302 Gathering the pieces
a zoning bylaw to help guide its growth and development, and since the 1960s
natural resource and land protection have been especially important.
In 1992 an ‘‘Open Space Framework” was delineated in a town plan to iden-
tify, compare, integrate, and rank the major town-wide features and the smaller
special sites of open-space importance. Thetown-wide patternconsisted of large
areas or patches of three types (built, natural, and agricultural) plus major cor-
ridors of three types (water-protection, wildlife, and human). Small special sites
of greenspace importance were then mapped on the town-wide pattern. The
results highlighted 25 priority places for protection, the highest priorities being
toprotect the essential core of large natural and agricultural areas, and sec-
ondarily major water-protection and wildlife corridors. The major patch-and-
corridor network identified provides a rich array of resources and benefits to
residents. Then from 1992 to 2004 8 % of the town’s total land surface was
protected.
The exceptional value of a large natural area for biodiversity, and espe-
cially interior species, is illustrated by a study of 22 hectares within one of
thetown’s large natural patches (600 ha Estabrook Woods). Highlights included:
forest-interior species rare in the town’s region (porcupines, fishers, barred owls,
black-throated green warblers, hermit thrushes, northern waterthrushes); other
species of special interest (great horned owls, blue-winged warblers, several vas-
cular plant species; two state-listed rare invertebrate species); a paucity of inva-
sive exotic species; and more state-listed and locally rare species on an adjacent
piece of the forest. This large natural area is one of only two in the Boston Region
with such a dependable array of forest-interior species.
In 2004 the next open-space planning process had a strong emphasis on
protecting agriculture, water, biodiversity, and nature-based trail recreation.
Intriguingly, it strengthened the Framework by considering three spatial scales,
regional, town, and neighborhood. Since a large portion of the town’s issues
involve one or more other towns, a regional approach seemed important. Yet tra-
ditional regional approaches have many familiar shortcomings, such as threat
tolocal control, inadequate budget, short half-life, and many issues extending
into a different region.
Therefore a new regional approach was developed. First, a long list of ways
Concord interacts with other towns showed that the bulk of the interactions over
thelast couple of decades were with 18 surrounding towns. Thus a functional
town-centered orlocality-centered regionwasrecognized, composed of 18 surround-
ing localities commonly interacting with Concord at the center (Figure11.3).
In this case the local region covered an area five times the town’s diameter.
Databases were gathered and maps drawn for the 19 town region showing several