#wolf trees

[spatheandspadix]

Click here to support Research: wolf trees & post-agricultural forest biodiversity by Marion Holmes

I'm raising money to travel to Athens County, OH to continue research on the ecology of post-agricultural forests. Money is requested to contribute to tr...

It’s my birthday month! I made this birthday money fundraiser to help cover some of the costs of my wolf tree research. Back in 2018 I funded my first wolf tree study with bake sales, now I’m about to be underemployed again when my postdoc ends (November 14th) and haven’t gotten any grant funding for this follow-up project. I’ll probably be spending a ton of my own money on doing the work because I think it’s interesting and important. The total costs will be significantly more than what I’ve listed here and that’s without even including any kind of payment for my labor. That said, offsetting some of the costs would be very helpful!

If you like my research or me and want to celebrate, please consider tossing me a couple bucks to support the continuing adventures in ecology. Tenured faculty, people with permanent jobs, people who want to support unfunded early-career scientists, this is for you! This isn’t a life-or-death project so please don’t donate if you’re short on funds! I’d rather you eat (or help somebody else eat)!

Check out the link if you’re curious about wolf trees or the project even if you can’t donate. They’re pretty cool!

[spatheandspadix]

Open-grown chestnut oaks in previously logged forests at Powdermill. These specimens likely escaped logging because of their horizontal branching and bifurcated trunks.

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One of my favorite wolf trees anywhere and part of the inspiration for my research on them. You can see the horizontal spread looming over the dense, young successional forest from a good distance when the leaves are gone.

Starting in mid May I'll be a postdoc in the Kuebbing Lab at Pitt. A year and a half of Scumbag Life finally ends and now I'll have a real job and be part of a lab group again and make a lot of money. It's good. It also means I have a lot of stuff I want to finish before field season:

-Get wolf tree manuscript to a submitable state -Write and submit abstracts for Natural Areas and Digital Data in Biodiversity Research conferences -Collect as much digital data for the parasitic plant project as possible -Finish teaching my class -Get my students' forest dataset cleaned up and posted on Dryad

🙏 🙏 🙏 🙏 🙏 🙏 🙏

[spatheandspadix]

Wolf tree of the day: This is the PA champion swamp white oak at Bald Eagle State Park. It's a former pasture tree and it might also be my cousin. Much of the Bald Eagle Valley and the surrounding region was farmed by my relatives starting in the early 1800's. I am the first generation born outside the PA mountains since then. This tree might well be older than their arrival and owes its spreading growth habit to agricultural history that they were likely part of. It may have began life in a forest and been kept to provide shade for animals, branches spreading after clearance to take advantage of new light. It may also have originated in a Seneca or Susquehannock game park, with trees kept at low density through burning to encourage growth of forage plants, and had an open-grown form from the start. It would be wonderful to core this tree and see what it has to say.

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Come to my colloquium talk for the Ohio University Department of Environmental and Plant Biology. It’s next Friday at 11:50 AM in Athens. Brand new research.

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BQMT dropped some big leaves this year.

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Wolf tree profiles: PSQMT, chestnut oak, 91.1 cm DBH. Surrounding forest 50-60 years past canopy closure.

[spatheandspadix]

Gonna post some of my field notes here because I can.

I’m working on the ecology of wolf trees right now. Wolf trees are those large individuals with branches growing all around the trunk and often low to the ground that can be found in forests all over. Their structure indicates that they grew in an open area such as a pasture rather than in closed forest; if you see one in a forest, that's an indicator that the site used to be pastured and the modern forest regrew after abandonment. I'm working on a study of how they contribute to habitat variation and spatial patterning of other plants in post-agricultural forests and how that changes through time. More sneak peaks coming soon!

-Structural heterogeneity around wolf trees is very apparent, even 50+ years after canopy closure!

-The area under the canopy is typically barren of trees except for a few small individuals. They can’t establish directly under the wolf tree’s canopy due to resource scarcity. Not enough light, probably competition for water as well.

-The zone around the canopy margin is characterized by higher tree density than the surrounding forest, and many of these trees are animal-dispersed (oaks and hickories). Nut-bearing species appear to be present in a higher proportion in this zone than in surrounding forest in some cases, which suggests a mechanism for the observed pattern. Seed-dispersing animals might be using the wolf tree early in succession and depositing seeds nearby, but those dropped directly under the canopy cannot establish due to competition with the wolf tree itself. The canopy edge might represent a "happy medium" of seed rain and light availability.

-Working on dry ridgetops is SO MUCH EASIER than in stream valleys like I did for my dissertation. Breezes, no mosquitos, no brutal humidity, no dense growths of armed shrubs. I saw one small greenbrier the entire time today and no multiflora rose at all! The herb layer is much sparser and less species-rich, but that makes it a lot faster to sample and I probably won’t have horrible eyestrain from counting thousands of tiny stems by 5 days in like I did previously.