New York State Department of Environmental Conservation

The Department of Environmental Conservation is committed to conserving, improving, and protecting New York's natural resources and environment and control water, land and air pollution, in order to enhance the health, safety and welfare of the people of the state and their overall economic and social well being.

John Demler, ’08, worked with Greg Owens at the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation in the summer of 2006. He created an inventory and evaluation of cultural resources at the Muller Hill State Forest, which comprises over 5400 acres of land near Georgetown, New York. The project focused on documentation and evaluation of 19^th and 20^th century home, farm and mill site located on 7,000 acres of state land.  This inventory will be used in a unit management plan, which outlines long-term procedures for ensuring biodiversity, sustainable timber production, watershed protection, opportunities for public recreation, and cultural resource preservation.

In the summer of 2005, Tara LaLonde, '05, worked with Owens to digitally archive aerial photos of southern Madison County, NY in order to examine reforestation.  LaLonde said,

"Reforestation has been occurring in Madison County, NY since the mid 1930s, when farmers began to shift agricultural production away from unsuitable lands. Agriculture has been the primary land use in Madison County, NY; however, there continues to be a decline in the number and acreage of farms, which enables the regrowth of forests. This project investigated whether soil quality could play a role in a farmer’s decision to cultivate or revegetate the land. In order to examine reforestation, historic black and white aerial photos from the NYS DEC were scanned in Colgate University’s Printer Services and georeferenced by using ArcGIS (9.0) in Colgate’s Geography Computer Lab. CDs were created of the 1936~1937 aerial coverage of DeRuyter, Georgetown, Lebanon, Hamilton, Brookfield, and Eaton, NY. Each CD contained the town’s georeferenced aerial photos, an excel file of the RMS error, a plot of the town, an index file, and a readme text file. The digital preservation of historical aerial photographs has much utility for the DEC and other organizations that seek historical knowledge about land cover/ land use (LC/ LU) of Madison County. Eaton, NY was chosen to examine its changes in forest, shrub, agriculture, developed, water, and coniferous plantation across the years of 1936, 1955, 1975, 1994, and 2003. A decline in agriculture and an increase in forest occurred over the years.  Reforestation occurred on 8,050.8 acres of Eaton, NY, which was 27.6 % of its area.  The areas of reforestation were analyzed based on soil quality of capability for agricultural production. The overlay of Eaton’s reforested lands and soils indicated soils with limitations to agricultural production reforested more than prime agricultural land over the years, as farmers took poorer soils out of production. An understanding of the timing and extent of reforestation in Eaton, NY aids in forest management policies."