ManagingMeadows

Registration Open

BUY TICKETS

Ticket Price: $100

Ticket price includes morning presentations, coffee and pastries, afternoon tours, Perfect Earth's Nature-Based Gardening booklet, and a lunch tray by the Café at Blue Hill at Stone Barns. A link will be sent in advance to all registrants to sign up for afternoon tours.

A limited number of discounted tickets are available.

Contact [email protected] for more information.

Managing Meadows: Best Practices for Biodiversity and Beauty

Thursday, November 7, 2024 | 9:00 am-4:00 pm

Stone Barns Center for Food & Agriculture

630 Bedford Rd, Tarrytown, NY 10591

Learn best practices for managing established meadows--from cultivating and protecting wildlife, to handling invasives, to using historic practices like burning and grazing. Panels and presentations by experts in the morning will be followed by a tray lunch from Stone Barns and site visits in the afternoon.

This symposium has been approved for up to 3 LA CES credits (1 credit hour per presentation).

Additional CEUs are being sought.

Morning Schedule

9:00-9:30 am | Arrivals

Coffee and pastries by the Café at Blue Hill at Stone Barns

9:30-9:40 am | Welcome and Introduction

Presentations

9:40-10:40 am | Insects, Turtles, and Birds: How to Support Different Taxa

Bella Ciabattoni (Deputy Director of Horticulture, Brooklyn Bridge Park), Leah Cass (Curator of Natural Resources, Westchester County Parks), and Claudia Knab-Vispo and Conrad Vispo (Co-Coordinators, Hawthorne Valley Farmscape Ecology Program)

How can you balance meadow management techniques to support different taxonomic groups--to maximize biodiversity and minimize harm? This panel will explore this question, sharing insights from distinct meadow projects. Panelists will discuss habitat creation, successional dynamics, and management practices that support diverse habitats to meet the needs of various species.

10:40-11:30 am | Taming Unruly Guests: Weed Management Strategies for Meadows

Chris Charpin (Field Operations Manager, Larry Weaner Landscape Associates) and Ethan Dropkin (Associate & Horticultural Specialist, Larry Weaner Landscape Associates)

In this presentation, Chris Charpin and Ethan Dropkin will draw on over three decades of experience from Larry Weaner Landscape Associates to share meadow management techniques for the Northeast, focusing on mechanical weed control and native species promotion. Topics will include evaluating meadow conditions, weed management strategies, and increasing biodiversity based on site-specific goals.

11:40 am-12:30 pm | Grazing and Burning: Utilizing Historic Meadow Management Practices

Ted Kendziora (Biologist, USFWS) and Chad Bitler (Senior Director of Research and Agroecology, Greenacres Foundation)

How can historic practices like grazing and controlled burns help us manage meadows today? This panel will explore this question, emphasizing how these disturbances can support ecological health. Participants will learn how to align management techniques with landscape goals, evaluate funding sources, determine feasibility, and consider the complexities of project decisions before beginning a meadow restoration or management initiative.

Lunch & Afternoon Tours

12:30-1:30 pm | Lunch

Lunch tray by the Café at Blue Hill at Stone Barns

1:30-4:00 pm | Afternoon Tours

Featuring meadows at Lenoir Preserve, Muscoot Farm, The Native Plant Center at Westchester Community College, Round Rock Preserve, Stone Barns Center for Food & Agriculture, Ward Pound Ridge, and more to be announced soon. A link will be sent in advance to all registrants to sign up for afternoon tours.

Speaker Bios

Bella Ciabattoni (Deputy Director of Horticulture, Brooklyn Bridge Park)

Bella is a horticulturist, naturalist, and landscape manager currently working at Brooklyn Bridge Park as Deputy Director of Horticulture. She began her time there as a lead gardener on Pier 6, where she played a key role in developing and solidifying the park's ecology-focused meadow management practices in the Flower Field, a half acre meadow. Before horticulture, she worked across the Northeast with the National Park Service, endeavoring to reduce habitat degradation caused by large scale invasive plant populations in natural landmarks. Her experience with both wild and urban landscapes, in a wide range of roles, lends her a multifaceted perspective on managing meadows.

Behind it all, she holds a deep love for insects and wildlife and enjoys experimenting with and sharing practical, beautiful ways of creating habitat niches for them in gardens large and small.

Leah Cass (Curator of Natural Resources, Westchester County Parks)

Leah Cass is the Curator of Natural Resources for the Westchester County Parks in the Conservation Division. Leah's work is focused on natural resource management planning, invasive species management, and rare species recovery. Leah also oversees Westchester County Parks' turtle conservation initiative which includes research and monitoring of terrestrial turtle populations in meadow environments. Before joining the Westchester County Parks in 2021, Leah worked as an intern for a variety of conservation organizations including the Ecological Society of America, Conservation International, and the Mianus River Gorge Preserve. Leah holds a degree in biology from the George Washington University and a Master's Degree in Environmental Science and Policy from Pace University (expected Dec. 2024).

