Lee, The two foot thick moss you speak of reminds me of sight I stumbled upon several years ago while hunting in Northern Maine, just outside of the town of Portage. I was walking the edge of a small lake to get to the other side. It wasn't long before it got to swampy and thick with brush so I had to hike deeper into the forest. I found myself in what I think was a nearly pure stand of northern white cedar. Every root, stump, log, or fallen branch was covered with thick moss. With every step I could here a muffled crunch and quite often steep in a hole up to my knee. It was beautiful and eerie at the same time.
George -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Lee Frelich Sent: Thursday, March 26, 2009 9:09 AM To: [email protected] Subject: [ENTS] Re: Nurse logs Don: That's one of the best illustrations I have seen of the continuing value of trees to the ecosystem after they die. Foxtail pine is one of my favorite species. Several years ago we (I was chair of the award committee) gave the Ecological Society of America Cooper Award to Andrea Lloyd and Lisa Graumlich for a study they did on long-term changes in high-elevation foxtail pine forests of southern CA, where they had reconstructed the tree population for a 2000 year period using tree ring analyses of live and dead trees. You should also see some of our recently burned forests in the Boundary Waters Wilderness in northern MN, where the fire burned away the duff and moss that was up to 2 feet thick in 200-300 year old forests, revealing that many of the the live trees had their root systems mostly or totally confined to large rotten logs buried in the moss. That's how the forest maintains itself on a granite batholith where the mineral soil is patchy and mostly less than a foot deep, in a climate with frequent droughts. Lee DON BERTOLETTE wrote: > Randy/ENTS- > On the topic of nurse logs, I ran across a recent photo I took in a > foxtail pine forest ...a foxtail pine may live to be 2000 > years...once dead, they may remain vertical for decades. Once > horizontal, it may take even longer to degrade into duff. > The young foxtail seedling growing at the tip of the dead and down, > soon to be duff foxtail pine in the foreground, probably came from a > seed that may have taken years to encounter the right combination of > seasonal moisture, soil warmth, and scarification regime to burst into > life and lend optimism to a forest currently facing changing climate > conditions. > -Don > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > From: [email protected] > To: [email protected] > Subject: [ENTS] Re: Nurse logs > Date: Fri, 6 Mar 2009 22:10:52 -0500 > > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ Eastern Native Tree Society http://www.nativetreesociety.org Send email to [email protected] Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/entstrees?hl=en To unsubscribe send email to [email protected] -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
