By Nina Newington, Citizen Scientist and Lichen Camp Coordinator
and Lisa Proulx – Citizen Scientist
Nina Newington
Our new map of the 3900 hectare proposed Goldsmith Lake Wilderness Area
Click on images for larger versions
On Saturday September 28th, after 210 days camping on a logging road in Annapolis County, Citizen Scientists and our many allies came together to celebrate the achievements of Lichen Camp.
When we set up camp on March 2nd, there was an imminent threat of logging in the forest west of Goldsmith Lake. Our goal was to keep the forest standing while we researched and documented the biodiversity of the area, and to educate both people and government about its extraordinary conservation value.
The forests are still standing around the camp, and we have put Goldsmith Lake on the map, literally. Our new map of the 3900 hectare proposed Goldsmith Lake Wilderness Area shows not only the 77 species at risk occurrences we have identified to date, but also 20 stands of old-growth forest.
Two of those stands have been on the Provincial Landscape Viewer map as official Old-Growth for more than a decade. A third one, identified by the citizen scientists just over a year ago, has already been added to that official map. Others are in various stages of the curiously secretive assessment process Natural Resources and Renewables conducts.
Some of these not-yet-on-the-official-map old-growth stands around Goldsmith are quite remarkable. A Freedom of Information request revealed that, in a 9 hectare hardwood stand NRR scored last fall, the average age of the trees sampled came in at 250 years old, blowing well past their threshold of 140 years for old-growth hardwood.
Trailcam image of Marten, edge of old growth west of Goldsmith Lake. View Lichen Camp Day 209 for details – View On FB or here
Two weeks ago, we added another rarity to our map: a Pine Marten showed up in a stand of old forest that Lisa Proulx was checking for species at risk lichens. According to the Wildlife Division at NRR, the Pine or American Marten is about to be added to the list of endangered species in Nova Scotia. That sighting was well to the south of Goldsmith Lake. We just learned that a trailcam picked up a Marten west of the Lake in February.
The discoveries keep coming, and we’ll keep looking, but we have decided that Lichen Camp has done its job for now. If what we have put on that map is not enough data to show that this area should be protected, I don’t know what will be.
Mycology workshop
When I look at our new map, I feel so proud of what we have done here — this remarkable team of volunteers. Forty-one people have camped overnight, others have covered day shifts. So many people who care have come together to protect this place. On September 21st, many of the core group of citizen scientists took part in a Mi’kmaw Water Ceremony on the shore of the lake. It was powerful. I wasn’t the only one who wept. This truly is a place for two-eyed seeing.
And now it is time to pack up camp.
It’s a bit nerve-wracking. I’d love to have a guarantee right now that this area will be included in the 20% of Nova Scotia that will be protected by 2030 but that’s not how it works.
We will continue to explore and monitor activity in these forests, but it is time for us to take what we have learned here and share it with people in the rest of the province. All over Nova Scotia there are people passionate about wild areas, people who have spent years observing the life of the forests and wetlands where they live.
LC Take Down Crew 2024/09/29
What we have learned at Goldsmith is the joy of coming together to put that dedication and knowledge to good use, protecting those wild places and all the lifeforms that depend on them. In the face of the ever more terrifying crises of climate breakdown and biodiversity loss, protecting the best of what we have left is simple, it’s effective, and it’s possible.
Lisa Proulx
Citizen scientists everywhere are helping governments identify areas to protect. I feel really good about what we have done here in the past two years, and particularly since setting up Lichen Camp.
We are all volunteers and most of us are not trained scientists. I really only got serious about lichens when COVID hit. I figured I could learn about them in my own backyard. I would never have guessed I would be going off to Maine to take a seminar in identifying stubble lichens you can barely see with your naked eye.
But it turns out stubble lichens do exceptionally well in the old forest west of Goldsmith Lake. We ended up doing a survey of them and finding 27 different species, one of them not known in Nova Scotia before. In April we had a scientific paper about that survey published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal.
Frosted Grass Whiskers Lichen sighted by Lisa Proulx, described in Lichen Camp Day 88 (May 28, 2024)
One particular stubble lichen has played a big part in stopping harvesting here: Sclerophora peronella or Frosted Glass Whiskers. It is very slow to establish and it needs old, undisturbed forest to survive so it is viewed both federally and provincially as an old-growth indicator species. The concentration of this species that we have found in this area, and particularly west of Goldsmith Lake, is quite extraordinary. To the best of our knowledge, there is nothing like it anywhere else in North America.
The Frosted Glass Whisker lichen is valuable in itself but also for the story it tells. The conditions it needs are quite rare and necessary for many other creatures too. The animals that need old forests to survive, from the Blackburnian warbler to the Mainland Moose, have been in steep decline right along with those old forests.
When we save old forests for the lichen, we are saving habitat for all the other creatures. That’s why it was so exciting last week — I was in an area of nice old forest we hadn’t visited before, checking out the lichens, when a Pine Martin popped up. It was quite curious, wondering what I was up to, though it disappeared before I could get my camera out. I reported that sighting to the Wildlife Division of Natural Resources and Renewables along with the Frosted Glass Whiskers I had just found in the same area.
76cm Dbh Yellow Birch in the stand a Marten was sighted.
Marten need old forest just like the lichen. In this part of the proposed protected area there’s been a lot of cutting. In fact, this stand still has an active harvest plan from several years back. It is one of the few stands left with old trees, including the big hollow yellow birch that provide good denning sites for martens. Seeing that Pine Marten really underscores for me the importance of protecting this whole area.
It’s been a wonderful experience, through all kinds of weather, exploring these forests. and we’re not done. There’s a complex of wetlands and old forest north of where I saw the Pine Marten we haven’t looked at yet. You never know what you will find.
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For a recounting of days at Lichen Camp, view Lichen Camp/Recent Posts on this website.