yale forests news issue 16 february 2016 yale forests news forests... · 2016-04-08 · 1 yale...

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Yale Forests News Issue 16 February 2016

A hardy bunch of seven Master of Forestry students moved to Yale-Myers in May of last year as the 2015 Forest Crew. They transitioned well from deftly slaying final exams to dropping trees on target during the Game of Logging chainsaw safety training. They forged bonds shoulder-to-shoulder over newly deepened water bars, flexed their raking muscles in the service of free-flowing ditch water, and built their heavy machinery CVs with several hours of mini-excavator time.

After breaking for Commencement and a silviculture field trip to California, the Crew—Akiva Fishman ‘15, Blair Rynearson ‘15, Eli Roberts ’16, Karen Bucht ’15, Logan Sander ’15, Meredith Flannery ’15,

and Nick Olson, ’16—reconvened to strategize about the French Division: over a thousand acres of working forest with no shortage of mountain laurel.

Weeks of boundary marking and forest inventory were interspersed with lessons on the ecology, geology, and biology of the forest, including the collection of a hundred plant samples arrayed on the bunk house porch. Dr. Ashton and Mr. Pasay put in endless hours to convert this bunch of rag-tag ivy leaguers into perceptive naturalists. After collecting data, much GIS wrangling, and re-mastering pivot tables, the crew made their pitches to the Forest Director and Manager for stands eligible for various treatments.

YALE FORESTS NEWSBrought to you by the Yale School Forests

2015 ANNUAL REPORTMark S. Ashton

Director of School Forests, MF‘85, Ph.D.‘90

In this newsletter we have plenty to report in a year that seemed to me to go so quickly.

The Year Behind…….

Our Forest Manager, Julius Pasay MF’14, entered into the second year of his fellowship. He has settled in nicely taking on roles in developing the agroforestry demonstration area and the “edible forest understory” garden and taking a much more active role in overseeing our Quiet Corner Initiative (QCI). Julius also presented on the accomplishments to date of QCI at the New England Society of American Foresters Conference and Forest Stewards Guild Northeast Meeting and is preparing something for publication—stay tuned. The Apprentice Forester program comprised seven eager Masters of Forestry graduates who performed admirably improving roads, marking our property boundaries, inventorying and assessing our stands, updating our GIS map classifications, and implementing silvicultural

À LA RUE FRANÇAISESummer Crew Report 2015

Eli Roberts, Assistant Forest Manager, MF ‘16

(Continued on page 2)

The great pontificator. Photo by Julius Pasay


Whoa, that’s a big pine. Photo by Julius Pasay

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prescriptions to meet management goals to diversify our forest composition, structure and age class distribution. This year they marked a total of 446 MBF of sawtimber across 70 acres of crown thinnings and 67 acres of a variety of regeneration cuts spanning first and second treatments of irregular shelterwoods, seed tree systems and group selection all in the French Division.

We started a nascent Field Ecology Program for masters and undergraduate students, including two undergraduates from Yale and students from a variety of other institutions including the University of Alberta (Edmonton), University College London, and the University of the South (SEWANEE). Students were mentored by doctoral students in Professor Oswald Schmitz’s lab group and mine. This first batch numbered five students who were all motivated to experience a range of different research protocols in field ecology. In conjunction with this program and with the Apprentice Foresters we organized three daylong workshops throughout the summer on “Plant Identification and Habitat,” “Identifying Breeding Birds and their Calls,” and “The Ecology and Taxonomy of Moths and Butterflies.” These were held in collaboration with the Peabody Museum of Natural History. Last but not least in the way of student programs, we started a very nascent agricultural internship program for students. We had one Yale College undergraduate and one FES Masters student participate in a working experience on a rotation of three very different local farms. Students spent three weeks on each of an organic vegetable farm, fruit orchard, and diversified CSA farm.

There was no letup in functions held at the forest this year. We had 43 separate events that comprised seminars, workshops, professional

training events, film showings, demonstrations, and shows for universities, landowners, schools, and alumni that reached over 1,500 participants.

