 So, all right So what I wanted to tell you guys about this morning is a new book that Andy Barton is a professor at the University of Maine Farmington, and I recently co-edited it. It's called Ecology. Oh, thank you. It's called Ecology and Recovery of Eastern Oklahoma Forest. So happy to see that Victoria has a copy of it already. That's his. That's great. But I got the Vermont Law School copy. I see you and you and me and I'm back. I want you to buy that. So This is a co-edited volume. It brings together chapters written by many of the foremost experts on ol' growth forests in Eastern North America, including Canada published by Anand Press. We're hoping to have Charlie Cobbville in this one, but it didn't quite work out. Next one, Charlie, we'll get you in here. There was a book published in 1994, I believe, by Mary Bird Davis, was the editor of that one that at that time synthesized sort of the early science around Eastern ol' growth forests that was developing at that time. And if you think about this early 90s, we'd just come out of this period of real discovery around ol' growth in the 1970s and 80s, but much of it was out west. Most of it was in the Pacific Northwest, and it was driven by concerns over the tiny populations of northern spotted owl, Pacific salmon, and later the marbled muralette. And so there was a huge amount of activity studying ol' growth forests in that region of the country, which then ultimately led to something called a Northwest Forest Plan that conserves most of the remaining ol' growth, at least in the US portion of the Pacific Northwest. And as those ideas about ol' growth were developed there, they percolated east, and folks around here started looking for ol' growth as well. And the sort of prevailing dogma until that time had been that, oh, we don't really have ol' growth in the eastern US, right? We're a highly settled landscape, and most of it was cleared in the 18th and 19th centuries. There's no ol' growth here, or if there is, there were just a few tiny stands that people knew about. I think the Nature Conservancy might have gotten its start on Long Island, is that correct? Preserving one of the few remaining ol' growth forests there. I think that was one of the very early chapters of the Nature Conservancy. Correct me if I'm wrong about that. We'll look it up later. So we had a few examples like that that folks knew about, but not much else. Well, anyway, people decided to challenge that notion, and they started looking. And the more they looked, the more they found. And we found large areas of ol' growth forests in the Adirondacks, State Park, for example. And now we know that there's something like 400,000 acres. Nobody knows for sure, because it's never been mapped, believe it or not. About 400,000 acres of primary and ol' growth forests there. And I'll just say as a side note, the Adirondacks are really exceptional that way, because the ol' growth there occurs across such large areas, large landscapes. So this argument that the ol' growth that we have is somehow anomalous, that these are just really strange little sites that, for whatever reason, escape logging or clearing is not really true of the Adirondacks. So these are the entire landscapes that are representative of ecological, geophysical diversity across the landscape. Okay, so anyway, that's one place we found some ol' growth. Also in parts of Maine, like the Big Reed Preserve, parts of the White Mountains in New Hampshire, yeah. I'm sorry to... Take it out, but how old is old? I like the way you're talking, to be honest. This question. So I don't like using age alone. No one does, because forests develop at different rates on different soils, different sites, different disturbance histories, but generally roughly in the eastern U.S. we think of about 158 years as a sort of an approximate kind of threshold around which we might see some of these characteristics developing. But we use typically a combination of age, structure or the architecture of the forest, and also it's particularly disturbance history and maybe how humans have affected it as well. So disturbance history, age and structure, we use those three criteria basically. But it's important in my view, again, not to be too restrictive around those things, because we don't want to bias ourselves and have this, again, archetypical notion of what we think old growth should look like. And then if we go out and we look for that, sure enough it's going to be a self-fulfilling prophecy and that's what we're going to find. Charlie has done huge amounts of work around pre-settlement forests using, I'm putting words in your mouth, so feel free to jump in at any point. Using witness tree records and showing that a lot of times old growth might not have fit our notion of what we think it should look like. So we don't want to be too restrictive around that. Okay, where was I? Old growth that we discovered. White mountains. Yeah, white mountains, southern Appalachians, parts of the Alleghenes up through Pennsylvania. So we found all those cypress swamps, you know, the few remaining cypress old growth stands down through the Carolinas, then around the coast and Louisiana, Alabama, places like that. Not to mention long needle pine systems of the southeast, slash pine long needle pine, these other systems that form more of a pine savanna type of structure, much like ponderosa pine forests do out west. These are fire dependent ecosystems, so they don't look like old growth in the northeast. They look like old growth should in the southeast in a pine system with an open understory and an open canopy, widely spaced, old pine trees. What about systems in the upper Midwest? We found tremendous amounts of old growth across northern Wisconsin, upper peninsula of Michigan, boundary waters of northern Minnesota, one of my favorite places on earth. And a whole wide range of old growth systems there, both northern hardwoods, old growth spruce fir or boreal forests, they're fingering down into the northern tier of the US, as well as