Claudia Knab-Vispo (Co-Coordinator, Hawthorne Valley Farmscape Ecology Program)

Claudia Knab-Vispo is a field botanist with the Hawthorne Valley Farmscape Ecology Program, who earned her PhD in Land Resources from the University of Wisconsin-Madison for her ethnobotanical and plant ecology research in the tropical forest of Venezuela. For almost two decades, she has been documenting the wild-growing plants on farms, as well as most other habitats throughout Columbia County, NY, and beyond in the Hudson Valley. She enjoys sharing her enthusiasm for plants in public ecology walks and through other media, and helps farmers, non-farming landowners, and land managers become aware of the diversity, beauty, and utility of wild-growing plants and manage for their continued presence on the land. She has been involved with a long-term native meadow trial at the Hudson Valley Farm Hub, coordinated its management, and monitored the vegetation and flower abundance in the trial consisting of six seeded meadows and three fallow controls for eight years.

Conrad Vispo (Co-Coordinator, Hawthorne Valley Farmscape Ecology Program)

Conrad Vispo is a wildlife ecologist with the Hawthorne Valley Farmscape Ecology Program who earned a PhD from the University of Wisconsin. Before returning to Columbia County, NY, where he grew up, Conrad conducted ecological research on a variety of organisms, including mammals, birds and fish in a variety of places, including the woods of northern Wisconsin and tropical Venezuela. For almost two decades, he has dedicated himself to the study of insects and agroecology in the Hudson Valley. He is co-coordinating the Applied Farmscape Ecology Research Collaborative at the Hudson Valley Farm Hub and conducts long-term insect monitoring on the farm, including in the native meadow trial, where he and his team have documented the insect communities in six seeded meadows and three fallow controls for eight years. He is an adjunct researcher with the Cary Institute for Ecosystem Studies.

Chris Charpin (Field Operations Manager, Larry Weaner Landscape Associates)

Chris Charpin joined LWLA in 2022. He holds a BS in Environmental Science from University of Albany, a Horticulture Certificate from Brooklyn Botanic Garden, a GIS Certificate from Hunter College and is an ISA Certified Arborist. Before joining LWLA, he worked as a senior gardener for the Trust for Governer's Island and as head gardener at Stuyvesant Cove Park in Manhattan. Since joining LWLA, he has worked on a variety of meadow, garden, and natural areas projects. Chris is a dedicated horticulturist and landscape manager dedicated to installing and maintaining sustainable ecologically functional landscapes. His years of work with some of the top public landscape institutions in New York trained him to exercise the finesse, sensitivity, and adaptability needed to successfully manage the most public facing of projects while still keeping the needs of the landscape foremost in his practice.

Ethan Dropkin (Associate & Horticultural Specialist, Larry Weaner Landscape Associates)

Educated in Landscape Architecture and Horticulture at Cornell University, Ethan has taken an inborn love of plants since childhood and followed that to a career in landscape design with a focus in native plants and landscapes at LWLA and lecturing on horticulture and plants at large. Ethan has a particular love of plants (and plant communities) that thrive in difficult conditions and how those plants and assemblages can be adapted to horticultural practice to solve some of our most difficult planting issues. When not designing or lecturing, he is an avid contributor to citizen science projects like eBird and iNaturalist and is a loving father and husband.

Ted Kendziora (Biologist, USFWS)

Ted Kendziora is the US Fish and Wildlife Service Partners for Fish and Wildlife Program State Coordinator for New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut and has been stationed out of the New England Field Office since 2010. Ted concentrates in the management of upland habitats throughout New England and the Hudson River Valley of New York. Ted specializes in the creation and enhancement of pollinator habitat utilizing tools such as prescribed fire, forestry, and field creation. Ted has a BS in Wildlife and Fisheries Management and a MS in Marine Biology and has extensive experience in project management, species monitoring, site reconnaissance, and environmental restoration.

Chad Bitler (Senior Director of Research and Agroecology, Greenacres Foundation)

Chad Bitler is the Senior Director of Research and Agroecology at Greenacres Foundation, a non-profit organization focusing on education and research in the areas of agriculture and conservation. Chad leads the Greenacres Agroecology team intending to explore connections between agroecological practices and the outcomes on soil health, food quality, and the environment - which are all inextricably linked. The data collected from Greenacres' research aims to inspire farmers, ranchers, and land managers to instill practices that produce nutritious food, provide valuable ecosystem services, and offer high-quality habitats for native species. Chad graduated from the University of Cincinnati with a BS in Biological Sciences and an MS in Nutritional Sciences. He has collaborated on research with notable land grant universities and organizations to help increase the collective knowledge surrounding agroecological practices.

Presenting Partners

Thank you to our Organizing Committee!

Green-Wood Cemetery, Lower Hudson PRISM, the Native Plant Center at Westchester Community College, the New York Botanical Garden, Partners for Climate Action Hudson Valley, Stone Barns Center for Food & Agriculture, Westchester County Parks, Recreation & Conservation