In regards to our field research, fifteen peer-review papers were published by seventeen School Forest researchers. Today we have 28 researchers of all stripes (faculty, doctoral students and masters students) from twelve different institutions around the region actively working on over forty separate research projects on the forest.

In our extension and outreach programs for QCI, we completed 500 acres and six steward management plans for landowners in “Management Plans for Protected Areas” and implemented recommendations of past management plans with three silvicultural prescriptions, two timber sales, a created a silvo-pastoral system, a sugar bush and a shitake mushroom demonstration. To date we have completed 26 plans totaling 2,600 acres and have a membership of 290 landowner partners comprising 15,000 acres in three sub-watersheds. We have a lot more to do but we are progressing nicely.

Finally, in regards to new happenings to buildings and facilities we installed two new gates, built a new bridge over the Heck Trail, enlarged the current parking lot and built a new guest parking lot for 30 vehicles hidden in the old-field pine stand to the south of the main camp.

The Year Ahead…

This coming year we envision more of the same but with even greater ambition with the second year of the new field ecology program and an even larger agricultural internship. With the generosity of the Class of 1980 we will be building an outside auditorium to house an audience of over 100 at our Yale-Myers Camp. We hope to hold our environmental film festival, and new events in music and theatre within this building once completed. We have the planning permission and secured the money so now it is up to us to build it. We will also be embarking on grand plans to build a research campus that comprises a modern station housing, a modern laboratory, storage rooms, a seminar room, and an experimental area well supplied with water and electricity for controlled experiments in ecology.

(Continued from page 1)

Demonstrating the proper use of a biltmore stick to eager MODsters. Photo by Julius Pasay

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Mike Ferrucci came to the forest for the first day of tree marking. He was able to help the crew through decisions about a crop tree thinning in two pine stands, with special emphasis on operational feasibility. After some practice, tree decisions that were agonizingly slow became not-quite-as slow. Just as they got used to crop tree thinning, the crew moved to crown thinnings with take-tree marking, adding complexity and time spent with arched necks. The decisions that seemed straightforward in the classroom became more difficult with the nuance and imperfection of the real world.

The summer was not all silviculture and sampling, however: the residents of Yale-Myers put on a Fourth of July party that included barbecued pork, excessive lawn games, and more glitter and face paint than the founding fathers could have envisioned. Several crew members and researchers assisted in the slaughtering and processing the local pig the day before. The FES brochures tout experiential learning, and they mean it.

The Director of School Forests and Chief Provider of “Small Eats”

continued the generous tradition of Monday evening G&Ts on the Ashton porch, and provided entertainment to guests by hosing off potential hot tub-goers. Head Chef Marcus Pasay continued his unprecedented streak of non-repeated meals that fuelled the Myers crew through arduous overland treks and leisurely underwater expeditions at Bigelow Hollow.

The real fun, though, came when it came time to mark regeneration cuts. The crew (with Mark Ashton’s voice echoing in their heads: “vertical structure!”) implemented complex first-cut shelterwoods that considered soil moisture, aspect, species composition, wildlife habitat, and financial goals. In the second-cut shelterwoods (where the illustrious crew of 2008 had preceded), the crew was struck by the luxury of marking 25-inch oak trees, in contrast to other stands’ decisions between epicormic 10-inch hickories.

The marked stands were combined into sales: Penelope’s Hard Bargain, Take It or Leave It, Akiva’s Golden Jewels (after an unfortunate paint gun incident), Squirrel Punting Dreamweaver, Le Phantom Rouge

(after a nonexistent red pine stand that Dr. Ashton “remembered”), Using My Maiden Name, and a habitat-focused variable retention thinning called HerpFest 2015. The crew remains glad they don’t have to see the loggers’ faces when these names come up on bids. In total, the crew marked 430 MBF of sawtimber.

