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TOPIC: Imitative to recalculate Mohawk's Rucker Index
http://groups.google.com/group/entstrees/browse_thread/thread/b25d5526ab6b548f?hl=en
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Date: Fri, Aug 8 2008 11:23 am
From: dbhguru@comcast.net


ENTS,
On Tuesday I went to MTSF to meet urban forester and middle school teacher Marc Mertz who is doing a project about the white pine in a Harvard course he is taking. I was to be his white pine guru. As my friends in ENTS can predict, I took the opportunity to remeasure the Jake Swamp white pine, tallest confirmed tree of any species in New England. 

Jake's crown looks slightly tattered, but still intact. Over the past couple of months, Massachusetts has been hit by a series of storms with accompanying high winds. Also, this has been the wettest summer in years. So Jake is being well watered while simultaneously slapped around

The best I could do was 169.1 feet or about 0.9 feet less than I got in early June. So Jake falls from the ranks of the northeastern 170-footers. one-seventies are the exclusive province of Cook Forest State Park, PA. However, with all the rain, growth in the understory of Mohawk has been vigorous for several species. I measured a striped maple to 64 feet in height at a dbh of only 7 inches. This is a tree to watch. It is the second tallest in New England. The tallest is around 65 feet and also in MTSF. Unfortunately, the tree I measured is growing up into the foliage of an outstretched limb of a nearby sugar maple. I don't know if the striped maple can do much more than its current 64 feet, but heck for a striped maple in the Northeast, that's more than just okay. It's bloody phenomenal. Most people see striped maples between 15 and 35 feet.

It felt good to get back into the interior of the forest and resume a suspended program of monitoring the great whites and recalculating the Rucker Index. However, I have little hope of raising the index without new discoveries and those would likely not be made until mid to late fall. Regardless, I am determined to recalculate the indices of Massachusetts's tallest forests. MTSF, Ice Glen, MSF, Robinson SP, Mount Tom State Reservation, Bullard Woods, and Bryant Woods are all on my calendar. I also plan to take David Govatski and Sam Stoddard of New Hampshire on their offer for additional visits to the White Mountains and a couple of nearby white pine stands on private property. I am especially interested in the latter. Sam Stoddard is a county forester and sees lots of white pines in locations I'd never know about.

I predict that properties with big pines will stand out even more in the future as emphasis on timber harvesting increases across New England. The upward trend gives added importance to efforts to identify the best that remains and secure stronger protections. Often great pine stands are not even recognized for what they are. The pines of Ice Glen is an example and for that matter until FMTSF and ENTS came on the scene, neither were the Mohawk pines. In Massachusetts added protection can best be done through: (1) greater participation by mainstream environmental organizations in locating special stands, (2) more interest by DCR in making administrative efforts to identify and protect "special forests" apart form the what Green Certification might otherwise encourage. We are not talking of large acreages.

But legislative or executive efforts not withstanding, I plan to continue my efforts to keep exemplary sites in front of environmental organizations such as Audubon and TTOR and those on public property in front of the State's DCR. Step #1 is to recalculate MTSF Rucker Index and place it into perspective vis-a-vie other eastern big/tall trees sites. I will also reach out to management foresters in DCR to visit Mohawk and survey the mature second growth areas. They need benchmarks for comparison and I know just where to take them.

Bob