Category: Conservation & Environment

You are better off NOT owning things you do not use very often or things you might want for special purposes. For our trip in Las Vegas, Zion and Grand Canyon, we rented a convertible. This is of little use in most places, but it was great yesterday and today. We drove around with the top down. You can see so much more, smell the air and feel the wind.

The Grand Canyon feels like home and it has since the first time I visited. I had a View Master when I was a kid and not very many many reels. Among them were a couple on the Grand Canyon. I looked at them a lot and so everything here seemed familiar from the start. This is my second visit to the North Rim. The North Rim is 8000 feet, about 1000 feet higher than the South Rim. It is cooler on this this side gets more rain, so there are more forests. I will write a note about that later.

Pictures, however, cannot do it justice. It is just one of the most strikingly beautiful places on earth and very interesting in multiple dimensions. Start with the actual multiple dimension of the rocks.

The Colorado River eroded through rocks that show millions of years of earth history. You can see it in the bands of different rock. The Colorado Plateau was once under the ocean. You can see that in limestone. It was a desert. You can see sandstone. It was a swamp, a forest and most other things and the evidence is in the rocks.

A couple of interesting facts. Most of the earth’s surface is made up of igneous rock, but much of the land surface is covered by sedimentary rock, so we think it is more common. The most common type of sedimentary rock is shale, which is essentially compressed & transformed mud, but the one we see the most is sandstone, since it stands out in cliffs and buttes. Sandstone, as the name implies, is compressed & transformed sand, but there is often shale underneath or holding it together. Limestone makes up around 10% of sedimentary rocks. It is made from the skeletons and shells of sea creatures and coral. That is why there are often fossils. And one more little fact. You do not find dinosaur fossils at Grand Canyon. I mentioned the layers. Evidently the Mesozoic layer was soft and washed away. There are lots of dinosaur fossils at the Vermillion Cliffs, which you can see from the Grand Canyon when the air is clear.
My pictures.  The top you see that most of the good picture places are taken by others. There were strong thunderstorms at the Canyon. On the way up it rained so hard we had to drive very slowly and considered stopping as sheets of water rolled down the roads. From the Canyon rim, you could see the storms and lightning at various points. Everybody was trying to get a picture when the lightning struck.

My draft to the Tree Farmer of the Year –

Some neighbors worried when the Wildlife Foundation of Virginia planned timber harvests on Fulfillment Farm. They thought it might hurt the wildlife, but that was almost twenty years ago. Today, their experience shows that the harvests have been helpful to wildlife and improved the sustainable health of the mixed forest ecosystem that sits on almost 2000 acres near Esmont in Albemarle County. Jenny West, Executive Director of the Foundation, explains that the goal is conservation and that means that human interaction with nature is an integral part of the sustainable future, and that Fulfillment Farm encourages hunting, hiking and birdwatching along with regular timber harvest.

The Foundation harvests around 65 acres of timber each year. This means that a given piece of land is affected about once every thirty years, which is a good rotation time in Virginia. Of course, some areas are not harvested at all. Fulfillment Farm supports significant wetlands, both natural and manmade, that provide habitats for waterfowl while enhancing water quality and recharging aquifers.

A hike across Fulfillment Farm rewards the visitor with experiences of a variety of habitats and environments. It is clear even to a casual visitor that this was a working Farm not very long ago. There still are fields planed in row crops, but now they are for wildlife. Pasturelands are transitioning into mixed forests and it is a joy to experience the early succession, sycamores near the water giving way to yellow popular as you walk up the hills all showing the impatient vigor of the new forests. It is interesting to observe the persistence of the grassland ecosystem. Their thick roots will resist the trees for a little longer and much of the open area is managed to keep it open.

Fulfillment Farm features some very large oaks of many varieties native to Virginia. Near the gate is a massive, ancient southern red oak, for example. Many stand in park-like glory, in a wonderfully inviting landscape. The great conservationist Aldo Leopold wrote that that you can read past decisions on the land today and oaks in particular tell a story. We can see that in earlier times the landowners did some high grading, cutting the bigger and more valuable trees. Current land management is remedying this by opening small but significant areas to oak regeneration. Oak regeneration is important in Virginia today. As our forests mature, relatively shade intolerant oaks lose out to shade tolerant species. But oak regeneration is tricky since it requires a balance of shade and sun, i.e. not full sun that favors pine and not deep shade that favors maple or beech. There also needs to be oaks nearby to provide acorns, which tend not to fall too far from the tree. Fulfillment Farm has several areas that meet these conditions and oaks for the next century are growing and thriving.

