The Magic Maples of New England

[Music] each autumn people in the northeast are treated to a spectacular pageant of fluorescent colors as nature plays its grand finale of the growing season from bottomlands to the uplands it's a show unmatched anywhere on earth the late day sun sets the forest aglow [Music] with the onset of autumn green chlorophyll in the leaves of trees and other plants gradually fades away revealing the striking yellows oranges pinks purples and reds of carotenoids and anthocyanins within the leaves the change is gradual and each tree species produces its own color some are always yellow or golden others are orange or red some are variable but the greatest palette of glowing colors is almost exclusively on display in the maples shorter days and falling temperatures signal deciduous trees to begin shedding their leaves in preparation for winter green chlorophyll that allowed photosynthesis to take place is drained from the leaves revealing hidden colors the maples range from yellow to gold to salmon to orange to blazing ruby red it's late summer in new england in wetlands the first hint of the coming fall is offered up by red maples about six months ago red and sugar maples were among the first to welcome spring the red maples with their red flowers the sugar maples with their yellow flowers the red maple is iconic to new england but it has a very very wide distribution in fact it's one of the most widely distributed of the eastern species is interesting too in terms of its gender one tree may be male another tree may be female a third tree may be both and one of those trees may actually change gender somewhere in the course of its life so it has a very interesting history there and it has a fairly broad adaptability in terms of wet versus dry so it's really a survivor with its tolerance for wet conditions red maple also known as soft maple often forms dense young forests in wetlands leading to another of its common names swamp maple in addition to its red flowers and often red autumn foliage this maple also has red fruit or samaras even its youngest twigs are reddish the leaves have three main lobes sometimes with two smaller ones at the base coarse teeth along the margins and sharply angular sinuses between the lobes like all maples it has opposite branching in a new england forest the only trees with opposite branching are maples ashes and dogwoods you may encounter this plant and identify it as a red maple seedling it has opposite branching and the leaves look right but what's this red maple doesn't have this fruit don't be fooled this is the maple leaf viburnum an unrelated shrub young red maples have smooth gray bark and can be confused with beach but beach buds are not opposite and they're a much different shape as are their leaves with age the smooth bark begins to crack and take on a rougher texture nectria fungus invades many red maples the tree contains the infection by growing callous tissue around it over the winter when the tree is dormant the fungus advances and next spring the tree grows another wall around it this is repeated for years and the result is what's known as a target canker nectria affects many species but only red maple shows this bullseye bark pattern in severe cases the canker can be extreme and kill the tree with greater age the bark has formed plates and begins to shed the tree has a shaggy appearance with bark strips curling up at their top and bottom ends some resemble shag bark hickory old forest grown red maples tend to be tall straight trees as impressive as any other sometimes forest managers look a little bit unfavorably on red maple because if you cut the woods too much if you open up too much and you've got a seed source nearby you can have a lot of red maples however the species self thins quite nicely and by the time the forest is quite mature the number of red maples per unit area will come down and when you get into an old growth forest they're there but not at all over represented these species have cycles and they adapt into different environments and we don't want to judge their value or their worth on the basis of a slice of their life let's say the first 40 or 50 years or what happens when lands that they grow on are overly disturbed it does quite nicely on its own in the forest environment we like these red maples one of bob's favorite red maples grows in the berkshire hills of western massachusetts i've been visiting this tree literally for years measuring it it's now 9.3 feet in circumference and at its tallest it was 118.9 feet pretty good for a single stemmed red maple growing in a forest environment in the new england woods it embodied all of the features physical features that make red maples attractive and speak to our imagination we named it magic maple red maple is not a particularly long-lived species 150 years is okay some can make it to 200 but all in all they don't tend to live that long so we're left here with an example of a tree that has reached its full potential and that's what we really love to see in the woods trees that are left alone to grow to reach their full potential so we really understand the species red maple it's become more common over the last century in our forest across the northeast but a lot of the eastern united states and we don't know much about its longevity but about 30 years ago two scientists in the catskills cored a stand and they found one that's 300 years old which is really surprising because we don't