At its January meeting, Adirondack Park Agency (APA) staff recommended approval of a seven-lot residential subdivision in a Rural Use zone off Route 73 in Keene, NY (the Aylward project). Staff noted that after several years of work with the applicant the subdivision had been modified from previous layouts to reduce ecological impacts to the area’s natural resources. They pointed out that the impacts of each new home and driveway extended beyond their actual footprint by approximately 660 feet, or 200 meters on all sides of the actual footprint.
This figure comes from field work by Adirondack ecologists Drs. Michale Glennon and Heidi Kretser who, in journals such as Landscape and Urban Planning (January, 2013), described how bird species and small mammals sensitive to human development were displaced up to 200 meters from exurban homes in the Adirondack Park, and that the overall ecological impact of a single exurban home in the Adirondacks extends well beyond the building footprints out to 31 acres. “Understanding these impacts can help inform ecologically sensitive subdivision designs,” wrote Drs. Glennon and Kretser.
I applaud APA staff for finally applying, albeit in a limited way, this ecological research. Adirondack Wild has been monitoring subdivision approvals by the APA.
In 2023 and 2024 (a full 12 months of 2025 permit data is not yet available on the Agency website), a total of 75 subdivision permits for a total of 235 new homes were issued in the Adirondack Park’s most sensitive land use classes, Resource Management (colored green on the APA map) and Rural Use (yellow on the map).
Just one of those permits came before the full APA board for a presentation and vote (74 other permits were issued by staff).
Prior to the Alyward subdivision this month, none of the 75 subdivision and development permits issued in 2023 and 2024 were described by staff as being modified to achieve ecological benefits – this despite the fact that the APA Act fully authorizes, indeed encourages staff to do this.
So, as much as we can appreciate staff’s January presentation and modification of the original subdivision layout, APA also clouded the overall picture by stating that the Aylward subdivision would only result in the loss of less than five acres of forest, leaving the subdivision “97% forested.”
As Glennon and Kretser have shown elsewhere inside the Park, the ecological changes resulting from Adirondack Park development far exceed the footprint acreage. By leaving the impression that just five acres out of 168 acres will be affected, staff create “an illusion of green.”
What does this mean? It’s explained in this excerpt below from Adirondack Wild’s educational guidebook Pathways to a Connected Adirondack Park: Practical Steps to Better Land Use Decisions by ecologist and land use planner Dr. Michael W. Klemens, Ph.D. (You can read the entire guidebook here):
“If a single word can adequately describe the ecological challenges faced by the Adirondack Park that word is fragmentation. Habitat fragmentation is a threat to a region’s ecological continuum which is a measure of its interconnectedness to surrounding areas and its ability to withstand damaging changes, its resiliency.
“Fragmentation occurs when natural or human processes break large contiguous areas of open space into ever-smaller, isolated patches. In the Adirondack Park, human activities are the dominant and primary drivers of habitat fragmentation, creating simplified landscapes that interfere with ecosystem processes, disrupt species movements, and cause the loss of critical habitats.
“This in turn leads to the loss of ecosystem services that human communities within the Adirondack Park depend upon including clean water, flood control, forest product production as well as diminished outdoor recreational opportunities, especially hunting and fishing. The disruption of the ecological continuum (i.e., the interconnectedness and its corresponding resiliency) at a scale of thousands upon thousands of acres poses the largest all-encompassing threat to the Adirondack Park.
“Interconnectedness is essential to allowing the evolutionary processes of adaption and dispersion to continue as they have for millennia. Interconnectedness of the Adirondack Park facilitated the successful recolonization (through natural migration) of moose back into the Park. Ecosystems, species, and genetic diversity are not static, and continually evolve in response to change.
“This is increasingly important in this era of dramatic global climate change as species and ecosystems will have to rearrange themselves upon the landscape, and can only do so in a landscape that is ecologically inter-connected.
“Fragmentation is described as an all-encompassing threat precisely because it amplifies the effects of a series of hazards to the ecological continuum, such as the deleterious landscape-scale effects of climate change, the misguided management of recreational access to wilderness areas, the lack of cumulative ecological impact analyses, and the character and placement of development projects, whether a single home or a large scale sub-division.
“The question is often asked, why should we be so concerned about fragmentation and development in a 6,000,000-acre landscape? It is precisely because a landscape of this size and integrity is so very rare and unique that one must consider all impacts, great and small, as contributors to its overall health.
“Who is to say where the tipping point may be? Who is to say how many poorly planned developments the Adirondack Park can absorb before it begins to unravel ecologically? If ever there was a case for the use of the precautionary principle (the concept of “do no harm”) in land-use planning, the Adirondack Park by virtue of its size is its poster child.
“The precautionary principle factors in not only what we know, but also, what we presently don’t know but suspect may be true. To paraphrase the naturalist Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac, the first step in intelligent ecological tinkering is to keep all the pieces. These important considerations are undoubtedly very challenging for those trying to view development in the Adirondack Park through the traditional land-use decision making lens.
“Yet, if we take the time and effort to understand fragmentation at different scales, and then adjust land-use and development patterns to accommodate ecological integrity, the Adirondack Park will continue to be a vast north woods ecosystem that can successfully serve multiple interests. Those interests include not only wilderness and wildlife, but working forests, outdoor recreation, and vibrant human communities, all existing within and dependent upon the Adirondack Park.
“Absent an over-arching ecological understanding of landscape integrity and interconnectedness, the Adirondack Park will suffer a steady loss of its resiliency, a death by a thousand cuts, affecting all who value and depend upon this vast forest for their welfare and survival.
Siting New Developments in the Adirondack Park
“Effective Planning: Wildlife, plants, and eco-systemic change moves across the landscape like a sheet of water flowing across a gently sloping field. But the common conceptions of wildlife corridors, underpasses, and overpasses have ingrained a skewed view of how ecosystems respond to change and how they stay connected and functional over time.
