The Guy Waterman Alpine Steward Award

Dan’s attraction to mountains began as a teenager when he started climbing 4k footers in the White Mountains with a local Explorer Post in Lexington, MA, which led to a deep interest in nature and ecology, and eventual college pursuits in forestry and plant biology. He was lucky enough to join the NH Nature Conservancy and the NH Natural Heritage Bureau (NHB) as a plant ecologist/botanist where he worked for twenty years. This was followed by eleven years as lead botanist at the White Mountain National Forest, before retiring this past spring.
In the early 1990s Dan was part of a diverse collaboration on Franconia Ridge, including Guy and Laura Waterman, Charlie Cogbill, AMC, NH Natural Heritage, and the White Mountain National Forest. This was the first of two such studies, twenty years apart, to which Dan facilitated and contributed on Franconia Ridge, culminating in Charlie Cogbill’s detailed reports on the scientific lessons from long term monitoring, and leading to helpful consensus on management directions.
After this work, Dan and Charlie teamed up to complete the first comprehensive floristic and vegetation study of alpine peaks outside the Presidential Range, including vegetation data from nearly all of the alpine peaks in the state of New Hampshire, leading to a comprehensive classification of alpine communities. Dan went on to produce two books at Natural Heritage, Natural Communities of NH with Bill Nichols (2004 and 2011), and The Nature of NH with Ben Kimball (2011).
With the Forest Service and many partners, Dan initiated the now eleven-year effort to control dandelions on Mount Washington, which has met with substantial progress and still emerging lessons. This work led to the first detailed study (with Bill Nichols and Mike Jones) of non-native species in the NH alpine recently published in the journal Arctic, Antarctic, and Alpine Research, and contributed to the first alpine invasive
management plan for an alpine zone in eastern North America (with Nichols at NHB). Dan, Mike Jones and Liz Willey also chronicled the first known extirpation of an alpine species in the U.S. with their case study of Sibbaldia procumbens in Tuckerman Ravine, not seen in thirteen years, and a demise believed to have been accelerated by humans.
Over the years Dan has been a part of wide-ranging collaborations with teams of researchers from the U.S., Quebec, and New Brunswick. He has participated in multiple GLORIA sampling efforts in NH, and in the Chic Choc and Uapishka Mountains (Monts Groulx), both in Quebec, and is mid-stream with a detailed study of alpine snowbank communities in eastern N.A., extending into Quebec, Newfoundland, and Iceland.