The Lifetime of a Forest
—Laura Green, Interim Conservation Director
Trees Offer Clues
Trees live much longer than we do. Because of this, it is easy to miss how forests change as individual trees thrive, compete, grow, and die. From red oak and sugar maple to white pine and hemlock, the trees in our forest need a range of growing conditions early in their lives to establish and grow successfully. Some, like the oaks, tulip trees, and pines, grow best when they start their lives with lots of sunlight. Others, like hemlocks and sugar maples, start out growing more slowly and can tolerate the shade of other, taller trees.
Understanding these species-specific needs can give us clues about what happened in the past to set the stage for the forest that we see today. Forests bear the signature of the conditions of their birth. If a forest is dominated by oak trees, this composition points to specific features of that place’s history. Though today a forest may have a tall canopy of trees, in the past it might have been a recently abandoned pasture, dominated by bright sun and grasses with baby oak and pine trees just starting to grow.
Future Forests
The long lives of trees and slow change of forests can lead us to assume that our forests have always looked the way they do now. The woods we grew up with can set a benchmark for our sense of how a forest “should” be. But if we zoom out and look back in time, we can see that the woods are far less static than they might appear from the perspective of a single human lifetime.
In the last several hundred years, there have been massive changes on our landscape, and our forests have changed just as our cities have. Land use and climate have shifted, big storms have rolled through, and new pests and pathogens have emerged. The canopy trees that define today’s woods represent the conditions of 80 or 100 years in the past. Much has changed since then. As our current canopy trees approach the end of their lives, what trees will take their place?
Without big clearings and openings with lots of sun to kickstart saplings’ race to the sky, our beloved oaks give way to trees that tolerate shadier conditions, like red maple, black birch, and beech. Each of these species of trees offers something different when it comes to food and habitat for animals, timber, and climate resilience. These shifts in forest tree composition also spell a change in the look and feel of our woods, and they prompt an exciting question: how will our future forest look?
Take a look at these old photos of the nature center to see how dramatically a forest can change in a short time.
A photo looking up the driveway. If you look in the upper left corner you will see the Parsons’ home peeking through the trees before it burned down.
A view from the top of the hill. In the top right corner you will see a church steeple to give you better perspective. This is now forested area.
Taking Action
As you walk the trails of the Nature Center, you may notice groups of small trees surrounded by wire cages. These are the trees we hope will be the future of Rye Nature Center’s forest. Years of browsing by many hungry deer have stopped the usual process of tree regeneration at the Nature Center: most baby trees are eaten before they can get tall enough to be safe from deer.
Without new trees growing up from below, our forest canopy becomes more and more fragmented as mature trees fall due to old age or storms. To try to catch up, we are planting (and protecting!) young trees of several native canopy species. We picked trees that are suited to anticipate changes in climate and that will grow quickly to fill in gaps in the canopy where mature trees have fallen. With a little water and good luck, these trees will carry the forest forward into the next hundred years.
A young tree planted at the nature center this fall. The wire cage protects it from damage by deer browse. Photograph by Laura Green.
