I wonder about this. I have some pieces of white pine timber from the early 19th century, and the growth rings are really narrow. Even in a relatively small piece of wood, you can count a couple centuries’ growth, so these are trees that would have been growing when the English first arrived. If a tree is only adding a a sixteenth of an inch of girth every year, you’d conclude that it was starved for water, light or nutrients, wouldn’t you?
Incidentally, one of the other factors that apparently is changing the Eastern forests these days is the humble earthworm. This European import is said to be gobbling up all the duff off the forest floor, making it significantly harder for seedlings to get going.
First off the forests that the Englsih found in most of the US was nothing like the Indian managed parklands. Diseases that had arrived with the Spaniards 100 years earlier and were being constantly introduced since had decimated the Indian populations. The accounts of the first English settlers make it very clear that vast areas of agricultural land had been abandoned before they had arrivedm and the forests showed avery odd age structure with lots of giant trees and poles but now mid sized trees. So if your peice of timber was 50-100 years old in 1600 it would almost certainly have been one of those tree sproduced by th epost-Indian recruitment event, and therefore facing sever competition from other trees in its cohort as well as the giants.
Secondly it is impossible for any tree to add 2 inches of girth every year for 400 years. If it did it would be 70 feet at death, or over twice the size of the largest redwood. The growth rings naturally have to become thinner as the tree ages. Imagine you have a tree in a totally open pasture, absolutely no competition form other tress. For the first ~5 years it will be subjected to serious competeition from the herbaceous pasture plants and grow slowly. Then it will be released from that competition and have an excess of resources for the next ~50 years. Then it will gradually reach a size where it has trouble just maintaining water to its own canopy because of the sheer mass of leaves. At this point growth will slow again and the tree is considered senescent, ie not growing.
That’s what we’d expect in the Indian parklands, trees with central growth rings closely spaced, then a period of widely spaced rings , then at least a century, probably two, of closely spaced rings indicative of a sensecent or moribund tree. And that’s prety much what we do see. Inc ontrast in natural forests inter-tree comepetition is so constant that growth rings don’t vary a lot for any age of tree.
Blake, you’ve given us this “Indian parkland” theory of yours before, and it still doesn’t wash. The Eastern forests of the US were far too vast to have been maintained as “parkland” by the Indians (taking their numbers into account).
Not to say that there were no areas where the Indians used fire to maintain parklike open areas. There were. Some areas were burned regularly to maintain them as grassland, the better to attract game. What is not credible is that the entire Eastern forest was kept thus.
See, this is really stretching the evidence to fit your “parkland” notion.
The growth ring pattern you are describing (slow growth initially, followed by a burst of rapid growth) is what you see in any forest. It takes several years for a young tree, sprouting from the shady forest floor, to reach the canopy. These are the years of slow growth. Then, when the tree finally manages to reach up to the canopy, and its leaves begin to get full sunlight, the added photosynthesis fuels a growth spurt, and you see thicker rings.
It isn’t my theory, it is the theory of the vast majority of paleaoarcheologists, dendrochronoligists and archaeoecologists, as you woudl well know from previous threads. I honestly don’t know of more than a handful of fringe dwellers who deny that prety much all of the Eastern US was maintained as a parkland/savanna by Indians and experienced tremendous thickening following Indian depopulation.
Wells since you’ve made that statement of fact in GQ…
CITE!
Show us this evidence that diagress with the scientific conclusions of the experts. Bear in mind that we have huge amouts of evdience from soil isotpoe ratios, dendrochronology, paleaoarcheology, contemporray written records and so forth that contradicts this claim.
I look forward to you producing what must be some pretty damn convincing evidence to overturn what has become pretty mcuh consenesus over the past 20 years.
No, it bloody well is not. Your level of ignorance inh this subject ios quite impressive.
First off I never said a slow initail growth followed by a rapid burst. I said that we see a very slow initial growth followed by a rapid burst followe dby slow growth in senescence. That is exacvtly what we never see in an undistrubed forest.