old growth jack pine systems, which is a little bit of a misnomer in a way. I don't know if you know much about jack pine, but it's considered an early serral species, meaning it's sort of successional to something else, typically northern hardwoods, and it comes in after a big standard place in fire. But if you have the right conditions and the right fire regime, the jack pine can form an old growth structure before maybe succeeding to northern hardwoods or something else that comes in later. So, yeah, so a huge diversity of old growth types, each with different disturbance regimes, different characteristics, and just a huge amount of dynamics that are involved here. Okay, so I've taken you to sort of the early 90s now, and you have this understanding that, okay, we do have old growth in the eastern United States. And that first book, again, by Mary Group Davis and co-authors, was really just documenting and describing the old growth that we had in the eastern US at that time since the 90s. So through the late 90s and 2000s, the science has moved away from just basic descriptions of these ecosystems to more of an understanding of their internal processing. So what are the processes that these ecosystems carry out like primary productivity and photosynthesis, and how do those things change as a force ages and do these systems become carbon sinks or carbon sources? That's really an important topic these days and really the focus of a lot of my research. How do these ecosystems interact with natural disturbances like wind and insects and ice storms and fire? How do they process and retain nutrients? Are they sort of like a sieve that nutrients are leaking out of into the streams or are they highly efficient at processing and retaining nutrients and limiting the movement of phosphorus and nitrogen and other things in the surface water bodies? It's really important here in the Lake Champlain Basin, of course, right? So the biogeochemistry of these ecosystems, how do they work, how do they take? So that's really where the science has gone. Dynamics, processing, functions, and that's why Andrew Barton and I felt like it was time for a new book. And it's not just a revision or a revision of the first one. It's really entirely new. So all of these chapters basically describe the new science, the new understanding of Olga Forest that's developed over the last 20 or 30 years. Again, stressing dynamics and processes. I have a question about that. I remember when Tom Wessels was here, he spoke extensively about only important connections under the soil. And is that one of the criteria that you are using in deciding what the whole program has to measure? No, it's certainly not a criteria. It's not a criteria. It would be incredibly difficult to use. I think what I can say is that there's a huge amount of interest in the below ground community in the Monterey-sur-Ise and understanding not just the types of symbiotic relationships that those carry out in terms of water acquisition and nutrient acquisition and the really fascinating way in which above ground vegetation literally farms that community of below ground microbes, not just mycorrhizal fungi, but lots of other things as well, by exuding photosynthate into the soil to farm that community that the trees depend on. So there's a lot of research on that, but there's also a lot of research just trying to understand the biodiversity of those mycorrhizal fungi species, which turns out to be immense. Hundreds, maybe thousands of species of mycorrhizal fungi. And fascinatingly, some trees and shrubs are very narrow in their symbiotic relationships. In other words, they only form those with a few mycorrhizal species. Others are very general and form these symbiotic relationships with tens or hundreds of species of mycorrhizal fungi. In some cases, those change as a tree ages and as a forest ages. So it's a fascinating area. We know very little about it. It's one of these sort of new frontiers of ecology, like deep ocean vents or thermal hot springs in Yellowstone or something like that. It's a fascinating area of ecology. I hope I answered to some extent. But no, it would be really difficult to use that. Okay, so that's what we attempted to do in the book. I'll just look at my slides to just prompt me a little here. So I started off with a quote and sort of along these lines or not a quote. I said quote because I'm used to quoting other people. But in this case, I actually wrote it. So in the introduction, I wrote all growth. The term evokes something deep in the human psyche. We imagine the forest primeval something timeless from our distant collective memory. It's almost like we have this nostalgia for a time past, that we yearned for a time before. Our landscapes, maybe, were so profoundly changed by all of these we've seen around us. And this is a very romanticized view of all growth. And by no means do we try to dispel that in this book. We just argue that we need sort of a new romantic sense of all growth, maybe. Because whereas the old view, this view of the forest primeval, something distant from our collective memory, is grounded in ideas of the squirrel that could move from tree to tree, from Georgia to Maine. And just kind of disregards the fact that there were tens of thousands of indigenous people living on those landscapes for thousands of years and profoundly influencing them. It disregards what we now know about natural disturbances and how those shaped and sculpted these landscapes. And they were messy and they were complex. And they weren't just a continuous cover of cathedral-like trees or groves of trees. So we need to change our conception of all growth landscapes. And we need to stress things like complexity and dynamics. I think that there's also, for 150 years of natural science, been this yearning for what we often call the balance of nature. You've probably heard that a million time in nature documentaries, right? Like the lion and the gazelle and they're maintaining the balance of nature in Africa and Savannah. And