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Meet the new Executive Director of the Greater ...

After a thoughtful search, we are thrilled to announce that Erika Rowland has accepted the position of Executive Director of the Greater Lovell Land Trust. She brings two decades of experience in the Land Trust movement, great academic credentials including a PhD in forest resources from the University of Maine, an education program background, and extensive work on climate change issues at both a local and national level.

Meet the new Executive Director of the Greater Lovell Land Trust!
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Searching for North America's Tallest Surviving ...

I am picking my way through second growth forest in Lovell, in search of the tallest surviving American chestnut tree in North America. From the deep, well-drained soil, towering white pines, like masts on a clipper ship, reach toward the canopy. Muscular red oaks vie for space in the shaded woods. I alternate between craning my head upwards, searching for a glimpse of the chestnut’s distinctive white flowers, and scanning the forest floor for last year’s burs and dropped leaves. It’s here somewhere. Maybe this time I’ll find it…

Searching for North America's Tallest Surviving American Chestnut
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GLLT Announces Opening of Storybook Trail

We are tickled pink to introduce you to the newly installed Storybook Trail along the left hand loop at the Kezar River Reserve on Route 5 across from the Wicked Good Store…

GLLT Announces Opening of Storybook Trail
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Significant Fairies

We’d made promises in the recent past that fell flat. With that in mind, when the Greater Lovell Land Trust’s Nature Explorers, a homeschool group led by Docent Juli, gathered this morning, she was smart and stuck to the life cycles of potential sightings like frogs rather than possibilities…

Significant Fairies
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Happy Earth Day!

In 1970, Senator Gaylord Nelson (D-Wis) promoted Earth Day as a call to embrace environmental causes and fight the forces that were polluting and damaging our planet. By July of that year the Environmental Protection Agency was inaugurated, with its mission to protect the environment and public health, the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act were signed into law, and a global awareness of the environmental movement was begun…

Happy Earth Day!

Mushrooms in Wonderland

Mushrooms in Wonderland

Mushrooms grow with astonishing speed, and the fully-grown mushroom often looks quite different from the baby version. The photos below are both amanitas. As the mushroom grows, the universal veil usually leaves patches stuck to the cap, and the partial veil (which encloses just the gills), often leaves a ballerina-like skirt around the stalk. And just so you know, these are poisonous…

The Giving Power of the Forest

The Giving Power of the Forest

Our predecessors understood and depended upon the giving power of the land. They valued every acre for what it could provide. Forests supplied building material and fire wood. Woodland yielded to pastures that returned milk, wool, meat and eggs. Stewarded fields produced life-sustaining crops and forage for farm animals. Family farms often retained a “back forty” wood lot for game, berries and nuts, lumber and firewood. Granite for foundations and mill stones was cut from boulders and ledge outcrops and every farmer held close the location of the prized hornbeams, used for tool handles of all shapes and functions. The giving power of the land was acknowledged and respected…

Water Loggers

Water Loggers

Water bodies large and small mirror the health of their ecosystems. Western Maine’s lakes and ponds are no different. They submit to the onslaught of natural and man-made impacts throughout the watershed and battle to absorb, buffer, or flush whatever comes their way—rain and storm-water carrying atmospheric pollutants; phosphorus from our backyard fertilizers; road salt, sand, and silt washed from paved and impervious surfaces; nitrogen from pet, wildlife, fish, and bird waste—the list is long. Our role is to identify, mitigate, and, whenever possible, prevent these threats in order to keep the lakes healthy for the generations to come…

Experimental Forests

Experimental Forests

Almost one-hundred years ago, Congress authorized the US Forest Service to establish a network of experimental forests on National Forest System lands. Long-term research was begun exploring topics such as ecosystem processes, forest management techniques, wildlife and their habitats, and factors that affect forest growth and health…