 Thank you for being here today. This is the fourth program in our series. I'm Marge Zunder. I'm a new member of the Central Vermont Alley Committee. We're very happy to have her. It is my honor to introduce today's speaker. Dr. Tony D'Amato has a wealth of information on trees for us. Can you hear me okay? Better when you get up. Better when you get up. He is Professor of Silver Culture and Applied Forest Ecology and the Director of the Forestry Program at the University of Vermont. He has also been a faculty member at the University of Minnesota and the Bullard Fellow at Harvard University. His research at UVM focuses on long-term forest dynamics, Professor D'Amato. Thank you for being here today. Thanks. Thanks, Marge. I'm going to try to get this to my height. Yeah, if people can hear me okay, yeah, I'll take it off. I tend to move around so people are hearing all right. So yeah, thanks for the invitation and certainly thanks for the interest in this topic. And so what I'm hoping to do today, I recognize there's a wide range of backgrounds in the room. Many of you already have a good appreciation just for how vegetation has historically moved around in response to changing climate. And really the goal of today is to talk a bit about both what we know about the history of Vermont's forests in terms of how trees have moved in the past and then how we're thinking about possibly moving trees in the future dealing with some of the challenges that are facing Vermont's forests and really more broadly the globe's forests today. So a lot of, oops, that didn't go very well. A lot of what's on our mind these days are very novel changes that are happening both environmentally as well as I'm happening with other dynamics happening in the region. So obviously I don't need to talk to those of you in Montpelier about both what we're getting for last year, not enough rain this year, way more rain than we ever wanted. And really, we've ironically had part of this year four years in a row that we consider a drought. And so as a region, we're certainly seeing some pretty dramatic changes. Again, don't need to belabor that in this room. But beyond that, there's things like spongy moth here in New Hampshire, that southern pine beetle on Long Island, beach bark disease, emerald ash borer, Asian longhorn beetle, hemlock olea delgid, all these things that are affecting forests in ways that really there isn't a historic analog for. And so it makes many of us concerned about what the future of the region's forests might look like. And importantly, our ability to sustain all those values that we get from forests, both aesthetics, ecological, cultural, as well as certainly economic. And so there's been a lot of discussion about how do we deal with this change? And should we, as kind of human parts of that ecosystem, be doing something actively to address that change? And so what I'm showing here is just a few headlines from the New York Times and Washington Post as well as Nature Magazine over the past several years talking about things going on in Minnesota. Is this like maybe the connection up here in that title? Anyway, we can be patient with it, not a big deal. So are we trying to plant the forest of the future? Can we help trees outrun climate change? Can we figure out ways to move trees around? So there's a lot of discussion broadly, not just in the Northeast about how do we respond to these changes and should we actually be actively doing things about it? And so I recognize that that was probably the main prompt to get me to come here today was there's some articles on some of the work we've been doing about potentially moving trees around in response to climate change. And I'll certainly talk about that today. But what I first want to do is just provide some historical context, which again might give you some PTSD to your old biology class. And they talked about glacial geology and things like that. But just to discuss that, trees have moved. They've always been moving and how does that compare to what we're seeing today? So what I'm going to do is give a bit of a historical context on tree movement and migration, particularly with New England as the focus. And a lot of what this information comes from are what we call pillow ecology. And so again, some of you very familiar with this. But what you're seeing on the right hand side here, these are sediment cores from from ponds or lakes or even sometimes small hollows in the woods. And what people will do is just through stratigraphy. So the higher up on the core, the younger the sediment was laid down. So the deeper you go, the further back in time you go. And then what they can do is age each layer and then then actually identify the pollen grains, which you're looking at here in each layer to understand what was a vegetation at that point in time in that location in Vermont or elsewhere. And so it's a really useful tool to historically look back and understand just how vegetation has been changing. So a lot of what we talk about when we are thinking about vegetation change is how it responded to the last big environmental change in the Northeast. And that really is how forests were responding to the retreat of the Laurentian ice sheet. So as most of us appreciate over 20,000 years ago, we'd have over a mile of ice above us right now here in Montpelier. And so we want to understand historically as that climate was changing, as that ice was receding, here's an active glacier receding in Alaska. First thing colonizing that landscape is alder. So understanding over time, how did species both colonize, move and importantly, what did that reflect in terms of the environment and what can that tell us? So as a simple example, this is just showing spruce species in eastern North America. So here's some spruce pollen grains. I always thought paleoecology was really cool. I love the graphs. And then what I found out is you just like take one core. So one day of fieldwork and the rest of your time is just staring at pollen grains. So so I got I do other things in the woods instead. But but they really produce some cool, cool diagrams and cool information. And so here's the Laurentian ice sheet. Twenty one thousand years ago again, where we are would have been under ice. And this is where spruce was the abundance of spruce species. So percentage within these pollen diagrams. Back in that time period. And so most of the spruce was located in the central Appalachian region. And if we look at spruce today, with obviously no longer an ice sheet, on the majority of spruce, kind of the most abundant spruce is what we were getting quite a bit of smoke from both in past past summers, as well as on this summer up into the boreal region of Canada. And so giving you a feel for just kind of over that 20,000 year period, spruce has really moved quite a bit across across that landscape. So what I want to do is provide kind of a just a little bit of a chronology as to what we know in terms of Vermont's forests and which species showed up when. And then we can talk a little bit about what does that tell us in terms of if we can just rely on natural species movement to start tracking these changes that we're seeing in the environment. So what I'm going to do is rely on a series of maps on the right hand side that basically are coded for different species. And so I'll start in the top left hand corner and work my way down to the most recent, close to recent time period, a thousand years before present. And what I'm going to do is just go through it again. Many of you have already familiar with this general progression of vegetation as it moved into the northeastern United States following the last glaciation. And so what we recognize as the first species, these S's are spruce. And so 14,000 years ago, if you were to be spending time on the Massachusetts Cape Cod, even the species that would be dominating those forests were spruce, primarily white spruce and black spruce, which would be similar to if you went to Northern Alaska today. Same idea, right? Latitudinal tree line as we get further north. As the climate continued to warm, we started to see white pine showing up. And so this is what things would have looked like 10,000 years before present. So white pine, this is a sample that happened up in Victory Bog that they used to reconstruct things. So white pine was starting to show up in those pine pollen diagrams. Six thousand years ago, hemlock really became quite abundant in our region. And then the most recent arrivals to our region are largely hickories and oaks. And some of those species we associate more with warm environments. So if you were to move just south into Connecticut, certainly further south into Pennsylvania and the central Appalachians. And so it really took a long time for those species to ultimately make it make it into our region. So when people talk about oak in particular, they actually say that that species moved a lot faster than they would have expected if it just naturally was dispersed. Does anybody know kind of what's often talked about is why oaks might have moved more quickly? Anybody ever heard the general legend of why oaks might have moved faster? Blue jays, exactly. And I had always been told that and always thought that. But