 So it's seven o'clock now, I think we'll get started. My name's Ken Bedney. I'm a teacher nationalist here at the North Branch Naper Center. And I'm just gonna keep things very short this week because I'm really looking forward to this talk. I know all of you are probably as well. Just a couple things to mention. This is our kid, bachelor's journey's top of the winter. We have one more coming up on March 20th and that's on the moose of Yellowstone and Isle Royale. That one actually should be a fantastic time. We have our field marks and the lobby over there. We also have our new spring calendars that all of our new upcoming programs and rather than lift them off, I'll just let you pick those up at the first shift. And without further ado, we have Carly Cogbill. Thank you. Thank you. 10 years ago, I gave a talk on the pre-settlement forest of Vermont to this group. And I'm gonna take the same talk except there's gonna be a 10-year update and I'll be working 10 years on what's going on. I encourage you to ask questions. Sometimes I can talk off in a different language or it's English but no one understands the words including me. So please pipe in if you have any questions whatsoever. I'm gonna be talking about the pre-settlement forest of the Northeast. We'll define pre-settlement early on. No offense to the indigenous but I'm not gonna really address that. They've been around as long as the forest has and are intimately part of that forest and its dynamics. But I consider settlement, Euro-American settlement when the original people came over from Europe or when Americans started to move inland. And forests, you know what a forest is. Northeast is basically the quarter of the country including New England, New York, and the Atlantic states. I'm gonna be interdisciplinary. I'm gonna be talking about models, theoretical things that might happen or might not happen but tend to be the academics, Bailey Wick. This by the way is the diorama at the Harvard Forest, the Fisher Museum of the pre-colonial forest that's based on a forest in Winchester, New Hampshire. The Pigeon Tract that blew down in 1938 and Harvard owned it but then lost what they considered to be the last Virgin Forest of New England. They thought. Here I am in an earlier stage. If you look very closely, there's a person there with a little axe. I like to think of that as a surveyor. There's another one down there. It isn't not humanly involved. There were people in the forest including the indigenous. Here we're gonna be talking about natural history in the field. Basically what's out there today. Can it tell us something what the original forests were like? This is in Franconia Notch, a Lafayette Brook. You can actually park in the parking lot and see this view. Very accessible in the Franconia Notch Highway. And finally, I'm gonna be talking a lot about history of the data. Information that was contemporary to the pre-settlement era. And here I am in actually the Callis Town Hall. Looking at a original larding map. Come on. She's easy. Okay, no talk about the original forest. Can't be poetic. This is Longfellow's Tale of a K.D. This is the forest primeval, the murmuring pines and hemlocks bearded with moss and garments green indistinct in the twilight stand like druids with elves with voices sad and prophetic. The first stanza of Angeline. A story of love lost and never gained again. And here is a lot of ecology. They have species. They have other understory plants. They have a little bit of spirit involved in it. And this is what we tend to think of when we think of the original forest. I have a lexicon of at least 50 tons. Primeval, old growth, maybe a forest or call it decadent. Various names for this concept. They're all advocates. I call it advocates in search of a noun. That's what I'm looking for. What is the noun in this story? Okay, we'll start off with an essential question. What was the forest like? This is Greenmount Cemetery in Montpelier. You've all driven by it. You can see there's a lot of color there and a little bit of invasive Europeans conifers. What do you think this looked like in 1787 when it was originally that part of Montpelier was settled? Was the dominant sugar maple the way it is here? Was it white pine? By the way, this was set aside as the white pine lot in Montpelier, a quarter acre to every settler in Montpelier had a piece of this, a lot that they used or at least had white pines on it ostensibly. Was it hemlock? Was it beech? Was it yellowverge? Red spruce? Red oak? The south facing slopes in the Wenuski Valley have a lot of red oak? What was it like? Anybody think it was sugar maple? Well, good, all right, it was state three. Yeah, it couldn't be better. White pine? Yeah, yeah, a main white pine state, that kind of thing. Hemlock, beech, has anyone been to my talks before? Yeah, yes. Yellowverge, all right, good. Red spruce, that's my totem tree, I'm quoting. Red oak? Okay, the other question here is not what it was, but how do we discover what it was? How can we answer that question without a vote? It isn't democracy. It's science. So, we'll go on, keep that in mind. This is really at least a tale of four forests. This is a picture from