Kittatinny Ridge Sentinel Landscape
Supporting Military Readiness, Climate Resilience, and Working Lands in Pennsylvania
Welcome to the Ridge
For 25 years, Pennsylvania's Kittatinny Ridge Conservation Landscape has united partners to protect one of the most biodiverse regions of eastern North America. "The Ridge" is a globally recognized corridor for rare wildlife, bird migration, clean water, and carbon sequestration.
The Ridge is also key to military readiness. It is home to the nation's busiest National Guard training center, Fort Indiantown Gap.
Development, outsized population growth, and land fragmentation threaten this globally significant resource and its vital defense capabilities.
Recognizing these challenges, in 2024 the federal government designated the Ridge as the Kittatinny Ridge Sentinel Landscape. This designation will bring new federal partners and resources, enhance landscape stewardship, and mitigate threats to military readiness.
The 250-mile long Kittatinny Ridge is the first major landform along the Appalachian Mountains. The Ridge spans from northern Maryland to New York's Catskill Mountains.
Encompassing 185 miles in Pennsylvania, the Ridge is among the state's most climate-resilient landscapes. Its long, uninterrupted forest cover makes it a globally significant migratory route for birds.
This value led Pennsylvania to designate the Ridge as one of its eight conservation landscapes .
Pennsylvania's eight conservation landscapes
The Kittatinny Ridge Conservation Landscape contains significant natural and recreational resources, including more than 160 miles of the Appalachian National Scenic Trail.
The Ridge is also vital to military readiness. The western half of the landscape houses several military facilities, among them Letterkenny Army Depot, Carlisle Barracks, and the Naval Support Activity in Mechanicsburg.
Central to the new Sentinel Landscape is the Ridge's anchor military installation, Fort Indiantown Gap.
"The Gap" is the nation's busiest National Guard training center . During fiscal year 2023, the Gap hosted 139,391 personnel and provided more than 850,000 person-days of training.
This 17,000-acre facility regularly hosts personnel from all branches of the military as well as foreign militaries, law enforcement, and local, state, and federal agencies.
The Gap operates the second-busiest heliport in the Army, behind only Fort Novosel.
The newly designated Kittatinny Ridge Sentinel Landscape focuses on this western portion of the conservation landscape. The region's dark skies and rural land use are essential to military training needs.
The Sentinel Landscape encompasses about 1.9 million acres. It includes portions of nine counties and more than 160 municipalities.
A Working Landscape
The Kittatinny Ridge Sentinel Landscape blends natural areas, working lands, historic places, outdoor recreation opportunities, and diverse populations.
Home to more than half a million Pennsylvanians, the landscape provides beauty, ruggedness, outdoor activity, ecological services, and spirit.
The Ridge also plays a central role in Pennsylvania's rural economy. Its valleys include some of Pennsylvania's best farmland, and its hillsides contain thousands of acres of working forests. The Ridge contributes to Pennsylvania's $17 billion outdoor recreation industry through its many state parks, forests, and game lands alongside federal opportunities like the Appalachian Trail.
As the start of Pennsylvania's Ridge and Valley Region, the Kittatinny Ridge is a diverse landscape with long forested ridges and fertile agricultural valleys. The landscape also includes Pennsylvania's state capital, Harrisburg.
The Kittatinny Ridge rises in the distance behind the State Capitol dome in Harrisburg.
According to Sentinel-2 land cover data, the Kittatinny Ridge Sentinel Landscape includes:
- 1.1 million acres of forest (58%)
- 465,000 acres of cropland (25%)
- 106,000 acres of rangeland (6%)
- 202,000 acres of built area (11%)
- 26,000 acres of water (1%)
Forested ridges and agricultural valleys define the Kittatinny Ridge Sentinel Landscape.
Federal, state, and local governments own about 17% of the landscape. Private landowners hold the vast majority of the land:
- Federal (1%)
- Military Installations (1%)
- State (14%)
- Local (1%)
- Private (83%)
The high level of private land means the Kittatinny Ridge Sentinel Landscape is a working landscape. Its fertile valleys supply some of Pennsylvania's best farmland. The U.S. Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) has classified 200,000 acres of soil in the landscape as Prime Farmland. Another 325,000 acres are classified as Farmland of Statewide Importance.
