Sylvania WIlderness and hemlock    Lee E. Frelich
   Mar 28, 2003 11:11 PST 
Michele:

Sylvania Wilderness is in Ottawa National Forest in western Upper 
Michigan, and right on the Wisconsin border near Land O'Lakes.

It was in the big package of wilderness areas signed into law in 1984 by
President Reagan. Sylvania includes about 15,000 acres of forest that was
never logged, mostly hemlock, but also with some large patches of sugar
maple, and some small groves of white pine. There is no hemlock looper or
woolly adelgid there at this time. It gets down to -35 there in winter, so
the adelgids are going to have a tough time if they reach the area.

The wilderness area is one township (6 x 6 miles) and was the summer
retreat for the Fisher Family (of Fisher Body Corporation, the automobile
bodies of which were used in GM cars for several decades). They sold it to
the forest service in the early 1980s. There is a good system of hiking
trails and also about 20 lakes, some of which are linked by portage trails,
so you can either hike or canoe to the lakeside campsites.

The are is far enough north and also 1000 feet above Lake Superior in
elevation, that tree heights are not impressive (or should I say they are
impressive given the location?), ranging from 90-100 feet for hemlock and
sugar maple and up to 110 feet for basswood, and 130 feet for white pine.
That's strange, its the only forest I know of where basswood is the tallest
except for white pine.

Sylvania has been one of our (Univ. of WI and MN) research sites for
large-scale patch dynamics caused by disturbances and neighborhood effects
since 1981.

If you thought the bugs were bad in northern MN, you should see Sylvania.

Lee
Re: Wilderness and George Catlin   Lee E. Frelich
  May 21, 2002 06:53 PDT 
Bob and Miles:

You have hit upon one of my favorite topics: the great mysteries of
paleoecology. Paleoecologists do the same thing as archeologists, except
that we study forests of the past rather than human settlements, although
obviously there is a strong link between the two. We use every form of
evidence you can imagine--old paintings, written accounts of forests, tree
cores, and fossil wood, leaves, cones and needles (macrofossils) and pollen
(microfossils)--to reconstruct the forest of hundreds or thousands of years
ago. I can't tell you what a thrill it was when as a graduate student
during 1987 I met Margaret Davis--arguably the world's foremost forest
paleoecologist--and she decided on the spot after talking with me for 20
minutes or so, to hire me as her post-doctoral associate at the University
of MN, even though I had no paleoecology experience. So I packed up and
moved to MN and learned how to do pollen analysis. The first sedimentary
core I analyzed has been named 'Lee's Hollow' in the scientific
literature. The hollow is in the hemlock and maple forest of Sylvania
Wilderness in Upper MI, which started out as a black spruce forest after
the retreat of the glaciers about 9700 years ago, then progressed to jack
pine for a few thousand years, then white pine and red oak for a few more
thousand years, until hemlock entered the picture 3100 years ago as the
interglacial started to wane and the climate became wetter. As far as we
can tell, that hemlock stand has never had a severe disturbance of any sort
in 3100 years, making it one of the oldest forest stands in the Midwest.
How do I know the black spruce forest was there 9700 years ago? Well, there
were black spruce needles at the bottom of the sediment core. I sent 35 of
these needles to the atomic accelerator dating facility at the University
of AZ, and after a rather long wait of 6 months (they were dating the
Shroud of Turin at the time and I had lower priority, so I had to wait),
the date came back of 9700 years before present.

By the way, Miles, you may be interested to know that 7000 years ago, at
the height of the interglacial, when summers were substantially warmer than
now and the prairie-forest border at the latitude of Minneapolis had moved
into Wisconsin, there was a maple-basswood forest in the middle of
Iowa. Richard Baker's fossilized plant remains from the banks of
meandering streams proves it. It makes one wonder if big chunks of mesic
forest can arise in the middle of the prairie just by chance, or because
the trees themselves alter the local climate. Its another mystery yet to
be figured out.

Lee


Sylvania Wilderness, MI   Lee E. Frelich
  Aug 23, 2005 07:11 PDT 

ENTS:

Yesterday I returned from a trip to Sylvania Wilderness in Upper Michigan,
which has about 15,000 acres of forest that was never logged other than a
few white pine removals.

Sylvania has a mosaic of hemlock and sugar maple forest patches, and the
origin of this spatial pattern has been the subject of much research among
paleoecologists (including Margaret Davis and Shinya Sugita) and forest
ecologists such as myself, resulting in over 20 papers published in the
scientific literature. The story seems to be that there was a mosaic of
white pine and oak forest. Hemlock tried to enter the area 5500 years ago,
but was wiped out across its range by the hemlock looper, and it took 2000
years to recover (similar to what the response will be the second time the
species disappears due to the wooley adelgid). So, 3300 years ago, a
recovering hemlock began to replace white pine in Sylvania, and this
reinforced the trend towards a cooler and wetter climate that was taking
place at the time, by shutting off the flow of fire across the landscape,
which in turn allowed sugar maple to replace oak in the intervening
patches. The mosaic of maple and hemlock has been maintained for the last
3000 years by neighborhood effects. Hemlock seedlings are unsuccessful in
maple patches, because there are not any rotting hemlock logs there, which
are their best seed germination sites, and because they are smothered by
maple leaf litter, since they only reach a height of 1 inch their first
year. Maple is unsuccessful under hemlock because they do not get the
period of high sunlight in the spring that they get under a maple canopy,
leading to a negative carbon gain once the energy in the seed is used.

Unfortunately at this time the forest is starting to be converted to some
sort of savanna due to high deer populations and European earthworm
invasion. There has been no successful tree recruitment for almost 80
years. When I worked in Sylvania during the 1980s, there was a continuous
green layer of herbs and tree seedlings on the forest floor. Now, even that
is gone, most of the forest floor is brown, and only about 10% had
vegetation. As trees in the 200-400 year age class die, they are being
replaced by suppressed saplings and smaller trees that are 80-150 years old
in some cases, and in other cases, there is nothing underneath and the gaps
are remaining empty. Pennsylvania sedge (Carex Pensylvanica) is a native
grass-like herb that is starting to appear in these gaps. In other forests
we have seen Pennsylvania sedge take over the understory, returning green
to the forest floor, but also preventing seedlings from surviving. So my
guess is that there will be some sort of sedge savanna for a few hundred
years, and after that I can't guess at what will happen.

At this point there are still a lot of 200-400 year old sugar and red
maples, yellow birch, hemlock, black ash, and basswoods (the latter
probably only 100-200 years old). in areas with rolling pitted outwash,
trees around the hollows reach 100-110 feet tall, which is the maximum
height for a place at 47 degrees latitude and 1700 feet elevation.

Starting next summer, we are going to recensus 27 ha (about 67 acres) of
old-growth forest plots where every trees was mapped during 1988-1989. We
will get quantification of the disappearance of the herbs and seedlings,
and decreasing density of trees caused by the forest decline syndrome of
deer and earthworms.

Lee
Re: Sylvania Wilderness, MI   Kirk Johnson
  Aug 23, 2005 14:23 PDT 

That is a very interesting description of the Sylvania Wilderness Area.
Thank you for that. I like to promote the use (and protection & expansion)
of America's National Widerness Preservation Sytem, so thought I would
contribute the following links:

http://www.fs.fed.us/r9/ottawa/recreation/rogs/sylvania_welcome.doc

http://www.wilderness.net/index.cfm?fuse=NWPS&sec=wildView&wid=588

http://www.fs.fed.us/r9/ottawa/recreation/wilderness/

http://www.fs.fed.us/r9/ottawa/images/maps/sylvania_04.pdf