The Forest

Red maple is the forest's pragmatist — the first to colonize a disturbed gap, the last to yield a wet corner no other species can tolerate. Its abundance reflects a history of selective harvesting and storm disturbance that opened the canopy repeatedly over the past century, rewarding fast-establishing generalists. In the context of climate change, red maple is largely well-positioned: it tolerates a wide range of moisture conditions and shows greater drought resistance than other maples. As sugar maple gradually retreats northward, red maple is likely to fill some of that ecological role — though not all of what's lost will be replaced.

In most canopy gaps here, red maple seedlings are among the first to establish. Watching what regenerates tells you something about where the forest is going.

Sugar maple is the long-term carbon banker of the northeastern hardwood forest — accumulating more carbon per acre than nearly any other species in the region, growing slowly and living long. A mature sugar maple may hold its carbon for two centuries. It is also the most ecologically generative tree here: its leaf litter enriches the soil, its seeds sustain birds and small mammals through the winter, and the understory beneath a sugar maple stand supports a community unlike any other canopy type.

But sugar maple is also the species most clearly in retreat. Higher summer temperatures, increasing drought, and acid deposition have stressed populations across the southern range edge — which includes this forest. The climate window for maple syrup production in southern New England is narrowing. Tending sugar maple here means reckoning honestly with that: some of what we're managing is a community in transition.

White ash is being lost — not gradually, but at near-total rates where the emerald ash borer has established. EAB has been confirmed in this county. The question is no longer whether the ash population here will be affected, but at what pace and what will fill the space it leaves. We are documenting ash diameter distributions to track the decline and watching for the rare genetically resistant individuals that appear in some populations. Finding and protecting those trees is one of the more intentional interventions underway.

Losing 13% of the forest's basal area is not a footnote — it changes light penetration, understory composition, and soil chemistry. White ash is among the last species to leaf out in spring, creating a brief window of understory light that a whole community of spring ephemerals has co-evolved around. When that canopy closes earlier and more permanently, that community changes too.

Red oak is one of climate adaptation's protagonists in the northeastern forest story. As warming shifts suitable habitat northward, red oak is competing more successfully across more locations — tolerating heat and summer drought better than the maples that currently dominate. At this elevation, red oak sits near the upper edge of its typical range, but that edge is moving. The acorn crop this species produces each autumn is foundational to the food web: blue jays, turkeys, squirrels, bears, and deer all depend on it through fall and winter.

Red oak regeneration in the understory functions as a leading indicator. Where oak seedlings establish successfully, the forest is telling us something about what it expects. Creating and maintaining the conditions for oak regeneration — managing deer browse, opening gaps with selective harvesting — is one of the more direct and consequential interventions available.

Sweet birch is the scratch-and-sniff species of the northeastern forest: crush a twig and you get the unmistakable scent of wintergreen. It fills a specific niche — growing quickly on disturbed sites, tolerating shallow rocky soils, and providing early successional structure while longer-lived species establish. Its seeds are light enough to travel by wind into any gap the forest opens, and germinate readily on exposed mineral soil after disturbance. In a forest defined by a history of canopy disruption, sweet birch is part of the recovery vocabulary.

In climate adaptation terms, sweet birch occupies the resilient middle: not especially vulnerable to warming, but not a primary beneficiary either. It's part of the forest's structural continuity — a species that keeps things functioning while conditions sort themselves out over coming decades.

The red pine stands here are almost certainly planted — not natural to this aspect and elevation. Red pine was planted widely across the Northeast in the mid-twentieth century for timber production and erosion control on abandoned farmland. These stands are aging: the trees experience increasing blowdown and wind throw, and naturally regenerating hardwoods are establishing aggressively in the understory beneath them. The monoculture structure of plantation pine — dense, even-aged, with deep shade and acidic needle duff — suppresses the diverse understory community that makes a forest ecologically functional.

We are letting succession unfold. As the plantation trees age and fall, they create structural diversity and coarse woody debris that the hardwood community building beneath them needs. This is a transition the forest is managing largely on its own. Tending here means staying out of the way.

Beech bark disease — a complex of introduced scale insects and native fungi — is pervasive across northeastern forests, and the beech population here reflects this: many trees show the characteristic rough, cankered bark, and beech snap (sudden stem failure in infected trees) is a documented safety concern on trails. The disease has no treatment. What exists is the possibility of genetic resistance in a small fraction of individual trees that survive with minimal damage despite heavy disease pressure.

Identifying resistant individuals, protecting them from harvesting, and building seed collection programs around them is one of the few active interventions with genuine long-term potential for this species. A healthy beech forest — smooth gray bark, fat winter buds, spring flush of lime-green leaves — is one of the northeastern forest's great aesthetic experiences. Its loss would be the most visible ecological transformation of our generation.

Black cherry is a forest opportunist with good climate prospects — growing quickly in disturbed openings, producing fruit that birds disperse widely across the landscape, and showing little sensitivity to warming or summer drought. The fruit it produces each August is a critical late-summer food source for migratory songbirds. Its timber is among the most commercially valuable native hardwoods in the Northeast, which means it pays its own way in any working forest management context.

Its primary vulnerability at this site is deer browse. Black cherry seedlings are among the most palatable species deer will selectively remove from a forest understory — creating a paradox where abundant seed trees produce almost no successful offspring. This is one of the clearest signals that deer pressure is a meaningful management variable. Where browse pressure is managed or excluded, cherry regenerates aggressively. Where it isn't, the next generation may be largely absent.

Yellow birch is one of the northern hardwood forest's signature species — its metallic bronze bark peeling in papery curls, its presence an indicator of cool moist conditions on north-facing slopes and near streams. At this elevation and latitude, yellow birch sits near its southern range margin. As conditions warm and summer moisture becomes less reliable, yellow birch is gradually losing competitive ground — regenerating less successfully and yielding to heat-tolerant species that thrive where it struggles.

Watching the yellow birch here is a way of taking the forest's temperature in slow motion. The mature trees are still vigorous. But in the understory, on the slopes and stream margins where yellow birch once dominated the next generation, the seedling density tells a different story. Tending a species in gradual range contraction means being honest about what you're doing — and why it still matters to try.