the more that I've learned about just the history of our region, I know the cruel professor trick, right? The question is, does the blue jay get a little bit too much credit? And the reason I bring that up is those that are familiar with the indigenous cultures really throughout the range of any oak species. Oak is a central staple of the diets of people. And importantly, the Hadmasone people, the Abenaki people, oftentimes some of the legends of those people are often were called the forest gardeners as they would move into areas. Many of these plants would follow them because they were very critical to their to their cultures. And so here's a picture from California of a tribal member with a basket of oaks. Here's some folks from the Seneca Huron clan actually knocking down chestnuts. Butternut trees, all of these these these mass species were still critical to this day for indigenous cultures. And so oftentimes when we look at kind of where there were native American settlements in North America, we often find that that species got there a lot faster because there was trade. There was actually value in encouraging those species in those areas. So blue jays are important, but not quite as important as as the people that were moving them around. Yeah. So that was a warmer, warmer area there. Yep. And also you were starting to pick up settlements in that region. Yep. So definitely kind of tracking that that that temperature. So just to kind of not to totally throw too much of a web bank, blanket on the blue jay, I just want to show a little bit more about how we know that there's a pretty strong human connection to migration beyond just the natural. So the map on the left is some work that was kind of that shows in 1500 to 1700 known locations of indigenous settlements, as well as the gray areas are just where we also know there was indigenous populations in the northeastern US. And what they what they did was evaluate relative to where those locations were the abundance of different species. And would they expect to see those species there just by climate alone? So in the graph on the right is just showing the distance from an actual settlement and the abundance of different species. The upper graph being what we call pyrophilic. So species dependent on fire. So those of us think already know that indigenous burning was a very important cultural practice. But the next line down deals with species that are actually mass producing so actually produced large nuts. And in particular, the abundance of oak is far more abundant when you're close to a settlement than as you move away. And so those species are actually being preferentially favored. And in many cases, actually moved into those areas given their importance. And so it's worth just pointing that out. As we talk about moving species today, oftentimes there's this notion well, how could you think it's a good idea to move species? We've been doing that for a long time. Obviously, the intent was very different 3,000 years ago, but nonetheless, there's been a lot of human movement of plants for a long time in North America. So what I want to do is provide just some context for tree migration today. And so if we're going to see climate change occurring, first off, are we actually observing those changes? And then if we're not seeing those changes happening naturally with climate, what might we do about that? But as you all appreciate, when we think about Vermont's current forests, it's often worth reflecting on the fact that they're already recovering some pretty dramatic changes that have happened really over the last couple of centuries. So this map shows and many of you may have seen this map before. It's percent forest cover on the on the Y axis here. Then with time, I'm not a huge fan of this because it actually shows there wasn't much of a population of people. It wasn't much of a population of European settlers in 1600. But again, there were large populations, you know, well over 20,000 indigenous people even from Vermont during that time period in different locations. But what we can see pretty clearly all six New England states almost 90 percent forested in 1600 by the mid 1800s. Amazingly, some in some cases, you know, less than 30 percent forest. It's a pretty, pretty dramatic transformation. What I think is also should be celebrated as just how resilient that forest has been so recovering to really what we kind of now view as a bit of a high water mark of around 77 percent forested in Vermont. But I'll also point out that we're now seeing these lines go down again for the first time in a century. So Vermont is losing forest land, which is which is not something to be celebrated at all. We are losing forest to conversion to other uses. It's not forest harvesting. It's actually forest conversion to something else. And so it's certainly something the state needs to and others need to grapple with, you know, do we do we think about the best way to for smart growth to minimize that? We're not going to talk about that too much more today. But the reason I'm bringing this up is that our forests are relatively quite young and certainly been altered quite a bit. So what we can do is look at the time period that Europeans were first really moving into the region and carving things up into towns and carving things up into states as a way to get a better understanding of what that forest, all that migration, all that movement of trees, what did that look like in the in the early to mid 1700s? And so some of you are already familiar with this work, but Charlie Cogville, who lives in Plainfield, Vermont, but is an amazing historical ecologist who's done a lot of work really deciphering what the forests of Vermont look like at the time that European settlement was really advancing. So the map on the left shows all of the historic towns that were being laid out by the royal surveyors in the 1700s. And so you'll notice states like Vermont, New York kind of have a fairly regular pattern, but other states, depending on how they were laying things out, some of the towns take on pretty large, large shapes. I think that's Plymouth, one of the largest towns in Massachusetts. You'll also notice Northern Maine has a very regular grid pattern. And so the history of surveying land in the U.S. It wasn't until the General Land Office was actually established in the early 1800s that we had a unified way of surveying land, the public land survey approach with townships and ranges. Those of you that may have hail from the Midwest or ever go out there and look at maps, a very different way of laying things out. So it's much more systematic. And so the point being is that these towns are being laid out. And when they laid the towns out, the surveyors would actually record what species they were seeing at each corner that they were laying the towns out. So it's really a nice historic source of what tree species look like. So I'm going to zoom in on north-central Vermont and just let's look at what tree species were most abundant in north-central Vermont at the time of major European settlement across the region. And so this maroon color is the one you're seeing a lot of. And that's American Beach, really, really the most abundant species in that pre-colonial forest. You'll also notice really nicely that the Northeast Kingdom is seeing a lot more dark green. So that spruce and firs are really reflecting kind of the importance of those species across that landscape and in a very different looking forest than what we have today. And I'll show a slide of that in a second. Any thoughts on why beach would be the most abundant species? Any thinking on that? Why that one like the surveyors would record that one most often? Absolutely. So a very important species for especially black bear but other species in very common. So certainly one that's a big part of our forest naturally. It's one of the species we associate with old growth or late successional forest. So these would have been areas. And the last piece is just I know nobody in this room has ever carved their initials into a beach. But if you were to scribe on a corner post as a surveyor, it's a really good treat of kind of mark, right? Because you could basically say this is plot corner five with a knife and that's that last on the trees is a little bit of a bias to beach because it's a good tree to kind of put your mark on when you're serving. But nevertheless, if we. So it's a really important. So beach, beach nuts are extremely important part of the bear black bears diet and actually not to get too into the weeds on it, but the female black bears, they don't have enough fat content when they go into hibernation, the embryo one implants in terms of food for to have clubs. And so being fat on beach nuts is a huge important part of what bears do. And so we really rely on beach a lot as a source of food for bears naturally out in the woods. So I'm going to look at our current forest. So this is the same same map. And now we're using current measurements of trees. And I'm going to zoom in on the modern forest. And for those that can differentiate reds, we'll see pretty clearly that that maple is now the most abundant tree species in Vermont. It's great for our fall foliage. It's great for