Participants in the Androscoggin Valley Community Forest Collaborative

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Dartmouth Students Bring New Tools to the Androscoggin Valley Community Forest Collaborative

This spring, three Dartmouth College seniors — Trixie Joy Adlaon, Harrison Kim, and Kellen Seeley — spent their final semester building new planning tools for the Northern Forest Center’s Androscoggin Valley Community Forest Collaborative, a partnership of eight towns managing 32,000 acres of conserved land across northern New Hampshire and western Maine.

“This project showed me that community forests are ultimately about people, and I was really inspired by the foresters, chairs, committee members, and community leaders whose commitment shows up in the work they do every day,” said Trixie Joy. “Their dedication taught me that stewardship is rooted in care, responsibility, and a long-term vision for future generations. It also taught me that collaboration is complex. Regional efforts hold so much potential but that isn’t enough on their own because collaboration requires understanding the different capacities and values that shape each community forest’s practices and uses.”

Launched in 2009 under the guidance of Program Director Julie Renaud Evans, the Northern Forest Center’s Community Forest program has helped nearly 20 communities conserve 40,000 acres for local benefit.

Julie also facilitates the collaborative. “These eight towns all have town forests,” she said. “We’ve been working with them for a couple of years now as a collaborative — a little bit of learning together, a little bit of ‘I’ve done this, I can help you with that.’”

The Androscoggin Valley Community Forest Collaborative visits Bethel Community Forest

This is the third time the Center has tapped into Dartmouth students’ eagerness to explore place-based conservation. Previous student projects included installing permanent carbon monitoring plots to estimate long-term carbon storage at the Buck’s Ledge Community Forest in Woodstock, Maine, and developing a story map for the Center’s website highlighting four Center-supported community forests and the natural and community benefits they realize.

This time, the students began by studying each town’s lengthy stewardship plan, then they interviewed volunteer committee members and visited the Randolph Community Forest in New Hampshire.

From there, they built a comprehensive database of management conditions and priorities across the collaborative — work that speaks directly to a challenge Julie sees across the region. “Small towns have trouble finding volunteers to be selectmen, to serve on the planning board, the zoning board, and now a forest committee, too,” she said. “Volunteer capacity is a real challenge.” A shared database means towns aren’t each starting from zero.

The students also combined each town’s mapping resources into a collaborative GIS map, layering in multiple public data sets. Together, the two tools give the towns a shared reference point for long-term conservation strategy and new regional acquisition opportunities.

Dr. Karen Bieluch, practice-based learning specialist and research associate at Dartmouth College, and an instructor for this partner-focused course, noted: “By visiting these communities and interviewing community members, students learned about the strengths, challenges, and beauty of rural communities in the Northern Forest region.”

Staff Contacts

woman smiling in front of trees

Julie Renaud Evans

Program Director

Email

Cell: 603-724-8322

Photo of Kendall Gray.

Kendall Gray

Program Manager

Email

Cell: 443-841-5201