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Stewardship at Hudson NERR, NY
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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.
Last Updated on: Thursday, October 22, 2009
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