They set out to study how climate change is affecting a near century old tree and right off the bat they start drilling holes in it and climbing all over it:
... So we came back in spring 2014, with Dave Orwig, a master tree corer at the Forest, to bore deep into the oak.
The big oak talked back with a krrreck as Orwig drilled the bit nearly to the tree’s heart. With a swift tug, he pulled out a long core of wood from the dark depths of the tree into the sunlight: a slim wand of time, looking into the past.
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Which is where Melissa LeVangie and her twin sister, Bear, came in.
Melissa, the tree warden for Petersham, Mass., is charged with protecting the town’s trees. She also happens to be a champion climber. So when it came time to get up in the tree, it was obvious whom I should call.
On the appointed day, Melissa and Bear arrived and rigged me up in a harness and ropes. I felt like a trussed turkey as the time came to give the rope that tethered me to the oak a pull. My feet lifted from the ground. In that moment, I was transported to the joy of my tree climbs as a girl, swaying atop a tall cedar in my tiny treetop girl nation of one.
My intended short visit turned into an obsession that eventually took me, with Melissa and Bear, into the oak’s leafy crown some 80 feet up, picnicking in a hammock and even writing parts of the book that would come of all this, Witness Tree (Bloomsbury, 2017). ...........
This Forest has a master tree corer? And a town nearby has a "tree warden?" Taxes must be sky high in MA.
... Harvard Forest, a 4,000-acre laboratory of mostly scrappy third-growth trees, on former pastures and farms west of Boston.
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I MOVED TO the Forest in the fall of 2014 to live with my tree for a year for what we called the Witness Tree Project, taking up residence just a short walk away from the oak in an old farmhouse. There was even a small troupe of cows for company in a pasture just outside the front door.
The big oak had sprouted by a stone wall as people left these woods for cities and factories, creating the emissions that are changing our world. ....
Bad people. They should have kept to their rustic farm life. Of couse, if they had her pet oak would have been turned into firewood long ago.
The tower by the big oak bristles with an array of instruments. Cameras and sensors poke into the business of this grove, logging every act in the leaves’ annual drama as they bud, unfurl, color and fall.
See it for yourself: Log on to the webcams at Harvard Forest to see the Witness Tree’s patch of woods on Barn Tower and Barn Tower 2, or click on the Witness Tree camera to see the big oak.
Yes, there sure is some money in trees in Massachusetts.
Now what climate catastrophe did she find? What endangers her beloved oak?
Combining O’Keefe’s field observations with the forest-eye view from the cameras, and data from a bevy of gadgets, the Richardson lab and its collaborators are breaking new ground in understanding the impact of climate change on forests. They published research showing trees were packing away more carbon and growing faster than at any time in the past 20 years, and using less water to do so. With so much carbon dioxide in the air, trees such as the big oak open their stomata — the breathing pores in their leaves — less to take in the carbon dioxide that is their food. They lose less water in the bargain.
Here was climate change, visible not only in the calendar of the forest canopy, but deep within the mechanics of individual leaves, even within one tree.
Curse that climate change. Wait ... what? That's it? The research shows the tree is flourishing?
Hey, what about THESE DEAD trees (below) turned into firewood to heat the researchers, tree wardens, master corers, climbers, etc? Who is monitoring those trees?
The Harvard Forest Woods Crew has readied the winter wood supply. Harvard Forest heats its buildings with locally sourced firewood from the Forest, thanks to the crew’s labors. (Lynda V. Mapes/The Seattle Times) |