usually think about red maple as a sturdy long-lived species but we have proof at least of one that lived three centuries one of my most memorable encounters with red maple was as a graduate student where i was coring a population at the harvard forest what i found was in this population is that over the last 30 years some of these trees had only formed about 12 growth rings instead of 30 growth rings or some individuals in the last 15 years had only formed seven growth rings instead of 15 growth rings so some of these trees are alive but they're only producing rings about half of the time that they've been alive you know in the last two or three decades we've nicknamed them zombie maples they're alive but they're not growing like you would normally producing growth rings each year and so it says a lot about their resilience or their persistence to be able to sit in the understory and just wait for another opportunity to grow into the canopy when their neighboring tree falls over a common question i get about these zombie maples or these these red maples that are missing a lot of rings in the last two or three decades is how do i know that they're missing so in 1981 when the gypsy moths defoliated the trees at the harvard forest and a lot of trees in central massachusetts the rings of not only red maple but also yellow birch and a handful other species turned white or the instead of being a nice dark color or a caramel color they were more white colored and a scientist ted hogg years ago defoliated seedlings of aspen in the laboratory let them grow for another year and then he harvested them and what he found was in the year that he defoliated these trees the rings were lighter in color and it was that lighter ring that allowed me to identify that 1981 was in that ring there's 1981 i cored these in 2003 and that allowed me to find the missing rings [Music] our next maple species is associated not with swamps but another kind of wetland habitat the floodplain forests of larger rivers this is the silver maple on a still day the calm forest is dark and green but a good breeze can flip over the leaves of half the tree and reveal how the silver maple got its name it's a fast growing tree that arises from the rich alluvial soil of river valleys subject to occasional or seasonal flooding extensive forests of silver maple shade these riverbanks though these are not particularly long lived trees they grow rapidly to impressive sizes the massive trunks and lush understory of shrubs and ferns convey the feeling of an old forest the maples keep company with other giants huge cottonwoods white ash and basswood lofty sycamores and a small american elm is a remnant of the great elms that once graced these forests flower buds open in early spring before the leaves emerge the leaves are deeply cut with five lobes and teeth along the margins their undersides are bright silvery green the samaras the largest of any of our native maples contain seeds that ripen in spring silver and red maples are the only two maples whose seeds ripen in spring rather than autumn young silver maple bark is smooth and gray easily mistaken for red maple as it grows the bark splits and shows orange color in the crevices further growth produces narrow thin bark strips in time the strips begin to curl away from the trunk similar to red maple but usually not producing as shaggy a look as some of the red maples following the demise of the american elm silver maples were widely planted as a replacement roadside tree many of these grew to massive proportions but decades later they were found to be a poor choice owing to their weak wood often scraggly appearance and shallow root systems that wreaked havoc with curbs and sidewalks the silver maple is a beautiful tree but out of place as a loner on a city street maybe it's best left to run wild with the pack in its natural setting [Music] in the floodplain forest there's another maple inhabitant the box elder like all other maples it too has opposite branching its young twigs are green box elder has compound leaves similar to the white ash in fact it's also known as ash-leaved maple leaf margins are notched not unlike poison ivy box elder doesn't possess the allure of other maples in the northeast it's a short-lived tree prone to storm damage and usually takes on a contorted and tortured form rarely rising into the forest canopy its autumn foliage is an unremarkable yellow but one thing it does very well is produce seeds [Music] it's early spring in an upland forest among the many plants coming back to life is a delightful unassuming little tree of the understory the striped maple also known as moose wood it has large three-lobed leaves that account for another of its common names goosefoot maple the leaf margins are finely sawtoothed small yellow springtime flower clusters dangle from its twigs and there's the characteristic opposite branching of all maples but its most pleasing feature is its white striped green bark the origin of yet another of its common names snake bark maple the green bark can even photosynthesize age darkens the bright green of young stems until it eventually is obscured but stripes remain visible typically more shrub sized striped maple has been accurately measured to heights over 70 feet as an understory tree striped maple is highly tolerant of shade we've actually sampled a small population in an old growth forest of striped maple and we found that they the oldest one was about 70 years old many