Hanover, New Hampshire, right above Lake Hitchcock. This is all glacial till. You can recognize the big class and the unsorted material here. And there are at least four forests that I see here. Everyone see the four forests? Okay, the one forest here is down in the organic matter where the till was laid down. That's the post-glacial forest. It's still there as organic matter, not as tree trees. Then this is the really neat one. See, the stone wall, the stone wall was put down by the original settler that cleared the land and the forest floor that was there, he sequestered. He hid below the rocks so that we could come back 200 years later and see what was growing there. So, this is the pre-settlement forest, number two. It is right underneath that stone wall. The third forest is represented by these white pines up here which grew up in this field after it was abandoned. After maybe 100 or 150 years of cultivation, was abandoned and the white pines came up. Then the white pines were taken over by hardwood trees that were growing up in this field. That's the fourth forest. Then those hardwood trees were cut and were missing the fifth forest. What would grow here in the future? Unfortunately, right now it's a condominium. Literally, I can go to this. Well, it had four forests originally. Why do I get two of the food price of one? That's still bad. Oh, I get it. Just delayed. Mm. Good. Yeah, you got that? That was a quickie. We can go back in time. We can go back using pollen diagrams. This is from a knob hill pond in Marshfield that has a pollen diagram taken out of it. The bottom of the sediments, which is the oldest deposits, are 13,000 years ago. Each of these columns is a different genre or species of trees. Look closely at the blue, which is spruce. Spruce came in very early and then declined. The red is hemlock. Hemlock came in about, who knows, 11,000 years ago, was almost a dominant until 5,000 years ago when it virtually disappeared. The great hemlock declined at 5,300 years ago. Maybe to be repeated. Then it took about a thousand years for hemlock to come back and is in here. And finally, beach that came in about 8,000 years ago increased and then kind of held its own more or less. This is a detail of the top of the diagram, the last 2,500 years. This line across here is settlement. You can see all these ambrosia and maize and grasses coming in. This is when Europeans started to settle. Notice there's no maize down here. The natives weren't growing it around here although the Europeans were. So this is the settlement horizon. And you can see coming from the bottom, we have spruce all of a sudden showing up 1,800 years ago increasing to about 100 years ago and then declining. There's dynamics going on. Here's hemlock that had recovered from the hemlock decline and has been declining slowly for the past 1,000 years. Here's a beach which was higher back here in the 3,000 years ago and has been declining slowly. So if we wanted to guess what the force was. Yes. What's the other big black one there and the other big black one next to it? This one is birch. Okay. And this one is percent organic matter. Don't worry about it. It just means how many plants were around. And you can see the organic matter here is very low way back in the post glacial just when the ice was leaving and then it bills out to a fairly constant. Oh, there are a lot of details in here. I could spend an entire time talking about this. But my takeaway here is that things are dynamic and we can take that pre-settlement layer and say that the forests around Noth Hill Pond which looked like that at the turn of the 1900s had spruce, pine, hemlock, dominated by birch, a little bit of oak, a lot of beach and lesser amount. The amount of pollen does not equal land on number 10 pond in the present palace. And we can go to Norbury. Here's Gail's description and he has witness trees on the four corners of this Norbury, this New York land. He has an elm tree, a red ash tree, a birch tree, a maple tree, and he has other beaches and birches. This is a pretty good description in Northern Harwich. And rich sites, where is the, there's butternut ash, birch, patches of butternuts with maiden hair and nettles. It's there today. What was there two hundred and fifty years ago is what's on this line today. We should really resurvey this, have a 250 year resurvey of the land. This all about me to mostly how it broke, but other ideas that we did have information from these trees. To look at witness trees, look at the original survey corners. And that's what the original survey is used to mark lots, which to mark the corners and tell what the species was. They called them witness trees, you can tell today, because they have a sign on them, witness tree. They used to put a post at the corner of the lot and then blaze trees around it, those are witness trees. This is a witness tree in Maine. In 1789, the Northwest corner of the Kennebec purchase is this location, started at Amar Beach Tree. That's the son of the beach. Right there, you can see the blazes. Not the same tree, but probably genetically, since it's proud to say, and that's Ephraim Ballard. Anyone ever heard of Ephraim Ballard? You probably