I think that the contemporary ecologist might reject the idea that there's balance in nature. I don't think there is balance in nature. I see no signs of it. I think that nature strives for change. It's continuously changing over time and space. It's dynamic. And in fact, what we now know is that biodiversity requires change. Because change and dynamics, those represent niches and complexity and resource availability and shifting competitive playing fields among species. So rather than seeking for balance and those kinds of ideas, we need to seek for change and complexity and those sorts of things. So, you know, if we start talking about restoring or bringing back the future-adapted ol' gross system, we need to recognize that that's not going to be some kind of static condition that we're going to create in the landscape. It's going to be something that's ever-changing, ever-shifting over time and space. Okay, so I'm really philosophizing here. Maybe it's because we're in church. I'm feeling that. So, that's just making me think. When you say the balance of nature, I don't see that as static of things. I see that as always fluctuating and adapting and making changes for, you know, what have you. There's a big burst of something going on. Well, that's good. I mean, I think if we think of it that way, then I would agree. Okay. You know, so, but I guess the point is that rather than it being a single static condition, it's really, it's a range of conditions. And the ecologists would call that the range of natural variability that ecosystems are constantly fluctuating within. Certainly, ol' gross systems do. Like, our bodies sort of do that. You know, they're constantly adapting to changes and influences from the outside and the age or whatever. We could have a really interesting philosophical discussion of where that idea came from with stability and balance. And I mean, in a history of science class, we might even trace that back to some of the early sort of theological pushback on Darwinian biology and the theory of natural selection and sort of like, well, we'll give you natural selection and punctuated equilibrium as long as we can still have balance. You know, because it sort of implies a sort of divine influence there. Anyway, there's a really interesting kind of history there behind some of these ideas. Anyway, I don't know if you would agree with that. Well, I don't know if this is the right time to ask this question and make complicated things. But I'm kind of wondering how you parse this definition of this primeval, transcendental forests, the disturbance regimes, the succession regimes, and then, you know, all the human influence with modern-day human aspirations for ol' growth forests. Everyone looks at them differently. And I know you mentioned biodiversity. And I don't know necessarily that maximizing biodiversity would be an objective, for example. You could disturb a long-leaf pine savanna and increase its biodiversity. So, you know, I'm kind of wondering how does, how do our sort of contemporary notions of sort of how we fit in these forests and what we might want to see in them. And biodiversity is often emphasized, like how much that figures into your thinking on this. It figures in quite a bit. And I would agree with you that, you know, when we talk about managing for biodiversity, what we're talking about is managing for a huge range of biodiversity associated with different kinds of habitat conditions and different successional stages. So, not just ol' growth, not just early successional habitats. The key is that we need a mix of all of those. And we should be thinking about the proportions of those things that we want in the landscape. Conservation biologists refer to these as alpha, beta, and gamma biodiversity. Alpha diversity is the diversity you have within a single habitat type. Beta diversity is what you have among multiple habitat types. And gamma diversity is what occurs across a gradient or across a landscape. And we need all of those things. And this bothers me a little bit because I feel like, at least in the forestry profession, we get really hung up around some of these questions. And these days, everybody's arguing for early successional habitat, early successional patch cutting, patch cutting. And they're saying, that's what we need for wildlife. That's what we need for biodiversity. But no, that's not correct. That's only one type of biodiversity and really we need to be thinking of the whole mix on the landscape. This was in my slide show. These are the vertebrate habitat associations of the Northeast and the US. And it's this classic U-curve that we see all over the world. So lots of species that need young forest structures, lots that need old forest structures, and then only a few that are in the middle. Most of our forests right now are in the middle. So what we need to think about doing then, which might have higher invertebrate diversity. Maybe, I don't know. No, I don't think so. So, you know, some folks are arguing for early successional habitat. I'm saying that's fine, but let's also promote some of this late successional old-growth habitat too. And those things are not mutually exclusive. We can have some of both. So that's really the key, I think. And, you know, 10%, I've heard that number floated. I think, Kate, you mentioned that in your introduction. You know, and that's fine as a starting point. And I'm happy that the state is even proposing that idea. But, you know, that's far less than what we would have had historically. I don't know. Maybe we can try it like this a little bit. So... So this is something called an age-class distribution. And this is kind of what we think the distribution of forest types would have looked like pre-European settlement. So it's a positive exponential curve, right? So lots of old-growth somewhere between, I don't know, 80 to 90% of the landscape in that condition. Maybe around 10% in young forest, mostly from beaver activity, some Native American burning, particularly through the mid-Atlantic