TOWN OF BRISTOL Inventory of Land Use and Land Cover Prepared for: Ontario County Water Resources Council 20 Ontario Street, 3rd Floor Canandaigua, New York 14424 and Town of Bristol 6740 County Road 32 Canandaigua, New York 14424 Prepared by: Dr. Bruce Gilman Department of Environmental Conservation and Horticulture Finger Lakes Community College 3325 Marvin Sands Drive Canandaigua, New York 14424-8395 2020 Cover image: Ground level view of a perched swamp white oak forest community (S1S2) surrounding a shrub swamp that was discovered and documented on Johnson Hill north of Dugway Road. This forest community type is rare statewide and extremely rare locally, and harbors a unique assemblage of uncommon plant species. (Image by the Bruce Gilman). Acknowledgments: For over a decade, the Ontario County Planning Department has supported a working partnership between local towns and the Department of Environmental Conservation and Horticulture at Finger Lakes Community College that involves field research, ground truthing and digital mapping of natural land cover and cultural land use patterns. Previous studies have been completed for the Canandaigua Lake watershed, the southern Honeoye Valley, the Honeoye Lake watershed, the complete Towns of Canandaigua, Gorham, Richmond and Victor, and the woodlots, wetlands and riparian corridors in the Towns of Seneca, Phelps and Geneva. This report summarizes the latest land use/land cover study conducted in the Town of Bristol. The final report would not have been completed without the vital assistance of Terry Saxby of the Ontario County Planning Department. He is gratefully thanked for his assistance with landowner information, his patience as the fieldwork was slowly completed, and his noteworthy help transcribing the field maps to geographic information system (GIS) shape files. Sheri Norton, Ontario County Information Services, assisted with map production, shape file maintenance and production of data summary tables. The GIS format of this data will provide ease of retrieval and allow for immediate reference use during site project review, while the written summary report will create a modern plant community analysis for the Town of Bristol’s natural resources database, a vital component for future updates to the Town’s comprehensive plan. Plant species vouchered and identified during this fieldwork will be added to the Finger Lakes Herbarium housed on the FLCC campus and enhance an ongoing update for a second publication of Ontario County Flora book. Funding for this work was provided through a special project grant from the Ontario County Water Resources Council, the water quality coordinating committee for the County. John Palomaki, P.J. Emerick and Russell Welser have served as recent chairpersons for the Council and they are acknowledged for their leadership efforts in overseeing the Council’s activities and the special projects mini-grant selection committee. I am also grateful to the college students that accompanied me on my fieldwork throughout the Town of Bristol over several seasons. And, of course, none of this would have been possible without the cooperation of numerous landowners I met along the way that graciously gave permission to inventory the plant communities on their properties. Project Introduction: The Town of Bristol, home to the hamlets of Bristol (formerly known as Baptist Hill) and Bristol Center, covers about 37 square miles of land in the west-central region of Ontario County. The town is home to 2315 people (based on 2010 census). This approximates the town’s population in 1820, 2429 people, and the town population has varied widely over the decades since its formation in 1789 from townships 8 and 9 in the 4th range of the Phelps and Gorham purchase (Conover 1893). Historic human land uses likely depended on town population size and lifestyle but little geographic information exists to document shifting human land use patterns. Air photo documentation only became available in the early 20th century. A human land use cycle of original forest conversion to multiple agriculture uses, followed by farm abandonment on marginal sites is most probable. State Route 20A passes east-west across the town while State Route 64 travels north-south within a broad valley now occupied by Mud Creek (also known as Ganargua Creek). Mud Creek drains north, passing through the towns of Bloomfield, Victor and Farmington before leaving the county. While the Mud Creek watershed serves as the major drainage network for the eastern half of the town, two additional watersheds drain most of the western portion of the town. The Bebee Creek watershed drains the northwestern section of the town, eventually flowing into Honeoye Creek. The Mill Creek watershed drains the southwestern section of the town and has a confluence with Honeoye Creek near its source in the hamlet of Honeoye. The extreme southern corners of the town drain, on the west side, to Honeoye Lake, and on the east side, to Canandaigua Lake. The town of Bristol watersheds comprise part of the larger HUC 12 watershed in New York State. Additional natural resource information is available on the Town of Bristol website (www.townofbristol.org). The rural town is located 50 minutes south of Rochester, New York, and 15 minutes west of Canandaigua, New York. Geographically, the town is located between the Lake Ontario coastal plain to the north and the Appalachian Plateau to the south, and has a terrestrial landscape ranging from ridged glacial moraines to steep, glacially scoured bedrock hills with postglacially, water eroded east-west drainage ravines. One such ravine, Center Gully, has its scenic origin along the 4-H Camp Bristol Hills property, former site of the Ontario County Fairgrounds. Another ravine on the west side of the Bristol Valley is the famous location of the “burning spring”. Methane gas emanating from the shale rocks can be ignited! The Bristol Valley itself is located within a north-south glacial trough extending through the town. At the close of the Wisconsin Stage of the Pleistocene Ice Age, this trough held Glacial Lake Bristol as evidenced by several surficial geologic features including an abandoned lake outlet in the neighboring town of South Bristol that drained southeast to the glacial lake found in the Canandaigua glacial trough at that time. There are also ancient deltaic deposits on the Bristol Valley floor, where streams once drained into the former glacial lake, and elevated strandlines, abandoned beaches part way up the steep hillsides marking shoreline positions of the former glacial lake. The town of Bristol is located within The Nature Conservancy’s High Allegheny Plateau and Great Lakes Ecoregions. Alternatively, using the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation Ecozone classification scheme, the town straddles the Finger Lakes Highlands and the Central Appalachians. Bedrock geology consists primarily of shale, siltstone and sandstone with relatively thin strata of limestone. Rock layers are exposed in ravines and along upper slopes and top edges of the large bedrock hills. Surficial geology varies widely and includes thick lateral moraine deposits along the northern entrance to the Bristol Valley as well as glaciolacustrine varves on the valley floor. The former were deposited along the edge of ice tongues that lingered in the valley during ice front retreat. The latter represent annual couplets of silt and clay that settled out to the glacial lake bottom during summer and winter, respectively. Dropstones released by melting icebergs floating on the glacial lake are also present. And there are innumerable glacial erratics scattered along the hillside slopes, sloughed off the massive, nearly one mile thick ice sheet at various times. The Town of Bristol can be located on the U.S.G.S. Bristol Center topographic quadrangle map sheet now available on-line their map locator software (www.usgs.gov). Elevations within the town range from approximately 870 to 1940 feet above sea level. Terrestrial areas within the town of Bristol have a diverse mosaic of cultural land uses and natural land covers that continue to change in response to altered human activities and natural successional processes. These plant community cover types have characteristic botanical assemblages and provide critical habitat for many of the local wildlife species ranging from small chipmunks to large black bears. Classification of plant community cover types reported here follows the protocols established, published and utilized by the New York Natural Heritage Program, a cooperative endeavor between the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation and The Nature Conservancy, the world’s largest non-profit conservation organization. Their hierarchical classification scheme begins with broad ecological systems, then subdivisions describing cultural and natural categories, and finally ends with specific plant community cover types. The Heritage Program ranks each plant community cover type for its rarity and vulnerability at two geographic scales: a global scale (G) and a state-wide scale (S). Ranking scores range from one (plant communities with few occurrences that are judged to be rare plant communities) to five (common plant communities presumed to be secure across the geographic scales). State rankings can assist local towns with developing a sense of special significance for certain plant community cover types found within their municipal boundaries. A third scale modeled after the New