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(L to R): ADAPT Team Members Ryan Smith, Aaron Hoag, Tucker Nugent, Audrey Kissin, and Edwin Hernández García at the UNH enrichment planting site. Photo: Aaron Hoag, UNH.

When  [RS1] stepped into his new role as Project Coordinator with the ADAPT team at the end of last year, he brought with him a hands‑on understanding of fieldwork and a long‑standing commitment to agriculture. As an student at UNH, Aaron worked with as an Integrated Pest Management Intern and Plant Diagnostic Laboratory Technician. Aaron connected with through his participation in the Andean-Amazonian Watershed Experience: Exploring Sustainability of Mountain Ecosystems in Ecuador () program in summer 2024. After graduating in December 2024, Aaron continued work with Heidi through ADAPT as a technician, where he found himself at the nexus of agroforestry research and practice, encompassing forest farming, silvopasture, and food forests.

Much of Aaron’s recent work centers on food forests and, exploring how strong plant communities and long‑term forest functions are supported. Last fall, he supported ground cover establishment tailored to different treatment areas—clover in nitrogen‑fixing plots, and grasses in non‑fixing plots—while weaving medicinal plants throughout the design. He also helped mill and install wooden pathways, creating access for monitoring and maintenance of food forest plots.

At the Experimental Linear Gap (ELG) site, Aaron is involved with the ongoing care of existing ginseng and goldenseal, preparing new rows for spring planting, and installing fencing to protect young plants from deer browse. He explains that these foundational steps are essential for research continuity and ensuring the long‑term health of slow‑growing understory crops.

(L to R): ADAPT Team Members Shannon Van Hise, Edwin Hernández García, and Aaron Hoag at the UNH food forest. Photo: Laurie Mooney.

One of Aaron’s most demanding efforts this past year has been a multi-state soil sampling effort for silvopasture research. Working alongside graduate student Jannatul Ferdous with collaborators from ADAPT and Alix Contosta's lab, Aaron collected soil cores down to 50 centimeters (about 20 inches) using a gas‑powered auger, a physically intense process complicated by rocky New England soils. Across twenty-two plots, the team sampled six points at four depths, totaling 528 samples, plus additional collections for aggregate and organic horizon analyses. The work supports a robust experimental design looking at changes in soil properties when a forest is left as is, transitioned into a silvopasture, transitioned into an open pasture. Each core is cataloged by treatment, plot number, and depth; and analyzed for properties such as bulk density, pH, total nitrogen, total carbon, and more.

(L to R): ADAPT Team Members Jannatul Ferdous, Aaron Hoag, and Bernard Nyanzu using the gas-powered auger for soil sampling at the Yale silvopasture-by-subtraction. Photo: Mariah Rietzel.

The coming months will shift toward planting. From March through June, teams will establish new trees, shrubs, and herbs across multiple sites, supported by winter‑stratified seeds and greenhouse propagation. American Hazelnut seedlings, which were difficult to source in bulk, are being grown in‑house at UNH’s Macfarlane Research Greenhouses.

Aaron describes the role as a gateway to further forestry research. By conducting pretreatment surveys across New England farms, he has expanded his skills in tree identification, field measurements, and applied agroforestry systems – growth that mirrors the landscapes he’s helping steward.

Social Science Team Update: Understanding Agroforestry Livelihoods in New England

Analena Bruce and Umama Begum Ruba are advancing their upcoming papers and preparing a conference abstract as part of their research on agroforestry practitioners in New England. Their research so far shows that growers rely on a wide mix of livelihood strategies, from off-farm work and agritourism to grants, educational programming, and complementary enterprises like nursery products or herbal goods. They draw on diverse social, financial, and technical support systems to sustain their operations, including inherited land, personal savings, and extension services. Across interviews, practitioners emphasized that better access to land, funding, technical assistance, networks, and processing infrastructure would significantly strengthen their decision-making and long-term viability. Publications are forthcoming. For more information, visit the Food Systems Lab. 

Over-Yielding: Promising but Hard to Measure

Ranjit Bawa is focused on the rapid assessment’s findings concerning broader human dimensions. His team’s research suggests that early adopters are often motivated by environmental stewardship, ecosystem benefits, and personal or community values, even as they remain attentive to the economic realities of implementation. That finding is notable because agroforestry is often discussed in terms of its promise to generate multiple benefits from the same land base, an idea captured by the concept of ‘over-yielding’.

Integrating trees, forage, and livestock into a single system can sometimes produce more total output than managing each separately. In a young chestnut planting, before the trees are mature and casting significant shade, for example, sunlight reaching the ground can grow grasses, and livestock can turn that forage into milk, meat, wool, or other products. The principle is simple, but measuring the combined gains in real-world systems is not. The benefits of over-yielding are hard to quantify, but they can be significant when trees, forages, and livestock share the same land.

In their recent SWOT assessment of agroforestry potential, Ranjit and Graduate Research Assistant Sajja Panta found that agroforestry adoption is often constrained less by a lack of interest than by uncertainty, management complexity, and limited implementation support. By producing more detailed evidence on the practical conditions that shape adoption, the ADAPT project aims to clarify what makes agroforestry viable in New England. For more information, click here.

At Yale, Professor and Research Fellow are advancing experimental linear gaps (ELGs) that are in various stages of preparation. In addition to overseeing the creation of new ELGs at both UNH and Yale, the team has been busy refining the environmental and plant measurement protocols that will guide data collection across the sites.

Research outside of ADAPT:

The has reached a major milestone in its restoration work. New research published in shows that recurrent genomic selection can accurately predict blight resistance in chestnut trees using DNA alone, dramatically shortening breeding cycles and improving precision. This breakthrough strengthens decades of grassroots effort and offers a promising model for restoring other threatened tree species. More information, including the press release and a downloadable PDF of the paper, can be found on the Foundation’s .