With sales named, MODs imminent, and proverbial nappies newly obsolete, the crew moved to Yale-Toumey Forest in Swanzey, New Hampshire. After a graduation ceremony with past forest managers, they began the now-familiar progression through boundary marking, inventory, prescriptions, and marking. Most of that time was spent playing hide-and-seek with surveyors’ pins, but the next crew will certainly benefit from the paint left behind. The Toumey totals included 190 MBF of sawtimber.

To finish the summer, the crew spent a weekend as guests of SOM Professor David Cromwell in the White Mountains of southern Maine. Botanizing along an elevational transect should always be punctuated by crystal-clear swimming holes and natural rock slides. Upon their return to Myers, the crew spent their last days emptying bottles to demarcate new CFI plots, and, in the midst of MODs, engaged in that time-honored pursuit of MFs: convincing incoming MEMs to change specializations.

The illustrious crew of 2015 ended the summer older, wiser, and having taken more ironic adult diaper pictures than they anticipated. This signature experience of Yale Foresters was made possible by the hard work of many people. These seven students will go on to promote timely thinnings, maintain generous stream buffers, and equivocate about “social values” long into the future. (Continued on page 4)

The crew of ‘15. Photo by Julius Pasay(Continued from page 1)

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Another excellent year at the Yale Forests that witnessed continued improvements to camp facilities, further development of our agroforestry demonstration area, and the addition of 30 plots to our CFI. Timber sales are cranking away this winter on our drier sites as we wait for this year’s winter to finally get cold.

At Yale-Myers

The French Division, just south of camp on the other side of Centre Pike, was the focus of this year’s Forest Crew. Seven Master of Forestry students in the Apprentice Forester program took care of business in this division, marking a total of 446 MBF of pine and hardwood sawtimber.

As is usual, the students provided the innovative names usually in connection to some aspect of their experience at the forest but please don’t ask me what! The first sale the students put together, known as “Squirrel Punting Dreamweaver”, surrounded the old French House and included thinning old field pine stands and hardwoods on the mesic slope adjacent the house, as well as a final shelterwood entry to remove high quality hardwood logs from the “Pie Thief ” sale of 2008.

The Red Front Lot also received some attention with a 35-acre thinning called “HerpFest!” designed to create more diverse age-class and structure and included several small openings for wildlife. One of our meadow burn sites will also be enlarged during this thinning.

Finally, the final shelterwood entry of “Shawn Walker’s Eyeballs,” will be paired with an adjacent irregular shelterwood establishment cut, “Sri Lankan Lunch”, to remove a total of 100 MBF.

From these sales, 35 MBF of quality red oak will be turned into rift and quartersawn flooring for the library, dining hall, and communal areas of the new Yale residential colleges that are currently under construction.

In addition, the crew added 30 new CFI plots to the CFI system, bringing the total plot number up to 93. The new plots were added to increase sampling accuracy after 20 years of regeneration harvests have increased structural heterogeneity throughout the forest. With the new CFI plots included, Yale-Myers has 57.4 million board feet of standing timber, 14.9 in reserve and 42.5 in production. These numbers indicate that we

have reached a steady state and are harvesting at current growth rates as compared to our last inventory of these plots ten years ago.

A new initiative that is coming together nicely is the Yale-Myers agroforestry demonstration area. This area consists of three demonstrations sites, two at Yale-Myers Forest and one on a nearby QCI partner property. These sites will be used to hold agroforestry demonstration workshops for students and Quiet Corner residents. One of the sites, a one-acre forest orchard, is a demonstration site for the Climate Change Response Framework run by the Northern Institute of Applied

NEWS FROM THE FOREST MANAGERJulius Pasay, Forest Manager

Prime red oak logs from Alex’s Last Stand will be turned into rift and quartersawn flooring for the new Yale Residential Colleges. Photo by Julius Pasay


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RESEARCH NEWS AND NOTES

Marlyse Duguid, School Forests Research Coordinator, MF ‘10, Ph.D.‘17

What is likely my last year as research coordinator for the Yale School Forests I look back on this year fondly, almost nostalgically. I continue to be impressed with the breadth and depth of research taking place at the Yale School Forests. 2015 was a great year for publications, outreach, new research expansion, and internships.