An undisturbed forest has what is called a reverse-J population distribution, because the population structure when plotted produces a reverse J shape. recruitment and establishment are continuous so the vast majority of plants exist as seedlings, then slightly less exist as saplings, then slightly fewer as poles, then slightly fewer as sub-mature trees and so forth until you have a tiny number of large overmature gaints. That does not and can not produce a growth pattern with slow initial growth followed by rapid growth for several decades follwoed by centuries of sensecence.
Think about it for just as second and you will see how ridiculous your claim is. If all trees remianed stunted for less than decade, then grew rapidly for a couple of decades and then senesced then then vast majority of trees in the forest should be large trees because they spend less than a decade in the sub-canopy and then spend over 20 years as canopy poles, then they spend 200 years in the canopy. That sort of growth pattern produces a true J curve, with lots of large overmature trees, fewer submatures, fewer still poles and very fewsaplings. That is never, ever seen in an undisturbed forest system, what we always see is a reverse J.
Absolute bollocks.
A young tree sprouting in the shade is either shade tolerant or it isn’t .
If it isn’t shade tolerant it dies within a couple of years.
If it is shade tolerant it can either grow in the shade or it can not.
If it can grow in the shade then it will find its way into the canopy within a few years at most. Once in ther canopy it will continue to grow slowly because resources will still be limiting because it has reached the canopy of a fully stocked forest. You will never see rapid growth followed by senescence.
If it can’t grow in the shade (and this is the vast majority of forest trees) then it will exist as a supressed seedling until such time as a gap forms, then it will immediately bolt for the canopy. Thus you will see seedling senescnece, followed by rapid growth of several years at most from growth into a destocked gap, followed by senescence. You do not see slow growth, then a spurt of several decades followed by senescence.
Your claim that it takes several years for a young tree to reach the canopy has no basis in fact whatsoever. There are some very few species for which this is true, but it is by no means the norm and we know it is not the norm and we know precisely which species it is true for, and we know that they are not just the ones we have observed this open habit growth for. The majority of North American trees are either shade intolerant and need to germinate in a gap to survive, or they are shade tolerant but exist as supressed seedlings. In neither case do they behave as you describe, taking years to reach the canopy fom a shady floor. They only reach the canopy when there is light reaching the flooor.
How the hell does that work? If there is sufficient water and nutrients and light available, and seedlings manage to reach the canopy in a few years as you claim then why the hell doesn’t any resouece ever become limiting?
This is just nonsense. It defies the laws of physics, never mind ecology. Any system, including a forest, has a maximal amount of usable energy available. That is when we say that the forest is fully stocked. If seedlings could manage to reach the canopy and then thrive once they get there as you claim then why hell haven’t they been doing that for millenia? And if they have been doing that for millenia then why isn’t the forest fully stocked?
Of course real forests don’t defy the laws of physics. Seedlings have to wait until a gap forms in order to occupy the space left vacant by the trees that occupied that gap so they can exploit the resources freed up by the fallen tree.
I’ve asked before and I’ll say it again: Why the hell does everyone believe they understand the natural sciences no matter how ignorant they are of even the most basic principles? I’m sure the physicists, ecnomists and so forth dont; get this sort of base level nonsense. It really is like someone arguing with an economist that he can print infinite amounts of currency and won’t increase inflation.
Just a quick link to the Manahatta project, one goal of which is to create a virtual version of Manhattan circa 1609 that you can “stroll through.” There is one CG pic of the upper west side from the period. Link
I asked you this once before Blake, and you never answered:
Have you ever been to the US? I don’t think you truly appreciate the size of the place or realize the amount of manpower it would have taken to maintain its vast eastern forests in the form that you suggest.
As for cites, you first! (Since you’re the one making claims about “parkland.”)
And while we’re at it, if the entire Eastern forest was maintained as open parkland, how did forest floor species like huckleberries and wild ginger and ginseng manage to avoid extinction? They would have had no habitat.
