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TOPIC: Trip to MI Biological Station
http://groups.google.com/group/entstrees/browse_thread/thread/867e8095180bdc53?hl=en
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== 1 of 1 ==
Date: Fri, Jul 11 2008 3:26 pm
From: Lee Frelich


ENTS:

I spent Monday-Thursday at University of Michigan Biological Station near
Pellston MI. They own almost 10,000 acres of forest and six miles of
shoreline on Douglas Lake. I was invited there to give the Bennet Memorial
Lecture for the 100th season of the field station (the topic was 400 years
of fire, wind and climate change in the boreal forests of northern MN) and
I also gave a lecture on earthworm invasion.

The forests are mostly bigtooth aspen, with red and sugar maple and red oak
coming up underneath, and a few scattered patches of red and white pine.
Hemlock and yellow birch occur in a few areas with richer than average
soils. Some of the aspen reach the impressive age of 170 years and 120 feet
in height. Most are about 90 years old and 60-70 feet tall.

Most of the forest is in the middle stages of earthworm invasion with
Lumbricus rubellus (leaf worm) present in most areas. There are very few
earthworm free areas, and a few areas in terminal stages of invasion with
the nightcrawler (L terrestris) present in large numbers.

The station recently acquired an 'old growth' forest on Colonial Point,
which has huge red oaks of veneer quality which were about to be logged
when the tract was purchased. The trees are mostly 170-180 years old, with
large very tall white pine, red oak, sugar maple, basswood, and beech with
a few hemlock. Apparently the site was important in Native American
Culture, and there is evidence that it was farmed by them in small patches
that rotated to different places every few years. They did not plow the
site, thus leaving the tip up mound microtopography of the forest intact,
and there are lots of storage pits, charcoal, and pottery remnants. Its a
site that should be in the ENTS tree height database, once someone visits
and gets some good tree height measurements.

Lee

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TOPIC: Tornados
http://groups.google.com/group/entstrees/browse_thread/thread/867e8095180bdc53?hl=en
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== 2 of 5 ==
Date: Mon, Jul 14 2008 5:30 am
From: doncbragg@netscape.net


Lee/ENTS--

I spent parts of two summers as an undergraduate working for Dr. Terry Sharik (then at MTU) on the UMBS in the early 1990s.? We used Colonial Point as a test stand for this radar study we were conducting.? I clearly remember the beautiful northern red oaks of the stand, but what impressed me most was the very large red maple we found on one of our plots.? I made a trip to this stand a couple of years ago and reported on it (very briefly) for ENTS.? To my great pleasure, I was able to relocate the big red maple, which was (in July 2006) 44.9 inches in DBH.? There are also some fairly tall eastern white pine in parts of this stand.

I also remember working in a gradient of aspen, from the dry, stunted stands in the deepest part of the sandy outwash to the highly productive moraine to the west (towards Pellston).? These stands were largely the same age, but vastly different in productivity, structure, and composition (besides the aspen).? I think there was also a stand of old (perhaps very old) northern whitecedar along a spring-fed stream in a steep valley carved into the outwash.

A fascinating place, to be sure, and home of decades of intriguing ecological research.

Don C. Bragg

== 4 of 5 ==
Date: Mon, Jul 14 2008 3:33 pm
From: Lee Frelich

Don:

Yes, the area known as 'The Gorge' has some old hemlock and white cedar,
and at the end of the trail, there is a flat wet area of white cedar swamp.

Lee