More than 380,000 acres of land are in active crop production, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The most common crops include corn, soybeans, and hay.
The valleys around the Kittatinny Ridge hold some of Pennsylvania's most productive (and beautiful) farmland.
Pennsylvania has the leading farm preservation program in the country, and its impact shows in the Kittatinny Ridge Sentinel Landscape. Counties and the state have permanently protected more than 80,000 acres of farmland in the landscape through agricultural easements.
Farmland preservation in the region averages more than 2,000 acres per year. Even so, farmer demand for easements consistently surpasses funding availability.
Where its valleys provide food, the Sentinel Landscape's forested ridges contribute to Pennsylvania's forest products industry. Pennsylvania is the largest hardwood producer in the U.S., accounting for 10 percent of the nation's hardwood supply.
The Kittatinny Ridge is a significant part of that production. Counties in the Sentinel Landscape together harvest more than 130 million board feet of sawtimber each year, according to the U.S. Forest Service.
A log truck transports timber harvested from the Buchanan State Forest District in the southwest part of the Sentinel Landscape.
Alongside farms and forests, the Kittatinny Ridge is a critical part of Pennsylvania's $17 billion outdoor recreation economy. The landscape includes 285,000 acres that are open to the public for free.
Among its destinations, the region features 10 state parks and more than 250 local parks. It also sports several long-distance trails including the Appalachian Trail, Horse-Shoe Trail, and Tuscarora Trail.
A priority in the landscape is expanding outdoor recreation access. In partnership with the Trust for Public Land and WeConservePA, the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources has identified high-need areas in the landscape that lack outdoor recreation access, as shown on the map.
To safeguard the many values this rural working landscape provides, land protection has long been a central goal of regional partners.
Led by the Nature Conservancy, the Kittatinny Ridge Land Protection Partnership has protected more than 25,000 acres since 2015. In all, over 400,000 acres of the Sentinel Landscape have been protected - more than 20 percent of the total.
Land protection along the Ridge takes many forms and involves many partners, among them government agencies, farmland preservation boards, non-profit land trusts, and private landowners.
The Kittatinny Ridge Land Protection Partnership has helped preserve many sensitive sites, including for threatened species like this bog turtle.
A Climate Corridor
The Kittatinny Ridge is an ecological superhighway. Its long, uninterrupted ridgeline provides a globally important migration route for birds. It represents a highly resilient and connected corridor for wildlife moving to escape rising temperatures, flooding, and drought.
The Kittatinny Ridge functions as a critical migratory corridor, climate-resilient landscape, and habitat for a wide array of species.
The Kittatinny Ridge is such a crucial migratory corridor that the Audubon Society has designated it as a Global Important Bird Area. This ribbon of forest is critical to 251 bird species.
The Kittatinny Ridge is considered the premier raptor migration corridor in the northeast U.S. The Ridge is home to Hawk Mountain Sanctuary, a designated National Natural Landmark.
Every year, an estimated 18,000 raptors, like this broad-winged hawk, pass through on their fall migrations.
The Sentinel Landscape is also home to many rare and vulnerable species. The region has more than 250 "core habitat" sites for species or natural communities of concern, as identified by the Pennsylvania Natural Heritage Program. It also includes portions of five Important Mammal Areas designated by the Pennsylvania Game Commission.
Among the many rare species that call this landscape home are regal fritillary butterflies, cerulean warblers, northern long-eared bats, and bog turtles.
The densely forested hills of the Kittatinny Ridge are important breeding areas for multiple forest interior birds of conservation importance, including this cerulean warbler.
Not only is the Ridge valuable to wildlife now, it will be even more so in coming decades. The Kittatinny Ridge is one of Pennsylvania's most climate-resilient landscapes, according to the Nature Conservancy.
The Ridge is considered key for wildlife moving north to adapt to climate change. Its folded terrain gives it a high diversity of microclimates, making it easier for sensitive species to find habitats that suit them.
The Kittatinny Ridge is also a critical water source. The Sentinel Landscape includes 27 lakes and over 5,000 miles of streams.
Thanks to its forested ridges, the landscape provides clean drinking water to more than 500,000 Pennsylvanians. The landscape has 17 reservoirs including the DeHart Reservoir, the water source for Pennsylvania's capital, Harrisburg.
The DeHart Reservoir covers 600 acres and holds more than 650 million gallons of water.
