Predictions – of snow and other changes

I’m sorry for a delay in adding to this blog – Christmas festivities here at Harvard Forest, along with a trip back to Scotland over the holidays, topped off with 10 days of flu which I guess I collected at Boston Airport along with my luggage.

Prospect Hill Road

It’s noticeably colder. My thermometer recorded -20C at new Year, and tonight, after a fresh fall of snow yesterday, we’re expected to reach -16C. In the basement next to the wood boiler is the Equipment Room, full of strange bits of kit, plus a pile of snowshoes. Poking around one weekend (as a distraction from working) I uncovered the stratified layers of snowshoe technology. The upper layer are newish aluminium and fabric, but the lower layers start to include wood and canvas, and right at the bottom are pairs of traditional teardrop ‘tennis racket’ designs. Never throw anything away…Anyway, this weekend I shall try out a pair, and report back on my elegant progress.

Avenue of Sugar Maples

Looking down to Highway 32
I slipped spectacularly on the ice underneath the snow about 30 seconds after taking this picture

Cold for the cows...

It occurs to me that I haven’t fully explained what I’m actually trying to do here. I’ve spent much of my time so far honing my central argument, and now feel confident enough to release it into the wild – and start to talk to forest and conservation managers. So this isn’t a bad time to try and summarize it in the blog. Here goes:

Many of the things we appreciate about trees are provided best (or only) by big, old trees. There are exceptions, of course - nobody wants a 200 year old Christmas tree, and plantation forestry is mostly about growing trees until their early middle age. But for wildlife, shade, water management, landscapes, carbon storage and perhaps our own wellbeing, we need the presence of big old trees. 

I thus started with the view that maintaining and renewing our stock of big, old trees is perhaps the chief responsibility of forest managers, particularly in conservation or multi-use forests. The difficulty is that growing big old trees takes a long time - and for all that time the tree must find its environment viable - i.e. remain within its limits - drought, cold, wind, resistance to pests/pathogens, or combinations of these. So when we select trees for planting (or allow them to regenerate) with the aim of producing some big old trees, we're essentially making a bet that our efforts will be rewarded in 150-400 years' time with trees that have remained within their limits for all that time. 

Our current policy is to promote native tree species, in part because we have evidence that they can successfully live in the required location for centuries - the evidence of that is in front of us. However, I'm increasingly concerned that by promoting the exclusive use of local native tree species, we're making the mistake of assuming that the trees' environment will be as benign over the next few centuries as it was over the last few.

'Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future' - famously attributed to Niels Bohr

There's been a great deal of work done to model and predict the future changes in climate. In the UK researchers in the Forestry Commission have used this data to predict the viability of many of our native tree species, and the news was mostly good - that the expected range of future climates don't seem to be an overt threat to the health of our trees. But the data they used only went up to 2080, and almost no climate forecasts (and no analyses of future tree health) go past 2100. Making decisions for 150-400 years based on predictions for the next 80 years or so seems to me to be extrapolating well beyond what the data will bear, into a period where we cannot know the climates our trees will have to live through. What we are pretty sure of is that substantial climate change is already inevitable,  and that the response of trees and their pests/pathogens is very hard to predict accurately.

So, what should we do, if we can't answer the question 'what will be the viable tree species for the next few centuries'? It seems to me that the only way to approach that problem is by embracing the risks and uncertainty - and that means not putting all our eggs in one basket - i.e. using a diversity of genetic origins, species and perhaps management approaches.

Some forests are naturally diverse, particularly tropical forests. The great north-eastern forest in which I working is pretty diverse too, with 115 main tree species between the Carolinas and Quebec. Any system with such a lot of diversity has - automatically - significant redundancy - that is, species could be lost and the forest will continue to function. Europe's forests are much less diverse (a function of the orientation of our mountain ranges) and my own forests in Scotland are significantly less diverse again. Our Caledonian pinewoods are dominated by our single native conifer, Scots pine. It follows that the loss of any tree species in these low-diversity forests would have an impact much more devastating than in more diverse systems. 