heard of Martha Ballard, the midwife's tale. Post-surprise winning, that was his wife. And in the midwife's tale, she talks about her husband going off to work in the woods. This is what he was doing. He was marking trees. There is only one witness tree that I know that survives from the 18th century that is in the deed office in Bangor, Maine. This tree was a 1792 witness tree and part of an 1880s timber trespass suit. So the surveyor cut the blaze out of the tree to show that that was the tree that was at the corner. And it still survives. It's in a glass case now in Bangor. That is an original witness tree right there in my hands. And I've been pursuing for over 40 years now, going around and getting records in archives of the original survey records and then pulling out witness tree data from those surveys. Okay, this just shows that work. If you know the former town clerk of Calis, this is a piece of parchment that has an original survey on it. This is the vault in Montpelier with the survey of Montpelier. There's a lot of records just sitting around. This is that original parchment from Calis. Oh, I didn't show you the archive. That's the... Eva used to have a... Actually a file on cabinet, I guess that's the best way to put it, that she used to keep this mapping in a piece of, you know, folder. But here is the original lots in Calis. And you can see at the corner of each, there's an M, an M, an E. At this place, this is the Max Gray Road or extension of the Max Gray Road that becomes the east road in Calis. And at that corner, there is a M, which is a maple. That is in the middle of the road. They didn't like to put the roads to the middle of the lot. They put them along the edge of the lot. And here's that corner. And you can see the maples lined up on the tree line. Unfortunately, the original witness tree is not long gone under the road. But we can add up what the composition was in 1783 or in Montpelier in 1787. And here are the pre-settlement composition in central Vermont. Here are the Montpelier witness trees, 186 on the map. And these are percentages. So the dominant was maple. Oh, wow. But there's also beech, hemlock, spruce, much less of birch. In Calis, the dominant was beech with lesser amounts of maple, hemlock, and spruce. In Cavett, the dominant was beech with lesser amounts of maple and spruce. And very importantly, in the third division of Montpelier, this is the white pine lot in Montpelier. That original question, here's the answer to your you've been waiting for. Beech spruce dominated 45%. Beech, 21%. Maple, 11%. Virtue? Pine, none. 100% is hemlock. Hemlock, yeah. Excuse me, 45. Dominate by hemlock. Ta-da. Ta-da. Yep, hemlock people won. White pine, there will be an argument that white pines were saved for their timber, so they weren't marked. But that's begging the question. A blaze on a pine tree is not going to change the value all that much. The thing is that pines were big and obvious, but were very scattered. Probably less than one per acre, or one per quarter acre. It just wasn't all that abundant. What do you think is the leverwood? Leverwood. We're going to get to that in a second. The answer is hot-horned bean. You see Latin, a strio-virginiana. But they didn't have that in Europe, so they gave it names here. And leverwood is one of the local names. Here's the composition, again, in the towns in central eastern Vermont. This is Plainfield. Anyone want to help me go through the town records? I've been through them several times. This is Barry. Orange, we have Gale's original survey. But there are some towns missing here. And this is the composition, with the greens being conifers, the reddish ones being hardwoods, the blue ones being temperate conifers, hemlock and pine, and the yellows and oranges being oak, chestnut, and hickory, the sprout hardwoods from the south. And you can see a dominant of this russet color, which is beech. The dominant tree in central Vermont at settlement was beech. I've looked at old buildings, and mostly just the species. And it is true that as you go from southern New England to northern New England, the timber framing changes. Changes from oak, white oak on the coast, chestnut in the interior in the Hudson Valley, through hemlock in southern Vermont, and finally spruce predominantly in northern New England. But we don't have all that many really old buildings, but the ones we have, you should core, excuse me, take a small sample out of the beams, or not the sills, but the joists that run under it. And you can get an anecdotal sample of what species were going locally. Even more so, you can get the growth rate of those trees and figure out what the climate was like in 15, when we had no summer. I've done this for over 1,400 pounds in the northeast, and this is just, and this is the squinty-eyed view. See, green up north, and it goes through the reds through Vermont, goes through the blues here, which are these transition pines and hemlocks, light blue hemlock, dark blue pines, down through the oaks and chestnuts, mostly oak, down in southern New England. Also, we don't stop at the border, this was all British territory. The eastern township has equal surveys, and these are