Mission

Stewardship of the Hudson River Reserve’s land and water ecosystems rests in the hands of a host of management agencies and public users who undertake a wide variety of actions to promote stewardship of Reserve sites and resources. Stewardship at the Hudson River Reserve groups these activities into three priority topics: Resource Protection, Habitat Restoration, and Land Acquisition, which are strategies to address habitat alteration that has occurred within the Hudson River estuary.

Priority Topics

• Resource Protection: Stewardship at the Hudson River Resrve focuses on maintaining Reserve sites as field laboratories to support research and education.  Public access is encouraged on those parts of the Reserve that are publicly owned or that have received private landowner permission for access, as long as it is not to the detriment of the resource, or does not interfere with approved research. Public access is restricted in key resource protection areas. Future identification of resources of concern may result in delineation of areas of additional protection based on need to maintain natural conditions and preserve resources.

• Habitat Restoration: Reserve sites have been affected negatively by invasive plant species, altered hydrology, land use patterns, and dredging and filling activities associated with construction of the federal navigation channel and railroad dikes. While many of these effects are irreversible, three types of restoration present opportunities for enhancing ecosystem function in the Reserve. These are control of selected invasive plant species, application of soft shoreline techniques and establishment of vegetated shallow and intertidal habitats through secondary channel restoration at Reserve sites.

• Land Acquisition: The Reserve encourages the protection of essential habitat within its sites, as well as essential buffer and habitat adjoining such essential habitat. Reserve boundaries are periodically adjusted to reflect current ownership patterns. The Reserve seeks to encompass an adequate portion of key land and water areas of the natural system to approximate an ecological unit and to represent the range of natural diversity in the Hudson River Estuary. Because of the magnitude of the Hudson River Estuary system, Reserve sites necessarily represent sub-units of the larger ecological setting.