Woodbury Mountain Wilderness Preserve

Map key

Iconic wildlifetap a species ↗

Black bear

Moose

Bobcat

Fisher

Wood turtle

Northern long-eared bat

Blackburnian warbler

Spotted salamander

Beaver

Town & county roads

Human settlement · 2020

People per 100 m cell

scatteredtown

Chitwan National Parkno residents

Buffer zone: 273,977 people over 729.37 km² — about 376 per km². Twenty user groups manage 108.87 km² of it as community forest. WorldPop 2020 (constrained) · DNPWC.

Altitude bands · 235–753 m (DEM)

Spruce-fir transition700 m +

Upper hardwood500–700

Mid-slope forest300–500

Headwater lowland< 300

Bands are altitude, not vegetation: beech/black-cherry mast forest and the spruce-fir transition both cross these lines.

Live · forest condition

Active fire—24h

Deforestation—30d

NASA FIRMS · Global Forest Watch

Wildlife · population

Woodbury Mountain Wilderness Preserve

6,257 acres (25.3 km²) across three separate acquisition parcels, added in phases since December 2021. Its boundary runs some 53 km as digitised — about 3.0 times the 17.8 km a circle of equal area would need, less compact than a single-block park because the preserve is drawn in three pieces with at least one inholding. Unusually, the OpenStreetMap-measured area (25.33 km²) and Northeast Wilderness Trust's own stated acreage agree almost exactly.

Area

6,257 ac NEWT, current

OSM-measured

25.33 km² +0.02% vs stated

Boundary

~53 km as digitised, 3 parcels

Compactness

0.11 Polsby–Popper

Established

Dec 2021

Elevation

235 – 753 m (DEM)

Largest non-governmental wilderness in Vermont

Forever-wild easement held by Vermont River Conservancy (2024) — no timber harvest, no motorized travel, permanent

Grown from 5,400 to 6,257 acres across three additions since the original December 2021 purchase, including the ~500-acre "Eagle Ledge Addition" in Elmore

Previously a family timber holding (E.B. Hyde Company) managed since the 1950s, before its 2021 sale.

Acreage and history: Northeast Wilderness Trust project page and Vermont Business Magazine (Nov 2024). Boundary drawn from OpenStreetMap relation 17054826 (boundary=protected_area, owner=Northeast Wilderness Trust). Note: this is a privately held conservation easement, not a WDPA-listed government protected area, so there is no separate "gazetted" figure to validate against — the comparison above is OSM's measurement against the landowner's own stated acreage. Perimeter and compactness are computed from the OSM ring at its digitised generalisation and are therefore scale-dependent.