Current Events

 

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Dr. Neil Pederson

Senior Ecologist
Harvard Forest
Petersham, MA

"Trees Don't Read Textbooks and Other Woody Stories of Persistence, Individuality, and Resilience"

Mark your calendar for the next NEBC Meeting on Saturday, February 1, 2020 at Harvard University's Haller Hall, 4:00pm.

Abstract: Trees don't read textbooks. They live through a strategy that might be considered persistence, brilliance, and resilience. By brilliance, I do not mean to personify trees. I mean something more like virtuosity, where a tree's proficiency and dexterity to find solutions in a stationary life doesn't result simply in survival. This brilliance is more about finding solutions that allow individual trees to flourish. "Look at how that tree grows – brilliant!", which is a phrase we can say in the forest and in the lab.

As we peer into long lives of trees and precisely document the annual chapters of their lives, our understandings of individual trees and populations of trees grow. Our studies reveal that the lives of trees are not nearly as monolithic or stoic as we might imagine them to be. Trees defy our expectations of growth, persistence, and longevity. And, as we have refined our abilities to understand the chapters in the lives of trees, we have also learned that the climate and old-growth ecosystems in which they inhabit have been more dynamic than what we have witnessed in regions like the Northeastern US.

For this lecture, I will reveal how we learn about the lives of trees, share the lives of some exceptional trees, describe the noisy chorus in a population of red oak at the Harvard Forest, and then show how some of the oldest trees indicate that future climate and ecology in the eastern US just might be as dynamic as some forecasts suggest.

 

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