This past summer’s research seminar series was amazing, yet again. We learned about old-field communities in a changing world, hormones and frogs, wild bees, and bat conservation. The talks were well attended and received, with over 80 people showing up to our final seminar of the summer. We are currently booking speakers for this summer, and it looks like it is shaping up to be an interesting line-up. Mark the dates on your calendar.

It was another great year for publishing amongst Yale Forest’s researchers. The folks in the Schmitz lab never disappoint, and this past year was no exception. Jeff Smith (MESc ’15) published his masters research on Cascading ecological effects of

landscape moderated arthropod diversity in Oikos, and Rob Buchkowski (MESc ’14, PhD ’19) published two papers: Detritivores ameliorate the enhancing affect of plant-based trophic cascades on N cycling in an old-field system in Biology Letters and Microbial stoichiometry overrides biomass as a regulator of soil carbon and nitrogen cycling in Ecology. We also saw some interesting work out of the Bradford Lab. An inclusive study in Nature Climate Change showed that Climate fails to predict wood decomposition at regional scales. Work by former post-doc Michael Strickland PhD (now at Virginia Tech) with Dr. Bradford looked at Compositional differences in simulated root exudates elicit a limited functional and compositional response in soil microbial communities in Frontiers in Microbiology.

A couple interesting studies came from non-Yale affiliated researchers this year as well. Hector Nuñez and Roland de Gouvenain from Rhode Island College published their work from Yale-Myers, Seasonal Variation in Understory Light Near a Gap Edge and its Association with Conifer Seedling Survival in a Southern New England Forest in Northeastern Naturalist. Robert Goodby from Franklin Pierce and colleagues found and documented a Native American fish dam at the Yale-

Toumey Forest, one of the first to be documented in New England. Read the paper The Swanzey Fish Dam: A Large, Precontact Native American Stone Structure in Southwestern New Hampshire in Northeast Anthropology.

The summer of 2015 was a busy field season with up to 10 resident researchers at the Yale-Myers camp at any one time. Adam Rosenblatt, PhD led the Schmitz lab team examining how the classic food web of spiders and grasshoppers in old-fields respond to climate shifts. Robert Buchkowski was back to do some pilot work for his dissertation, and could be found counting earthworms and roly polies in the leaf litter. This year we saw a great expansion of our undergraduate field ecology research program. Shannon Murray (MEM ’14) returned as foreman. Sewanee student Gabrielle Marion joined Yale college undergraduates Serena Lian and Chase Ammon as our core interns. They spent the summer measuring trees, catching grasshoppers, and learning the pains and joys of field ecology research. Visiting researchers Gabriel Oltean (University of Alberta) and Louie Evans (University College London) joined the team for part of the summer as well. If you know an undergraduate student who would be interested in working as a field ecologist for the summer send them our way.

Climate Science. Educational materials are being developed for future workshops and tours of the demonstration sites.

The one-acre forest orchard that was cleared two summers ago was planted this year. The plantings include over 30 edible fruit and nut species and varieties and are arranged to grow into a multi-strata forest garden. Examples of canopy trees include walnut, chestnut, and hickory-pecan; midstory trees include persimmons, pawpaws, and Korean dogwoods; and the shrub layer includes blueberries, raspberries, and wild cranberries.

Part of the orchard was planted more traditionally with heirloom varieties of apples, pears, peaches, quince, and pluot. This orchard complements, the forest-farming site located across the road under a small sugarbush by the Morse house. Here, a shiitake mushroom log rack, produced during a QCI workshop, has been added to the understory planting of ramps and ginseng.

In addition to these two sites at Yale-Myers, a silvopastural system is being developed on a QCI landowner partner property in Eastford. Working in conjunction with an

NRCS grazing specialist and a local logger, we have marked 60MBF of pine on 6 acres of land adjacent to an existing cow pasture. When finished these three sites will make the most comprehensive agroforestry demonstration site in Connecticut.

