of a management plan.

Noted ecologist Tom Wessels will present an evening slide show entitled the Granite Landscape, based on his book of the same name about granite domes of North America, including those at Acadia.

Attendees will visit Cadillac Mountain and work in teams to develop and present recommended management strategies to the park, guided by a series of carefully prepared questions. Several key park staff will participate as advisors to these groups.

---

The Waterman Fund's grant to ADK for 2007 will fund a Botanical Summit Steward in the High Peaks Wilderness Area of the Adirondack Park.

The Steward is a fifth summit steward position that conducts surveys of rare alpine plants and communities, so a more accurate picture can be established of the overall health and extent of the alpine vegetation found in the Adirondack High Peaks.

The data collected by the Botany Steward will become the baseline information for future monitoring projects. ADK is attempting to create a carefully measured baseline as a standard which they can compare future measurements, enabling ADK to detect changes in plant population size and community structure. Information gathered by the Botany Steward will also provide the Summit Steward Program with a more intimate knowledge of the alpine zone resulting in the hiking public receiving more accurate and powerful information.

The Botany Steward will increase the number of plots surveyed from 210 to 724, or 10 plots per square hectare, and increase the number of summits surveyed to 18-the total number of summits identified with alpine terrain.

---

The Appalachian Mountain Club received a grant for their Alpine Phenology Monitoring Program, a key component of their larger Mountain Watch initiative, an educational environmental monitoring program based in Northeastern alpine habitats where participants contribute observations to a long-term alpine monitoring database.

At the National Mountain Conference in 2000, co-organized by AMC and numerous other organizations, experts expressed increased concern that alpine ecosystems limited to mountaintops could become extinct due to climate change in the near future. This may be especially true in the Northeastern U.S. where alpine habitat is limited. Alpine habitat is a major draw for hundreds of thousands of tourists who visit the Northeast's mountains each year. However, the hiking and recreation audience is not fully aware or engaged in the environmental issues facing the mountains they visit. Raising public awareness and concern about global environmental change and the vulnerability of alpine habitat is a major goal for the AMC.

AMC's Mountain Watch program is designed to educate and encourage participants to become active in natural resource stewardship. Monitoring initiatives are focused on tracking long-term trends in, and the ecological response to, climate change and air pollution. The main objectives of the Mountain Watch program are a) to educate through active 'citizen-science', hands-on monitoring of alpine and mid-elevation ecosystems, b) to engage the outdoor public in a manner that motivates them to take action towards stewardship, and c) to use the citizen-science database to further our understanding of mountain ecosystems relative to global climate change.

An important component of Mountain Watch is our Alpine Phenology Monitoring program. This program is designed to monitor alpine plant flowering times, which may serve as indicators of the ecological response climate change. In August of 2004 AMC launched the Alpine Phenology Monitoring program to document plant phenological changes in the mountains of the Northeast. Protocols were developed for alpine plants by adapting rating systems currently used by the International Tundra Experiment (ITEX Manual, 1996).

AMC would like to increase public participation in their Alpine Phenology Monitoring Program through 1) outreach, 2) refining their current program materials, and 3) developing a web-based data entry system that would allow interested participants to view data collection results and analyses.

---

The Randolph Mountain Club received funding for alpine trail work on the heavily-used Lowe's Path, from the junction of Lowe's Path and Gray Knob Trail, to the summit of Mount Adams.

The goal of RMC's Lowe's Path Stewardship project is to combine on-the-ground trail work and trail restoration with other elements of stewardship, including education of hikers at nearby Gray Knob and Crag Camp, as well as RMC members. In addition, the RMC hopes to further the discussion among land managers and trail workers in the White Mountains, regarding trail work principles in the alpine zone.

The RMC plans to employ a highly skilled, three person trail crew. The crew will work during September and October, as weather dictates. Using a log developed in partnership with the US Forest Service, the club will undertake alpine trail work, including cairning, recairning, drainage construction, low scree walls, brush scree and rubble to reduce trail "threading."

There will be three educational components to the project, as follows:

• Alpine Trail Work Principles Discussion
  The RMC plans to convene the major partners in trail work in the WMNF, including WMNF trail work supervisors, AMC, DOC and Sandwich Range Conservation Association, to facilitate a discussion on the principles of alpine trail work.
• Photo Documentation
  The RMC will take photos of the project, and will create three, identical photo albums. One each will be placed at Gray Knob, Crag Camp and Stearns Lodge, RMC's new facility for its trail crew and caretakers, in Randolph valley. The albums will include captions, explaining the goal of the work and the principles involved, so that guests to RMC facilities and future trail crews will have a basic understanding of the work. The album will also be placed online on the RMC web site, at randolphmountainclub.org, in the club's alpine stewardship section
• RMC Newsletter article
  The RMC will produce an article on the project, with photos, for RMC's twice-annual newsletter. The goal of the article will be to explain alpine trail work principles to RMC's membership.