Welcome to Montour County Public Trails!
This is a project meant to collect data about Montour County's public trails and lands. Montour County is Pennsylvania's smallest county, but it has a wide variety of publicly accessible habitats in a relatively small geographic area. These include:
-The dry shale-dominated Virginia Pine-Heath ridgetops of the Geisinger Stewardship forest, which host several state-listed insect species associated with xeric barrens
-The marshes of the Hess Recreation Area, which are home to numerous wetland plants
-The rocky mountaintop of State Gameland 115, where one can find hundreds of beautiful Pink Lady's-Slipper orchids in the spring, as well as many migrating songbirds
-The floodplain of the Susquehanna River, accessible via the North Branch Canal Trail, which serves as a corridor for riparian species as well as containing a population of the globally rare Barrens Moth (Properigea costa)
-The ponds and lakeside habitats of Montour Preserve, which hold the most concentrated biodiversity in the county, from migrating birds (it's not unusual to see upwards of 80 species in a morning here at peak migration!) to breeding amphibians to abundant wildflowers
As of the start of this project, about 1,500 species have been reported on iNaturalist for these locations. Many more insect species will be added over the coming months from natural history collections, which contain many Montour County species that have been collected as specimens but not yet uploaded to the website. If you're reading this, I hope you come out to some of these areas and add to the growing list of biodiversity for the county. There's plenty more out there to find!
Note that this project is not associated with any of the property owners or managers of Montour County's trails. I am just a local naturalist interested in improving our knowledge of the county's natural resources.
Comentarios
Agregar un comentario