our syrup industry. But really, it reflects that the forest has been shifted a bit, you know, away from that strong beach dominance, particularly beach is a large tree. And so now we have an ecosystem that that's been changed. And so the reason I'm showing this is that when we think about this forest now responding to climate change and all these other changes, it's already kind of been homogenized and altered a bit from our intensive land use. And so now we want to observe, you know, is it actually how is it going to respond and are we going to see some shifts in that ecosystem over time? So I'm going to go through a couple of studies that have occurred that have just looked at our tree species actually moving now. But we know that Vermont is having milder winters. We're getting drier. I know it's weird season to say that this is an anomaly compared to what we've been having the past several years. Dryer, warmer. Are we seeing actual tree species migration in response to that? So this is some work that was done at a Purdue University looking at 86 tree species in the eastern United States and evaluating over the last three decades, have we seen seedlings from those trees actually moving further than their parents are? So are we now finding those trees in new places that they weren't, you know, prior to this measurement? And so what these arrows indicate are just the movement of some tree species. You can see that a lot of those arrows are going west. And so what they found is about 73% of the tree species they evaluated have shown kind of a westward migration over the last three decades. And so if we think about kind of the western edge of the eastern forest, it becomes very oak dominated. We also have a lot of areas that are agricultural. And so trees are kind of colonizing a lot of those areas. And it's drier. And so those species like oak are now kind of moving and tracking that changing climate. There's also been some movement northward. It's kind of what we expect. 63% of the tree species actually kind of have been shifting northwards. We're seeing some movement of trees. But the question is, are those trees moving fast enough? Are they actually going as fast as climate is changing? So to put this in perspective, following the glacier, they estimate that most tree species traveled about a tenth to three tenths of a mile per year. It's kind of how fast they could move. And so if we look at current climate change, trees would have to go as fast as four to six miles per year to actually track that, right? So trees can't move as fast as climate's changing. This is a map just showing the velocity of climate change. So in some places, a tree would have to move over 100 miles per year to actually go as fast as climate is changing in that area. And so there's a lot of concern about over time, if trees can't move to where the climate becomes suitable for them, at the same time, the places where climate's changing, those trees currently there are declining. Are we going to have some unintended consequences in terms of what's happening with ecosystems? And so this is oftentimes the impetus for thinking about moving. But before I end on that negative note and get into more action, I want to have a positive story of tree species migration in Vermont that I think is why this is not as simple as just looking at climate. There's a lot going on there. So there are some shifts that can happen not just with latitude and longitude, but also we think about a state like Vermont. There can be things that might actually happen with elevation. We might see changes with elevation as climate changes. And so one of the areas that people have been interested in is that, as we all know, we have this really neat transition zone in our forest between hardwood dominated, typically northern hardwood forests at lower elevations, to more spruce and fir-dominated forests at higher elevations. And in between those, we have what we call an ecotone, which is essentially just the transition zone between those two ecosystems. And so with climate change, 99 out of 100 scientists and others would say, the expectation is that these spruce and fir, it's going to be harder and harder to be at lower elevations because they get warmer and warmer. And so that line is going to start receding. At the same time, this maple is going to be going up slope, kind of moving into more favorable environments. So we were interested in looking at this and what's been happening over the last several decades in terms of where is the location of this boundary? Are we seeing it go down slope, or are we seeing this boundary go up slope? And again, most would predict that would go down slope. Sorry, up slope. And so what we did is evaluate all the areas in blue within the Green Mountain National Forest and all the areas in blue within the White Mountains and evaluate over the last three decades, what has been the direction of movement? Are trees going down slope or are trees going up slope? And so this is a graph just showing the distribution of kind of the average location of that lower edge. And what we generally found is that actually spruce are going down slope. They're actually going the exact opposite of everything you would predict. Things are actually moving down slope. It's not a tremendous rate. It's about four to five feet per year, but the general trend is things are moving down slope. So whenever that occurs, you have many reasons you throw out the wall to think it through, but this one actually is pretty clear just knowing that the land use history of Vermont and more broadly the land use history of the Northeast. And in particular, anyone that's really followed the history of logging in the Northeast knows that there was a time period where spruce was heavily persecuted from our forests. And in particular, before we had railroads to move wood, water was the way to move wood. And so if it floated, it was a much more valuable species. So our wonderful sugar maple veneer that's gonna sink to the bottom of a stream, right? So it really was that spruce that was quite important. I'm from Massachusetts. I never fully knew why Holyoke was called Paper City. There's not any spruce around Holyoke, but the Connecticut River flows right into it. Now as a source of spruce logs, Mount Tom, there's a big mill down there for spruce. All that was coming out of Vermont, New Hampshire, being floated down these mills. And this is a picture of the last big log drive near Bella's Falls, Vermont. You could walk across the Connecticut on logs. This is all spruce. And so what was happening if I go back a couple of slides is when we look at the mountains and oftentimes we'll see this pretty linear line between the hardwoods and the spruce. And so they were basically going up slope, cutting all that spruce out of the hardwood and kind of artificially pushing that elevation upwards, just via land use. And so what's been happening over the last several decades, if not centuries, that spruce is starting to recover. Both those small spruce they left behind now are big enough to cast seed. Anybody that kind of hikes up in the mountains or remembers times going up a chair lift, you often see spruce just down slope from a mature tree that basically is the seedlings coming off of that individual. So we're seeing this recovery both due to just the maturation of the seed source but also because of the Clean Air Act, spruce was very sensitive to acid deposition. And so we're seeing a lot of recovery of that species due to just better air quality. At the same time, we're seeing additional stress on some of the hardwood species it's with. So a lot going on there, but generally a positive story of migration, kind of going the opposite of what we think with climate change. So I'm gonna get to now talking about if we can't solely rely on trees sprinting as fast as climate change, do we actually think about moving trees and planting for change in the future? And so what often catches a lot of people's attention in terms of what are you doing out in the woods and why you're planting that and where is that coming from? A lot of that is planting for change and thinking about can we anticipate that? So again, just for context, this is a map of average drought tolerance of trees in the US with red being low tolerance of drought. So our current forests are very mesic, very well adapted to wet conditions. So as we see more and more dry periods, there's some concern about the future of our forests. Likewise, this map in the middle, essentially view this as if you could see like future new perennials in your zone. There's a lot of work that's looked at kind of the potential for new tree species in the Northeast if they could just run there as fast as they could. And you'll notice that estimates suggest up to 20 new tree species could find habitat in this region over the next hundred years just based on climate change projections. And then finally, just to remind you, we're talking about climate a lot, but a lot of my work deals not just with climate change, but also just this tremendous density of non-native insects and diseases in our region. Again, I already took my hat to growing up in Massachusetts. I have a youth of squashing spongy moths in the early 80s outbreaks. Now we talk about in Vermont because it's been an issue in Chittenden County, but that's just one of many non-native insects and diseases we're dealing with. And sadly, we gain usually one new, even non-native wood borer for every five years. There's just something new coming every, even beach leaf disease is a new one we're talking about. So a lot going on there. So I work in forestry and forest conservation. So when we're talking about forest management, one of our main areas of emphasis is that if I'm gonna do a harvest like was done in the foreground here in the White Mountain National Forest, I'm really trying to make sure I'm getting good regeneration back, new seedlings. And so in our part of the country, we really rely heavily on just natural seedlings coming back. It's really fortunate. We don't talk much about planting at all. We're the last big planting efforts with the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 30s. Really, we don't think about planting. And just to put that in context, so Maine obviously is our biggest player in the region in terms of forest management activities. 