states in the south. Maybe parts of Vermont and the lowland areas. And a little bit in the middle. By the 19th century, of course, we'd completely shifted that distribution. So we had a landscape dominated by open, grassy, and shrubby conditions. Late 19th century, abandoned agricultural lands. And that's why, 150 years later, we have this bubble of essentially mature or sort of middle-aged forests that regenerated on that abandoned agricultural landscape. And so really what we're talking about with this debate, and I think fundamental to your question, is what do we do with this bubble? And there are those that are saying, well, we should ship more of it back to Earth, really special because we miss seeing those bird species that we're familiar with and that we love seeing. I get that. My mom is an avid birder and she misses seeing those and then wants them back. I understand that. But we can also ship more of this to that late-successional old-growth condition as well. 10% is a starting point, but my point is that it's still far below what would have been here. But maybe it's practical, given the modern landscape. But I'll just try to come target for a little bit. So, again, I've spent a lot of my career of the last 20 years studying logo forests in lots of places, the Northeast, but also many other places. And what I've looked for then in this research is some similarities that these systems have and reasons why it might be important to conserve and manage for them. And one of the most important things that we've found is that even with the high degree of variability among systems and their different pathways along which logo forests can develop generally, as a general statement, oops, a commonality that almost all of these systems form or have is very, very high levels of carbon storage. So, this is a figure showing forests in the Northeast. These are my data from the Adirondacks, and I've got biomass or carbon on this axis and I have forest age on this axis. And even though there's a lot of variability and different pathways here, there's this general trend of increasing carbon storage and biomass very late into forest development in our forests here. And the important point in this figure is that that continued positive accumulation of carbon storage and biomass seems to continue much later into forest development than we previously thought. Earlier models that came out of Hubbard Brook and elsewhere predicted and showed a peak in biomass fairly early on at around age 170 and then sort of a leveling off of that later and maybe even declines. And we still see that in some places. There's research in the Upper Midwest that seems to suggest that well, maybe that's the trend that their forests follow. I think that the most recent science has shown that there actually is a lot of variability in how this can play out over time, but still in general I think we've learned that older forests store very, very high levels of carbon more so than we previously thought. And that's not just true of the northeast. That's true of the Pacific Northwest. The same trend there. It's true in Tierra de Fuego and Patagonia and it's true in the Carpathians of Eastern Europe. So it seems to hold up sort of universally at the global scale. So that gives us then a whole new reason to think about promoting old forest structure, right? And if the forests of the future will be different from the forests of the past, we still might be able to promote that function. So forest structures or architectures that store very high levels of carbon and provide habitat for the biodiversity that needs complexity like that. Okay, so that's maybe one reason to really think about old growth restoration, carbon storage, climate change, mitigation. And now with rapidly developing carbon markets both domestically, mostly through the California Compliance Market and then also internationally through international voluntary carbon markets, now there's actually an economic incentive for landowners to do this because the forestry practices that promote that kind of complexity and carbon storage are exactly the kinds of practices that the carbon markets incentivize. So there's now sort of a new financial incentive for some folks to think about this. Okay, something else that I've learned and we have a chapter about this in here is the exceptionally high quality of stream habitats that run through old growth forests. I wish I could show you these pictures blown up on this stream. I don't know if you can see this beautiful adder on that stream all the woody debris piles in it massive, massive accumulations of down logs and debris dams. These don't look like most of our streams that we see around here but old growth streams have this incredible complexity largely related to the input of large logs but also related to other things like I don't know, rooting strength and geomorphic complexity in the stream channel and other sorts of characteristics. We've learned a lot in our research about how that complexity in these old growth streams influences things like primary productivity in the stream and how where you have a complex forest canopy over the stream you typically can bring in more light, in gaps and sunflex into the stream environment which gives it a little bit more productivity or autotropic production by algae and aquatic plants compared to a younger forest stream that has a strictly closed canopy overhead and very very little light reaching the stream. So these old growth streams I'll try to maybe describe that a little bit more clearly these old growth streams have a huge complexity of light environments they have cool shaded patches that are really important for brook trout and macroinvertebrates they also have some sunlit patches where you have a little bit higher primary productivity and the combination of those enhances the overall complexity and productivity of these stream systems. So this is a really brand new research to sort of hot off presses but it's another reason then to think about managing