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Part III Biodiversity Forests are central to the character of the Highlands landscape. As highlighted throughout this section, natural ecosystems are dynamic, continually responding to varying environmental conditions or discrete disturbances; change is a constant. Chapter 6 discusses how the Highlands’ forests were heavily exploited in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a homegrown energy source in the form of charcoal to power the iron industry or as fuelwood to heat homes. Most of the region was repeatedly cut over so there is little or no original “virgin” forest to be found. As recounted in chapter 7, when given a reprieve from the wholesale cutting in the late 1800s, these forests quickly regenerated to again cover the Highlands in a thick mantle of upland forest dominated by a mixture of broad-leaved deciduous trees. Chapter 8 explores the region’s wetlands and explains how swamps, bogs, and herbaceous marshes add to the landscape’s habitat and biotic diversity. As noted in chapters 9 and 10, the Highlands are home to a rich diversity of plant and animal life, but very few endemic species are unique to the Highlands. In fact, the Highlands forest is quite similar in structure and composition to forests across the entire sweep of the Appalachians from Georgia to Maine. What makes the Highlands forests different and of special value is their proximity to the teeming human population centers of the Hartford to New York City to Philadelphia region. These renewed forests and wetlands are increasingly valued for the “ecosystem services” they provide, such as their ability to serve as natural water and air filtration systems or their role in storing carbon. Not to be forgotten or belittled—from a selfish human point of view—the Highlands forests, the wetlands, and the resident plant and wildlife provide aesthetic values enhancing the quality of life for the human residents as well. While demonstrating great resiliency in the past, the Highlands forests, wetlands, and native biota are under assault from a host of new forces: habitat conversion, imbalances in wildlife populations , invasive plants, exotic pests, point/nonpoint-source water pollution, atmospheric pollutant deposition, and global climate change. The challenge moving into the future is how to protect the Highlands from the dangers of habitat loss, fragmentation, and homogenization and thus sustain a vital functioning regional ecosystem. 106 Biodiversity ...

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