What I'm Working on: Pigeon Hill, Rockport, Massachusetts

The multiple blue pin above show GPS coordinates I captured in Rockport, Massachusetts with Nick Toarmina, president of the Cape Ann Vernal Pond Team, and Linda Ireland, a volunteer with the Massachusetts Audubon.

There are hundreds of vernal pools on Cape Ann. The is comprised primarily of granite bedrock. Winter precipitation is significant - resulting in lots of snowmelt.

The area above, Pigeon Hill, was once the location of a few dozen granite quarries. Nick and Linda and I hiked the area to document several potential vernal pools listed in the Massachusetts OLIVER system, a many-layered GIS archive.

OLIVER's predictive algorithms take into account depressions in the landscape, proximity to bedrock, slopes, and elevations. Sometimes the predictions turn out to be little more than culverts or drainage ditch.

I periodically pull potential vernal pool locations from the database to assist the team in the field. They take the field notes, I do the orienteering and fly the drone to capture aerial shots of the pools to document their shape and measure their square footage.

These pools were easy to find: they lay in thin woods close at the end of a paved road and were by scant underbrush and thickets of brambles.

One of the challenges of vernal pool certification is access. Much of the interior of Cape Ann is public land - drinking water watersheds, conservation holdings, parcels given over to public use in perpetuity.

But large portions of the area are privately owned.

Of the six pools above, three are on private land. Their owner was happy to allow us access to document the pools, and was glad to learn they would later be listed in the state's database of certified vernal pools eligible for a range of legal protections.

Landowners are sometimes loath to have vernal pools discovered on their land, and can be hostile to overtures of the team to certify them.

Suffice it to say Nick, Linda and I were glad to meet the landowner as he drove past us along what was not, in fact, a public road but the driveway to his home. 

After some initial pleasantries, he showed us around, watched us take notes at the pools, then set us back off into the woods with the warning that his neighbor, whose adjacent woodland holdings are extensive, too, and abutted public land, would not be so open to intrusion of any sort.

I use professional-grade UAV systems to create, manage, and render GIS data and models for Massachusetts nonprofits and municipalities.  If your organization or town would benefit from this sort of work, please get in touch.