Harvard Forest - United States of America

The Harvard Forest is a collection of five properties, totaling about 1500 hectares, in Petersham, Massachusetts. Petersham is a rural town in Worcester County, Massachusetts, about 60 miles west of Boston. It is largely in the Swift River Watershed, and lies near the center of a twenty-mile wide band of hilly uplands that form the eastern edge of the Connecticut Valley. The north part of the town is rolling and the south more distinctly hilly; the lowest basins are about 200 m above sea level, the flats around 400m. Th e climate is cool temperate. Petersham, like many of the adjacent towns, was settled in the early 18th century, extensively cleared and farmed in the next hundred years, and then progressively abandoned after ...