200 year old oaks, dying from drought. Vierzon, Loire, France

 Which, to me, poses some difficult questions of our central woodland conservation principle of only using local native tree species. If that principle leaves our low-diversity woodlands open to future risks of catastrophic failure, perhaps it needs to be modified to accept a wider range of species, including non-native ones. Of course, such 'new natives' would need to have some functional overlap with existing natives. As an example of this thinking, before I left SNH, I made a recommendation that we should stop advocating the removal of sycamore from woodlands that would naturally be dominated by elm and ash. We expect to lose the elms, and the chances seem high that we'll see significant losses due to Ash Dieback. So, these woods may lose both their key canopy species, ash and elm, in the foreseeable future. Sycamore, with its large shady canopy (analogous to elm) and its basic bark pH (elm and ash) has become arguably an asset, not a menace, despite its non-native status. 

This seems to me a good test of my logic, and I wonder what you think? 

Nature Wars

We're used to news of the natural world being dominated by stories of decline, loss and extinction, and those trends are undoubtedly very real. But we also have problems of super-abundance, and those are all the more difficult when they stem from perfectly valid programmes to save rare species. Jim Sterba, from the Wall Street Journal came to Harvard Forest a few weeks back to give a talk on this topic through his new book 'Nature Wars - how wildlife comebacks turned backyards into battlegrounds'. It's a great read, and I recommend it - full of eye-watering facts and appalled realisation of the size of unanticipated problems.

White-tailed buck

What particularly struck me was the chapter on deer - the white-tailed deer, Odocoileus virginiana. By the end of the 19th Century, habitat loss and hunting had reduced the population to 350000 across the whole US. In a century or so, they have rebounded to 40 million or so, and despite an 'informal army' of hunters as numerous as the ten largest armies in the world, and an annual kill of more than 6 million deer, are still rapidly increasing in numbers. Some of the consequences of this super-abundance are familiar to us in Scotland – hollowed-out woodlands deprived of understorey, regeneration and non-deer wildlife, people and deer injured and killed in collisions with cars, damage to farm crops, and a ‘mass transit system for ticks carrying Lyme disease’.  Some of the causes are familiar to us as well – hunting lobbies intent on maintaining high populations for their sport, and a focus on shooting bucks rather than does. But Sterba emphasizes a new factor – the regrowth of the great north-eastern forests, and their new residential use.

From the diorama pictures in my last post, you’ll have picked up on the trajectory of the forests here – the massive transformation by European settlers from a mosaic of old forest and beaver/native American maintained open areas to open farmland. The Erie Canal and later railroads opened the much better soils of the MidWest to export-led agriculture, and New England and the rural east emptied – and the trees returned – but so did the people. What’s not obvious – especially to summer visitors – is actually how many houses there are behind the green walls of roadside trees. Not until the leaves fall do you see a forest perforated by houses everywhere. In Massachusetts houses can be built without restriction anywhere which has a frontage on any ‘Town’ road – which includes all the rough tracks and dead-end dirt roads on which I regularly get lost while out cycling. The dean of the Yale School of Forestry, John Gordon, made a great observation:

“If you looked down at Connecticut from on high in summer, what you’d see was mostly unbroken forest. If you did the same thing in late fall, after the leaves had fallen, what you’d see was stockbrokers.”

This Perforated Forest is essentially a massive deer sanctuary. Residences have a kind of petro-ecology of nutritious lawns and shrubs, mown and fertilised, and are often undisturbed except during the periods when cars hum with commuters or kids at the beginning and end of working days. Not only that, but this perforated forest is largely off-limits to the deer’s principal predator – humans. For example, restrictions on firearm use near roads or houses make about 60% of Massachusetts safe for deer apart from vehicle collisions – and make even the task of stabilising deer numbers almost impossible. Add to this mix a range of public attitudes which include energetic anti-hunting attitudes, and the ‘almost impossible’ has in many places moved to ‘impossible’.

It’s fascinating that, throughout ‘Nature Wars’,  there is no coherent conservation philosophy of how we should manage these novel landscapes or runaway species management ‘successes’. Here, as in Scotland, we have no coherent vision, just advocacy from partisan groups promoting their species or habitat or land use at the expense of others. In a crowded world, with space at a premium, perhaps this is understandable. But I don't think that conservation philosophy has really accepted that we’re in a post-Eden world, and that we need a new mental architecture to help us manage messy issues like this – novel, widespread, and where an objective of ‘make it more natural’ becomes both unattainable and meaningless.

