Ed,
I'm glad you brought up the subject. I've spent a lot of time over the
years thinking about how to bring area into play to facilitate fair comparisons
among our sites. However, I fear I have often erred by following political
boundaries to advertize an area, more as a sporting event than the practice of
science. However, if we want to do it right, we do have areas to experiment
with where we could do various kinds of hypothesis testing. In particular, MTSF
provides us with a wealth of data that can be sensitized to area computed in a
variety of ways. In fact, Mohawk amply reveals how important it is to organize
around habitat. Fortunately, most of the forests in Mohawk fall into the mature
to very mature classification, so area expansions don't bring into play very
young forests or buildings and sidewalks. There is very little truly young
forest in Mohawk.
By contrast, the Connecticut River Valley is a patchwork of fields, towns,
and forests. There are swaths of mature trees along stream corridors, in yards
and parks, and in the forested zone bordering the valley. But there seems
little to be gained by merely expanding an area in the valley unless the
expansion incorporates big tree habitat. Expanding into areas that don't have
have trees sufficiently mature to communicate species potential has limited
value.
In Mohawk, concave areas on ridge sides, toe slopes, and ravines
contribute most of our big/tall tree habitat. I'm inclined to add up the
acreage in those areas instead of starting at a point and expanding outward.
Bob
-------------- Original message --------------
From: "Edward Frank" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Bob,
Congratulations on finding another tall pine over 140. I have been thinking
about how to deal with Rucker Indexes along the lines Jess suggested - i.e.
plotting a rucker height index on a graph versus increasing area. I am
wondering if it would be appropriate when comparing rucker indexes of sites
within a larger area such as the Connecticut River Valley with the area of the
valley itself or whether it would be better to just compare the individual
sites to the composite area of the patches included in the overall rucker
index? What I am saying is that much of the area of the valley contribute
nothing to the rucker index as it has been cut over and farmed again and
again, so should these non-contributing areas be included in the rucker index
area of valley as a whole? Since the measurements are made from a patch of
sites here and there, should not the area for the valley just consider the area
of those patches.
I have been talking to Dale about compiling a species profile for the Clarion
River corridor (defining it to basically just include the flood plains and
flats, rather than the entire drainage basin). If all of the species were
listed in a single table along with the heights of the tallest ( or fattest)
examples of those species, then you could more easily see what gaps there were
in the information, what trees were missing, or represented by undersized
specimens, etc. I should have did this before my river trip Thursday with
Carl, and I know I would have grabbed some measurements of trees, which were
unspectacular in terms of Cook Forest, but would have contributed to the
Clarion River corridor. This is something that should be considered for other
broader reaches which are initially a composite of pieces of other sites. The
main problem with the Clarion River stuff is that Dale has all of the data, so
any scheme I come up with, means more work for poor Dale.
Ed Frank
Join me in the Eastern Native Tree Society at http://www.nativetreesociety.org
and in the Primal Forests - Ancient Trees Community at:
http://primalforests.ning.com/
--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
Eastern Native Tree Society http://www.nativetreesociety.org
You are subscribed to the Google Groups "ENTSTrees" group.
To post to this group, send email to [email protected]
To unsubscribe send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/entstrees?hl=en
-~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
