• May 15 webinar: Forest health: What to look for in your woods this summer
• UMN Extension’s Yard and Garden News
• MN Tree Farm Awards, MN Forestry Association Spring Field Days
• Northern Minnesota phenology report: Ovenbirds
• Meet a Minnesota family forest owner: Roger and Linda Howard
• Other items you may have missed
• And as always: Upcoming events, quiz of the month, poem of the month, discussion board, other items you may have missed, news, and more.

Read the May 2012 update here.

Related posts:

1. Read the April 2012 update now
2. Read the March 2012 update now
3. Read the January 2012 update now

Crown competition in a northern Minnesota pine stand. Click for a better view.

1. Trees and woodland stands are constantly changing. Trees have to grow to live, and big trees take more room than small. Constant competition for growing space means that some trees will win and some will lose. Depending on how variable your land is in terms of slopes, soils, and species, the competitive struggle may play out differently across it. The more you know about which species grow best where on your land, the better you’ll be able to plan for the future of your woods.

2. Invasive species are moving in. Garlic mustard, emerald ash borer, and a number of other invasives are establishing themselves throughout Minnesota’s woods. New species are arriving every year. Once these species are well established on a site, it can take a tremendous amount of work to eradicate them. The more quickly we notice when these species have arrived, the more likely we are to succeed at controlling them. Minnesota Forest Pest First Detector volunteers are an important part of this strategy, but the more informed eyes and ears across the landscape, the better our chances to reduce eradication costs and maintain woodland health and productivity.

Red maple on the north shore. Photo by Lee Frelich. Click to read the 2009 CURA reporter article.

3. New native species are moving in too. Every 30 years, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration calculates new “normal” temperature and precipitation levels based on data over the past 30 years. Minnesota’s new normals, calculated for the period 1980-2010, show a January average temperature that’s 2.5 degrees F higher, warmer nights in both summer and winter, and higher precipitation than the 1970-2000 normals. These changes have begun, and will continue to affect how and where trees grow. In the coming decades, the ranges of many native Minnesota trees will continue to shift toward the north and east.  The sooner we notice these changes on our land and begin to plan for them, the healthier and more productive our woods will be.

4. To engage kids and family. Noticing when trees or flowers start to bloom, when leaves appear in spring, when acorns start to drop, the first frost of the fall and the last of the spring is easy; it just takes attention and a pencil. This kind of monitoring is a great way to help your kids or grandkids develop not only observation skills, but an appreciation for nature and your land. Why is this important?  Many woodland owning families find themselves wondering about the future of their land.  With declining hunting participation among younger generations, increasing attention to digital screens and less time outside, actively cultivating a fascination and deep connection with nature gives us hope for the future of such a big part of Minnesota’s culture and history: Wise use and sound management of our unparallelled natural resources.

Thinned red oak near Mora, MN. Click for a better view.

5. To inform your woodland care and management activities. The best land management involves first understanding what’s happening naturally on your land, then working with those natural forces to lead woodland stand development to match your goals for the land. Those goals might involve growing big trees faster, supplying a local renewable resource to the market, attracting diverse wildlife, or simply maintaining a safe and healthy woodland for the next generations of your family to enjoy. The more carefully you observe the natural changes on your land, the better you can work with them to achieve your own goals.

6.  To protect your investment.  Minnesota’s “new normals” will change the population dynamics of some native as well as non-native woodland insects and pathogens by both reducing winter pest mortality and weakening and stressing trees adapted to different conditions. Informing yourself about Minnesota forest insect and diseases, then paying attention and quickly detecting and controlling pest outbreaks will not only keep your woods healthier, they’ll reduce your costs and protect your investments, financial and otherwise, in the future of your woods.

We’ll be writing more about monitoring on MyMinnesotaWoods in the coming months. How do you monitor your woods? What do you look for and why?

Related posts:

1. Emerald ash borer and the future of the Minnesota woods
2. Woods story: D-day for buckthorn!
3. My Healthy Woods: New book on care and management of Southeast Minnesota woodlands

Related posts:

1. January 2012 update
2. February 2012 update
3. March 2012 update

Related posts:

1. Quiz of the month: January 2012
2. Quiz of the month: February 2012
3. Quiz of the month: March 2012

CC-licensed photo by Ken Schneider. Click for a larger version.

Those surroundings are mature hardwood forests. Ovenbirds prefer large uninterrupted forests even though they defend a relatively small home territory. Shady glens may be home to several pairs of ovenbirds, and you might hear them defending their chosen places from rivals.

If you’re lucky enough to see an ovenbird you’ll discover a sparrow-sized bird with an olive green back and a white breast marked with black streaks. The eye is ringed with white and the top of the head has two dark lines. In the hand you’d notice a bright orange patch of feathers outlined by the two bold black lines on the top of the head. I’ve seen a few ovenbirds in the forest and the orange patch has never been apparent.

