A professor from Siena College visited the forest this month to begin leading a three-year research project on the effects of housing development on forest ecology and wildlife.
The study was made possible by a $184,511 grant from the Northeastern States Research Cooperative that was awarded to Siena assistant professor of science and environmental studies Dan Bogan in June.
“I was very excited to receive this grant, and I had a moment of being beside myself for a minute there and I had to take a quick walk around our yard and enjoy the moment,” Bogan said.
The money will allow him not only to buy the necessary equipment and other resources, but also to hire more than 20 students over the next three years to help out and gain their own fieldwork experience.
“This is a pretty sizable research grant,” Bogan said. “I know that I will be able to do field research for the next three summers and more with this amount of money.”
One of the students joining this fact-finding mission is Lauren Costello, 20, a senior at Siena studying environmental science. She will assist with both fieldwork and data analysis.
“I’m really excited to get started,” said Costello, a native of Cohoes.
Bogan, Costello and the rest of the research team will explore the Northern Forest, which stretches across New York, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine. The researchers will remain in Albany this summer for a pilot session of the project, but over the next three summers they will examine how human expansion into natural and forested areas, also known as the wildland-urban interface, affects the ecosystems that live there. .
According to Bogan, who has studied wildlife conservation in urban landscapes for years, housing development irreversibly changes natural habitats in a way that other changes to the landscape, such as agriculture or the construction of a park, do not. This change not only reduces or completely eliminates the habitat that the area’s wildlife once inhabited, it also threatens biodiversity.
“One of the other types of conflicts that I want to shed some light on is the complex nature of where our ecosystems currently are and how predator and prey interactions are out of sync with what they were historically, which ends up leaving some of these populations. completely uncontrolled or almost uncontrolled, like white-tailed deer,” Bogan said. “We see a shift towards a particular species of small mammal, the white-footed mouse and the deer mouse, rather than seeing the diverse community of small mammals evolve that we would normally see in a healthy wild environment.”
But this biodiversity loss doesn’t just threaten species within forested areas. For Costello, it also threatens the opportunity humans have to learn from the nature around them.
“I think it’s very important that we maintain these environments and make sure that we maintain that level of biodiversity in our area and the Northeast in general,” Costello said. “People can learn a lot from wildlife and their habits and the habitat that they live in, so we need to preserve it so we can learn from them.”
Bogan and his team will use several tools to study this impact on mammals, including non-invasive camera traps, live capture and recapture of small animals, and vegetation sampling.
The findings of this research will naturally benefit the environmental science community, but will also have significant implications for the Capital Region. According to a Cornell analysis of US Census Bureau data released earlier this year, most counties in the Capital Region, including Schenectady, Saratoga, Fulton and Montgomery counties, saw growth in the population from April 2020 to July 2021.
With this growth comes pressure for housing development, particularly in the rural and forested areas of upstate New York. But in addition to habitat and biodiversity loss, housing developments in forested areas often lead to human-wildlife interactions.
Housing developments tend to be built in patches, leaving natural and forested landscaping between each developed space. This leaves room for animals to roam and, inevitably, enter residential sites and encounter humans.
“There is a lot of wooded habitat interspersed within housing developments,” Bogan said. “And for a lot of people, that’s what they want: They want to see that natural habitat, that green space, around them, but what it ends up doing is providing the opportunity for interactions between wildlife and people.”
The Capital Region has had its fair share of these interactions recently. In May, a moose came to Niskayuna and the Department of Environmental Conservation had to remove a sleeping bear from a tree in Albany’s Washington Park. A black bear and cub were also seen in Albany in June.
“The example of the black bear and also the moose moving into a fairly suburban and populated area — those are examples of some of the symptoms that we would be looking at, so we want to get to the root cause of what leads to those special cases. . Bogan said.
These interactions are not usually dangerous to humans, as animal attacks are rare, although they can pose more of a threat to small pets that may be outside.
“Unfortunately, what happens is if a person lets their cat or small dog out, that predator could see the cat as a food source or maybe the small dog as a competitor and can often injure or kill them. to pets,” Bogan said.
The most common interactions between humans and wildlife come in the form of communicable diseases, most notably Lyme disease, to which Capital Region residents are no strangers. These types of diseases may become more prevalent as animals, such as white-tailed deer or deer mice, move more into residential spaces as a result of development in wooded areas.
According to Bryon Backenson of the New York State Department of Health, this movement increases the likelihood that people “are in places where animals have been where ticks could end up landing” and exposing humans.
All of these effects will be investigated in Bogan’s research. Overall, however, he hopes the study will inform future land development policies and practices to encourage conservation and better predict potential human-wildlife interactions.
“We’re doing this research to learn something about our local environment,” Bogan said. “But really, ultimately, we want to be able to make recommendations to municipalities and developers to make really informed decisions about where to develop so that we can protect biological diversity and protect wildlife and forests, but also protect the interests of communities. people. .”
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