Forest soils certainly benefit from the addition of plant nutrients. Elements like nitrogen, phosphorous, potassium, calcium, and magnesium are the building blocks of leaves, twigs, trunks,…

Last fall when acorns were falling out of the oak trees by the thousands, a neighbor said we could expect a hard winter. Presumably the deer needed lots of acorns to last them through the…

I’m interested in learning more about how trees self-prune. How does a tree “decide” that a branch is no longer useful? Think of it as nature’s cost-benefit analysis.…

Why Do Evergreen Needles Look So Different From Deciduous Leaves? Ask anybody to draw a leaf and damn few would draw a pine, spruce, hemlock, or fir needle, and even fewer would draw the green…

Forest fragmentation is the breaking of large, contiguous, forested areas into smaller pieces of forest; typically these pieces are separated by roads, agriculture, utility corridors,…

In assaying wooded land, foresters observe, measure, describe, and map the forest, delineating it into smaller areas – or management units – known as stands. In this way, a forest…

Let’s face it: trees are better off in the woods. Although forest trees – like their more urban counterparts – face many threats to growth and survival, at least in the woods…

A tree’s growth is based, in part, on competition from its neighbors. Its first priority is to gain access to the sun, and in a forest up is the only way to go. (An open grown tree will…

Those bulging cysts on the otherwise very smooth, gray-brown bark are a distinguishing characteristic of balsam fir trees. They’re all over most fir stems. Aside from the really young…