The New York New Jersey Trail Conference is a confederation of 100 member clubs and over 9,000 individual hiker/volunteers designing, building, maintaining and protecting trails and trail corridors since 1920. The Trail Conference hopes you will be interested in helping with invasive plant species monitoring along our hiking trails.

Together with Rutgers University and the Palisades Interstate Park Commission (PIPC), the Trail Conference is participating in a United States Department of Agriculture (USDA)-funded research project to monitor specific plants, using trained volunteers as “citizen scientists.”

The 2007 data is being scrutinized. Results from both years are very interesting. Some species of interest were very common, others not found. Some places in Harriman seem rather intact. What we learn may help keep it that way. We also learned much about what people think about non-native plants and science in general. To understand an environmental issue, it is imperative that we include the human and social elements in the equation.

Trails News

2008 Data Collection begins in June

We have added an on-line training option: see the 'Training' link at left

2007 Data is currently being analyzed