ENTS,

      Yesterday Monica and I returned to the Frog Pond area of MTST.  I've written about Frog Pond before and send a few images. However, I'll be concentrating more on Frog Pond for the remainder of this year and will be photographically documenting it. I need to get with Gary Beluzo to learn how to make optimal use of my iPhone for photographic documentation tied to GPS coordinates and other data. Now to the images.
    

FrogPond.jpg 331K View Download

1. The first attached image gives us a peek at it. The brown on the banks is not dirt, but pine needles. 

bigBlueStem.jpg 451K View Download

 2. The second two images highlight the meadow adjacent to the Frog Pond Pines.  The first of the two is of what? Yes, big bluestem grass. It grows in both upper and lower meadows. There are many clumps of it in the lower meadow, plus a ton of little bluestem. 

LowerMeadowGrasses.jpg 279K View Download

 3. The third image was taken from very near the Frog Pond looking toward Hawks Mountain and the Trout Brook Cove. Hawks is a small mountain rising from a basal elevation of 560 feet to just over 1800 feet. It has a little old growth on it it a a couple of places. There are many white ash trees growing near its base surpass 120 feet in height. On the side of a connecting ridge between Hawks and the west side of Trout Brook grows 'Sweet Thing' a 150.2-foot white ash. It is the tallest of its species that we know about in the Northeast. I will photograph it later in the summer or early fall.
 

MirrorPine.jpg 381K View Download

4. The fourth image was taken in the Trees of Peace. It is of the Mirror Pine, a 156-foot tall, 11-foot circumference big boy. It isn't the mirror image of any other tree, but mirrors the tall trees of the Trees of Peace Grove from the road. Its base is deep in the duff below the road (the old colonial Mohawk Trail), which continues to accumulate. Were its root system better exposed so that 4.5 feet up the trunk from the chosen base point  would stop at a lower point on the trunk, the girth would likely be at 11.4 or 11.5 feet. Will and I measured the tree 3 years ago. Time flies when you having fun.

     While at the north end of Frog Pond, I measured two more lofty young pines. The measurements are:

       1. Height = 146.7 ft, Girth = 7.4 ft
       2. Height = 147.2 ft, Girth = 6.8 ft

     These two bring the total to 3 that exceed 145 feet in height and probably don't exceed 100 years in age. The Sweetie Pie Pine at the south end of Frog Pond is the 3rd 140-footer. More specifically, it was 140.5 feet last year. It is now at least 141.5. There are probably 3 or 4 other 140s in the Frog Pond stand, plus many in the 130s. Virtually all of them are over 120 feet. The pines are young and have the potential to put on 10 to 20 feet more of height before height growth diminishes to 2 or 3 inches per year. It is a stand to watch. Girths among the young trees are modest. Big girths will be slow in coming because the pines form dense stands except for a few bordering the old Shunpike. A fewpines  eventually may make it to around 12 feet in girth. They have the potential. At the present, most are from 6.5 to 8.5 feet around. A few trees exceed 9 feet.
      The Frog Pond Pines are sequestering a lot of carbon each year at a rate that belies the timber community's belief that mature trees do not efficiently sequester carbon (the trees are young by my criteria, but mature by theirs). Later this summer, I intend to delineate a fixed area in the Frog Pond stand, measure every tree in the area, calculate the total standing volume, and the rate at which the stand is currently accumulating mass. It will be a numerically intensive exercise. I'll submit an article to the Bulletin on the results. 
      Basically, each pine will be measured and a volume form factor assigned. The average radial and height growth will be determined for each tree for the past growing season. The Macroscope 25/45 will be used to determine the annual growth increment.  Volume analysis will be done using approaches outlined in the latest Bulletin of the Eastern Native Tree Society.

Bob