or promoting old growth forests on the portion of the landscape for these stream functions. So that's not something that people typically think about. Okay so we've outlined maybe a couple reasons then to think about conserving or managing for old growth we've said biodiversity making sure we take care of those groups of species. We've said carbon storage, climate change mitigation, we've said stream functioning or high quality stream habitats. So then the question is how do we do this right how do we actually restore old growth forests and all right off the bat there's two fundamental options right. One is we just do nothing and we allow these forests to develop on their own and there certainly will be large portions of the landscape where that happens. In Vermont that might be some major conservancy preserves but it also is going to be you know mostly on the congressionally designated wilderness areas on the Green Mountain National Forest for example there's a hundred thousand acres of designated wilderness there where these conditions will develop over time. But there are lots of other places where we might think about using silviculture to actively promote the development of these characteristics and that's where my research comes into play and so I just want to be careful about this because I'm not saying that we should do this everywhere. I'm saying that there's a role for that in some places on land trust lands in a conserved areas. Even on working forests where we have landowners that are interested in providing a mix of habitats, a variety of conditions on their property and also maybe where they're interested in participating in carbon markets and gaining that financial incentive through the sale of emissions offsets. Okay so there's going to be a role for this kind of silviculture and that's why I've spent the last 20 years studying a system that might work for that objective. I also want to be really careful though that I'm not to say that I'm not the only person on this. There's been lots of great work University of Maine University of Wisconsin and Minnesota and we've seen a number of different silvicultural systems tested that promote the development of old growth structure over time. The one I'm about to refer to is just one example it's the most local but in the book we have two chapters on old growth silviculture I wrote one and Tony DiMotto and a group of other people wrote the other so we can discuss a number of different options that landowners might consider. Okay my system, can you guys see this when I use one slide? It's better than nothing I guess. Okay so my study is up on the west side of Mount Mansfield it's called the Mod Force ecosystem management demonstration project and there's the the forehead and this is the Butler Lodge Trail that comes up here through the middle of it and I have these experimental units back in the woods on both sides of the trail that most people are unaware of and then this whole study is replicated at the Jericho Research Forest and also at another location in the Adirondacks So in this study basically started with what I learned about old growth forests what are their characteristics what is their structure how do they function so we used the remaining old growth forests as a reference and then from that I developed a silvicultural technique called structural complexity enhancement so notice that I'm not calling it old growth restoration because I wouldn't presume to be sort of re-engineering an old growth forest exactly instead what I'm saying is we can use really good forestry techniques to kind of reintroduce more complexity into a managed forest a working forest then let's say more conventional silvicultural approaches might achieve so we developed this approach called structural complexity enhancement I implemented this on the study 16 years ago I think the winter of 2003 and so we've been monitoring how the site has developed for 16 years now and excitingly it seems to be working quite well these are pictures of my structural complexity enhancement units 14 years after they were treated they have developed tremendous vertical complexity what I would refer to as a vertically contiguous canopy a foliage from the forest floor to the top of the canopy there are gappy they have lots of large down logs and tip up mounds they have more big trees than would be typically found in a forest like this so they just have a tremendous amount of structural complexity so it seems to have worked that way we've also put a lot of work into monitoring the biodiversity responses I could show you lots of data for these but I just brought one slide because I thought it might be interesting this is data from a recent paper on the fungal responses the fungi you asked me about my carazae before and this white bar here is basically what we found in the structural complexity enhancement units the old growth treatment and the other bars are what we find in the more conventionally harvested comparisons so areas that were single tree selection or group selection and then also the controls I'll just finish the thought and then I'll take the question so what we've seen is that we were very successful with this approach 15 years for this paper in really substantially enhancing the richness of the fungal community and then when we dig in further we find that that's true of not just the decomposers and the synthetic fungi that you might guess we show that response but also the macarazale community and edible harvestable mushrooms as well so that should make the mushroom pickers really happy so that was really just an exciting result you may be getting to this but you used the word treatment and I'm curious if you could say a few words about that or a little about what we did what is the intervention you're doing what am I going to do when I go home right so great so structural complexity enhancement how does this work basically what we're trying to do is mimic the way mother nature does it herself and she does it through natural disturbances that