witness trees from the eastern townships that are just in the database. Yeah. How much clearing happened before there were enough settlers to split it up into towns? The model was to survey before sediment. Because if you didn't survey, you didn't know who owned what. And at least in New England, they were proprietors, they were groups of anywhere from 50 to 60 people that bought the town in common, and their job as proprietors was to divide it up both on the land and then ownership. So the rule of thumb is survey before sediment. So you didn't have groups of loggers getting ship mass and stuff like that? No, squatters or whatever. Occasionally you'd have somebody there, but remember these witness trees are on the edge of the lock, which simply means that the lock, actually it's illegal to disturb a survey boundary. Still is today, don't take that pin out of your point. The trees were to remain because they indicated the boundary between two people, and then you had to argue over your neighbor of who's disturbing it. They're stealing from you or you're stealing from them? Come on. It's incredible work, Chara. Cut the giant pines for mass. No, no. A quick digression of the King's Arrow Pine, starting before 1775, when the English crown still on the land, all pines over two feet in diameter to reserve for the King's Navy. The record showed that 1,000 trees were sent to England for mass. Do you realize how much land for 1,000 trees? You know, it's one town in southeastern New Hampshire. We do have rumors that King's Arrow Pine trees survive or that was poaching. There's no record whatsoever of anyone being prosecuted over taking a big pine. There are nice stories of flooring and houses that's 23 inches wide everywhere. It could be 26, 28. The governor of New Hampshire wasn't, which was Benning Wentworth, by the way. He owned 500 acres in every town. He didn't have to come and find you for using a tree on your own lawn. So I tend to tamp down on King's Arrow Pine. This is getting to terminology. This is a maple vernacular usage. That is, how many sugar maple trees were there in Vermont originally? None. They didn't have a name. Sugar maple was a Pennsylvania and New York name. This is the pre-settlement name. The name in Vermont was hard maple. You're a real Vermonter, you have hard maple. And the other maple that we might call red maple down here was called soft maple. Hard and soft. If you're from Maine, you called it rock maple. And the opposite of rock maple was white maple. So we have different terms. Local terms, vernacular. The really neat ones are what we call ironwood. See these green here? This is leverwood, the green in here, which was a Vermont name for this ironwood. In Windsor County, it was called Riemann. Only in Windsor County. In Maine, it was called Hornbeam. And out in New York and Pennsylvania, it was called ironwood. And it also had other blue beaches of different species, but it could be in Southern New England. It could be called hazel, not rich hazel. This is a tree hazel. Gum, gum is the best. It doesn't, genus doesn't occur in Europe. And it doesn't occur much in Vermont, although Colchester Bog and here down in southeastern Vermont. But around New York City and New York, it's called pepperish. Everyone's seen pepperish farm? You've seen the logo of pepperish farm? It's a mill with a maple tree beside it. Pepperish farm, no. They don't know what they're talking about. In Connecticut and Rhode Island, it's called Swampwood. In central to Northern New England, it's called Wild Pear. So you can tell where an original settler was from, if we wanted to interview them, of just what do we call that? By the time they got to Pennsylvania, they were just calling it gum. You have the German and French names too? Yeah, they're of, not much, and native names. Wikipedia is basswood in Algonquin, of Anarchy. We do have some Dutch names. But most of these, by the way, most of the surveyors were Scots, the kind of a higher class of refugees coming in. That was a little bit biased, but yeah. Going back a slide, too. So it was hard maple in Vermont, the term for sugar maple. Yeah. And then... Rock maple in Maine. And the pear was hard maple, soft maple, rock maple, white maple. Don't get confused, many people today call silver maple, white maple. You've got to talk the language at the time. Soft maple in Vermont would have meant... What we call red maple today. Thank you. You said that they had different names because they didn't have the trees, the same tree in Europe. And certainly in Ironwood and gum, it was the multiple names. When you get to maples, you're really talking about, they're putting a species name on it. And the species names developed through time. Actually, the Latin names came before the species names. And they usually came from the species name. So Acer rubrum is the Latin name. So if you translate that into English, you get red maple. But the surveyors weren't talking Latin, they were talking English. So they called it soft maple or white maple. So what trees, if any, were identical to between Europe and Northern Georgia? We share almost no species. We share maybe 70, 80% of the genera. So that's where the Ironwood