At Yale-Toumey

A final shelterwood harvest of the “Embarrassment of Riches” (2013) was just completed. The harvest yielded 32 MBF of choice red oak, much of which will help supply wood for the Yale residential college flooring. The oak regeneration in this stand is absolutely phenomenal.

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NEWS FROM THE QUIET CORNERSara Rose Tannenbaum

SUMMER SEMINARS 2016 June 9th

June 23rd

July 7th

July 21st

FILM SERIES 2016July 12th

July 26th

Refreshments 7 pm, seminars and movies 7:30 pm. Speakers and

movies to be determined.

HARVEST FESTIVAL 2016September date TD

The northeast corner of Connecticut may look quiet by satellite, but the Quiet Corner Initiative has been any-thing but quiet. From annual tradi-tions to new education programs, the QCI continues to embrace learning in and taking care of the woods we so love.

Last spring, we were lucky to host two expert educators in our workshop series. Sue Morse—the renowned wildlife tracker, scientist and photog-rapher—helped us interpret fresh fox prints and pee stains in the snow at Bigelow Hollow State Park. Tom Wes-sels, educator and author of Reading the Forested Landscape, took us on an interactive land use history walk of Yale-Myers Forest.

Over the summer, we partnered with three local farms for the first ever Qui-et Corner Farm Internship. Abington Grown, Buell’s Orchard, and Cran-berry Hill Farm took turns hosting Yale College student Adam Houston. As Adam rotated between the three different operations he learned hands-on about various farming methods, including draft power.

Our 2nd annual Harvest Festival celebrated the arrival of fall with a rol-licking feast and plenty of good cheer. This year we encouraged attendees to bring potluck contributions. Our friends and neighbors brought de-licious dishes to pair with the local-ly-sourced food cooked by our student chefs. Throughout the evening, students and landowners worked away at the cider press, learned about beekeeping, and competed in crosscut saw competitions, all to the tunes of Yale College’s folk band Tangled Up in Blue.

In October, we hosted 40 sixth graders from Ashford Middle School for an environmental education field trip at Yale-Myers. We taught them about forest management and landuse his-tory. They played an interactive game about tree competition for resources like water, sun and nutrients, each represented by a different color popsi-cle sticks.

After 5 years we have written a total of 26 management plans for our neigh-bors. That totals 2,600 acres! This year we added the latest 6 from the Still

River Watershed. It is incredibly heart-warming to watch the relationships between the students and landowners and the land grow. Director Mark Ashton’s new spring course on Forest Health and Disease will continue this tradition by using these management plans and information on Yale-Myers Forest to plan a neighborhood forest health and invasive species strategy.

Looking ahead, we hope to provide more opportunities for learning not just about land management, but about land conservation. In No-vember, we partnered with the New England Forestry Foundation to host representatives from CT DEEP, the American Farmland Trust, and the NRCS. The speakers introduced us to funding options for protecting and maintaining Connecticut forests and farmlands. Our new QCI staff, Re-becca Terry and Josh Morse, will be working one-on-one with our land-owner partners to help them explore conservation options such as these so that our Quiet Corner can stay quiet in perpetuity.

Quiet Corner Initiative tracking workshop with Sue Morse. Photo by Dana Patterson

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THANK YOUWe would like to acknowledge with thanks donations and gifts from various friends and alumni for allowing us to engage the students with our neighbors and with providing both students and landowners a learning environment focused on sustainable land management. Thank you Class of 1980, and USFS State and Private Grants Program.

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Top: Infamous paper wasp nest

Right Upper: Red pine savannah prescription burn

Right lower: Hermit thrush eggs

Left: Pileated woodpecker feeding

Bottom: Yale-Toumey pine thinning

Photos by Julius Pasay

yale forests news issue 16 february 2016 yale forests news forests... · 2016-04-08 · 1 yale...

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