5,000 acres of forest in Maine in 2019 were planted. That's 4% of all of their regeneration activity. Really, they're relying likewise on spruce and fir. That's 4%, actually, is JD Irving up in Northern Maine. They do a lot of plantations up there, but not much else. But what we've been seeing both in terms of philanthropy, so there's the Trillion Tree Project, the Nature Conservancy, others, they want to plant forest. In general, we're seeing just a lot of interest in Vermont and more broadly in the Northeast of people wanting to plant more. So this is a survey of a small number of foresters, 42, and over 90% are saying we're gonna plant more over the next several years. We are anticipating planting. So why is it they think they're gonna be planting? So we asked them, and kind of the main core reasons are to diversify the current forest. So just a good precautionary principle, things are changing, having more diverse forests is a good thing. But two of the other main reasons are to adapt a future climate and to adapt a future disturbance. So trying to think about providing potential species out there that might be able to do better under these changing conditions that are affecting our ecosystems. So what I'm gonna talk about and give you a little bit of a background on is just this whole notion of what we call assisted migration. So basically the active movement of a tree species into an area in response to anticipating change that might impact either the current ecosystem or in some cases trying to move a species into an area where it might find more suitable habitat. So there's three kind of flavors of assisted migration we talk about in forest adaptation. So forest adaptation being kind of active management trying to adapt the ecosystem and kind of our expectations of those systems. And so one of these is what we call assisted population expansion. And so this one I'd view as kind of the least controversial or doing is largely moving a species a very short distance within its current range. So we're not kind of going north of where it currently is kind of moving it within its current distribution. The next one assisted range expansion as the name implies we're actually moving that species beyond its current range and essentially moving it to where you would expect it to be if it could just sprint as fast as climate was changing. So we know this spot right here is now gonna be suitable for that species but there's no way it can get there based on just a natural movement across that landscape. And the final piece is a very controversial one one we don't do very much of in forestry but assisted species migration. We did a lot of this historically Scots Pine, Norway Spruce, all of the Norway Maple bringing species from other countries and planting them here or moving things long distances. So this really involves kind of large distance movement from outside of a species current range to a new region. And basically this is often talked about mostly with kind of rescuing species that might be imperiled in their current range and moving in the new regions and definitely can be quite controversial. So you just don't know how well it's gonna do in a very novel environment. So I'm gonna show a diagram just to kind of reinforce what I'm talking about here. And so again, on the left hand side this is assisted population expansion. So the green is the current range of this tree species. And so what we're doing is just kind of moving that species within its current range. And in many cases often increasing the representation of that species in areas where it might be a minor component. So red oak is a great example for the Northeast. You know, we don't think of red oak being a big part of Vermont's forest but it's out there, you know, in small amounts but based on future climate change most suspect it's gonna really have a lot of suitable habitat. So we might actually plant that or augment the population. Here's assisted range expansion. So just north of that current species range planting that species. And then again, assisted species migration. We're really moving that species quite a long distance across the landscape. So we've been doing a lot of research in Vermont, in New York, in New Hampshire as well as we also have a lot of work going on in Minnesota and Wisconsin. Looking at what is this actually kind of play out on a landscape in terms of both how do managers think about integrating this into what they normally do. And importantly, how do you actually pull this off and is it successful? Do you actually see species doing better or not depending on where they're from and where we move them to? And so I think a key thing to remember is that when we're choosing a species to actually move into an area there's some key considerations. If our goal with adaptation we're trying to basically respond to changing climate, changing disturbance regimes. And the reason we're responding is that we are concerned that the many values we get from the forest today are gonna be impacted by climate or other stressors. And so we wanna find ways to still sustain those functions even in a changing environment. And so we just talked about the value of American beach to black bear. And so if American beach really does suffer from this new disease, beach leaf disease which does not seem like a very good thing that's starting to move into the Northeast and we're threatened with a loss of beach. One adaptation strategy might be to plant species like oak that also produce a large nut that would serve as a very important food source for black bear. So kind of similar ecological functions. Likewise, similar cultural values. So there's no substitute culturally for a species but there might be some aspects of a different species that could still be used for cultural traditions. So black ash with basket making. If you lose black ash there are other species that you can still derive materials from to make traditional baskets or other uses. So white oak being an example for that. And importantly, if you're gonna plant the species it's important to consider is it actually gonna be adapted to the future? Are we planting something that we already have a sense for is gonna be stressed by climate change? So how do we make this decision? We're really lucky to have sustained investment in federal research around a tool known as the climate change tree atlas. If you Google it after the talk or even now if you're tired of listening to me and wanna look at that instead. The climate change tree atlas is a really great tool that the US Forest Service has been producing over the last decade. And one of the things that the climate change tree atlas does again just to put this into more kind of like gardening speak it's similar to generating kind of new zone maps for species. Where might we find that species? Is this spot now a zone four, zone three? I guess speaking the other way, zone six. And so it's a way to see like where that species might find suitable habitat. But what it also does is generate some projections of where might that species migrate to on its own under climate change? And where might that species actually have suitable habitat in the future? But it's probably not gonna get there on its own. And that's kind of the spot that we look at. And so this map on the left is for white oak. And so anywhere on this map that's magenta white oak already is there, right? So we don't need to really think about kind of movement of that species to those sites. And then anywhere in this map that's dark blue they expect will have suitable habitat for oak in the future under climate change. And it's highly likely that oak will get there on its own. And it's like a no duh, right? It's already here in pink. It's gonna get to the dark blue. But if you look at a spot like north central Vermont this lighter blue suggests that the climate's gonna be suitable for white oak over the next 50 years there. But there's no way it's gonna be able to get there fast enough to actually establish. And so those are the spots that we might look at and say, hey, you know, that could be a place where we consider possibly planting some