Giant mice

I thought I would show you a little more of Harvard Forest - some pictures, and those giant mice. I stay in an apartment in the old 1760s farmhouse, converted in the 1940s to provide staff and visitor accommodation. The main building, Shaler Hall was built in the 1940s too, some years after the establishment of Harvard Forest in 1907. Commuting takes about 1 minute, which will be handy when the snows come (cost of a set of snow tires significantly exceeds the value of my car, so I just need to avoid driving on snow).

'Community House' - the 1760s Sanderson Farmhouse

My office - Shaler Hall

The 'ship's boiler' - wood-fueled 1940s system deep in the basement

The other key feature of Harvard Forest is the Fisher Museum (Shaler and Fisher were early directors here). It's most famous feature are a series of 25 dioramas, showing the changes in New England's forests and landscapes. It's fair to say that before I arrived here, the dioramas weren't particularly on my list of things to get excited about - but actually, they're rather wonderful. My photography isn't great - combination of flash and glass cases not helpful - but the next 5 illustrate the transition from pre-colonial deep woods (interspersed with some open areas) through the immense clearances, agricultural abandonment and regrowth. Living here now, in Massachusetts with 62% forest cover, it's extraordinary to imagine the landscape looking like, well, north Devon really. These dioramas really make that contrast clearly.

Old-growth pre-colonization forest

1800 - peak of farming intensity. Those stone walls are threaded through today's forest, buried in drifts of autumn leaves 

1800 - peak of farming intensity

'Old-field' succession - the return of the trees after farming is abandoned

Mid 20th Century - the forest returned, with timber management dominant in some places

Oh, and the giant mice? Not so long ago a pair of mice found their way into one of the dioramas, and scrambled around in the wire trees, and dwarfed these model woodsmen, until the diorama could be carefully taken apart and the mice restored to a non-Lilliputian world.

Man-sized mouse

Taxes, Big trees, and Happy St Andrew's Day

I'm afraid I've missed a week updating this blog - last week was very focused on preparing for a big seminar  on 3oth November presenting my thinking so far to the (academically intimidating) staff at Harvard Forest and and others (including landscape ecology professor and international guru Richard Forman). There's nothing like a big presentation to force your thinking from the vague to the specific, as you try to sum up complicated ideas into pithy sentences. I enjoyed being able to start the presentation with a 'Happy St. Andrew's Day slide, fresh that morning from Scotland, of Jonathan setting off for his school's sponsored walk. 

Happy St. Andrew's Day

It seemed to go well, and we had a long discussion afterwards. One of the striking things I've learned is that in thinking about the effect of climate change and novel pathogen effects on trees, proposals for action have generally been dominated by saving species. A good example is the Torreya, a subtropical conifer native to only a few fragments in Florida, and soon to be lost to rising temperatures. The 'Torreya Guardians' - a group of enthusiasts - have decided to save the species by planting new stands far to the north in North Carolina.

Planting Torreya far outside its 'natural' range

In this case it seems a reasonable thing to do, although I have detected some concern that such 'guerrilla conservation' - i.e. outside formally consultations or programmes - might lead to unfortunate actions elsewhere, since similar processes have given us many damaging invasive species (think grey squirrels). However the key element for me is that such actions may save species (by moving them to another part of a giant continent-sized country), but don't maintain the forest where they're currently found. In small countries/islands like UK and Scotland, there may not be room to do that, and in any case, we probably want to find a way of maintaining our forests where they are now. That's a much bigger challenge.

Last week also saw final bike rides of the year - it's pretty cold now, and the roads have all been salted. Just before the frosts and snows I rode a loop through the tobacco growing country along the Connecticut River, and stopped to have my lunch beneath  the Sunderland Sycamore (Platanus occidentalis - not the European sycamore) - reputed to be the largest tree east of the Mississippi, and anywhere up to 400 years old. 

Sunderland sycamore (wikipedia photo - I forgot my camera!)

Recently measured at 113 feet tall and a with a girth of 25 feet, it has a huge presence. Those figures come courtesy of the Eastern Native Tree Society, a group with the coolest acronym in woodland conservation (one for Tolkien enthusiasts...).

Taxes remain big news here, but nevertheless I was surprised to receive a tax demand for a car tax from the local Town council of Petersham. It's only $12.50, but its part of the system of local Town councils setting tax rates, collection, and spending at a far finer grain than anything that we're used.