Blake, controversial cited or uncited claims aside, your initial post (Post #14) was VERY informative, and answered all the questions that I wasn’t informed enough to ask. I appreciate it very much!
Thanks to everybody else for all the information, especially the additional book recommendations.
I agreed with your skepticism when I first read and and still would not rule it out. However, the Jamestown accounts of forested land that you could gallop a horse through are almost definitely accurate. The Jamestown settlers picked that area in a pretty haphazard and less than ideal way so it is unlikely they just encountered this phenomenon through dumb luck although it certainly doesn’t mean that it occurred everywhere on the Eastern Seaboard.
I realized that it could make sense for this to happen.
Native Americans certainly didn’t have a huge population everywhere but they needed wood all day everyday for heating and cooking. The same is true with the early European settlers. Many people would find it hard to believe that we have more wood than in history in some Eastern states and the pre-1900 people managed to basically clear-cut entire states over time using just hand tools. All it takes is time an a desperate need for wood to live every day life.
The Native Americans may have had a different forest management system than the European settlers did. Letting some trees grow and just scavenging every thing that is left under the canopy would make this idea true.
I am not sure how clearing fires worked. You can certainly use a fire under ideal conditions to burn 1000’s of acres at a time but you can only do it so often for a given area. There simply isn’t enough fuel to start large fires in the same area year after year. Still, the natural result of clearing fires is large trees left unharmed and the underlying brush and debris cleared. These fires will alter the ecosystem as well so you may see an environment that is not common today. We tend to suppress fires as much as possible until giant fires that wipe out most vegetation and trees are the only remaining option.
Shagnasty, thanks for providing some reasoned discussion on the subject.
Do you have a cite for that description? I do remember a similar description, but I was thinking it was something about being able to drive a wagon through the forest. Describing the same phenomenon, of course, but I have only seen second-hand accounts of this, and I would like to see the original description to better evaluate it.
I think that may just describe the difference between an old-growth eastern forest (which few of us have seen) and the relatively youthful forests of today. (It may also describe the difference between the forests the English were accustomed to and American forests of the time.)
I don’t doubt that in an old growth eastern forest, featuring the huge chestnut trees described upthread, there would be some room to maneuver a horse. An old-growth chestnut (or poplar, or oak) is going to create some space around itself just by virtue of its canopy monopolizing the sun in the surrounding space.
Here I disagree. Indians had long settled in numbers along river banks (where the most fertile soil is found). So it seems to me that by choosing to settle along a large river, the Jamestown colonists were choosing the very place where Indians would be present in large enough numbers to affect the local environment. And I have no problem accepting that. But Blake isn’t arguing that. He’s arguing that all the eastern forests were maintained as park-like settings, which is utterly incredible.
I’ll ask again: how did forest floor species survive, if the trees were scattered in grassland (as Blake describes)? Ginseng, wild ginger, and huckleberries (just to name a few) would all be extinct if that were so. And what about understory trees and shrubs, like dogwood and sweetshrub and redbud? They are not fire-tolerant species. Moreover, they require at least partial shade to thrive.
Absolutely true. And that may very well explain the phenomenon observed by the Jamestown settlers in the local environment around the James River.
Probably true. But I think this would have only been a localized phenomenon where populations were large enough to maintain that system.
We do know that even after colonization, the Indians maintained certain areas as hunting grounds, using fire to keep them as grassland (so as to attract deer, elk and eastern bison). IIRC, the Shenendoah Valley was maintained in this fashion at least into the 18th century.
And in the Appalachians, grassy balds were created and maintained on mountaintops, using fire. The original reason is lost, but probably a combination of creating a hunting ground, a ceremonial ground, and heck, maybe just because Indians enjoyed the views this created.
Yes, but again, if regular fires had been conducted throughout the entire eastern forest (as Blake suggests) we wouldn’t have the floor and understory plant species that we do. We’d have fire-adapted species instead.