open up gaps in the canopy or free up growing space for the larger trees to add foliage in the photosynthetic area or by freeing up growing space for trees in the sub-canopies to then be released and work their way towards the top of the canopy so we're trying to mimic the natural disturbance processes that would enable or facilitate the development of an old growth structure over time so what that means for us then is creating small gaps but not just like cookie cutter gaps variably sized gaps that are highly irregular and ragged if you spend time with me in the old growth of the Adirondacks you would see that the disturbances there are incredibly irregular you know it's not this classic gap model of a little cookie cutter slice taken out of the forest basically the canopy overhead is just continuously variable so we have gaps with residual trees that have survived sometimes lives, sometimes dead sometimes snaps, sometimes uprooted all different densities and configurations that create your regular variable canopy conditions so that's what we're trying to create so culturally I also did things like a technique called crown release where I basically thin around the crowns of some of the larger most dominant trees and what you're trying to do in that case is to produce larger trees faster and this gets a little tricky because if we're talking about a 100 year old tree or 80 year old tree you're not going to be able to increase its growth rates its growth rates are already slowing down at that point but what we're trying to do with crown release is we're trying to arrest the rate of decline you know arrest that so that the tree reaches a larger size faster than it otherwise would and we think based on previous research and it seems to be working is that we can basically have the time it will take for it to reach a very large size or sort of an old growth size what kind of forest communities are these? northern hardwoods my sites as well are your typical sugar maple beech, yellow birch or the Jericho research forest it's a mixed woods how big are those plots? each treatment unit is a parametral treatment on manipulation each of those is assigned to a 5 acre block and then it's a replicated design statistically robust so we have lots of replicates of each of the treatments we did other things just to finish the answer it's a long answer girdle trees to create big snags I fell trees and left them on the ground create downward debris we even used machinery to either push trees over or to pull them over to create big tip-up mounds and that's been one of the most exciting things we have a huge tip-up mound and port beyond my wildest expectations in terms of winter wrens nesting in these tip-up mounds evidence of black bear denning under them incredible regeneration of yellow birch on top of these tip-ups just like we see in old growth forests other things like elderberry and other shrubs coming in on top of the tip-up mound because that's where the birds are just like in an old growth forest it's fascinating to see this so we did lots of things but structural complexity enhancement is basically a package of all of those different civil cultural treatments and this is a really important point because when I present this to foresters or to landowners these things, no it's that this is more of a menu that you can choose from you can pick and choose these different techniques depending on how they meet your objectives for your land and your property so if you're more interested in harvesting timber you can tweak this if you're more interested in flat-out old growth restoration you can tweak it that way it's very flexible and with this treatment it could be done in a number of different ways it doesn't have to be one particular way in my experiment we did the harvesting in two different ways on Mount Mansfield it was mostly mechanized with a machine called a tree shear it's a big mechanized machine drives around on tracks and has a big arm that reaches out and grabs a tree and cuts it and then can de-limit and then you pull the log out it was some hand-felling of crews running around the woods where the machine could get you know it's all about the logger getting a good contractor who knows how to do this well and you would be amazed where they can go but it's a really important question to not do more damage more harm than good so we had a good sort of mainline access road and then skid trails that went off from there the other location the Jericho Forest less of a road network and for other reasons like steep terrain I wanted to be really really careful so I used smaller machinery small skitters mostly cable skitters as opposed to a big grapple skitter that's used for whole tree harvesting and that kind of thing and mostly hand-felling which is harder to do these days it's harder to find contractors that can make that work financially because they have to pay all these people and there are all these problems and forestry is on a tight margin these days and it's hard for these contractors to make a living so anyway I just had another question about that you've been you're getting the crowns of large trees to to arrest the decline yeah yeah so a tree's growth rate begins to slow down once it hits around 80, 90, 100 years of age so its growth rates are declining at that point and I didn't think that I could turn that around and cause that tree to increase its growth rates instead what I'm trying to do is just to arrest the decline so that its growth rate declines a little bit more slowly and if I was grabbing this out what that means is that the tree size reaches a higher point faster than it otherwise would have okay so the tree is way as close as going down but the tree is getting larger sooner exactly it gets larger sooner because it's not declining as fast but there's some interesting you know scientific evidence around this question actually emerging from another a number of places around the world suggesting that in some cases big old trees that reach the top of the canopy are