white oak to see if that can be kind of a part of that future for us. So we've been looking at kind of how managers that do for a stewardship in the region have been kind of integrating this idea of assisted migration into their management. And this graph is just kind of summarizing kind of main reasons. So anything with blue or gray, sorry, group, anything in blue suggests that they're interested or they're already doing it. And so the most common type of planting with assisted migration currently happening is to restore what we call keystone species. So American chestnut, American elm, species that were historically quite important, even red spruce to try to bring them back to the landscape and restore them out in the ecosystem. This idea of a replacement species, the next most common thing. So what they're talking about there is they know a species might be lost due to an insect or disease. And can we actually plant another species that might serve similar functions in that ecosystem to keep that forest functioning in a similar way? As you'll notice, they start getting into assisted population expansion, assisted range expansion. Those tend to be the last kind of most common things, but very few foresters are talking about doing like this really long distance transfer. It's much more around these ecological values. And so what I'm gonna do to kind of to transition toward the end here is just show what we've been doing, kind of the species we often are planting in the work that we do. And so much of the research we do is in primarily Northern hardwood ecosystems. Again, in places like Corinth, Vermont, Northern Coloss County, New Hampshire, Wilkwood, Vermont, other places. And what we're doing there is both evaluating how these species perform over time, but also what are those species doing in terms of trying to sustain those values on that site? And so we've been looking at other species besides this list, but I'm just gonna talk about this group because they're the primary ones we've worked with. So big tooth aspen, black cherry, eastern hemlock, red oak, red spruce, white pine, butternut, hickory, black birch, or sweet birch, and then American chestnut. And so most of what we do is this flavor, this assisted population enrichment, really trying to represent the representation of a species that will likely gain more suitable habitat and that region in the future, although we're not moving it outside of its range. But there are three species that we work with, butternut, hickory, black birch, and American chestnut, we're actually moving those species just to the north of where they currently are, kind of anticipating that change. So what have we been seeing over the last seven years of doing this work in terms of outcomes? If you don't wanna look at the graphs, just look at this summary here, but this graph is showing survival, so how well are those species surviving versus growth? And there's often a trade-off there for trees. And so it's ordered from big tooth aspen to red oak. And so big tooth aspen is definitely our fastest grower. Those who didn't know aspens is pretty amazing what they can do, but aspens also had our lowest survival rate. On the flip side, red oak, kind of slow and steady as a species, but its survivorship has actually been quite high. And so if we look at kind of the collective combination of those two, white pine, red spruce, big tooth aspen, those tend to be the species doing best, red oak, eastern hemlock as well as part of that group. And all these are shaded green because these are all species that we're not really moving that far. They're kind of just being kind of enriched in an area. So pointing to that risk of possibly moving some of these other species across the landscape. One of the challenges for eat planting in general is that certain species we don't have great local seed sources for. And so American chestnut, the trees that we're planting are part of the American Chestnut Foundation's breeding program. So they're trying to breed resistance to chestnut blight. And so these trees actually are 92% American chestnut, 8% Chinese chestnut. So that Chinese chestnut component is trying to give it resistance to that disease that wiped it out. And the parent trees are from Virginia because we just don't have any big mature seed bearing chestnut up in Northern New England, right? We basically lost so many of those. We don't have an opportunity to work with seed from those. And so what we find is that when we plant those in places like Northern Coas County, one of the biggest issues is that we get a lot of this winter injury, right? They're surviving, but they're just not cold hearty on the site. So part of our challenge is just trying to find the right ceilings that it might be more close to the climate we're trying to plant into. So these final graphs are just showing kind of what we're seeing so far in terms of survival and growth and in terms of species that are being just enriched within their range versus species that are actually moving northward. And they'll see generally survival is higher with population enrichment as well as growth is higher between those two populations. And what this really speaks to is that a lot of the changes that we're anticipating in a lot of the shifts in species ranges that are expected to occur really are projected for like 50 years from now, right? So we're planting today for a change that might not fully manifest itself in the future. And I hope it's a hard cold winter. I like when it still feels like Vermont, but if I'm planting a tree that's actually gonna be better adapted to Vermont's winters in 50 years right now, it might not do well in our environment. So there are different things that certainly create issues. Nonetheless, a lot of how we look at this and if anybody in the room ever did dabble in forestry, this would be viewed largely as a failure. Survival rates of that low, normally when we're doing free forestation, we're talking about 85, 90% is kind of what we're looking for. But with this type of planting, really what we're looking for is that even if 10% of the Bitter Nut Hickory we planted today survives to 50 years from now, what that now represents in that region is a seed source for a species that's gonna be far better adapted to that spot than the current forest. And so we're really, really thinking more about kind of enhancing that potential for adaptation in the future as opposed to just trying to reforest with these new mixtures of species. So the last thing I'll mention to end is that planting trees is not as simple as all the, kind of again, trillion tree, billion tree initiatives, all the things we hear about, we can plant our way out of climate change. There are some pretty significant logistical hurdles that we learned out the hard way because I think we're the only people that are really trying to plant a lot of trees right now in the scales we do for our research. And that is, we don't have much for nurseries. Anybody know what the state nursery of Vermont used to be? Used to be a nursery that grew seedlings, you could buy seedlings. Anybody know what town that's in? Essex, awesome. Yeah, so the Essex where the soccer, there's a soccer field plus the Vermont Forest Parks and Recreation State of Maine closed their nursery in 1988, Massachusetts, HO Cook State Forest, that was their nursery. The only New England state that still has a nursery is New Hampshire and thank goodness we still have that nursery, we buy a lot of seedlings from them, but generally we do not have a lot of places you can buy trees from. This is not just a Vermont or New England thing, it's a nationwide thing, that we just do not have enough seedlings to go on the landscape. And so what we've been doing is trying to understand, what is actually out there for us to plant? And so this map here, the first thing I wanna point out are all these little delineations, those are different seed zones, right? Again, think of that as kind of if I wanted to plant for a certain hardiness zone, same idea. And this is for red oak. And so anything that has any shade of green in it, you can actually buy seedlings from that zone. So if I really wanted to be intelligent with my assisted migration, which obviously I haven't been, and I was gonna plant in Corinth, Vermont, the most logical source for red oak would actually be from this seed zone, right? The just south of it. I still want red oak, I want oak that is maybe a little bit more warm adapted, but it's not a huge move for that species. But really the only source I can get oak seed from that's close by is from this county as well as in this part of New Hampshire. And so we really are currently underserved in terms of the ability to actually pull this off in an intelligent way. And so again, I recognize it's only my Google news feed that gets these updates, but six months ago, the president actually, there was a significant amount of money invested in nurseries in the US. This is a huge problem. And so the state of New Hampshire's nursery got about a quarter million dollars, which largely was enough to kind of update what they had from 20 years ago in terms of their capacity. And so if we really want to pull this off, we're gonna need a lot more investment in