Requirement, and we'll begin with a presentation by our deputy Craig Turner.

Some environmental review aspects of secret of zoning board went for sure.

What quite begins?

Okay, last year we had one big presentation of transfer of development rights, density flow rights, sorry.

This year we're going to touch just a number of little issues.

Sitting at you know these planning board meetings and seeing these zoning board meetings, and people are getting up and you know, screaming about things that staff has written or things that rules they laws they think exist.

I decided we should start addressing things that are coming up at our meetings and why you know why these issues are popping up and what are the real regulations about them.

Uh so we're gonna start with one, we're gonna start with a sort of an overall environmental review comment, and this got brought up a lot at the vineyard estate ceiling, is you know, oh, this is a coastal oak grey forest, and we can't develop here because it's a coastal oak hickory forest.

So, and you know, if you read a lot of our more involved sea reviews, what you will notice is that every most of the sea reviews we write identify the land as coastal oak hickory forests.

This is the most common ecological community for probably 75 to 80% of the town of Huntington.

What the ecological community is it's basically a description of the general environmental features of that area.

Describes you the dominant trees, the understory trees, the shrubs, the ground cover, and the animal species that live in an area.

And every section of the town has some ecological community assigned to it.

Coastal oak hickory is one of the most common ones on Long Island, and it's the one we tend to use because we're going to talk about it in a second.

A lot of the other ecological communities on Long Island have very specific features that if they don't meet those specific features, we tend to fall back on coastal oak hickory bars.

And all it simply is it's a general description of what it looks like, and we have nice little picture.

This you go out by in your house and you look into the woods, and this is in most of Huntington what it looks like.

You have a few mature trees, you have some low ground cover, but you don't have a lot of heavy shrubs in most areas.

You have a few scraggly things growed along the ground, and you know, this is our description we assign in most of our sea reviews to the as the ecological community.

Uh, you know, oak trees are the most dominant tree on Long Island, simply but they grow the tallest, so they shade everything else out.

So most areas of the town of Huntington, you will find oak trees as the tallest trees in the area.

Uh in the understory, we normally see the things that tip us off to be coastal hickory.

Uh we see dogwood trees, we see hickories, obviously in the name, black cherry, saxafrass, which is the picture there.

A lot of people think call it like the glove leaf.

Uh and we see a lot of blueberry is the underneath uh environmental species.

Uh some of the other ecological communities sometimes will write wrote out.

We have coastal oak heath, coastal oak laurel, and coastal oak beach, as you can see, oak again, most dominant tree on Long Island.

Uh this is really description of not really description of the dominant tree since everything is mostly oak, it's a description of what's underneath it.

Uh areas underneath laurel is mountain laurel.

Uh if you go out to the sedan house on 25A, uh where Centerport Road comes into it, and the town owns you know about 50 acres of parkland up the hill there, uh, as we commonly say back to where, you know, behind what council former councilman Gene Koch lives, all that area looking down over the water.

You have a lucky, you know, Mount Laurel comes into bloom in June, and you can definitely notice it's a different kind of community that you find in other areas.

Uh you know, this came up recently, the Lau Cabin, which the town just designated as historic site.

That is an area where coastal oak laurel predominates.

Uh, coastal oak beach is again is an area you notice.

Uh the beach is a very popular tree in the understory, and the beach area is actually compete with the oaks, so that's an area we get a lot more sunlight in, and that becomes a noticeable area.

Uh pitch pine scrub oak is something you see down in the south borders of the town, similar to the pine barrens out east.

We have our own pine bear area with the southern part of Dicks Hills that goes east into the Edward Plains preserved.

Obviously, the pitch pine scrub oaks, you have a lot shorter vegetation.

Uh areas that you know, because of soil conditions, trees can't grow as big, and areas that weren't farmed back in the day just because the soil is poor.

So the same thing that led to it not being farmland is the same soil conditions that prevent it from you know producing large scale trees in the Academy as in other areas.

One thing we talk a lot about in our reviews is native species versus invasive species.

Obviously, going back to some of the previous slides, you know, when you look at the logical community, there's animals there that have that live there and they're dependent on the vegetation found in their community.

You know, hickory trees produce nuts, the squirrels eat the nuts.

It's you know, everything is balanced together as an overall community, and when you have invasive species, one of the reasons we don't like either invasive or non-native species is they don't provide the same kind of environmental benefits for the rest of the community.

Uh, this is you know, picture the most common one we see now around Long Island.

Commonly known common name is called Tree of Heaven, uh scientific name Alianthus.

This is a tree that came from China.

Uh people started planting in the United States, and as you know, if you drive around and see in a lot of areas, you'll find this tree because it spreads rapidly.

And why some people say, well, at least it's still a tree, is you have an invasive plant species, and it leads to other invasive species.

And here we have this modern lantern fly, which also is from China, and in China, its favorite plant host is the tree of heaven.

So, you know, first you have the invasive plant species, and next you have the invasive insect or animal species.

Uh so you know, we try to produce you know plant native species when we do landscaping plants because they attract animals and other plants that are native to the community.

Have these land flies decreased the amount of tree of heaven since they feed off of them?

Have they?

Well, unfortunately, the tree of heaven grows so rapidly, we actually don't see too much of a decrease in the tree of heaven because they just sprout new stalks and sprout new leaves.

So even though we now have these lantern flies all throughout the community, we still have to trade them.

And we move to other vineyards and whatever.

Is is there a correlation between what we consider our oak forests and what world is allowable for us to be building our planning for structure.

Are we open to the public?

I have just full of chair.