actually able to increase their growth rates and you're seeing their photosynthetic capacity shoe up and their productivity suddenly ticks upwards it runs absolutely counter to dogma to what we thought in poor psychology for 15 years but it seems to suggest that big old trees if they gain access to that light they're the winners you know they're the genetically superior individuals that have made it to that point in the canopy sometimes they can show this growth response yeah I'll go here then so the climate change and the weather being more changing the wind being intense and fires in a sense the forest responds by increasing its productivity and more frequently so climate change is horrible of course but at the same time climate nature puts out effort right to try to regenerate at a quicker pace maybe it's a tricky question I see what you're driving at there so certainly if we see more disturbances more frequent disturbances I mean it seems like you're trying to mimic the disturbance in the forest to encourage that goes in the details on this one so you know in my case I'm trying to mimic finely scale natural disturbances I think the concern with climate change is that we'll see more chronic I'm not saying it's a good thing but just like some of these good storms that come through it's all about the intensity and the frequency of those things and if we keep knocking the system back over and over and over again sure you're going to have release you're going to have regeneration so the system is resilient in that respect but it might be harder for this old structure to develop all the time that said one of the things we've learned about in forest ecology in the last 10 or 20 years is the really important role of what we're now calling intermediate intensity disturbances so things like microbursts and tornadoes and straight line ones and things like this that remove maybe 30 to 50% of the canopy so they're not sort of classic canopy gaps you've all probably seen microbursts as you know they look like they're very irregular and they tend to create a very interesting sort of multi-aged forest structure they leave behind some big trees they leave some mid canopy trees they release whatever dance regeneration is in the understory and so that creates a different kind of complexity on the landscape and it might be that that's completely natural you know that we might have just been sort of disregarding that kind of disturbance of that and it's probably been here all along and I think one of the really interesting questions now is whether that kind of disturbance is increasing on the landscape or whether we're just paying more attention to it now I think the evidence is beginning to support that with climate change and sort of atmospheric instability we really are seeing more of this kind of thing so yeah that was an interesting discussion I don't know if I answered your question fully a couple things first of all I have 100 acres of the Plainfield but we just got a USDA and RCS grant for what they call pre-commercial thinning which really amounts to taking the skinny tall trees out of the way so the big trees can grow better and so there seems to be accidentally grown on purpose some support you know to help people do that sort of thing and I had a chance a month or two ago to talk to Peter Welke in the state forestry department or something I'm not quite sure what his title is but to say that the stake ought to help people understand how to put more carbon in I'm not big enough to be in the carbon market but I'd like to do it right the kind of thing you're teaching us is part of doing it right pre-commercial thinning is a very valuable approach here and that was part of this study as well there are different terms for that people call thinning from below the canopy or timber stand improvement but that idea you're basically increasing the rate at which that forestry naturally thin itself self thinning is the other term that we use for it and that can push you along towards that lead successional oil growth condition more rapidly so actually that was part of my study as well and with cost share like that you know that's the way to make it work economically to make it work economically because otherwise typically can't pay for it yeah what is the wholesale elimination on the species like the ash yeah so ash is important it's an important sort of minor component of a lot of these forests more of a significant component on richer sites and in the coves and other kinds of landforms certainly if we're talking about green ash and by perian forests the loss of ash would be huge there but in a lot of our upland kind of rolling hardwoods especially on less productive sites it's not going to be as important of a loss, still important but it's just not as major of a component of the forest so I'm concerned about ash believe me but I'm even more concerned about hemlock woolly adelgid and the really the 100% mortality rates that they're seeing in Connecticut and Massachusetts and sort of the old hemlock stands down there just really really bad damage I'm also really concerned about the loss of large American beach and we never talk about this you know the destination of our forest from beach bark disease it is just incredibly sad and large beach have basically dropped out of the canopy of the old gross sites I'm working in in the Adirondacks whereas 30 or 40 years ago they were a really important component of those systems and of course what replaces them is this thicket of beach sprouts in the understory and I'm really concerned about that what you know the future of those forests will look like you know and as the remaining the other species in the canopy begin to die so the hemlock the sugar maple the red maple the yellow birch they're still there and they're clearly not able to regenerate now underneath this sub canopy of really really dense beach and then for other reasons too like deer brows and acid deposition and all the other calcium depletion all the other usual suspects but the beach I