Petersham Town common (i.e. green)

The Town of Petersham has a population of about 1300 - broadly comparable to Glen Urquhart where I live. However the range of local responsibilities is much larger, including the Town Police (2 full-time officers), the school, the Board of Health, Fire, Highways, Animal Health and Planning Departments. This strikes a different balance between local accountability and (probably) the efficiency of multiple tiny departments. One of the issues my colleagues here have emphasized is that school spending can vary enormously depending on the local property tax rates. Poorer towns often simply can't pay for public schools as good as those in wealthy towns - which seems likely to entrench privilege and opportunity for the children of residents in more wealthy areas.

Thanksgiving, conservation and the US gun culture

It's Thanksgiving - one of the central US holidays, focused particularly on family get-togethers - vast numbers of people travelling, and consequently the institute is emptying fast, apart from rare migrants like myself. It's also thankfully relatively uncommercialized, apart from all the food, which is why there's been much disquiet at the decision of some big stores like Walmart to open tomorrow night - Thanksgiving evening - for the first time. I've been invited to several Thanksgiving dinners - people keep saying that nobody should be alone at Thanksgiving - so tomorrow's a day off from the office.

It's getting colder, but we've been in a 2 week dry spell under a canopy of high pressure, so no snow yet - some forecast for next week. The weekend is forecasting similar, dry sunny weather but with stronger winds. Going for a bike ride with windchill at -15C may be, er, bracing.

Ice developing over a nearby pond - the ubiquitous beaver lodge in the background

All the leaves now gone, waiting for the snow

Guns and Conservation

Election unhappiness continues for the Republicans, and  views like this from right-wing commentators  are not unusual:

‘America, like Western civilization, is a set of ideas, institutions, and ways of doing things. For all intents and purposes, this has become occupied territory; land occupied by hominids who subscribe to a primitive set of foreign superstitions and wantonly attempt to impose those primitive superstitions on the rest of us.’  (Breitbart website)

One consequence of this viewpoint is that it seems to encourage people to buy guns and ammunition. Both Obama's first election win, and even more so the current election process has led to big increases in sales, as the graph below indicates. 

Sales of guns and ammunition rise to unprecedented levels.

How does this fit with conservation? We had a fascinating seminar last week on a piece of 1930s legislation - the Wildlife Restoration Act. This Act, and later amendments means that all sales of guns, ammunition and archery equipment is subject to an 11% federal tax. This is paid to the Federal government which then distributes it to the states, paying 75% of the costs of suitable projects. 

Hunting season at Harvard Forest - I wear my day-glo cycling jacket to go for a walk

Thus for conservation projects, the last few years have been bumper years. 2009 provided funds 150% of the average in the Bush years, and 2012-13 looks even better - this single source of income is expected to pay out $555 million - about £370 million, purely from this guns-n-ammo tax. The staff in the Fish and Wildlife Service (somewhat equivalent to SNH) have been trying to prepare better for this surge by encouraging more projects. Incidentally, the other major source of state funding for conservation comes from the sale of hunting licences - which means that here in Massachusetts, $60 million of the state conservation budget  (roughly equivalent to SNH's total budget in Scotland) comes entirely from hunting and gun taxes. That's an interesting contrast to Scotland, where hunting contributes little or no direct revenue to wider society. 

Election Fever, and a trip to Martha's Vineyard

It's grand theatre, with billion-dollar budgets and full-spectrum media coverage, but even for interested spectators it's a relief its over. Especially for those with a landline/phone number - with endless 'robocalls' - recorded messages - and calls from live party volunteers. In Massachusetts the presidential election was always going to go with Obama, but we had a very close senate race, with significant implications for the overall control of the US Senate at stake. A dozen of us - Harvard Forest staff and fellows living nearby - gathered for the evening in our conference room, with some good Pennsylvanian beer, super-sized packs of unhealthy nibbles and a bottle of champagne (just in case). As always, the earliest results are analysed in minute detail, even if they are only for 'Assistant Dog-catcher, West Texas' type races (locally there was a competitive race for the local 'Registrar of Deeds'). However the drama unfolded as I'm sure you know, and  all that's done now apart from some fine examples of ungraciousness in defeat (e.g. 'the typical Democratic base constituency of the poor, stupid, and illiterate', or 'the growing number of Democrats who are scums, bums, union thugs, perverts, old fools, young fools, racists and traitors'). 