gets the hazel comes. In Europe, they have a hazel, which is a carpinas. So when they came here, they saw something that looked like carpinas, which is really Australia. That's now back to carpinas that they called hazel. Little complicated. These are the species distributions. And you can see that Beech was in a band in Northern New England. Maple was much less important. Maybe 6% in the vermonica, maybe to 15% in some locations. Oaks, the dotted line is the current distribution of oak in 1990s. The colors are oak distribution. And you can see the dominance in Southern New England. But the range is very, very close. In fact, I'd say the range from the pre-settlement is a better indication of the range than the range is today. It's been screwed around with logging and planting and all that kind of stuff. And pines, look it. Pines hardly any in Vermont. The dominant pines are out here on Cape Cod and in the Merrimack Valley and the Soco Valley. And that was mostly a pitchfile. White pine was a relative rarity. Charlie, these are all current amounts? No. All the colors are 1800. All the dotted are current. Here were spruce in 1800, going down into Western Massachusetts in Worcester County, in the mountains in Maine. Hemlocks the same band through here, but shifted a little south. Chestnut. This is what the American Chestnut Society should see. See how much chestnut there was in Berkshire County and Bennington County, but very little in the rest of the state. The range of chestnut in the pre-settlement was beyond the range of chestnut that this American Chestnut Society foundation has there. And Hickory's much the same as chestnut. You can see there, there's a little more detail. Here we're going to a classification, and this is the kind of final piece. If you take all the species, and you do fancy arm-waving mathematics, you get towns that have similar spectra of species, a similar composition. And color those towns the same color. It's called cluster analysis, where cluster in towns they have the same composition. And here in Vermont, you can see the major Green Mountain chain has this color here. The Champlain Valley has a darker color, which is more northern hardwoods. In fact, there's some towns within the Champlain Valley that are getting over to that yellow color just barely. And then in the Northeast Kingdom, you have the green, which are the softwoods from the north. And this is the real map of variability and composition of forest huts in Vermont in 1800. So what are the colors that's made? The colors are just the colors. They only cluster. They are towns that have similar composition. But what is composition? Composition is the relative abundance of the different species, beets, birch, maple, hemlock, pine. And you do a similarity, and then you do a matrix, and then you do a principal components analysis. So it's not a forest community, necessarily. Call it forest community, yeah. OK. I call it forest type, because it's simply associated with a spectra, a set composition. Is the white too simply on the yellow one? White is no data. And here we are for the whole Northeast with the same thing. And I want to point out here that the greens and the reds separate from the yellows, oranges, and blues by a very distinct line. It isn't a straight line by any means. This is the tension line, the separation between the northern forests dominated by beets early on and the southern forests dominated by oak. And there are a few really neat, look at this, in the Merrimack Valley, in the Connecticut Valley, in the Hudson Valley, in the Allegheny Valley, in the Susquehanna Valley, there are tongues going north of oak. Similarly, there are tongues going south of the Poconos. Cambria County, Pennsylvania. It's an outlier. Maybe it was a flood in Jamestown, who knows. But an outlier there, this going down into northern Connecticut, through the Berkshires, is an outlier. And then we have these northern areas. This is the Panopska Valley. These are the Camden Hills. We have a very few towns, a few scattered towns. There are southern towns that occur in the north, almost no northern towns that occur in the south. It's a very distinct line. And it's a line between beach and oaks. You can see that line here, the tension line, the dividing line between the southern forest and the northern forest. This is a fancy analysis of that. If you look at the distance between towns and what the distance between there are similarities. In other words, look at their geographic distance and their taxonomic distance. And you plot that. This is the geographic distance. And this is the taxonomic difference. If you put all the towns together, it's the blue. And as you get further apart, they get less alike. And you cross the 50% line at about 150 kilometers. However, if you take northern towns, the green, are southern towns, and do them alone. Don't mix the north and the south. You get the 50% line is somewhere up here around 400 kilometers. And if you go across the tension line, you just cross it by 27. 