NSF Grant Seeds Harvard Forest

The 3,000-acre Harvard Forest is getting green—a lot of it—to promote green.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) announced this week that it will award over $4.9 million to the Harvard Forest, an ecology and conservation center in Petersham, Mass. The grant is the largest in the center’s 99-year history, eclipsing the one NSF gave in 2000, the previous highest, by nearly one million dollars.

The Harvard Forest will use the recent grant to support the work of over 25 scientists, and further research on issues like global warming, land use, invasive species, forest clearance and development. Since 1988, NSF has been renewing the grant to the Harvard Forest every six years—increasing the grant amount each time.

“We’re trying to look at effective management and conservation approaches for dealing with these issues long-term,” said David R. Foster, director of the Harvard Forest.

The center’s findings on forest development, greenhouse gases, and land subversion have been used by state agencies and other major conservation organizations, according to Foster.

The money will be used by scientists to conduct a combination of analysis of historical and modern data across New England, long-term measurements of land changes, and experiments in which the land is modified in a number of ways and later observed.

“The actual measurements range from looking at animal populations to looking at forest ecosystems to looking at the movement of material into and out of forests,” Foster said. “It’s a pretty diverse range of analyses.”

The Harvard Forest is one of 26 sites in the NSF’s Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) program, originally created in 1988 to encourage scientists to track ecological changes at each location over a long period of time.

The Harvard Forest has contributed to “our understanding of the legacy effects of agricultural clearing 200 years ago on today’s northeastern forests, as well as the effects of hurricanes,” Henry Gholz, the NSF’s LTER program director, said in a statement released this week.

While the Harvard Forest also receives funding from other agencies, including NASA and the U.S. Department of Energy, the NSF grant will be the bulk of its funding.

The money will also help the center develop “computer and cyber infrastructure tools for advanced data analysis,” Aaron M. Ellison, a senior research fellow at the center, said.

The grant issued will be up for renewal in six years.