What's
Cooking
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What's Cooking
It has been a while since we
have
updated the 'what's cooking' page, but we have been brewing
nonetheless. There are a couple of central new efforts:
The Know Your Place Project
continues to come to life. Anna Duhon, a social anthropologist, has
recently joined us and is mulling over ways of helping us to describe
the social/cultural landscape that shares the ground with the
ecological landscape. Expect to see more of her hand in the months to
come. Graham Hawks is joining us for a sabbatical and, in relation to
Anna's work, is initiating an oral history project here in the County.
His focus is on gathering stories about the County's agricultural past.
Another major focus has been
agroecology. This summer has seen all of our interns out nosing around
Hawthorne Valley Farm with sweep nets, pit traps, Malaise traps, and
aspirators to see if we can map out the distribution of major pest and
beneficial insects in and near our vegetable gardens. The hope is that
this will form the basis for understanding how habitat management might
be used to manage some of these insects in a farm setting. Much of our
past work has looked what farms provide in terms of habitat for native
species; now we are flipping the question to ask - what might native,
or at least wild, species provide to farms?
Aside from that, our 'traditional' work of ecological description
continues. Claudia is afield with one of our interns and several of our
volunteers describing more floodplain forests. This includes work
farther south in Dutchess County, in collaboration with Hudsonia. Aside
from expanding our geographic scope, Claudia is looking at more
disturbed sites to see if they are distinctly different from the more
pristine areas we studied last summer. In the cooker: a possible study
of old farm woodlots as examplars of some of our county's
'ancient forests'.
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