of them were 30 to 50 years old and what i learned about striped maples it's a disturbance species when there's a hole put into the canopy for various reasons striped maple will come in colonize and and form its own population within that gap so the decline of beach through the beach bark disease has triggered a lot of regrowth of striped maple we don't know much about the species other than that but we have learned that it can live at least 70 years old but i wouldn't be surprised 120 year old one lives out there somewhere in the forest spring summer or fall can there be a more unimposing and charming little forest tree than striped maple resembling striped maple is the mountain maple but its flower clusters stand erect rather than dangling down its leaves are more coarsely toothed its stems are brown instead of green and it does not grow much beyond shrub size mountain maple is typically found in more rocky terrain along ledges and in ravines if i had to choose one tree species for new england that stands out just about in every mine and everybody loves the species it would have to be our sugar maples the glorious fall colors of course the sweet sap the sugar maple literally has everything going for it sugar maple has opposite branching with brown twigs the leaves have three major lobes and two smaller ones at the base but unlike red maple there are no serrations along the margins and the sinuses are not sharply angled norway maple introduced from europe can be confused with native sugar maple also known as rock or hard maple norway bark has grooves and ridges whereas sugar maple bark matures into plates and there is black maple which has a similar but glossy leaf and bark similar to norway maple in early spring sugar maple flowers brighten a landscape eager to say goodbye to winter samaras develop over the summer and drop from the tree in autumn they require exposure to winter's cold to then germinate next spring of course autumn brings on the painted parade [Music] when we started studying uh sugar maple from a tree ring perspective just about four or five years ago i really didn't know what to expect prior to that dan bishop a master student at suny esf in syracuse had me join his project where they looked at 18 populations across the adirondacks and in fact dan found that about 75 of the sugar maples in this study were actually in a decline we're not growing as well as they had in the past it didn't matter what soil type we're at they were on whether they're on rich soils or poor soils it didn't matter if they were small or large or young or old about three quarters of the population in the western adirondacks are in a growth decline right now and that was surprising because the climate in general in the northeast has gotten warmer in the winter not too hot in the summer yet and a good bit wetter those mix of conditions climatically speaking should allow for greater growth of sugar maple not poor growth it's hard to know why sugar maple declining we as a society as a culture have been cleaning the pollution from the coal plants coming out of the midwest and so the acid rain has been on a decline for the last 30 or 40 years so that should have improved sugar maple growth and i suspect it's a degradation of soil quality due to a century of acid rain and perhaps a decline in snowpack in the late winter early spring that might increase the mortality rate of the fine roots of sugar maple it's a complex system that we don't fully understand but as of right now while the environmental factors are improving sugar maple we saw in this study were actually declining but since that time we've studied a couple more populations in the eastern adirondacks and southwestern new hampshire in old growth forests and we haven't noticed the decline quite to that severity that we haven't studied it as deeply but the good news is we have found sugar maples that were 50 60 80 years old all the way up to about 250 years old and so we've seen that at least in the last 60 to 200 years there's been a good recruitment of sugar maple in these old growth stands and like this tree they seem to be at least externally doing okay sugar maple actually might be a species that actually enriches the site that it lives in that its roots go out harvest uh calcium and other micronutrients and kind of pump it up bring it up to the surface and then over time improve the quality of the soils in which it lives in the adirondacks in this old growth forest that we sampled the oldest sugar maples dated to about the 1780s it's a stately tree in the interior of the forest on rich sites it easily tops 100 feet and we have measured them in new england up to 136.5 feet that was the best we ever really did but we got a lot above 110 115 the wood is beautiful used for lots of different purposes but beyond the obvious utilitarian values it's just an absolutely gorgeous tree it's one of the sites that endeared me to new england coming from my native southern appalachians where we have them down there too but here in greater abundance it was just seeing the sugar maples in the first autumn up here that said ah this is the place i really want to be [Music] [Music] you

Channel: New England Forests

Views: 11,610

Rating: 4.9819818 out of 5

Keywords: maple, fall foliage, sugar maple, red maple, acer, bob leverett, silver maple, striped maple, box elder, old growth forest

Id: N8zSxfPxA4U

Length: 25min 53sec (1553 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 25 2020