Last weekend, a change of gear from the political drama to the landscape drama of Cape Cod and Martha's Vineyard. As the ice sheet receded at the end of the last ice-age, it left gigantic moraines and colossal volumes of sand around the southern edge of New England, in the shape of the islands and penninsulas running from Long Island east to Nantucket and Cape Cod. Several of us migratory Fellows were invited for a weekend to the Harvard Forest Director's house on the island of Martha's Vineyard, and in glorious sun and near record warm temperatures we enjoyed a wonderful contrast to the early winter woods of western Massachusetts. Martha's Vineyard (MV has made a transition from early settlement in 1640 to whaling prosperity and and now as an exclusive and very expensive holiday island. 

This house on Cape Poge is yours for $8.5 million dollars (also required: an insouciant disregard for recent and projected sea-level rise)

 For those with long memories, the island of Chappaquiddick (next to MV) and a certain bridge will stir some memories. In 1969 after a party,Ted Kennedy, Senator, brother of JFK and potential presidential candidate drove off the side of an island bridge leaving his female companion drowned - but failed to report this for many hours. The swirl of conspiracy around this probably ended any presidential hopes. The bridge has since been rebuilt (below), and to my delight, without any evident irony the guard rails either side have been ungraded to anti-tank status. No Kennedy's gonna drive off this bridge any time soon!

 MV has some wonderful coastal scenery, with saltmarshes and endless beaches, and even a large arid pitchpine/scruboak  forest on the central plain of coarse sand. It's here that the Heath hen - a ground nesting bird related to the prairie chicken - finally became extinct in 1932, despite one of the earliest formal efforts  in conservation history. Apparently a 1791 Act to preserve 'Heath-hen and other game' ran into problems with a misinterpretation of 'Heath-hen' as 'Heathen' - not a helpful error in Puritan New England!

Chappaquiddick saltmarsh

endless beaches

pitch-pine forest

 Hurricane Sandy hit the sandy cliffs of southern MV hard, accelerating the long-term erosion trends already present. Part of the unseasonal warmth we enjoyed is connected to this event - the sea here is currently about 4C warmer than normal, allowing the tropical hurricane to maintain its intensity further north than normal.

In the shellfishing harbour at Menemsha, the Hurricane Sandy surge overtopped these quayside posts

Particularly striking was the (probably) doomed efforts of the super-rich to defend their beachfront mansions. At Wasque Point after Hurricane Sandy the owner had initiated this mammoth effort with giant sandbags to stop the cliff erosion.

Wasque Point less than 2 years ago

Post-Sandy efforts to hold back the waves...

the beach a mass of fallen trees and tangled driftwood

After the storm...

Well, we had a stormy 24 hours, maybe 3 inches of rain, but nothing worse than a winter gale in Shetland. The whole university shut down on Monday, and we lost power for half a day as a tree outside the institute fell onto our power lines. 

The unusual westward swerve of Hurricane Sandy was so large as to take the worst weather away to our west, and away from the coast the storm surge was of course not an issue. The weekend was an extraordinary time, with the possibility of calamity even squeezing the elections out of the conversations...

I've been following with great interest the ash dieback developments in the UK, culminating in a COBRA meeting today in some bunker under Whitehall (add your own sentence here including the words horse, stable, bolted and door). It's fascinating to see both  press and website comments eager to embrace a positive note - maybe it won't be as bad as Dutch elm disease, maybe ash will recover, or my personal favourite - 'Ecologists know that Nature is resilient'. I'm all for happy endings to stories of mild peril and rescue, but if there's one thing ecology can tell us, it's that in the face of human influences Nature isn't proving very resilient at all. 

We had a lunchtime discussion this week with staff from a private college in Connecticut who have just built a no-expenses-spared environmental research institute, and were looking for ideas for what research they should consider doing. I guess when a major donor offers you a large chunk of cash you say yes quickly, and some of the details get left until later. We had an entertaining debate over the inspirational qualities of 'wacky' research -with the Harvard Forest simulated hurricane being a good example, but numerous other examples - reintroducing species, mouse-proof fencing, blowing up trees to create deadwood and so on.

Next week - our first snow of the winter, an all-night election nail-biter, and a trip into Boston...

Election quote of the week: "It's time for the Governor to slalom down from Bullshit Mountain"

Most heard local radio song: 'Tequila makes her clothes fall off'