By Laura Nagy
Walking along a wooded trail provides different views to different people. While some folks may pass through without much thought about the flora surrounding them, many Eastmanites pay closer attention, perhaps taking time to identify tree species or admire particularly striking individual specimens. Ecologists, however, take a more holistic view: they see the forest as a community, a natural village where many floral and faunal citizens interact, sharing, contributing to, and sometimes competing for space, light, water, and nourishment.
Like any community, a woodland system changes in response to external and internal events and processes. Left alone, forest communities generally develop in a somewhat predictable pattern, with recognizable stages of growth and development that succeed one another. Scientists use the term “succession” to describe the transitions in age, composition, and resources over time. The maturation of dominant trees affects the whole community, altering light and water regimens, depleting minerals, and rendering the local habitat more favorable or less favorable for other organisms.
Soils, climate, and outside disturbances like storms, logging, drought, or disease play a role, too, as does browsing by animals. It’s a dynamic interchange, but with the lifespan of some trees like maples (upwards of a couple of centuries) it occurs in slow motion.
In Eastman, many trees are approaching—and some have already eclipsed—the century mark, having sprung up after much of New England was clear-cut for farms during the early 1800s. Significant logging activities by the Draper Mill Company removed most of the usable maples in Eastman by the 1930s, and the great Hurricane of 1938 toppled astonishing quantities of board feet across the state.
The severity of these disturbances reset the successional clock for much of our local woods. White pine seedlings are notorious sprouters. With sunlight as abundant as it surely was here in the early 1940s, their skill at snatching photons is now evident in their silhouettes towering above the hardwood canopy on the hillsides around the lake.
Other tree species have also matured in the half-century since Eastman’s founding, creating woodlands that are fairly heavy on overstory and rather sparse on healthy seedlings and saplings. The shade created by so much high cover limits what grows beneath, which in turn affects what animal species prosper here. Songbirds are a good example. While wood thrushes and scarlet tanagers thrive in thick woods, chickadees, chipping sparrows, and indigo buntings prefer edges, where fields meet forest. Baltimore orioles, eastern bluebirds, savannah sparrows, and eastern meadowlarks, on the other hand, require open grasslands, which are in short supply in Eastman.
While many human inhabitants might argue the merits of reaching mellow maturity, across-the-board aging in our forest may not bode well for its long-term sustainability. Ecologists agree that the healthiest natural communities are those in which biodiversity is highest. Even-aged stands are great for shade and fall colors, but not so much for incubation of seedlings, growth of shrubs and grasses, and variety of furry or feathered denizens. In addition, biodiverse systems are more resistant to catastrophic disturbances like storms, diseases, or fires, and are also more resilient, i.e., able to bounce back to a healthy balance if such events do occur.
“The mix of species that predominates the future forest,” a U.S. Forest Service report on Northeastern woodland regeneration explains, “depends not only on climate and soils, but also on management decisions made today.” Changes in forest composition will affect the quality and variety of forest resources available to future generations and wildlife. To this end, the Sustainable Eastman Committee is continuing its initiative to inform and facilitate efforts to preserve the quality of our natural environment.
When she’s not serving as co-chair of the Sustainable Eastman Committee, Laura Nagy roams the Deeryard woods surrounding her home.
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