Given the region's importance for water quality, it's no surprise that the U.S. Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) has identified more than half the Sentinel Landscape as being within a Priority Watershed. The region has over 50 Hydrologic Unit Code 12 (HUC-12) watersheds designated as priorities by NRCS.
NRCS has further identified 10 HUC-12 watersheds in the region as eligible for dedicated funding through the Pennsylvania National Water Quality Initiative . Half the watersheds in Pennsylvania eligible for this funding are located in the Sentinel Landscape.
Native brook trout
Water quality on the Ridge matters beyond Pennsylvania. The western areas of the Sentinel Landscape are part of the Chesapeake Bay Watershed, while the eastern areas are part of the Delaware Bay Watershed. Conservation work in the landscape will support pollution reduction goals in both bays downstream.
The combined benefits of the Kittatinny Ridge's natural resources are vast, but they can be hard to quantify. That's why, since 2009, regional partners have contracted with researchers to conduct "return on environment" studies.
These studies calculate the economic impact of open space through values such as stormwater reduction, improved air quality, and outdoor recreation.
Six counties in the Sentinel Landscape have had these studies completed. In total, the studies found that the landscape provides $4 billion in natural system services every year, as well as another $1.5 billion in outdoor recreation value.
To learn more about these values, click on a county on this map for a link to that county's study.
A Military Training Hub
A 10 Thunderbolt CAS training at Fort Indiantown Gap in May 2023.
Not only is the Kittatinny Ridge important environmentally, it is also vital to national security. The Sentinel Landscape includes four military installations, including the landscape's anchor installation, Fort Indiantown Gap.
The Gap is America's busiest National Guard Training Center, training more than 139,000 personnel in fiscal year 2023 alone.
U.S. soldiers attending the Field Artillery Senior Leader Course fire live artillery at Fort Indiantown Gap in March 2023.
The installation is home to several schools, among them the Eastern Army National Guard Aviation Training Site, the 166th Regiment Regional Training Institute, the Regional Equipment Operators Training Site, the Lightning Force Academy, and the Northeast Counter Drug Training Center.
One of the major trainings the Gap hosts is Warfighter, a simulated exercise designed to train and evaluate Army division-sized elements on mission command in large-scale combat operations.
Fort Indiantown Gap is centrally located in the Kittatinny Ridge Sentinel Landscape. It includes land in Lebanon and Dauphin counties.
The Gap is more than 17,000 acres in size and strategically positioned. It sits about 20 miles from the state capital, Harrisburg, and within 150 miles of major urban centers including New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C.
Despite its closeness to population centers, the Gap itself is in a generally rural area. The region north of the Gap contains large amounts of conserved land, especially state game lands, state forests, conservation easements, and agricultural easements.
The Gap's landscape and mission are intertwined, as demonstrated in this water bucket training to combat wildfires.
This rural landscape is essential to the Gap's training mission. It uses the areas north of the facility for special use airspace and its aviation training corridor.
As one of only three specialized Army National Guard aviation facilities, the Gap provides critical training on the Army's rotary wing cargo and utility platforms (CH-47 Chinook, UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters, and their variants).
The rural landscape is especially important to this aviation training because many nighttime training missions rely on dark skies. The area north of the Gap offers among the darkest skies in southeastern Pennsylvania.
The Gap flew more than 15,000 hours of rotary- and fixed-wing aircraft sorties in fiscal year 2022.
The rural landscape around the Gap benefits many rare plant and animal species. Nearly all of the Gap is within a Core Habitat Area as identified by the Pennsylvania Natural Heritage Program.
The Gap itself is currently home to more than 60 threatened and endangered species at the state or federal level. Among these rare species, the Gap supports the sole known population of eastern regal fritillary butterflies in North America.
Female eastern regal fritillary butterfly at Fort Indiantown Gap
The perseverance of the regal at the Gap is no coincidence. The active military operations on the land, alongside calculated land management from conservation staff, provide the right amount of disturbance for early-successional grassland habitat. The resulting mosaic of warm-season bunch grasses makes the Gap a perfect home for this grassland-endemic butterfly.
This longer video (13 minutes) describes the habitat work occurring at the Gap that benefits not only regal fritillaries, but other rare species as well.