The ovenbird makes a ground nest and adds a lid of leaves and grasses to aid in concealment. It is this unusual nest that gives the ovenbird its name. The early naturalists were reminded of a Dutch oven when they encountered these nests. I’ve never actually stumbled across an ovenbird’s nest. And “stumbled across” is the right expression since they are disguised and very difficult to locate. Almost everyone who has discovered a nest has done so by nearly stepping upon it, causing its occupant to flee. Like the killdeer she may pretend to have a broken wing and try to lead you away from her home. Don’t be fooled, concentrate on the spot you first saw the bird, perhaps you’ll find her nest.

CC-licensed photo by K.P. McFarland. Click for larger version.

When ovenbirds move about on the ground they walk with style. They move across the forest floor with aplomb, stepping high, head bobbing, tail often raised. Like a dancer, their movements are measured and graceful. Pausing to assess their terrain they disrupt this image of pomposity by bobbing their tail. The scientific name for their genus is Seiurus and it means, “to wave the tail”.

One feature of the ovenbird remains mysterious. That is the so- called “flight song”. John Burroughs describes it as follows. “Wait till the inspiration of the flight song is upon it. What a change! Up it goes through the branches of the trees, leaping from limb to limb, faster and faster, till it shoots from the tree-tops fifty or more feet in the air above them, and bursts into an ecstasy of song, rapid, ringing, lyrical; no more like its habitual song than a match is like a rocket…” Quite a description and the change is so complete that it left Thoreau baffled. He mentions hearing the song of the “night warbler” at least fifteen times in his journals. He became so obsessed with trying to identify the bird doing the singing that his good friend Ralph Waldo Emerson cautioned him that he should stop trying to find out what bird it was lest he make the discovery and thereafter lose all interest in life.

I have yet to become obsessed with the flight song of the ovenbird, but I will certainly be listening dawn and dusk to see if I can pick it out from among all the other birds certain to be singing in the month of May.

John Latimer is well known throughout northern Minnesota for his phenology work.  John appears weekly on KAXE radio in Grand Rapids, and audio and twitter archives are available here. We hope his work will be a frequent feature on MyMinnesotaWoods.  This article also appeared in the Duluth Senior Journal.  It is printed with the author’s permission.

Related posts:

1. Northern Minnesota phenology report: April 2012
2. Northern Minnesota phenology report: February 2012
3. Northern Minnesota phenology report: March 2012

Well the sunset rays are shining
Me and Kai have got our tools
A basket and a trowel
And a book with all the rules

Don’t ever eat Boletus
If the tube-mouths they are red
Stay away from the Amanitas
Or brother you are dead

Sometimes they’re already rotten
Or the stalks are broken off
Where the deer have knocked them over
While turning up the duff

We set out in the forest
To seek the wild mushroom
In shapes diverse and colorful
Shining through the woodland gloom

If you look out under oak trees
Or around an old pine stump
You’ll know a mushroom’s coming
By the way the leaves are humped

They send out multiple fibers
Through the roots and sod
Some make you mighty sick they say
Or bring you close to God

So here’s to the mushroom family
A far-flung friendly clan
For food, for fun, for poison
They are a help to man.

-Gary Snyder

From Turtle Island, New Directions Publishing Corp, New York, 1969. 

Related posts:

1. Poem of the month: December Moon
2. Poem of the Month: An Evening when the Full Moon Rose as the Sun Set
3. Poem of the month: Planting Trees

Emerging bur oak leaves. Click for a larger version.

To everything there is a season. From deciding when to spray mosquitoes, trim trees, plant corn or apply fertilizer to deciding where to go to fish for trout, see spring wildflowers or fall colors – timing is everything. Phenology, the timing of seasonal biological events like leafing, blossom dates, migration, insect emergence or fish spawning, is critical to understanding interactions among species (e.g. plant-pollinator, predator-prey); determines growing season length for plants; and affects human health (e.g. pollen, tick, mosquito season). The timing of seasonal biological events is a critical ecological process that ensures the health, productivity and integrity of our natural resources.

Keeping your own phenology records can be not only informative and rewarding, but also helpful to researchers interested in tracking phenological patterns and changes in Minnesota.  And it can be a great way to engage family members, particularly kids, in observing nature in your woodland or other natural spaces.

Watch a webinar on this topic now:

Phenology: Tracking Minnesota’s ever changing forests

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Phenology is the  study of periodic biological phenomena, such as flowering, breeding, and migration, in relation to climatic conditions.  In other words, it’s all about noticing, and keeping track of, the changes in your woods.  (Many Minnesota woodland owners hear John Latimer or Larry Weber’s phenology radio shows every week.)  We’ll discuss the importance and value of good phenology data to not only sound woodland care and management, but also research.

