Project sets out to map Vermont’s vernal pools

ENOSBURG — Ice still skimmed the little pool in Nancy Patch’s woods one mid-April evening as a group of citizen-scientists ringed its edges. By June, the water will have dried up. In the weeks between March frost and summer heat, forest puddles full of snowmelt such as this one will incubate an explosion of life. Salamanders and wood frogs will scurry from the underbrush to breed in the shallow water. The pool dries up each year, so fish that prey on salaman´ der fry don’t live here. The salamander larvae can grow in safety. Fairy shrimp found only in these ephemeral pools will hatch, breed, lay eggs and die, living their entire lives in a season. Birds, turtles, snakes and other frogs might visit to feed and rest. Before the short-lived pools disappear this spring, groups of volunteerscitizen-scientists will tramp the northern Vermont woods to search them out and document the creatures they harbor. Their work is intended as a first step toward providing some protection for the places where amphibians breed. Vernal pools, as they are known, provide crucial habitat for wood frogs, fairy shrimp and three species of salamanders — spotted, blue-spotted and Jefferson — yet they receive little state protection. That’s because the pools are so small and isolated that they don’t appear on the official maps that identify wetlands worthy of protection. “You can’t conserve something if you don’t know where it is,” Michael Lew-Smith, a Hardwick ecologist, told the group of 18 Franklin County volunteers who gathered for a training session on vernal pools in Enosburg. “How many vernal pools have been lost?” asked Steve Faccio, a biologist at the Vermont Center for Ecostudies. “We just don’t know, but we’ve certainly lost a proportion of them. People see these wet depressions in the woods as waste places. They don’t see them as critical wildlife habitat.” Read more at http://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/article/20090430/NEWS02/90429051/1009/NEWS01