July 2, 2025 Breakfast Meeting Notes
Guests were Skla (one of our transition grant winners) as well as two students, Naomi and Jael, who attended RYLA.
The 50/50 was won by Alicia, who donated the money to Tom.
Bill won the draw for the card game but selected the 6 of clubs. The game continues.
Skyla is going to community college for massage therapy. She wants to help people and was inspired by a speaker at her LNA class. Once she is done with massage training, she will become an aesthetician and will use the money to buy supplies. She is hoping to get a job at the Common Man spa this summer.
Weekly highlights: This past Saturday we took 9 bags of styrofoam to Gilford, close to a record.
Tom was presented with an official plaque honoring him and his wife Dawn as Citizen of the Year. Congratulations!
There will be an event in Burlington VT on Saturday, July 12 at 5 pm at Centennial Field to Strike Out Polio. Sponsored by our district 7850 and the Vermont Lake Monsters, the event will donate a portion of ticket sales for that evening’s game to Polio Plus. There will also be a special recognition for the University of Vermont’s Vaccine Testing Center at the Larner College of Medicine.
Member’s minute: Jake spoke about an idea to attract new members by getting the more on the public image committee to go to more events. He suggested that we get a booth at National Night Out in Thornton in August. Eight hundred people attended in Thornton last year. It will be the 2nd Tuesday of August and is held at the Sugar Shack. It’s a fun event, organized by first responders, and is free (including food!) for all attendees. We could use volunteers to run the event and publicize all of the good things we do in the community.
The RYLA students Naomi and Jael told us about their experience. They did a “true colors” activity to determine what their personality type was and how they could use their strengths in leadership roles. Naomi learned a lot about public speaking and communication. There was a talent show in which each attendee had to do something; everyone found that they had a talent, even though they didn’t realize it. Both agreed that it was an excellent experience.
Our speaker today was our own Raisa Kochmaruk, speaking about the Hubbard Brook Ecosystem which is conducted in the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest.
Hubbard Brook is the main water supply to the forest. Together with its tributaries it supplies 9 separate watersheds. The forest covers about 1300 square miles or 8320 acres. The land was shaped by moving glaciers which left glacial erratics. The old growth forests moved in 13,000 years ago (beech, birch, maple and hemlock trees still flourish there). In the 1700s the trees were cleared for farming but the land wasn’t really fertile so over time the trees grew back. In the early 1900s the area was logged again and the loggers did detailed surveys of the trees, which was unusual at the time.
Hubbard Brook is the site of much research to see how water moves through ecosystems and how it affects the area. There have been several studies on how tree cutting affects the watershed. The water is on igneous bedrock, so the only way water can escape the forest is via the streams; it can’t seep into the ground. There are weirs on each of the streams so they can measure how much water escapes.
In the 1960s, a researcher named Gene Likens took stream samples and found that pH was 100x higher than he expected. He began to investigate how long this had been going on and what effects it had on the water and surrounding watershed. After 10 years of research he was able to demonstrate that acid rainfall was triggered by power plant emissions in other states. President Bush signed amendments to the Clean Air Act into law in 1990 to address the problem. As a result of the changes promoted by these modifications, he acidity of rain has been reduced by 80% by 2016, but more work is needed.
Hubbard Brook Forest is also a site for many other long term ecological studies. The most famous study is on the black throated blue warblers that breed in New England in the summers and migrate down to South America and Caribbean in the winter. Dartmouth, Cornell,and Welleslyey students use the forest for their research. There are also studies on moose, salamanders, and beech bark disease, as well as studies of how mycorrhizal fungi on tree roots aid in communication between trees.
In 2015 an ice storm experiment was conducted at Hubbard Brook. The researchers tried to simulate a whiplash event with extreme winter weather by coating trees with a layer of water of various thicknesses and measuring the responses of the trees to this stress. Fortunately the trees have largely recovered from this experiment, although there are still some lingering damages from a severe natural ice storm in 1998. We can expect such extreme events to become more frequent as local warming worsens.
In the 1980s researchers conducted an experiment in which they stripped two of the watersheds of trees and then observed what happened. Stripping the trees tends to deplete calcium, especially for maple trees, but adding calcium back helped them to recover.
Next week Hubbard Brook is going to have their annual conference and there will be a barn dinner on Wednesday night. Gene Likens, the discoverer of acid rain, will be speaking. Rotarians are welcome and there are still 4 openings. If you would like to attend, please let Raisa know. She also showed a QR code to scan for those who would like to receive the Hubbard Brook newsletter.
Happy dollars were shared by Sharon, Alicia, Lora, and Tony.
Respectfully submitted,
Lora Miller, secretary
