Another productive weekend   Robert Leverett   Sep 12, 2005 07:53 PDT  ENTS:    This weekend was another numerically intense one for yours truly, both Saturday and Sunday. A full accounting follows. Saturday:     I modeled the huge Mount Tom hemlock for volume. The big tree about drove me nuts, but by the end of the modeling, I settled on 749.8 cubes. However, based on the events of Sunday, the jury on the hemlocks volume must be declared as still out. It looks like the volume of the big tree can be safely put at between 720 and 770 cubes. I won't go into the calculations and cross-checks that I did on Saturday to support this range, but I think that even with future refinements, the volume of the Mount Tom tree will not go below 700 cubes and I can’t imagine it reaching 800. We are closing in on its volume.     For me, an important observation about the Mt Tom hemlock volume is that it, representative of the largest Northeastern hemlocks, is around 50% of the volume of the largest Smoky Mountain hemlocks. When thinking about it, I find this a remarkable statistic. The hemlock is most commonly associated with the Northeast, where it grows widely across the landscape. It shows up just about everywhere. But in the lower latitudes of its full range, the hemlock is restricted to the mountain South. In the North, the hemlock has an enormous range of habitats and area to strut its stuff. In the South, its distribution is very limited.    What follows is a set of comparisons for the hemlock, north to south. I'm using rounded figures below based on approximate maximums. Height              Max North                  145     Max South                  170 Ratio North to South      0.85 Circumference    Max North                   16    Max South                   20    Ratio North to South      0.80    Volume     Max North                750     Max South               1500     Ratio North to South    0.50     Thanks to the contribution of the mountain South, with the exception of the bald cypress, the hemlock is presently our most voluminous eastern conifer. I should note that ENTS has very little volume data on the bald cypress, so we don’t truly understand its volume range or how often it achieves volumes in the range of the largest hemlocks, but based on what I've read and seen in old photographs, I have no problem putting the bald cypress as #1 and the eastern hemlock as #2.    For volume, the white pine and loblolly are presently in a race for 3rd place. Will Blozan believes the loblolly to be #3. He’s probably right. Historically, it may have been a close race between the two species of pines, but thanks to Congaree, the loblolly is ahead at this point in time.     In terms of tree height, there is not the slightest doubt as to which is the modern-day winner among the tallest eastern conifers. It is the eastern white pine. Perhaps the loblolly matched the great whites in times past. We’ll never know. But not now. Sunday         This day turned out to hold a delightful surprise. It started out to be a so-so day with not much to be accomplished by me on tree measuring. What would keep me from the trees? My partner, Professor Monica Jakuc, needed to catch up on tasks associated with her upcoming concert of Sept 24th. It is an all Schubert concert featuring some of his most complex music. As part of her concert preparation, on Saturday evening she played and recorded the A Major Sonata Opus posthumous. The piece is listed as number 959 in his catalog of compositions. The A major sonata is a grueling 40 minutes long. According to Monica, it challenges the performer's endurance, technique, and concentration. When Monica records a practice session, afterwards she needs to carefully study it. But too tired to do that on Saturday night, the review was to occur on Sunday. Rats! I needed to be out and among the trees. Stalemate! After hand-ringing and a woe-is-me performance by yours truly, Monica agreed to go with me to the forest provided I would listen to the recording in the car, both going and coming, and give her feedback, as a lay listener, while she followed the score and made notes on her music. While in the woods, she would sit among the trees and work on her program notes while I flittered around measuring whatever came into my view, but remaining unobtrusive. Sold!. We were off to the Charlemont Inn for a quick breakfast and then into the woods when guess who we ran into? There was our old friend and super tree measurer mathematician John Eichholz with his wife Patty, and a friend from Arizona named Ken. We had breakfast together. Unfortunately, Patty had John's day all planned out for him - lined up full of chores. However, John and I succeeded in talking Patty into giving John a few hours off so he could help me with my RD 1000 calibration. Yippee! So after breakfast, off we went to the Elder's Grove, which had been where I originally had wanted to go.     Well, John Eichholz put his savvy as a mathematician to full use as I explained to him the idiosyncrasies of the RD 1000. We modeled Saheda again, finding that at 96 feet to the trunk, the instrument tends to understate the diameter by one click. At 124.5 feet to the trunk, the instrument tends to understate the diameter by two clicks. Further calibration rules need to be developed. However, from 50 to 80 feet, the values obtained as "best fit" seem to be reliable.      