both nurseries but nurseries that are producing species that represent diverse ecological functions. I think we can all guess what the CCC had at their disposal in the 30s, red pine, nori spruce. We see it all the time now in our landscape. And that probably wasn't the best ecological decision to plant then. And so trying to build this capacity as a key piece. So to wrap up, I think we all appreciate, unfortunately, whether it's geopolitically or ecologically, we were definitely in a time of quite tremendous change and uncertainty. And I think one thing that just as someone that works in the woods and just admires their power and beauty is that the history of our forest from glaciation to today is a story of resilience. I mean, it's just amazing how forested Vermont is despite all of our best efforts in the 1800s to kind of eliminate that forest cover. I mean, including having hooded animals pounding on the soil throughout the landscape. And so there's a lot of, I think that we can learn that we don't necessarily need to be mass engineering the future. But at the same time, we're seeing these rates of change, these novel dynamics like emerald ash borer that just don't have an analog and our forests are just not adapted to respond to those changes that are motivating many of us to actually do things and try to find ways to address that change. And so a lot of this talk was about moving things around planting trees, but I'm also have a lot of hope. This is a gap that was planted in Northern New Hampshire. So you can see American chestnut, white pine, black birch, all these were planted, but you notice that we're still leaving sugar maple. We're still working with that current forest as well in trying to hopefully harness some of that resilience as part of our solutions going forward. So I'll end with that somewhat hopeful, hopeful comment and acknowledge a lot of people that have certainly funded this work over the years and this nice view on the Green Mountain National Forest. How much, I know it changes. Are you seeing adaptation, are any of the trees adapted to the change in climate that you can see yet? Yeah, so the question was, so one response to the change in climate is the trees are moving, but there's also when the trees are present in experiencing that environment, they also can adapt in place. And so there's certainly some work that's shown. That's partly why you don't wanna totally harvest all the trees in the forest because as those trees age, they can actually have genetic mutations and other things that occur that can provide adaptive response. And so we haven't been looking directly at the genetics of some of the trees that are going out there, but we're now looking at basically when they're exposed to stresses, is there kind of a change in their genetic makeup? And there's a lot of work that suggests that trees exposed to drought early on, trees exposed to some sort of insects and diseases might actually, that might be kind of a priming function that gets them to kind of alter some of their genetics to be more adapted to that. So we're not seeing a ton of that in the region. I'm trying to think through, I mean with some insects and diseases, certain like morphological forms. So we don't worry much about white pine blister rust, which was another non-native pathogen introduced ironically, it was talking about planting. When we didn't have much for nurseries in the US, we actually would grow our seedlings in Europe and then bring them back here. And so they think white pine blister rust got to us from Germany on white pine seedlings from the US that they've grown there. And so with that one, where you get to the western part of its range where it's really lethal, some of the white pine has a much more waxy covering on its needles. It seems like those are less prone to being infested. And so over time, you start seeing more abundance of that genotype in the environment. So I can't think of any good examples for adaptation that we're observing in Vermont, but at the same time, we know it occurs. And so we want that inherent resilience piece, we want to make sure that we're factoring that in and I think it's the key to all of this humility. But I think there's some people that think we're just going to redesign and replant the force of the future, but I think you want to also honor what's out there and some of those abilities to adapt in place. So it's a great, great point and really not something we've looked at directly, but has been observed in a lot of other spots. Yep, great, great observation. Yeah. The people that do it with this act like it's big, it's so again, having been around forestry and reforestation, what we do, usually we're talking like the biggest planting we've done is 11,000 trees in the Mulhegan Basin. Most of that, those familiar with that landscape's history, it was before the US Fish and Wildlife Service acquired that land, it was owned by Champion Paper. And so very much, you know, intensively managed really large reduction in species diversity. And so a lot of that planting was to restore red spruce, wipe wine to that landscape. And so that that scale sounds large to some, but those that have been around reforestation like out in other parts of the country where they plant trees, a veteran tree planter could do that in six days on their own, but us, via college students and professors and others, you know, it's many weeks of plant, so we're slow, but so most of these experiments that we're doing are pretty, pretty small, you know, three to 6,000 trees. And part of that is not, these are still big experiments, but as I mentioned earlier, it's often, most of the forests we're looking at other ways, we're manipulating maybe to create open areas and thinned areas and kind of diversity of structures that might respond differently to climate change. And then in one location, we're also planting, but we're not doing it everywhere. And so we view it as kind of part of the broader toolbox of adaptation and one that again, you can be proven wrong pretty quickly, and so doing it over large scales and kind of clearing forests to do that is just not something we're advising. But there's again, another thing to look at called a reforestation hub that the Nature Conservancy developed that really looks at parts of the country where there's the potential to add forests for carbon climate mitigation. And so the scales are talking about, you know, tens of thousands of acres of planting to establish new forests as a way to try to kind of offset that. So that's some pretty big scale planting being talked about. But in Vermont, given we don't do much for kind of large scale management to begin with, oftentimes they're kind of finer scale operations. They still seem big logistically for all of us, for those of us that haven't spent much time around like the Southeast or other parts of the country where they plant, you know, millions of trees each year. But here, it seems like a lot, yeah. You mentioned you looked at reforestation in northern Maine, and there was a fair amount. Is that still monoculture for logging? Yeah, so JD Irving Corporation, so Irving Gas, same company based out of New Brunswick. So JD Irving has quite a bit of land up there. Historically, they were favoring red spruce, but now they've really shifted to white spruce. They do a lot of tree breeding for preferable traits, both in terms of like rapid growth rate, as well as to some degree, less vulnerability to spruce budworm, the other plantations, single species. And so that's not what we're talking about here. We're trying to think about diversity, kind of a mix of species across the landscape. And in many cases, those single species situations where we're trying to move away from, right? That's a very vulnerable condition. And partly, even one of our challenges as a state, if something ever came into Vermont that was gonna wipe out maple, like we're in trouble, because it's so much, I love the maple we have, but we have so much over so many areas that trying to diversify, that's not a bad thing when we think about insects and diseases or climate change impacts. Elizabeth, you have a hand over here. I wanted to ask about what happened to the butternut tree because as a child, I used to pick butternuts with my grandfather to add to the maple candy. I also wanted to ask about where is the nursery in New Hampshire? Yeah, so the first is the butternut tree, so that there's butternut canker, another introduced disease, and so butternut as that placard from New Jersey was showing, as you mentioned, really the relative to walnuts, kind of like the yin and yang, a walnut quite bitter and also from a walnut, if you've ever tried to grow grass beneath it, it has a natural chemicals that releases that kill of vegetation. Butternut, very, very rich forest species. We see it occasionally lingering in places where there's really good soils, but it's just one or two butternuts, but those are wiped out by an introduced canker, so there's very, very few butternut left in the state. And again, culturally, it was such an important species, just as a source of food for wildlife, source of food for people. And so it's one of many examples. In the Northeast, our history of trade and the fact that we have