Reflection on Harriman & Biodiversity at Different Scales

When I began this project, I chose Harriman State Park because it was already a familiar place. Having grown up near the park and spending lots of time hiking, camping, and working seasonal jobs there, I was under the impression that I understood the landscape fairly well. However, exploring Harriman specifically through the lens of biodiversity changed how I see a place that I've known for most of my life, as I began to realize just how interconnected the forests, lakes, wetlands, soils, geology, wildlife, and human activities within the park are, and how biodiversity is shaped by the physical conditions and ecological relationships across a landscape.

Looking at Biodiversity Locally

At the local scale, biodiversity is closely ties to the characteristics of individual habitats. Soil type, geology, topography, moisture, and climate influence the vegetation communities that can establish in different parts of Harriman, while those communities provide habitat and resources for other organisms. The soil and mapping exercise helped illustrate these relationships by showing how environmental conditions vary throughout the park, and the species research involved in the dendrology assignment helped provide additional context by connecting individual species to the forest communities and environmental conditions in which they occur.

Local biodiversity is also affected by ongoing environmental pressures like invasive species and shifting ecological communities. New York State has identified hydrilla in Lake Sebago and implemented a multi-year treatment program to control the invasive aquatic plant (NYS Parks, 2022). The park is also facing forest regeneration concerns as a result of long term white tailed deer browsing (NYS Parks, 2026). These issues help illustrate that maintaining biodiversity requires monitoring ecological change and managing the factors that influence species and habitats.

Biodiversity at the Regional Scale

The ecological systems within Harriman extend beyond the park's boundaries. Wildlife movement, plant dispersal, watersheds, and the spread of invasive species connect the park to the surrounding Hudson Valley landscape. Maintaining these connections is important because isolated protected areas are often not able to provide all of the habitat or wildlife corridors required by species over time. Research on protected area networks consistently emphasizes the importance of ecological connectivity for maintaining functional ecosystems and supporting wildlife movement (Stewart et al., 2019).

The mapping work provided a practical example of this regional perspective. Because Harriman crosses county boundaries, I had to work with separate datasets for Orange and Rockland Counties, even though the ecological systems represented by those datasets are continuous. The same issue occurs at larger scales, where conservation efforts involve multiple municipalities, agencies, landowners, and protected areas. Regional biodiversity management therefore depends on combining information and coordinating conservation efforts across boundaries that do not necessarily correspond to ecological systems.

Biodiversity at the Global Scale

The pressures affecting biodiversity in Harriman like habitat and land use change, invasive species, climate change, pollution, and other human activities are also major drivers of biodiversity loss globally (IPBES, 2019). A local issue like hydrilla in Lake Sebago can be connected to a much broader challenge involving the introduction, spread, and management of invasive species. Changes in climate can also affect local growing conditions, species distributions, and ecosystem processes, while being driven by processes occurring far beyond the park.

Global biodiversity patterns are shaped by large scale environmental pressures that operate across continents and ecosystems. Habitat loss and fragmentation, the spread of invasive species, and climate driven shifts in temperature and precipitation all influence how species are distributed and how ecosystems function (IPBES, 2019). These pressures can be observed directly in local systems in the park. The presence of hydrilla for example reflects larger global pathways of species introduction and spread, while long term changes in forest composition and regeneration are consistent with wider ecological responses to altered disturbance regimes and herbivory pressure.

Connecting the Scales

Each assignment in this project highlighted a different layer of ecological information, showing how biodiversity is understood by combining species data, environmental conditions, and spatial analysis. The species research provided information about individual organisms and communities, the soil and geological maps helped explain the environmental conditions supporting those communities, and the climate and invasive species research connected local conditions to larger environmental processes. Even the challenges of combining datasets highlighted the importance of being able to integrate information across geographic and organizational boundaries.

Looking back at the project as a whole, one of the key takeaways for me was how interconnected biodiversity is across different contexts and how difficult it is to separate local ecological issues from broader regional and global ones. Each part of the project highlighted a different layer of the same system, whether it was individual species research, mapping soils and geology, or examining invasive species and climate data. Harriman State Park became less of a case study in isolated scales and more of a reminder that ecological systems are constantly interacting across boundaries. Overall, the project reinforced that understanding biodiversity requires piecing together information from multiple perspectives, and that effective conservation depends on seeing those connections rather than viewing them as individual problems.

References:

Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). (2019). Global assessment report on biodiversity and ecosystem services. IPBES Secretariat.

New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation (NYS Parks). (2022). First occurrence of hydrilla found at Harriman State Park in Lake Sebago. New York State Parks.

New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation (NYS Parks). (2026). Harriman State Park. New York State Parks.

Stewart, F. E. C., Darlington, S., Volpe, J. P., McAdie, M., & Fisher, J. T. (2019). Corridors best facilitate functional connectivity across a protected area network. Scientific Reports, 9, 10852. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-47067-x