“While corridors, overpasses, and underpasses may move wildlife safely through key constriction points (e.g. over a highway), this is only a small part of the equation. The much larger problem is maintaining a landscape that feeds into those corridors in as un-fragmented a condition as possible. While a corridor may be measured in feet and acres, the landscape that feeds that corridor is measured in square miles and thousands upon thousands of acres.
“In order to plan for and understand the challenges of fragmentation one needs to consider each project, whether a single home or a large subdivision, from three levels, colloquially the macro, meso, and micro landscape levels. Each level has a different set of considerations and each level provides opportunities for creative planning and mitigation. Also each level has different stakeholders and decision-makers.
“These concepts are neither new nor radical. They are in fact, the foundation of SEQRA, the New York State Environmental Quality Review Act that recognizes that impacts occur at different scales with different effects. Together, they form what are termed cumulative impacts. To the untrained eye, all can seem well in a landscape that is a mixture of development and forest.
“But this is what I so often refer to as the illusion of ‘green’, because while vegetated, the system is often stressed and dysfunctional. It is a challenge to impart to the general populace that while trees and vegetation present themselves as green and therefore ecologically friendly, in order to understand the true health of the system one most look much more closely and carefully.
“Macro Scale: When faced with the issue of how to site a land-use activity upon the landscape the first consideration is gaining an understanding of the large scale ecosystem that extends far beyond the footprint of the proposed activity.
“While we are easily able to discern the development footprint, a corresponding ecological footprint encompasses a much larger area where the impacts of that development resonate deep into the ecosystem. To understand this in a readily intuitive manner, consider an interstate highway such as the Adirondack Northway.
“While the Northway offers great benefits for travel and commerce, it forms a near impenetrable barrier for most wildlife dispersal. To the untrained eye the actual impact zone of the Northway, the development footprint, is confined to the roadway, shoulder, and the embankment adjacent to the highway. However, the impacts of this roadway on wildlife, the ecological footprint, extend a half mile if not more on either side.
“These impacts include loss of wildlife through mortality, noise, light, and other pollutants, as well as invasive plant establishment. So in order to understand the impacts of any proposed action, we need to understand the ecosystem into which it will be embedded.
“Meso (= intermediate) Scale: This is the scale at which most planners review new land use and development. At this scale it is critical to understand which species occur on the site, what their movements are, and the connection between wetland and upland habitats. The development area needs to be placed in a portion of the development parcel so as to minimize the impacts to the adjacent ecosystem (i.e., the macro scale discussed above).
Spread out dispersed development characterizes rural sprawl and has impacts similar to those caused by the Adirondack Northway previously discussed. This is where the role of Conservation Design comes into play. Very simply stated Conservation Design seeks to shrink the ecological footprint of a proposed development through innovative planning and site design techniques.
“While the developed footprint and the ecological footprint are never equal, the goal of Conservation Design is to try to bring the ecological footprint into closer harmony with that of the developed footprint, while maintaining the development values of the parcel.
“There are a host of techniques that can be used to accomplish these goals, including clustering, development lots without front, side, and rear yard zoning setbacks (also referred to as zero lot line developments) which allow much more efficient use of limited land resources in hamlets and similar developed areas, as well as incentive-based hamlet re-development, to name but a few. Another challenge is that some of the more innovative land use cluster techniques and low impact conservation designs are usually not the site plan standard.
“These ecologically beneficial forms of development usually require extra steps in the permitting and review process. If a community is serious about implementing these ‘green design standards’ these should become the default site plan standards and the more conventional, sprawl type of development only be permitted if the applicant demonstrates that the site cannot be developed in an ecologically friendly manner.
“Frogs and salamanders, which are a vital component of the Adirondack forest food chain, are also greatly affected by Meso Scale land-use decisions. Species such as the wood frog, essential for nutrient cycling and energy transfer within the forest biome, occur in meta-populations (a biologically-connected group of populations occurring in close geographic proximity to one another). The survival of these meta-populations requires clusters of wetlands and their surrounding upland habitats.
“Micro Scale: The final scale is the site plan design level. So much of what is built creates serious impediments to movement of wildlife around a house or building, which in turn fragments the built landscapes, and impedes movements of wildlife within the Adirondack Park. Curbs and catch basins, coupled with hydrodynamic separators to remove suspended solids from storm water, kills millions of amphibians, insects, reptiles and small mammals every year.
“Simple ways to avoid these types of mortality utilizing a variety of site design techniques include: Curb-less road systems that are crowned to shed water into roadside depressions or swales which naturally clean the runoff and allow unimpeded wildlife movements; downward-directed exterior lighting sources of low lumen intensity that shield disruptive light spillage from adjacent wetlands and forests; and simple wildlife excluders built into pool fences that eliminates the impact of in-ground swimming pools that serve as ecological sinks or traps by capturing and killing many small creatures.
“When one thoughtfully considers all three scales of potential fragmentation in each project, one may achieve a more modest ecological footprint from development. An achievable goal, these considerations should be at the forefront of each and every decision made by the APA, and also at the local municipal level. If each project that is designed and executed in the Adirondack Park is done with these principles in mind, the resiliency and interconnectedness of the six-million acre Adirondack Park will remain as a highly functional ecosystem for future generations.”
Read more about the Adirondack Park.
Illustrations, from above: A 2017 draft APA map of remote spots showing areas 3 miles from road or snowmobile trail or 2 miles from motorized waters in blue and stars indicating the most remote locations; map of the Aylward subdivision in Keene, Jan 2026 (APA); and the cover and a photo from Pathways to a Connected Adirondack Park.
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