With John's steady hand and superior eye and Monica's tripod, we modeled Saheda to a reduced 614 cubes. This is 200 less than my first attempt when I mixed methods and discovered the err of my ways too late. I'm surprised that Saheda isn't a little more bulky, but the great tree does slender down a little quicker than its companion the Tecumseh tree. So be it. I'd rather make my mistakes at the beginning than at the end.       So, if Saheda shrunk, what was the delightful surprise mentioned above all about? Running into John and family? Yes, of course, but there was another. After modeling Saheda, I persuaded John that we needed to check Saheda's height again to look for hidden sprigs. My success with the #75 in Trout Brook the prior weekend made me hopeful that despite all the measurements I had made of Saheda, we hadn't found the top. We shot two tops and got 163.2 and 163.6 which matched prior measurements I made in August. But John wasn't ready to give up. I had told him that the high points of the tree were on the downhill side from our vantage point. But we had exhausted the downhill possibilities, so John went searching on the uphill side of the broad crown and after a while sure enough got a bounce from a twig that held promise. Calculate, recalculate, and Presto! Saheda's tall spot IS on the uphill side and it is an exciting 164.3 feet! YES! That puts Saheda in the very exclusive, aristocratic 50 Meter Club. That's 3 trees in Massachusetts and 6 for all New England.     Walking back from the Elder’s Grove, there is a bridge that we cross over the Deerfield River. From the bridge, the crowns of the tallest white pines in the Elders Grove can be seen. Saheda stands out prominently. So, the idea struck me as we started across the bridge that through strong binoculars, we might be able to examine Saheda’s crown and see if the uphill side looked taller than the downhill side. Monica has an extremely good set of binoculars, courtesy of her ornithological interest. After each of us examined Saheda’s crown, the three of us agreed that the uphill side had a slightly higher top than did the downhill side. At the distance we were looking, our perceptions didn’t substantiate our calculations, which show the uphill side to be a mere 0.7 of a foot more than the downhill side. However, the view through Monica’s binoculars was consistent with our calculations and that was good enough for me.      The addition of Saheda to the 50 Meter club may be premature. John and I need to go out again in the fall when visibility is better and confirm the new measurement. At the least, though, there are no less than 3 tops over 163 feet on Saheda, two of which have been verified by repeated readings. The fact that the verification of this as a contending top for 50-meter status has come so late in the series of measurements of Saheda points to several topics worthy of ENTS attention. The first has to do with my measurement methodology, the others are more general. 1. Once I have identified what I think is the highest sprig, I measure it over and over, (as opposed to looking for higher tops), to establish the annual growth and to record the pattern of measurements that I can expect from my different instruments used under differing measurement conditions. 2. A very tall, double-crowned conifer jutting through a fairly thick hardwood canopy that is 100 to 120 feet tall can present almost insurmountable challenges. Differing light conditions along with intervening clutter can lead to widely varying results as the laser bounces off different targets from what the eye sees. One tends to return to spots of best visibility, which means one tends to re-measures the same sprig or sprigs. Around 1996, Jack Sobon and I measured Saheda with a transit and got 160.1 feet. The measurement was on the uphill side of the tree and from the left trunk looking, up river. Will’s climb in 1998 was of the right trunk. The complex, double top must make identification of all candidates difficult. 3. To resolve of close calls requires the attention of more than one qualified measurer. More on this topic later. 4. Anyone following these list discussions on ENTS tree height measurements should well understand the totally inadequate nature of standard tree height measurement methods advocated by the state champion tree lists, by American Forests National Register of Big Trees, and commonly used in everyday forestry. The problem is that the maintainers of the lists don’t publicly acknowledge the limitations of their methods and as a consequence the big tree lists are saturated with junk data. I no longer look at or am the slightest bit interested in the champion tree lists.         On our return trip, I dutifully listened to the 4th movement of the Schubert A Major Sonata, thankful for Monica's fine music and thankful for the great whites of Mohawk Trail State Forest. There is a little more to this story, but I’ll save it for a future e-mail. I don’t want to mix measuring with the mystical. Bob       Robert T. Leverett Cofounder, Eastern Native Tree Society   Home