Click here to watch the recording (April 2012).

The instructor is Rebecca Montgomery, an Associate Professor with the University of Minnesota Department of Forest Resources.

More Minnesota phenology links:

• The 2012 Minnesota Phenology Conference is in Cloquet April 27-29, 2012.
• John Latimer’s monthly MyMinnesotaWoods phenology column and KAXE’s Phenology Show
• The National Phenology Network
• Signs of the Seasons from the University of Maine Extension
• The MN Phenology Network Facebook page.

Related posts:

1. Northern Minnesota phenology report: February 2012
2. Northern Minnesota phenology report: March 2012
3. Northern Minnesota phenology report: April 2012

This month’s features:

• April 19 webinar: Phenology – Tracking Minnesota’s ever-changing forests
• Wildfire Awareness Week is next week: Learn how to protect your home and property
• Climate and Minnesota’s woodlands: Reflections from a February 2012 event
• Northern Minnesota phenology report: Pelicans Third MN Phenology Conference April 27-29
• Meet a Minnesota logger: Elmer Dobbs Logging, 65 years in and going strong
• And as always: Upcoming events, quiz of the month, poem of the month, discussion board, other items you may have missed, news, and more.

Read the April 2012 update here.

Related posts:

1. Read the May 2012 update now
2. Read the March 2012 update now
3. Read the January 2012 update now

Related posts:

1. Read the April 2012 update now
2. May 2012 update
3. January 2012 update

With increasing storm frequency and an increasingly clear trend of increasing temperatures, particularly in winter, in Minnesota, a great deal of recent attention has been focused on the future of Minnesota’s forests. First, what’s really changing? University of Minnesota climatologist Mark Seeley discussed recent observations of Minnesota’s climate. Generally avoiding discussion of predictive models, Seeley focused on data observed already in Minnesota, emphasizing a few prominent trends: Milder winters, rising dewpoints, and “the changing character” of precipitation toward a smaller number of more intense rain events. This last trend, the shift from a large number of low-intensity rain events to a smaller number of major storms means that more rainfall runs off the surface and less is retained in the soil, increasing the frequency and intensity of drought events even as total precipitation increases.

Lee Frelich, also of the University of Minnesota, discussed the effects of the changes in drought frequency on biome boundaries. Frelich emphasized that as with most ecosystem attributes, biome boundaries have shifted in the past and will shift again, likely driven primarily in the coming decades by increasing drought frequency, coupled with increasing impacts from wildfire and intense wind events like the one that affected the Boundary Waters Wilderness in July 1999. Frelich emphasized the important role that landowners can play to help forests adapt to these changes.

Emerging bur oak leaves. Click for a larger version.

Ecosystems will respond to these changes in a variety of ways. Can trees themselves change their “behavior”? Describing a major Cloquet study of tree physiology and phenology changes in response to warmer conditions and higher temperatures, Rebecca Montgomery shared some interesting insights. A large study manipulating soil and air temperatures as well as ambient carbon dioxide concentrations (the B4WARMED study) found that all ten of the Minnesota tree species studied have some flexibility in their response to higher temperatures, but each species responds in its own way. For example, the timing of budbreak in sugar maple increased in a linear fashion with increasing temperature, but paper birch had a more complex response. Noting the comments already made about the changing character of Minnesota’s summer precipitation, Montgomery noted that the future moisture regime would be important to how Minnesota’s trees responded. In general though, her research suggests that boreal conifers such as black spruce and balsam fir appear to be less able to adapt, while temperate species such as red maple, along with some woody invasives, seem well positioned to thrive.

The morning presentations suggest that A) conditions have already begun to change in important ways; B) these changes are likely to continue, although there’s a great deal of uncertainty in exactly what future conditions will be like; C) these changes will affect the composition and health of Minnesota forests and woodlands; and D) different species and ecosystems will respond differently.

Taking action: How to maintain healthy, productive family woodlands?

So what can Minnesota’s woodland owners, who manage 1/3 of the state’s forest land, do to maintain the health and productivity of their woods? This was the topic of the afternoon presentations. Family woodland owners have a great opportunity to be part of the solution in Minnesota.

Drawing on detailed data collected on a 125-year old red pine stand in the Superior National Forest, University of Minnesota silviculturist Tony D’Amato discussed the complex relationship between thinning and drought response. The data suggest that for the same reasons that you thin the plants in your garden, thinning is one of the most effective strategies to improve vigor and health. (For a variety of reasons, this is less true for aspen than for most other forest types.) But D’Amato also found that thinning too heavily can reduce the stand’s ability later in life to grow through major drought events, particularly as the stand ages. Young stands were more “plastic” and able to grow through droughts than old stands in which trees carry a higher physiological load–it takes more energy to maintain a large, spreading crown. Thinning remains one of the most important and effective strategies to improve the health and productivity of many of Minnesota’s important forest types. (Even stands thinned too heavily are in much better condition than stagnant, overstocked stands.) But historic data suggest that when it comes to drought, a series of light thinning treatments may produce a more resilient stand than one or two heavy thinning.