50% is 20 kilometers. In other words, the amount of change over the tension line is for 20 kilometers is equivalent to 300 kilometers either north or south. It's very steep. It's the definition of an ecotone, a rapid change of ecological characteristics. I've been working with the Palaeon Group, which is putting together these witness tree records for the entire northeast. But we're going from Minnesota to Maine. And these are from witness tree records from the whole area. And here is Spruce. Here is Oak. You can see the tension line here. Excuse me, it's right there. It goes across, cross, cross, cross. Right through Stillwater, by the way. Where is he? Okay. This is just the composition of the original forest over all of Vermont, 34% beach, 15% maple, 13% hemlock, 11% spruce, 9% birches, ashes. And we have some other things. We have butternuts and a few hickories. Very few poplars, cherries, chestnut, any foresters out there? Cherries, poplars, chestnut. All these growing in disturbed areas after cuts, you know, a lot of light. These species growing in shade. It's kind of coming around to climax on the backside. There are a series of species that represent shade tolerant and a group of species that are very rare early on that are shade intolerant. I'm just about there. Just to show you, there are other data that you can pull out of these records. This is the percentage of the survey line that's described as burnt and in red and wind thrown in blue. If you do some high grade mathematics, take your reciprocal and assume that 25 years, it's still visible. 1% equals 500 years return time. So, oh, excuse me, a 5% is 500 years. So these, the only place is in Northern New York and part of Allegheny that has a 500 year return time on fire at any location. None of the wind throws come close to that. The wind throw is closer to 2,000 year return time. These are not the disturbances that dominated the early force. We didn't have fire, we didn't have wind throw. I've been working on trying to get some more metrics. I can pull out a little bit of the witness trees. Sometimes they measure the distance to the witness tree. You take one over that square, that is actually the density of trees in that location. And these are numbers from various areas of the Northeast, which is the density of trees more than 20 centimeters. Trees per hectare, if you're English speaking, you can divide that by 2.47, two and a half, and you'll get trees per acre. But this, there's a little glimmer of that, our pine. The problem is that Jersey was two different states, East Jersey and West Jersey. East Jersey has very good settlement records. West Jersey was quite good in their records and not as good in the... I think it was more common ownership. Also, you'll notice that Mason-Dixon line stops. And that's because southern plantation, large land holdings were the land tenure system in the South. And they have a very different survey. The outlines for the outlines tend to be very subjective. They tend to be harder to find because they're registered in the counties and the counties always change. So there's a good reason why this goes to Pennsylvania and then starts where the federal land survey, the so-called public land survey, starts in Ohio. In Ohio West, all the way to the West Coast, the numbers are fantastic. You lose yourself in too many numbers. I'm from West Jersey, so I can relate to that history. I need somebody to go to Trenton and look in the West Jersey proprietors. Their provider records are in the state departments in Trenton. Yeah, do me a favor. I know Ironwood is not always called Ironwood, but when people call Ironwood, Ironwood, why do they call it? Because it's very hard to dance. And that's why they call it Leverwood. I mean, if you're an old Vermont farmer, you say, all right, I've got to move this rock. Bring me a Leverwood on a stone boat. Yeah, runners or skids on, yeah. Is there any evidence of what caused the die-out of the hemlock in the ancient day of the West? There are three theories. In the same layers in the ponds, there are wings of hemlock looper, okay? Now, did the looper follow the decline in eat-off of dead trees or not? There's also very good evidence that there were droughts and climate triggers going on at that time. And the final evidence is, even though the original observation said that it was contemporaneous within 100 years over all of East New North America, there are places that didn't decline. So why didn't they decline? So they were affected by the drought, the looper was around, whatever. Right now, it's just that it's an example of a major decline probably caused by either a pathogen, a pest, or climate, or combination of this. Thought to where the forests are headed with the disease and the birch and the hemlock and the ash. Every species, I can give you ash, a butternut, maples, hemlock, dogwoods. I developed this long ago talking with pathologists. They were convinced that every tree was sick and about to die. And they were actually right. Every tree is sick and about to die. It's a lot like humans. We all have issues and we have a limited lifespan. That doesn't mean that they're gonna die before they reproduce or before they have an influence or whatever. So I tend to fall back on Hugh Rao's description. He was a non-believer in climax, a vehemently non-believer in the climax. And he was