Harvard Forest researchers, with the assistance of
scientists from the Center for Tropical Forest Science (CTFS) and the
Smithsonian Institute’s
Forest Global Earth Observatory (ForestGEO), completed the census of woody
stems within the 35 ha plot located on Prospect Hill in March 2014. Using
standardized CTFS-ForestGEO methodology, Jay Aylward and field assistants Kyle
Krigest and Sarah Myers have measured, tagged, painted, and mapped the final
4,400+ woody stems greater than 1 cm dbh in the remaining section of forest
located in the beaver swamp in the north-central portion of the plot.
The
swamp is particularly dense, containing over 29,000 stems of winterberry holly
(Ilex verticillata), highbush blueberry (Vaccinium corymbosum),
witherod (Viburnum cassinoides), and maleberry (Lyonia ligustrina).
The final plot tally from Dave Orwig, Jay, and 26 field assistants was over
116,000 woody stems! The HF SIGEO plot is dominated by eastern hemlock
(> 25,000 stems) and northern hardwood species in upland plots, and will
make an excellent comparison with several other hardwood plots in North America
and China at similar latitudes.
This plot is part of a global array of
large-scale plots established by CTFS, which recently expanded sampling efforts
into temperate forests to explore ecosystem processes beyond population
dynamics and biodiversity.
The geography and size of the Harvard Forest plot
(500 m x 700 m) was designed to include a continuous, expansive and varied
natural forest landscape that will yield opportunities for the study of forest
dynamics and demography while capturing a large amount of existing science
infrastructure (e.g. eddy flux towers, gauged sections of a small watershed,
existing smaller permanent plots) that will enable the integrated study of
ecosystem processes (e.g., biogeochemistry, hydrology, carbon dynamics) and
forest dynamics . Thus, the resulting data will integrate well with ongoing
NSF-funded LTER (Long Term Ecological Research) and NEON (National Ecological
Observation Network) studies.
