George, I actually only posted on RGI for Plain Grove Fen. It had a number of fat trees. I have encouraged people to do them in the past, and over the last couple of weeks some people have taken me up on the suggestion (and example) and posted some for other sites. It is nice to see your numbers from Valley Forge. One way in which I think this is valuable is that people without laser rangefinders can generate good Girth Indexes. Presently we have so few examples that it is difficult to determine their value. The only thing we can do is to collect more RGI's and see how the numbers look once we have a good sample. One thing we could do would be to plot the RGI vs. RHI for different sites to se if there was a pattern. In general I would expect that there will be a cluster of fat and tall trees and a separate cluster potting differently for short and fat trees. These clumps would represent those grown in the forest with competition for light by other trees, and the other those trees grown in the open with essentially little or no competition for light. But we need numbers to see if this is true. So people with sites with fat trees, please calculate a Rucker Girth Index. These trees should be the fattest of each of their representative species on the site, but not necessarily the tallest of each species. Different trees could be used in the Girth Index versus the Height Index. So number crunch away everyone.
Ed --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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] -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
