A Plan for for Sustaining New Hampshire’s Lakes Region

By Paul Doscher

What image comes to mind when you hear the words “Lakes Region?” Is it a glistening lake with loons calling in the distance? Is it casting a line with kids on a calm summer morning? Or boating over the broad expanses of the “big lake”? Perhaps it’s the view from Mt. Major, Belknap, or Gunstock. Chances are that any image you have includes clear, clean, and abundant water surrounded by a landscape of green trees and fields.

The region’s extraordinary natural beauty and resources are its greatest assets—but these assets also put the region at risk. New Hampshire’s famous lakes remain a major economic driver within both the region and the state, contributing to the economic base through recreation, tourism, and real estate revenues. 

Development—some of it well-planned, and some not—has an impact upon both the quality of the water and the surrounding land. Those impacts are magnified when the land in question has provided a home and habitat for moose, bear, otter, waterfowl, and other wildlife, or when it overlays critical aquifers where groundwater is recharged.

For many years, a number of conservation and other organizations throughout New Hampshire have taken steps to ensure that these landscapes and the lakes they surround remain in the future of the Lakes Region. Many thousands of acres have been protected by the landowners, municipalities, land trusts, and public agencies. Those conserved acres make a significant contribution to securing the clean streams, wetlands, rivers, lakes, and ponds that are the lifeblood of central New Hampshire’s famous lakes.

Making Choices

The places that contribute most to the quality of life and environmental integrity of the region deserve special attention when land conservationists are deciding where to focus their limited resources.

Land trusts and conservation agencies have always tried to be strategic when choosing among conservation opportunities. Knowing which places have the highest conservation values and the most importance to the future of a region is important. That’s where land conservation planning becomes essential. The Forest Society has been working with New Hampshire communities and other conservation organizations to identify and conserve a statewide system of conservation lands.

Responsible conservation planning includes the acknowledgement that not all land should be protected. Some land is more appropriate for other uses; smart conservation goes hand in hand with smart growth. The Forest Society’s proposed statewide vision, called “New Hampshire Everlasting,” places a priority upon conserving open space for wildlife, clean drinking water, farming, and forestry. To become a conservation priority, land must have size, location, qualities, and linkages to other conserved areas. Conserved lands should also balance the need for healthy ecosystems, working landscapes, and public access for recreation.

Our early tools for looking at the larger landscape were rudimentary. We had maps of soil types, black-and-while aerial photographs, and sometimes anecdotal information about wildlife sitings. Trying to plan land conservation was most often an exercise of visiting with knowledgeable local people and finding out what places in their communities were most valued for open space, working forests or farms, recreation, or wildlife. 

With the introduction of computer mapping systems in the 1980s and 1990s (now called Geographic Information Systems), all that changed. Soon soil maps were available electronically, and other resources and information followed. Before long, even aerial photographs were digital and could be used in combination with computer generated maps. Today, the library of digital landscape data is enormous and growing rapidly. We now have scientific research about forestry, ecology, and water quality that enables us to focus our conservation efforts on those lands that provide the greatest benefits to our communities. Our ability to gather information, combine it, slice it, dice it, and generate maps that show the co-occurrence of various natural resources on a selected acre of land is simply unprecedented.

Regional Distinctions

These new tools have enabled us to become more strategic in our selection process. We now have the ability to proactively identify the best conservation features within a landscape and define priorities. In recent years, the Forest Society has worked with many partners to apply this prioritization process to the development of regional land conservation plans for the Coastal area of the state, the bi-state Quabbin-to-Cardigan (Q2C) region, and the Merrimack River Valley.

But different locales have different priorities. In the Q2C region, stakeholders of both western New Hampshire and north central Massachusetts place a premium upon the large tracts of working forest lands for which the region is renowned. New Hampshire’s Coastal Conservation Plan focuses upon the land surrounding rivers and other water bodies that drain into the Atlantic Ocean. Along the more densely developed Merrimack River Valley that winds through Concord, Manchester, and Nashua, the parcels that border the Merrimack River and the fertile soils left behind by the river’s flooding are the stars of the show.

So, which is better: 2,000 acres of working forest in the Quabbin-to-Cardigan region, or a 150-acre farm in the Merrimack Valley? Understanding the conservation priorities within a given region enables conservation planners to make informed comparisons between potential land protection projects within that area. The value of the smaller farm may be less apparent to those who prize the vast forested landscapes of the western part of the state. To the residents of Merrimack River Valley cities, however, 2,000-acre blocks of undeveloped land within city limits are just a memory. But the smaller farm and the larger forest both rise to the top when compared with other similar properties within their respective regions. Regional plans help us identify conservation priorities beyond just acreage goals.

Setting Conservation Priorities in the Lakes Region

The current regional conservation planning priority is the Lakes Region. The landscape’s dramatic topography plays a role in directing the focus of conservation efforts within the area.