like the port of New York, even, there's just so much coming in and out every day, and it all takes us one pallet that's got an insect in it or one shipment of plants that's got a disease in it, so global trade has really contributed to just more and more insects and diseases coming into the country. And so butternut canker is an earlier example of one chestnut blight. Many of those that came early on when people were shipping plants around and not really inspecting them or thinking about it. In terms of the New Hampshire state nurse reads down in the Concord region, so kind of central part of the state. And they're awesome to work with. They've just, I feel like we have like a, they're friends because we talk every year, we need seedlings for this project. And what we find is just, there's certain things that you don't think of as being limiting, but there's only so many people that are cone collectors anymore that collect cones, only so many people that go out and collect acorns. And so even the ability to grow seedlings, the first step is having enough seed. So there's some concern over even losing that, but they have been growing their capacity and they're just seeing a lot more people wanting to plant. COVID was part of it because people just wanted to do something. But beyond that, now people are just getting more and more interested. And there's a lot of stories in the news, state of Maryland, state of Virginia is asking, send us your acorns or look, there's just a lot of interest in growing seedlings, but the first step is getting seed and getting seed from the right spots. But they're great to work with. They used to get their catalog right around Thanksgiving. Now it's online, just started last year. So right around November, if you want to order some exports from New Hampshire, that's an option. Yeah. So us that are on the land use plan, I'm wondering about the communication about all of these initiatives to the foresters who then talked to us, the property owners, and can we include it in our land use plan? Yeah, so a couple of things. One, NRCS, so the Natural Resource Conservation Service, which provides a lot of cost share assistance to landowners, they are now including planting, it used to be very much focused on riparian areas, but now it's also including upland plantings, that there's a lot of money flowing through, I think it's through the Inflation Reduction Act, going to private landowners to do climate smart forest management, and that includes things like planting for adaptation. So if you're working with a consulting forester and they're not aware of those programs, it might be worth bringing them up, but many and actually Red Start Forestry, it's a great group of foresters out of Corinth, they are now actually have established their own nursery because they're recognizing there's not enough seedlings for these projects, and so they're starting to grow their own nursery, their own seedlings for projects. So there are definitely some consultants that are well aware of it, and we do a lot of outreach and training around just strategies for dealing with change, and there's often a lot of interest in just thinking about if we're gonna plant, where do we get the trees, and how do we do that? But I would definitely endorse that. I mean, they're UVM forestry alum, so that's a good thing, but they're also very thoughtful and proactive on these changes, and including they just receive some grants to kind of create their own nursery in Corinth to be growing seedlings for some projects with landowners. And who is that? Red Start Forestry, Red Start, yeah, Ben Machen, M-A-C-H-I-N, is one of the foresters that runs a company. Yeah. How has past legislation affected all those future legislations that you recognize? Yeah, and I think one of the biggest ones is the nursery piece, and the challenge again, actually to Red Start's credit, starting your own nursery is a risky proposition, and basically you're planting something that you're assuming there's gonna be demand for, and what that's created over time is often most nurseries will grow what they know people will buy, so red oak, white pine, but a lot of what we talk about sometimes, like a good example would be like wetlands that are threatened by emerald ash borer. There's a lot of interest in using silver maple or swamp white oak. Those species aren't commonly produced at a nursery because it just hasn't historically been a lot of demand there, and so providing some of that cost share assistance or even they can't kick out the soccer fields or the offices in Essex, but if the state's serious about a lot of the work they're trying to do both with riparian reforestation but also more broadly, I think there's a need for more investment in that just in terms of nursery capacity. I see the state of Vermont writ large that we're the first state to have a climate forester, so as a state we're pretty darn progressive in terms of thinking about adaptation, and actually we're the first state to have a formal policy in assisted migration, so they do have a lot of thinking going in around this. The challenge is that that policy is pretty strict in terms of where you get seeds from and seedlings from, and so I don't think it fully recognized that it's not as easy, you can't just go to Walmart and pull off the shelf, I want the Southern Seed Zone for Red Oak or the Windsor County Red Oaks, so I think there's some logistical hurdles, and then also just I'm hoping this climate conservation service they're talking about, part of it will be just getting, labor is a huge shortage too, it's getting people out there to do this work, so I think just policies like that can be important, but the biggest one is trying to keep forest forest, and say if I had one chip to play in a state house, it'd be that we were losing forest land as a state, we're losing large forest blocks because we're still allowing houses to be thrown in the middle of like 500 acre chunks of woods, and so forest fragmentation and forest loss, I mean, I'm talking a lot about trying, and this is a good example, Green Mountain National Forest, we're super lucky, that's a concern, there's no risk of there being a house put here, and so we can think about how to manage creatively, but once this is a house or a solar array, we've kind of lost that incredible natural climate solution, that incredible fabric, and I think there's not enough attention being paid right now, because there's been a bill in the legislature for a long time now on trying to modify building and zoning to minimize fragmentation, and it hasn't gotten, the governor's been videoing that, so I think that to me would be the one chip I'd play, independent of seedlings and nurseries, it's just like keep forest forest, I mean, that's so important to all of us, and globally it's so important, I mean, we are an important part of the carbon budget, so keeping it wood, it's critical, yeah. In the 1600s, 1800s, we had a lot of beach, all of the beach bark disease, what is the most widely-successful part? Yeah, so just to repeat the question, so she's got an area that's got a lot of beach bark disease, and I think most of us are familiar with beach bark disease, I don't want to get you dizzy going backwards here, but I can give you a picture of a really challenging spot. Yeah, I'm bringing back all these bad memories, all right, there we go. So this is, you're not gonna see it now, this is an area that they, nope, it's really bad. So this is an area, you can't see it very well, but this is all beach suckers, and then there's like declining beach in the over story, so beach bark disease, another non-native scale insect, so the disease part is a native canker, nectria, but the scale that causes the wound in the beach tree that then allows it to have the disease is actually was introduced, and unlike most introductions that happened to the south of us, this one actually happened in Nova Scotia in the late 1800s, and then moved its way, so if you grew up in Maine or went to Maine and said, what is that tree that looks crazy, that's like shotgun marks in it, it's probably most severe there because it's been there longest, and if you've spent time in southern New England, like I grew up in Massachusetts, like I mentioned, I just remember these big beach that were smooth, looked like elephant legs, so beach bark disease hadn't quite gotten there yet. So in Vermont it got here in the 50s and 60s, and what it largely does, again, recognize many of you are aware of this and what she's describing, is it stresses the over story beach, it causes them to root sprout, so set up sprouts from the root system, and then beach is extremely tolerant of shade, it's actually the most shade tolerant hardwood species, and so it can kind of develop these thickets of beach beneath it, and so when we think about climate change and climate change impacts on beach, usually the way I interpret projections for beach is that this is one tough species that's hard to see moving and leaving, and so a lot of these places will continue to be just sprout origin beach. The real concern I have right now, and I mentioned this a minute ago, and I don't want to make this all about gloom and doom, but there is a new, they call it a disease affecting