LAIDLAW Research Pilot
Nature’s Pharmacy Project (the “Project”) began by considering the connection between forest soils and human health. Soil microbial communities help drive decomposition and nutrient cycling and have historically been an important source of antibiotic compounds. Yet these communities are not visible in routine forest assessment and are expensive to analyze directly through laboratory analysis.
Research increasingly shows that aboveground forest features are linked to belowground microbial communities and forest-floor processes. This raised a practical question: could visible forest features that are ecologically relevant to those processes form the basis of an assessment framework for land practitioners?
Drawing on peer-reviewed temperate-forest research, forest census data, and regional forest inventory data, the Project evaluated candidate habitat features based on ecological relevance, practicality of field measurement, responsiveness to forest management, and availability of an appropriate basis for comparison.
The Project developed a pilot version of the Visible Habitat Profile (VHP), which establishes standardized field protocols and reference ranges for three forest habitat features: native woody richness, coarse woody debris (CWD) volume, and identifiable surface-litter depth. These features were selected because the ecological literature links them, to differing degrees, with microbial biomass, fungal properties, enzyme activity, community composition, decomposition, moisture, and other forest-floor processes. Also, each can be measured using simple field methods, interpreted against existing forest data, and influenced through forest stewardship, including decisions about native regeneration, deadwood retention, invasive woody vegetation, and forest-floor disturbance.
The Visible Habitat Profile
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A reference-based field tool for New England Forest Practicioners
The VHP Method:
The VHP is a way to measure three features of a forest and understand what those measurements mean. The tool compares each measurement against forest data from across New England and tells you whether your plot is Low, Typical, or High for that feature, giving you a result you can act on.
The pilot VHP is supported by a set of practitioner materials. These include measurement instructions, an interpretation guide, a field datasheet and mobile app for recording measurements, and a plot workbook that assigns each value to its reference range. Together, these materials allow practitioners to use the framework without consulting the underlying datasets or scientific literature and without performing their own conversions.