think are playing a really important role I'm worried that the whole system is going to basically collapse into a beach thicket over time because nothing is coming up under this beach so I'm really worried about the future of these forests and we have to do something I think to deal with this problem I'd love to see more attention paid to the beach bark disease issue there's some but not enough can you speak about the clay plain forest restoration efforts I could try I'm actually not the expert on that who's the fellow at Middlebury College Mark Lapin is the person to go to for that and TNC has done a lot of great work also I think for us so I'm not as expert about them I do know that it's a fascinating community just because it's so diverse and has that mix of more than hardwoods and central hardwoods and some of the kind of real wet site species as well scarlet oak and these others so I think that it's a fascinating challenge in terms of bringing back that diversity of species and the clay plain also it's so fascinating because where you have that hard pan of clay you have the potential for really impressive uprooting and I'm a kid I'm a tip-up mountain fan and Williams Woods and elsewhere you just see these colossally huge tip-up mountains because of that hard pan which creates these spreading root systems that lift up beautifully after a wind disturbance so some people say well this is a disaster this mess created by wind but to me, to my eyes this is beauty this is no flex this is exactly what we want so if I was doing restoration there I would try to mimic some of those processes I'm just wondering if there's been any research done for the Old Roads forest and some of the insect flights we do have does it seem like there the effects of the insects are minimized in older, more diverse forests I'm not sure I'm prepared to say that are you referring to native insects or invasive? No, the invasive I don't think I could say that and I'm not sure that we've seen any evidence of that I know that there's been a theory for a long, long time that a more diverse ecosystem should be more resilient to those kinds of invasions it's the Irish potato famine analogy but if it's a monocrop of anything it's going to be more susceptible that's probably true in any way but with the pests that we've seen with emerald ash borer hemlock-loy-delgid, peach-barf disease the mortality rates are so high even in these Old Roads it doesn't seem to be a lot of evidence but there's some really interesting new work coming out around EAB, emerald ash borer and some new thinking about how we might be able to actually manage the forest in such a way that would help us to identify whatever individual trees out there might have some degree of genetic resistance and then if we collected samples from those we could then breed a resistant variety of ash so for the first time in several years I have a glimmer of hope that we might be able to actually restore that species don't cut them all no, this preemptive salvage idea is not a great one I understand why landowners would want to do that makes sense but we need to leave some out there in order to determine if there is any resistance you know, okay let's just approach your question slightly differently so one thing I haven't mentioned yet is another new theory developing called complex adaptive systems okay, and a lot of folks especially in Quebec are working on this Christian Messier at the University of Quebec Montreal Europeans have been working on this for a long time complex adaptive systems it's the idea that systems that are more diverse structurally and functionally might actually be more adaptive to global change and it's because you know, it's sort of like Aldo Leopold, you know, the first rule of intelligent tinkering is to keep all the parts, right? you keep all the parts there and you give the system the capacity to change and to adapt even if you can't anticipate exactly how that's going to happen the more complex it is the more diverse, the more likely it is to adapt so that's one aspect of this the other is an idea called functional traits and I understand this is a group of gardeners and horticulturalists, is that right interest in this area so you're probably familiar with this idea of functional traits that plants have different groups of plants have different functional traits different industry strategies different pathologies and structures and so it's this idea that we manage for ecosystems that have a high diversity of traits the more traits, functional traits we pack into that system again, the more potential it has to change and adapt and evolve in response to global change and the work in Montreal there study just outside the city has experimentally treated a larger 52 different combinations of plant communities each of which has a different mix of functional traits and then we're going to look at how well each of those adapts to future change so from that standpoint, complex adaptive systems functional trait diversity I think you can also make an argument for all growth systems that they tend to have those characteristics so the more of this we can have on the landscape, the more adaptive the landscape will be overall at least that's our working hypothesis we'll see over the next 100 years what happens what do you mean by a functional trait a functional trait might be something like a species that is able to put on a lot of fine roots to very competitively acquire nutrients below ground, that might be a functional trait or something that produces resins or pitch to fight off insect infestation that's a functional trait or different shapes and morphologies I don't know if you know that term shapes of crowns that allow trees and other plants to compete for light at different levels in the canopy, each of those is a functional trait it's reproductive strategy it doesn't reproduce early in the die there's a weight which is the canopy that's a functional trait as well hundreds of these are we ready to wrap it up? okay I can keep going