Jennifer Howard has long loved to hike along the Taconic Trail in the Berkshires, from the hollows to the lowlands to the ridge. The birds, the wildflowers, the views – they always remind her how lucky she is to have access to some of the state’s most beautiful natural resources.

Now Howard is doing her part to protect similar spots across Massachusetts and make it easier for others to enjoy them. Howard, who works for the Department of Environmental Management in Northampton, is leading a project to identify all of the state’s greenways, waterways, and trails and show how they could be linked into a coordinated network.

“It’s really important for people to get to these really incredible places,” says Howard, the agency’s greenways coordinator. “The whole concept of greenways is to have a place for recreation and to enjoy nature close to people’s homes, so you don’t have to drive three miles to go to a park” or to take a walk or bike ride.

The goal is not only to encourage people to use the existing trails, but also to identify key gaps and focus planning on the most critical areas, she says. Eventually the effort could result in a trail spanning the entire state from, say, Boston to the Berkshires.

DEM hired the Boston-based Appalachian Mountain Club, the nation’s oldest conservation and recreation organization, to prepare the statewide plan by the fall. The club is developing a series of state and regional maps and a database of the existing greenways, creating a “vision document” of future possibilities, and designing a publicity poster to promote the project.

“There’s a lot of potential in Massachusetts,” says Peter Donahue, project coordinator for the Appalachian Mountain Club. “What we’re starting to see in developing the information is that there are some projects that with a little bit of assistance…they could really take off.”

Howard defines “greenways” as corridors of land and water that protect and link important natural and recreational resources. They include bike paths, multi-use paths, unsurfaced hiking trails, walking trails, green space by rivers, even historic trails in downtown areas.

Massachusetts already has seven to ten major regional, long-distance trails – including the Taconic and Appalachian trails in the Berkshires – that could serve as the land “spines” of the network, she says, plus at least six major river areas that could be the water “spines.” Dozens of smaller trails and waterways could fill in the gaps by hooking up with the bigger pieces.

The Appalachian Mountain Club has already identified at least 60 smaller greenway and trail segments significant enough to include in a statewide network that DEM hadn’t known about, Howard says.

Her office held a series of meetings across the state this spring to ask residents about their priority projects. Most agreed that the major long-distance trails, such as the Bay Circuit Trail, which links the North Shore and Southeastern Massachusetts, should be completed, Howard says. Many also want better access to greenways along rivers.

Others are hoping for progress on the state’s portion of the East Coast Greenway, a 2,000-mile trail in the works from Calais, Maine, to Key West, Florida. Massachusetts would host more than 100 miles, planned from coastal Salisbury on the New Hampshire border through Beverly to Boston, then to Worcester and on to Providence.

It’s too early to know how much money would be needed to complete the statewide “vision.” Howard says the idea is to have it done in pieces by local governments or private organizations, with financial help from the state, the federal government, or private foundations.

Pat King, a Newton resident who chairs the East Coast Greenway board of trustees, says the more the better. One need look only as far as Memorial Drive in Cambridge on summer weekend mornings to see the demand. The road is closed to auto traffic, and droves of cyclists, roller-bladers, joggers, and walkers crowd the asphalt expanse that winds along the Charles River.

“It just shows there’s such a crying need for these things,” King says. “When they’re there, people use them; they use them like crazy. That tells us that people want more.”