“What makes the Lakes Region unique within New Hampshire is that it has these vast visually open areas—the lakes—that provide vantage points for distant viewscapes defined by surrounding mountains,” said Tom Howe, senior director of land conservation at the Forest Society, who works on land conservation projects in the Lakes Region.

No doubt, it’s the visual character of the area that helps people know when they are in the Lakes Region. The myriad elements that create the visual landscape: forests, ponds, lakes, bogs, rivers, farms and hills, are the stuff of conservation planning. All of these, arranged in the unique configuration that is the Lakes Region, are elements that can be quantified, identified, and mapped in a manner that helps identify which places are the most important to preserving the fabric of the area.

To craft a plan that is realistic and reflects community priorities, a group of stakeholders from the area must be involved. In the Lakes Region, that group is the Forest Society, Lakes Region Conservation Trust, Squam Lakes Conservation Society, Green Mountain Conservation Group, Newfound Lake Region Association, the Nature Conservancy, Lakes Region Planning Commission, and the NH Fish and Game Department, as well as individual communities. 

“While New Hampshire communities cherish their independence, natural resources and wildlife habitat do not follow town boundaries,” said Martha Twombly, Newfound Lake Region Association program director. “By taking a regional perspective and collaborating, towns and non-profits doing this work can be more focused and effective in successfully conserving the most important areas.”

The Lakes Region Conservation Plan builds upon and supports the existing work completed by individual communities and conservation groups like the Newfound Lake Region Association and others, then seeks to bridge the gap between these local plans and statewide initiatives, such as the NH Department of Fish and Game’s Wildlife Action Plan and the Forest Society’s New Hampshire Everlasting vision. The local plans influence statewide priorities, and vice versa.

Each group participating in the Lakes Region Plan brings its own set of conservation priorities to the table, and each gets a vote in how the various layers of conservation data (such as soils, forest blocks, high value habitat, aquifers, etc.) are weighted in the priority setting process. That process is called a “Delphi analysis.” In effect, it’s a voting mechanism where each group assigns each resource value points. When all the votes are in, the weighting of the votes gives levels of consensus importance to each resource. These data can then be turned into a colorful map, with varying shades that illustrate the conservation importance of each part of the landscape, acre by acre. Not surprisingly, the participants in the Lake Region conservation planning process selected features in the broader landscape that contribute to water quality both regionally and locally. The combination of steep slopes and highly erodible soils have the potential to compromise water quality; ergo, these features were highlighted as conservation priorities. Forest blocks ranging from 250 acres to more than 10,000 acres in size also play an important role in both the quality and quantity of the water in the region’s undeveloped watersheds. The Plan also incorporates unique data on high quality stream watersheds from US Geological Service, as well as the locations of impaired waters mapped by the NH Department of Environmental Services.

Ground water quality was another conservation priority. The Ossipee Watershed includes the largest stratified drift aquifer in New Hampshire. “This important groundwater resource for the Lakes Region is at the heart of Green Mountain Conservation Group’s mission,” said Susan Slack, acting executive director of the Green Mountain Conservation Group (GMCG). “This is one of the conservation values that will be incorporated into the Plan, which will in turn help guide GMCG’s conservation efforts.”

The new Lakes Region Conservation Plan is nearing completion. When finished, it will be a tool for each of the participating organizations to prioritize its land protection efforts. It can help inform municipalities as they develop their own open space conservation plans or evaluate proposed development projects. The plan will live in the computer systems of conservation groups and help guide regional decision making for years. That’s a tool that is really useful and helps ensure that, decades from now, when we look back, the view we’ll see will include the same images we have today of clean and abundant water and green hillsides.

Conservation Planning Case Study

In the mid-1990s the Lakes Region Conservation Trust (LRCT) began developing a strategic plan to guide its land conservation work. “We were looking at environments that were both conservation prizes as well as prime real estate investments,” said LRCT President Don Berry. “We identified two key conservation priorities: shorefront land, and large, upland forested tracts that are visible from great distances. These parcels are important from the standpoints of wildlife, recreation, and community character.”

More than a decade later, LRCT had the opportunity to conserve nearly 2,500 acres overlooking Squam Lake on the crest and southern slopes of the Squam Range, one of the largest unbroken wild areas in central New Hampshire. The Range’s quantity and character of wildlife habitat, its vital role as a water source, diverse forests, wealth of trails, linkage with other conserved lands, and importance to the viewshed of Squam Lake established it as a conservation priority of the highest order. Because earlier conservation planning efforts had already identified the Squam Range as a premier conservation resource, it was easy to make the case for conserving this regional landmark when the opportunity to do so arose. It’s this kind of proactive conservation planning that the Lakes Region Conservation Plan seeks to emulate on a larger scale.

For More Information

Green Mountain Conservation Group

Lakes Region Conservation Trust

Lakes Region Planning Commission

Newfound Lake Region Association

NH Everlasting

NH Fish and Game Department

Squam Lakes Association

Squam Lakes Conservation Society

The Nature Conservancy

UNH Complex Systems GRANIT program