We congratulate the Wildlife Foundation of Virginia on their winning the Virginia Tree Farmer of the Year honor. Fulfillment Farm is an excellent example of what a Virginia tree farm should be – a place that balances production of forest products with protection of water, improvement of soils, habitat for wildlife and natural beauty. The fact that it is open to the public offers a showcase for tree farm values. It is well worth the trip and taking the time to savor the variety.

Migrating forests
Tree species can “migrate” naturally about thirty miles a century. If climate change happens faster, some may be unable to make the trip in time.
Humans, however, have already moved species. Loblolly pines, for example, have been successfully planted in large numbers significantly north of their natural range and I have seen stands of bald-cypress in Minnesota. They do not naturally regenerate that far north, but they are there – waiting – if climate change makes conditions appropriate. We may well see new associations.

I took part in a tree farm strategy meeting in Charlottesville, at the Department of Forestry building.  The goal is to make more people aware of the sustainable way we do forestry in the U.S. today and make tree farming more valuable to tree farming members.  Learn more about tree farming at this link – https://www.treefarmsystem.org

One of the challenges is that certified wood really does not get a premium price.  People claim to be interested in sustainability but they will not really pay for it.  Most forestry people want to do the right thing anyway, but it would be nice to be able to tell them that there was a cash benefit.  There are other benefits to tree farming besides the feeling of doing the right thing.   The tree farm provides inspections and advice  And I do not think we should underestimate the value of just paying attention to values and standards.

Anyway, my task is to develop a communications strategy.  I know how to write these things and I really believe in the goals.   I am not sure that we happy few can make a big difference, but I expect that we can do something.

Longleaf pine restoration is the topic of articles in other parts of this magazine and I will leave the details longleaf cultivation to experts. Adding longleaf back into the forest mix encourages diversity and I want like to talk more about the general changes and the benefits of diversity in our forestlands.

Encouraging species diversity is a good strategy when faced with uncertainty, complexity and change. Forest landowners face these conditions and the effects are accelerating. Forest planning must look at least several decades into the future. We cannot predict the future in detail, but we can be reasonably sure that conditions thirty years from now will be significantly different from what we have today because the factors that will create the changes are already here.

Leave aside for a moment the big uncertainty of climate change, more about that below. We have enough change drivers without it. For the last century, Virginia land area covered by trees was expanding as forests regrew naturally or were reestablished on former agricultural fields. This trend is finished, as conversion of land for development more than balances forest growth. Urbanization will continue to take up forestlands and, maybe more importantly, divide and fragment them. Twenty ten acre tracts separated by roads and houses are not the same as one unbroken 200 acre one. Beyond that, with the new roads and houses will come new species of trees and plants. Deodar cedar and metasequoia are beautiful in the Virginia landscape, but they are not from around here.

Invasive species are challenging. Some have been around for a long time, such as tree-of-heaven, kudzu or multiflora rose. They are nuisances, but we are used to them. However, new ones are constantly coming and they can be disruptive. The emerald ash borer may eliminate forests of ash. Sometimes big changes come from familiar insects, animals or plants in new association, as seems to be the problem with white pine in the western mountains. Moreover, sometimes it is hard to tell what is going on without looking closely, as with dogwood anthracnose. Researchers tell us that dogwoods dying out in their traditional places in deep forests and becoming a tree of the sunnier forest edge where the fungus spreads slower. We see dogwoods along the roads but may fail to notice their absence deeper in the woods. Dogwoods play an important role for wildlife, shading waterways and recycling nutrients. How do our forests respond when they are gone?
Let’s return to the big factor of climate change. While we cannot precisely predict the effects in any particular place, we can make some general assumptions. Climate change will open opportunities for some species, maybe invasive ones, and make life harder for others. We may see novel ecological communities, with species associated in ways they were not before. This may affect longleaf pine. The natural range of longleaf pine extends into Virginia, but not very far north or west. In most of the state, if you establish longleaf pine you are creating a new association, not “restoring” it. However, in a time of climate change and disequilibrium this may be exactly the right thing to do, as changes may open opportunities to expand the longleaf range. Conditions thirty years from now may be very kind to it.

This is not the first time we have gone through big changes. Walk around your land, look at the witness trees, the boundary trees, and read the descriptions on the old deeds. If your land is like mine, you will notice significant changes in the types of trees represented among the witness trees compared with those growing up now. It speaks to a different sort of forest when those old trees were young. The forest we leave to our grandchildren will be different again. It is our task to make it sustainable for ourselves and for them.