| 162
and growing |
Robert
Leverett |
| Mar
29, 2007 05:38 PST |
ENTS,
As of this morning, our membership stood at a
new high of 162. So,
welcome aboard to our newest members. We hope to hear from you.
However,
we should tell you though that you live among a vast silent
majority.
That isn't by our desires. We love hearing from each member. All
of you
are equally important. We value diversity of background and
interest.
There is room for all in ENTS and all tree topics. We also point
out
that ENTS is not an activist organization. We do scientific
research,
historical documentation, just share information, and we
celebrate trees
and forests in a variety of ways as our website amply reveals.
In terms of the distribution of our
membership, we are gaining ground
across the East. In the early days of ENTS, the big tree reporting
spotlight fell mostly on the Northeast and southern Appalachians
with an
outlier location or two like Congaree NP in South Carolina and
Hartwick
Pines in Michigan. Then, the upper Mid-west got a big boost,
courtesy of
our vice president, Dr. Lee Frelich being located in Minnesota.
We get
great reports from Lee, although they often relate to the
weather
extremes he is caught in as he visits his research sites. Lee
doesn't
avoid blizzards like I do. He welcomes them.
A third focus of attention has developed in
Arkansas, courtesy of Dr.
Don Bragg, a research forester-forest ecologist with the USDA
Forest
Service and now the creator and editor of the ENTS journal,
"Bulletin of
the Eastern Native Tree Society". More recently, we picked
up Larry
Tucei, Jr. in Mississippi. Larry has opened our eyes to the
extent of
large, charismatic live oaks across the deep South that were escaping
our
notice and the importance of getting coverage from all parts of
the
East.
At present, regular site and tree reporting is
clustered in a
relatively few states: Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, New York,
North
Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, and Mississippi
receive
the lion's share of attention. Other states such as Florida,
Alabama,
West Virginia, Vermont, Maine, Missouri, Virginia, New
Hampshire, Ohio,
Indiana, Missouri, Maine, and Michigan get more occasional
coverage. The
truly heaviest concentration has been in Pennsylvania,
Massachusetts,
and New York in the Northeast and the southern Appalachian
region, and
recently Mississippi, in the South. When our dear friend Colby
Rucker
was alive, we had good coverage from Maryland.
All sites and tree topics are tied together in
our unexcelled
website, courtesy of our webmaster Ed Frank. There is no way we
can
overstate the importance of the role that Ed has played. He has
become
the internet voice of ENTS.
While we hope to get tree dimension and
site description data as we
pick up members in new areas, we also value qualitative
descriptions.
But most of all, we just want to hear from you.
Again, welcome aboard. Oh BTW, when we
use "ENTS" we refer to the
Eastern Native Tree Society. When we use the term "Ent",
we refer to a
member. An Ent is a person. ENTS is the organization.
Bob
Robert T. Leverett
Cofounder, Eastern Native Tree Society
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