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May 31, 2023

New Report Offers First Ever Accounting of Forever-Wild Land

A bull moose drinks from Sandy Stream Pond in Maine in autumn

While 81% of the land in New England is forested, only 3.3% of that land has been legally protected as forever-wild: land that can never be developed or logged and thus holds an unmatched capacity to store carbon, protect biodiversity, and sustain the lives of plants, animals, and humans.

A new report co-authored by scientists at Harvard Forest, Highstead Foundation,

May 31, 2023

Old-Growth Forests: Elders Under Threat

Photo shows large old growth tree. By Liz Thompson.

By Emily Johnson

For over a century, Harvard Forest researchers have been studying old-growth forests to better understand our past and prepare for our future. And for millennia, the People of the Dawnland – where the sun first touches the North American continent – have been in relation with these respected elders in ways far beyond measure. In more

May 25, 2023

Summer Interns Arrive to Advance Research Projects

Photo shows students and mentors in front of Harvard Forest's main building

This week, in addition to the chorus of tree frogs and the bloom of pink lady's slippers, 21 undergraduate students arrived at Harvard Forest. Hailing from universities across the country, students began their 11-week Summer Research Program internships in which the pursuit of mentored team projects will span topics that include root microbes, seedling regeneration, forecasting carbon, and

May 5, 2023

Grad Student Opportunity: Summer Digital Learning Specialist

A dozen Harvard Forest winter interns and mentors smile in a conference room front of a screen

The Harvard Forest Schoolyard Ecology team is seeking two part-time, remote Harvard graduate student interns to create an interactive web feature that will allow K12 classrooms to interact with our innovative and award-winning Witness Tree Media Project. The two students will work with our team to develop this resource over a combined period of 150 hours (75 hours per

April 13, 2023

Bullard Spotlight: Exploring Harvard Forest's Ectomycorrhizae with Jenny Bhatnagar

Photo shows Jenny Bhatnagar examining mycorrhizael fungi

The growth of trees in Harvard Forest depends heavily on ectomycorrhizal (EM) fungi, which colonize the roots of live trees, but there is currently no well-curated database on EM fungal abundance and diversity at the forest. To address this, Bullard Fellow Jenny Bhatnagar is compiling data from different fungal herbaria to create the first longitudinal dataset of fungal

April 13, 2023

Survivors: An Event to Celebrate Old Growth Forests (April 26)

Photo of an old growth tree by Liz Thompson.

Join Discover Maynard's "Week of Trees!" event on April 26, where speakers will discuss human dimensions and perceptions of old growth forests.

Featured speakers include Nipmuc cultural steward André StrongBearHeart, who will discuss landscapes from an understanding of traditional cultural values, Harvard Forest researcher Neil Pederson, who will reflect on what old growth forests represent from a western

April 4, 2023

Student Event to Mobilize Data Visualization for Local Classrooms

screenshot of blue and grey Lidar point cloud of an oak tree in summer

What: Design Sprint/Hack-a-Thon to build the scaffolding for a new web-tool that will visualize real-time data from the Witness Tree Social Media Project

Who: Open (free) to Harvard undergraduates and graduate students, particularly those with experience in coding, data visualization, and/or educational technology design for middle and high school audiences. Space is limited to 15 people, so register early!

When: Friday,

March 31, 2023

Provenance in Art and Science

Photo shows researchers involved in the Provenance Project

In the world of art, provenance is the history of ownership of a painting or other work of art that helps to establish the work as authentic.  In a similar way, in the world of science, provenance is the history of an item of data that describes how it was created and transformed.  This information (if available) helps the scientist

March 15, 2023

March 30 & 31: Susan Trumbore Presents Inaugural Bullard Lectures

Photograph of Dr. Susan Trumbore

The Harvard Forest and the Harvard University Center for the Environment are delighted to co-present the Inaugural Charles Bullard Lectures featuring Dr. Susan Trumbore, Director and Scientific Member at the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry and Professor of Earth System Science at the University of California, Irvine. 

The annual Charles Bullard Lectures were established by the Harvard Forest in 2022

February 22, 2023

Bullard Spotlight: Lynda Mapes on the Cutting of our First Forests

Lynda Mapes interviews Jerry Franklin at Harvard Forest.

Author and newspaper reporter Lynda Mapes is two-thirds of the way through her 10-month residency at Harvard Forest's Charles Bullard Fellowship program. 

During her Fellowship, Lynda is researching and writing a book that takes an intimate look at the cutting of our first forests and what that has meant for Native cultures and ecologies. The book travels from First Nations

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