HANOVER — When word came on Monday that the U.S. Forest Service would keep New Hampshire’s Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest open, a sizable group in the Upper Valley breathed a sigh of relief.
A private nonprofit, the Hubbard Brook Research Foundation, works with the federal research forest, and much of its leadership lives in the area.
“One of the reasons Hubbard Brook is off the list,” said Dorothy Heinrichs, a Hanover resident and chairwoman of the research foundation’s board, “we’re the only one to have its own foundation to protect the work.”
The USDA announced a major restructuring of the Forest Service on March 31, which included moving its headquarters to Utah and consolidating many of its research stations. All told, 57 of the agency’s 77 research facilities were ticketed for closure.
Hubbard Brook, on the eastern side of Grafton County and headquartered in Woodstock, N.H., wasn’t slated for closure, reports said at the time, but all research stations were “under evaluation.” Bartlett Experimental Forest, in neighboring Carroll County, remains on the list of research sites to be closed.
On May 11, Gov. Kelly Ayotte, a Republican, and U.S. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., said they’d reached an agreement with Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins to keep Hubbard Brook open. The closure of Bartlett Experimental Forest is under review.
Keeping Hubbard Brook maintains a long history of research that has had consequential results for the environment. The experimental forest was founded in 1955 as a site for hydrologic research. The effects of acid rain were first documented by scientists working at Hubbard Brook, which led the federal Environmental Protection Agency to craft regulations that reduce sulfur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels.
Dartmouth College was instrumental in the establishment of Hubbard Brook Ecosystem Study, in 1963, and always has students conducting research there, Heinrichs said. The scientific research conducted there ranges from how pests such as the emerald ash borer might affect New England forests to how forested land behaves during and after floods and droughts, increasingly common events in the northeast and beyond.
It’s also important to New England’s foresters, maple sugarmakers, loggers, ski areas — anyone with an interest in the life of a region that has reforested itself over the past century.
Hubbard Brook also maintains 70 years of climate and environmental records, including water samples collected since 1955, which might make it inconvenient for an administration that has denied the existence of climate change, Heinrichs said.
The 2,600-acre Bartlett Experimental Forest is even older, founded in 1931, and also plays a key role in providing information to foresters and the wider research community, Heinrichs said.
In general, national parks and forests are “natural resources that belong to all of us,” for recreation and for maintaining clean air and water, she said.
Those resources, safeguarded over the past 125 years, are now under threat. Gene Likens, the scientist who first documented acid rain at Hubbard Brook in the 1960s, said in a March 2025 interview with The Guardian that the Trump Administration’s rollback of environmental protections on internal combustion engines and coal-fired power plants threatens a return of acid rain. Studies have documented the widespread death of spruce trees in northeastern forests and danger to sugar maples, a key crop in northern New England.
The Hubbard Brook Research Foundation, set up in 1993, helps support the work at the forest by making the research public, raising money and organizing K-12 school trips to the forest, among other things, Anthea Lavallee, the foundation’s executive director, said in an interview.
“It was the brainwave of a collection of groundbreaking academic researchers who had the insight that a friends group would be a resource,” Lavallee, a Woodstock, Vt., resident, said.
In addition to Heinrichs and Lavallee, other Upper Valley residents involved in the foundation include Associate Director Elise Tillinghast, of Thetford, and several trustees, including Michael Shoob, former executive director of The Hitchcock Foundation at DHMC, of Thetford; Kathleen Hubbard, director of Corporate and Foundation Relations for Dartmouth Health and the Geisel School of Medicine, of Lebanon; Christopher Rimmer, director emeritus of the Vermont Center for Ecostudies, of Norwich; and Anant Sundaram, a professor at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, of Hanover.
The forest also is supported by the Hubbard Brook Ecosystem Study, a consortium of researchers who work at the forest and also raise funds to support it. Each of the three organizations with Hubbard Brook in its name contributes about $1 million in funding annually.
“We all share in the scientific productivity, and we all share in the expenses,” Lavallee said.
The foundation made it easier to make a case for Hubbard Brook after the Forest Service reorganization was announced. Its staff of 10 people cultivates relationships with Congressional staff and other key officials. Lavallee called it “a unified signal.”
Lavallee and other supporters of the work at Hubbard Brook were “absolutely thrilled” to get the news of the forest’s continued operation. She’d like to see the foundation’s model at work across the country, she said.
“It would be so great if there could be a national network of communicators,” she said.
In the meantime, the foundation and other people and agencies who support environmental science are still at work trying to keep more federal projects up and running. The bipartisan support from Ayotte, a Republican, and Shaheen, a Democrat, is a help.
“It feels like we have a legitimate claim of support for science coming out of this,” Lavallee said.