once asked apocryphally, what do you think the future of the forest is? What would be the climax of this area? And what would the forest be like without skipping a beat? He said, trees. And that's the way I feel, I really feel. Whether it's gonna be maple trees or hemlock trees or red maple trees or whatever, it probably won't be chestnut. It probably won't be hemlock, but it'll be something. And we just have to accept that. That's just the normal thing. We've only been 10,000 years since we had nothing. So let's not complain about, oh, this species isn't gonna make it. I think that's a state of the question. Very anticlimactic. Answer. I'll answer that. Yeah. I don't remember you say anything about pylons. Were there pylons there at that time? They weren't terribly common. They showed up in 1% or their amounts. There were two species that were viable here. There was a slippery red-elm and American or white-elm or whatever you want to call it. They did occur on the flood plains, which is where we see iconic pictures, but they also occurred on the uplands. And at least right now, at least about 20% of the elements are resistant to Dutch-elm disease. So we still have elements around. We don't have them as street trees, but the street trees are a little bit artificial. But is Dutch-elm, there's not a Dutch-elm, right? There is an elm in Europe that's fairly resistant to Dutch-elm disease. And it's called Dutch-elm disease because it was brought over on the nursery stock from Europe. From, yeah. And most of the elms around here are American-elms, isn't there? Virtually many. I actually get on little calcareous stalls in Champlain Valley or whatever, and you will get slippery elm. It's around. And you can easily tell it. Just take your knife and cut a piece of the bark and see whether it's a marble cake or whether it's a chocolate cake. Charlie, one year earlier, a slide showed us the four forests. Basically, there's a picture of a kind of deforestation that's stone walled. You mentioned forest number two was under the stone wall. Absolutely. Tell us a little bit more about the two forests. That's my tease for anybody that wants to know what the pre-settlement forest is. The remains of that, of the pollen from those forests and the organic matter from those forests, which could be put through genetic stuff, is sitting underneath a black rock under every stone wall. Every early stone wall. And almost all the stone walls were 1820 or 1830 latiss. So all you have to do is dissect the stone wall, which is an activity in itself because you can see what the size is and how much they weigh and what the shapes are and where they came from and all sorts of things. And then at the very bottom, in a place that hasn't gotten any exposure to erosion or air, there's a little bit of organic matter left over from the forest when that wall was built. Good activity, although you need a pond lab. How do you scoop of that, would you need to find something out from it? Teaspoon. Teaspoon. Okay. Actually, that was done in Harvard Forest about 10 years ago, thereabouts. And they came up with a lot of field species and fragments. Obviously, the stone wall was built from a little back to the field. But somewhere around there, I mean stone walls on either side of a sugarbush you could. What's changed since 10 years ago when you gave this talk? Okay. The first four slides were the same. Some of the maps 10 years ago were just New England. Cool. And as you notice, I'm getting into the west and I'm getting into Canada. And next up probably is New Brunswick. All the white spots on the map were really bothering me. There are reasons for many of them but they're fodder for the next, for filling it in. Even though we don't need that with computer smoothing techniques, I can make it look as if I'm sampled every show. And there are a third of a million trees represented in the big map from Minnesota. Are any of these slides or maps available? Yeah, there is a publication in the Journal of Biogyography. There's another one back in 19, I don't know, 2002. You can email me at cdcognitivegmail.com. I can send you a PDF of that. There's a paleon, which is this big project, it's been publishing maps. And NSF funded means that all of the underlying raw data has to be available. So there's supplementary and there's a close one article that came out two years ago that has all the Minnesota main stuff. By the way, that's what the new EPA requirement is. You can't base EPA rules on things that don't have raw data published. So a lot of modern publishing is just throwing out raw data. Nobody else will be able to figure out but it makes it legitimate. But yeah, there are at least two publications that have summary stuff. And give me an email, I can send you what your own county is, what your county is, whatever you might, or what your students might want to do. We've got some Montpelier teachers around. We might revisit some of the corners in Calis or Caledon or Montpelier or whatever. See what's there today. I can take you to one place on the Max Gray Road and you can say, here's still an unable. I'm going to stay around a little longer. If you have particular questions, thank you very much.