Unfortunately, the rural landscape the Gap relies on is under threat. Much of the land immediately east, south, and west of the Gap is unprotected and faces high development demand due to its proximity to the I-78/I-81 transportation corridor.
Encroachment threats northeast and northwest of the Gap also pose a risk. The ridges in these areas are potential high-value sites for wind turbines.
Development in the identified encroachment concern areas poses noise, light, and tall-structure risks to aviation training missions.
To address these threats, the Gap has identified 56,000 acres around the base as its REPI Partnership Opportunity Area. The buffer covers encroachment threats immediately around the Gap, as well as areas northeast of it.
Thanks to the work of many partners, more than 10,000 acres in this buffer now have permanent development protection. The new Kittatinny Ridge Sentinel Landscape designation will further these protection efforts and help secure the Gap's ability to train for current and future military missions.
A Threatened Future
Aerial view of warehouse development in the Sentinel Landscape
The rural landscape that the Gap and the broader Kittatinny Ridge rely on is under threat. The same strategic location and large open spaces that make the Ridge so valuable for military readiness also make it a popular region for residential, commercial, and energy development.
Relatively low land cost and a lack of zoning along much of the Ridge have resulted in sprawling warehouses, overtaxed infrastructure, increased impervious surface, and potentially disruptive energy projects. This development threatens the Ridge's globally significant natural resources, climate resilience capacity, and military training capabilities.
The Kittatinny Ridge sits at a literal crossroads. The region is a major transportation hub of interconnected highways: I-76, I-78, I-81, and I-83.
These interstates link the region with major population centers such as New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C. They are part of what make the region strategic not only for Fort Indiantown Gap, but for the other military facilities in the landscape.
However, the Ridge's interconnected location means that it also faces high development pressure. Many of Pennsylvania's fastest-growing municipalities are in the Sentinel Landscape, according to U.S. Census data.
This outsized development pressure puts the Kittatinny Ridge's rural landscape at risk. From 2018 to 2022, the region lost 24,000 acres of farmland, according to Sentinel-2 land cover data. That's a loss of 1 percent of its farmland every year.
During the same time period, the region gained another 16,000 acres of built area, a 9 percent increase.
An example of this development occurs just north of the Borough of Duncannon, located in Perry County along the west shore of the Susquehanna River.
The field at the center of this map was in agricultural production as recently as 2019 (left). By 2022, a suburban housing development had replaced it (right).
Development pressure is not limited to residential construction. The Sentinel Landscape's highways and proximity to major cities make it a prime target for commercial warehouse construction.
The intersection of I-78 and I-81 shown here is one example. Imagery from 2015 (left) shows this area as largely farm fields. By 2021 (right), six new warehouses have together replaced more than 100 acres of agricultural land adjacent to Fort Indiantown Gap, shown in orange on the left.
Finally, energy development is another risk to the sentinel landscape. The long hilltops of the Kittatinny Ridge make this region highly valued for wind tower construction. At the same time, the valley farmlands are prized for grid-scale solar installations.
In this example from Peters Township in Franklin County, more than 80 acres of active farmland in 2019 (left) were replaced by 2022 with a 15MW solar facility (right).
Renewable energy is a critical part of America's energy future and its journey to become climate resilient. Balancing renewable energy development with maintaining the rural landscape will be essential for the Kittatinny Ridge in the years ahead.
This balance is achievable, as demonstrated by Fort Indiantown Gap. The Gap now supplies more than half its own energy through renewable energy, including a 3MW onsite solar farm.
The Ridge Is Calling
Although the Kittatinny Ridge faces threats, for now it remains a largely intact, working rural landscape. The recreational revenues, natural system services, national defense capabilities, and farm and forest products the Ridge provides are worth billions annually to local communities.
Those values are maintained thanks to ongoing effort. Local, state, and federal partners have cooperated for 25 years to safeguard rare species, preserve farm and forestland, enhance military training, protect water quality, and expand recreational opportunities.
But there is much more to do. With 83 percent of land privately owned, undefined zoning, and unprotected land to the east, south, and west of Fort Indiantown Gap, the Ridge faces many challenges. The new Kittatinny Ridge Sentinel Landscape designation will strengthen existing work, but, most valuably, it will create new partnerships and unlock innovative resources.
The Ridge drives our economy. It sustains our natural resources. And it powers our passions.
Can you hear it? The Ridge is calling.