beach called beach leaf disease, it's starting to make its way into the popular press, it's primarily been in Connecticut, Pennsylvania, it's unclear, it was unclear initially what was causing it, but I think it's actually a nematode that's affecting the beach, and it causes the leaves to look all crinkled up, this was the worst year to look for it because of that late season frost we had, every beach looked like it had beach leaf disease after that frost, but that one has me worried, and again, most foresters we get annoyed with beach because it does this, we want other species to grow back, but beach is so important, as I mentioned ecologically, if we lose beach, that's a real problem for a lot of our wildlife on the landscape, and so in those areas, oftentimes in those sites, they tend to be pretty good sites for yellow birch, other species, but you need to basically do a harvest that kind of eliminates the beach to get those back, and so if you're just looking at that area naturally changing, it's going to stay beach until something really, if beach leaf disease gets there, it might change, but this is a pretty darn resilient species, which is a curse to foresters because they want other stuff to come back in those spots, but if you're just concerned about, is it going to change other species, beach is pretty darn tough, it's going to keep re-sprouting and be there on that site for a long time. Yeah. We re-evaluate the smoke from the Canadian fires all summer, and this is a little out of your head, but it's closed. I'm curious about, we heard about all the thousands of acres that burned, and I assume they were sort of one species, but what should happen now? Yeah, so the question was about, again, it's interesting, UVM is, as many of you know, we have students from, a lot of students from out of state that come and actually increasingly a lot of students from California, and so I teach about forests and talk about forest fires, and it's been useful to kind of call on those students to have them share their experience, like how many had their fall sports seasons canceled because of air quality. So in many cases, it was a little bit interesting for all of us. I mean, it's stunk, but it's like this puts in perspective what the West deals with a lot now with these air quality issues because the wildfire, it's just even what we had was a drop in the bucket. So I'm not trying to diminish it, but just to put it in perspective, just to the impacts of climate change on people's well-being. And so those areas that are burning in Northern, some of them were in Alberta, somewhere, I mean, there's the largest fire year on record for Canada. So I mean, I can pick in any province and it was a big fire year. But if we look at Quebec, which often is we do see some smoke from Quebec wildfires, you know, oftentimes it might be a hazier view certain days during the summer. So most of those are arboreal black spruce forests. So they are pretty monospecific. Some of that is natural. So black spruce is a species that it has cones that are what we call semi-serotonous. So they actually stay somewhat shut with like a resin. And when they're burned, they open. So it's kind of a natural adaptation to a recolonizing somewhat of jack pine or lodge bull pine. So those forests are naturally built to burn. That's kind of what they do. But what we do is we create lots of areas that look just like that kind of uniform fuels. And again, kind of to go back to indigenous stewardship, there's a lot of discussion about use of fire by First Nations people historically in that boreal region and how it almost was used as a way to provide buffers and safety from those. So they often would encourage hardwood species, less flammable species around where they were. And we kind of break up that like giant monolith of flammable forest. And so those definitely were forests that naturally would burn, but the scales they burned at were both a function of climate change, just warmer, drier conditions, but also a function of what we do to the land, which is often create homogeneity over large areas that are just very prone to the big scale disturbances. So the Western US is a huge issue in general. We can't, I know it was suggested by someone that we can rake the forest, that's not, we can't rake enough to fix that. Or even like forest management, that we know we should be fitting in reducing fuels, but it's such a, the magnitude of what needs to be impacted is so great that just impossible to tackle. And so a lot of the emphasis of the government on like funding nurseries is because they know we're gonna have these big fire events, how do we go back out there and reforest? And I would implore them to reforest in ways that don't set it up for a future fire. So trying to make sure there's still mixes of species, lower densities in places, so the fire can kind of work through and not crown out. And so it's not going away. I don't think of Vermont as a, like we're very lucky that we're at most, we just, our forests aren't really built to burn. You know, the heart, you're gonna call me next year after the big Vermont fire year. I know I did, none of that said it, but, you know, we've had fires and again, even Maine in 1947, the year that Maine burned. It still wasn't, you know, there's definitely, you know, fires occur, but, you know, compared to the West, we are so lucky. And that's kind of why I brought up the keeping forest forest piece. We look at carbon, you know, and the ability even to harvest trees sustainably here, like things grow back. I mean, we were so wet, you know, again, not to belabor that point this year. Whereas out West, it's pretty scary, you know, what's going on out there. You know, there aren't some thresholds that they might not have forests in places in the future. And so we should be really, I think, really taking care of just how great this resource is here and thinking about how to manage that and conserve it in the future. Yeah. Yeah, sure. Is there any courage of leaving slash behind, encourage fires? It would if we lived somewhere else. But here it's actually, and that's always, it's great you bring this up. So the question was about current use. Again, Vermont's use value appraisal program, which is very important, obviously to reduce taxes that people are paying on forest land. And so the question is, you know, that it actually asks land owners to leave behind slash and dead wood. And that's really, you know, to me as a forest ecologist and just scientist, I love dead wood. You know, it's such a big part of the forest. And then actually, if you look at the writings of Leopold and others, when they first went over, we first went over to Europe, that he was just blown away by like, there's no wood in the forest. Everything's been kind of manicured and pulled out. And so our forest naturally have a lot of dead things in them. And we talk about a healthy forest. Oftentimes you'd say, well, this is unhealthy, all the trees are dead. But if you're a species that requires dead wood, it's actually a very healthy, yeah, it's a very healthy spot. So our forest naturally, like we have windstorms, other things that have dead wood in them. And so our forests are naturally messy. And so it's more of our psychology, like to your point, especially after logging, there's a lot of residue and slash that's left out on the site. But that slash has, you know, a lot of important functions of critically, if we look at this, this is a pitch pine here that's been killed by Southern Pine Beetle, which is kind of spread north with climate change. In this tree, most of the nutrients, kind of the highest nutrients in this tree actually are in the branch wood, the small twigs, because the bowl of the tree really is that bark and the cambium, the outer part that has most of the concentrations of nutrients, right? The inner part of the tree is dead tissue. There's not any nutrients stored there. So these parts of the tree per capita have a lot of nutrients in them. And so if we want to leave that as we can on the site, so that can go back in the soil. At the same time, there's a lot of wildlife that require a slash. And so it's a good, and also this summer, if you were logging, good luck, but if you were logging, that slash can be really important also to kind of cushion the equipment. So we're seeing a lot of loggers getting into machinery that actually delimbs the trees and kind of makes a cushion to go on. So there's a lot of good reasons to do it. But I think there's definitely like a tradition around we want the woods neat and clean, but ecologically, yeah, it's a good thing. So current use is spot on with that recommendation. And it's part of, even during a drought, which wasn't this year, those spots can be really important for retaining moisture. So good spots for seedlings, salamanders, other stuff that needs that. So I vote for dead wood, but that's my own. Maybe not at the university, but in the woods, definitely. Thank you too much there. May I remind all of you that we have another program away from today on the 251 Club in Vermont that encourages people to visit all of the towns and cities in Vermont. Love to see you back. And please leave your name tag with us as you walk out. Thank you for coming.