PA Environment Digest

The Pennsylvania National Guard will celebrate Earth and Arbor Day with educational displays and children's activities from 11 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. on April 29, at Fort Indiantown Gap, Lebanon County.

The event, which will be held in the Keystone Conference Center that overlooks Marquette Lake, is free and open to the public. "Sustaining the Environment for a Secure Future" is the theme of this year's event.

"Our goal is to encourage every member of the community to play a role in managing our nation's resources," Col. Sam Hayes, commander of the Fort Indiantown Gap National Guard Training Site. "Every effort, no matter how small, takes us further down the road to a sustainable future."

Fort Indiantown Gap offers more than 17,000 acres and 140 training areas and facilities for year-round training. It is the only live-fire, maneuver military training facility in Pennsylvania, annually supporting 19,000 Pennsylvania National Guard members and more than 130,000 other states' Guard, military, law enforcement, and civilian personnel each year.

As one of the region's most ecologically diverse areas, Fort Indiantown Gap also manages an outdoor recreation program that last year afforded 2,400 people access to the installation to hunt, fish and gather wood.

Fort Indiantown Gap is home to 99 species of conservation concern including the only population of Regal Fritillary butterflies in Pennsylvania. It also provides a wide variety of habitats for 36 species of mammals, 122 breeding species of birds, 34 species of reptiles and amphibians, 25 species of fish, 792 species of plants, and many notable species of invertebrates including 85 species of butterflies and 237 species of moths. The installation also features 1,000 acres of scrub oak and pitch pine scrubland and 3,000 acres of native grassland habitat – the largest in the state.

For more information, visit the Fort Indiantown Gap Environmental Stewardship and the DMVA Bureau of Environmental Management webpages.

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