Mark White of The Nature Conservancy in Minnesota and Brian Palik, a researcher with the US Forest Service, both emphasized that landowners and natural resource managers will will need to integrate a higher level of uncertainty into their plans now than they have before. This is particularly true given the long rotation lengths of many Minnesota tree species–at best, growing aspen in Minnesota, foresters are planning for 35-40 year horizon. With red pine or other, longer-rotation species, rotation lengths are more than twice that time.

Palik discussed current factors considered by natural resource managers in developing silvicultural plans. Some of the more important factors are the following:

• Regional forest and landscape priorities: The Minnesota Forest Resources Council’s regional landscape plans are a good local example.
• Stand-scale considerations such as implementation of Minnesota’s voluntary site-level guidelines, riparian zones, the wildland-urban interface, visual quality, ecological classifications, soils, site index, management history, etc.
• Current stand structural characteristics and species composition.
• Stand health and risk factors
• Landowner objectives
• Fish and wildlife habitats
• Cultural heritage considerations
• Current and future markets for harvested products

In considering climate change, the same planning framework remains valid. The major change is that uncertainty is much higher now than in the past. Given Minnesota’s relatively short growing season, our consequent long rotation lengths, and the pace of observed climatic changes discussed above, uncertainty becomes an important consideration that may impact stand health and productivity to a greater degree than in the past. Specific considerations include projected future habitat suitability of component species due to expected warmer conditions, more frequent storms, and more frequent drought events. Novel native pest behavior, introductions of new non-native insect, disease, and plant species, increasing wildfire risk, and greater plant stress are also potential sources of uncertainty.

A red pine thinning treatment. Click for a larger version.

Palik discussed a case study of managing pine systems around the Chippewa National Forest in north central Minnesota. A century from now, habitat conditions are expected to be less well suited than they are now for most of the important tree species in this system. What can land managers do now to prepare stands to remain viable and productive as conditions change? Palik emphasized three broad strategies:

• Density management: Frequent thinning is perhaps the most important strategy available. Palik suggests maintaing stands closer to the lower end of traditional stocking recommendations to emphasize tree vigor, health, and resistance to bark beetle, which may become a more important pest in Minnesota in the coming decades.
• Composition management: A key factor here is maintaining complex stands with more native species represented and a broader suite of age classes across the landscape, favoring species and genotypes with a high level of adaptability to changing conditions, and adding new species and genotypes likely to perform well under expected conditions.
• Fuels treatments: Wildfire may be more widespread in the future, particularly given the possibility of more common drought conditions. Prescribed burning is risky, particularly in areas near human inhabitation. Other kinds of fuels reduction treatments and strategies like reducing the density of understory hazel brush will facilitate regeneration of desired trees and increase soil moisture.

Mixedwoods release treatment, Grand Rapids. Click for a larger version.

White discussed similar practical strategies to manage forest stands to increase resilience and adaptive capacity in the face of uncertain future climate conditions. White described a series of alternative silvicultural strategies. His talk focused on conifer restoration in northeastern Minnesota. In both case studies, White emphasized climate adaptive strategies involving increasing the mix of even- and uneven-aged management, increasing species and life history diversity, and increasing mid-tolerant species. Assisted migration of southern species into these systems may be important as well considering the relatively slow pace of natural migration of important species.

Summary

Several of the presentations at the SFEC event emphasized a consistent theme: Managing for an uncertain future by increasing forests’ resilience to changing conditions. We heard repeatedly about the relatively new concept of increasing response diversity: recognizing that different species and age classes will respond differently to changing conditions, managing to increase both species and age-class diversity. Increasing stand- and landscape-level diversity promotes an inherent capacity for diverse responses to change. This in turn increases the chance that at least one or a few will respond favorably to the changes that emerge.

Thinning has long been recognized as an essential tool in increasing forest productivity and vigor. Looking to the future, thinning is likely to become even more important, not only to simply increase crown size and growth of existing dominant trees but also as a silvicultural strategy to accelerate compositional change toward a diverse mix of species more resilient to uncertain future conditions.

More information on the February 21, 2012 SFEC Adaptive Management in the Face of Climate Change symposium, including PDF versions of the presentations, is at SFEC’s Summaries of Past Workshops page.

Related posts:

1. Minnesota woodlands and climate change
2. Northern Minnesota phenology report: February 2012
3. Read the February 2012 update now