counting trees

[SwampDonkey]

Well it's hard to explain the whole procedure in here unless you write a book, so you just hit the highlights. ;D

[mountaineer]

i am trying to download a few pics. my pics are to big to download. is there anyway to make them smaller?

[Tom]

Go to Help at the top of the page and look for the photo instructions.  The link will take you to the post in Behind the Forum where their is a pretty good set of instructions.

[mountaineer]

so here is my first attempt at posting a pic. here are two shots of a piece of maple. does anyone know what kind of maple? i was told by the man that owned the tree that it was not red or sugar. my next guess would be silver, but i really have no idea.

[mountaineer]

it worked!!! it only took like three hours to figure it out. 8) here is another tree i have cut up that is dead on ground and i don't know what it is.

[mountaineer]

and #3 is a tree that was 150yds from the 2nd one but looks a lot like #2 inside but the bark looks nothing alike.

[mountaineer]

wrong bark in last pic. here it is

[beenthere]

For me, pics are tough to identify from, but the first looks like walnut and the second like cherry.

Just a 'seat of the pants' guess. Or a WAG....

[Dodgy Loner]

The first pic appears to be a silver maple, but the bark is in kinda rough condition so it's hard to tell.

Second pic looks a whole lot like slippery elm.

Third is most definitely a black cherry.

Keep 'em coming

[SwampDonkey]

The first post looks like soft maple (red or silver) and the last is cherry. Are your maples in flower? I guess not if they are firewood.  :-\

[WDH]

The second pic looks like hickory to me.  It split a little to clean to be elm, but it might be.  Looks like the old red hickory to me.  Now-a-days, it is considered a type of pignut.

[Lanier_Lurker]

Yep, the second one does look like hickory.

If the wood is *real hard* and causes sparks to fly off your chainsaw chain then it is probably hickory.  ;D

And I agree with Dodgy (although he is the pro and you should listen to him over me any time  smiley_goofy_face), that black cherry bark is unmistakable.

[WDH]

Yes, unmistakable.

[mountaineer]

it cut pretty easy so it's probably not hickory i'll take a couple more pics that are a little better.

[OneWithWood]

Onewithwood
It's great your are taking the time to learn and observe your forest so intimately. Observing what comes next is vitally important. I would be curious to know what your mid-story is.
Are you checking growth rates?  How are you doing on oak seedlings and saplings?
How are the invasive plants affecting your desirable regeneration? Do you have garlic mustard?

To date I have counted 1331 trees 6" and up.  Here is a listing of the trees 561 >6" and <12" that comprise the midstory.  This is maybe 1/3 of the total woodlot.

Ash          17
Aspen        2
Basswood  1
Beach       94
Bl Oak         7
Butternut    3
Cedar          1
Cherry         7
Dogwood     2
Elm              4
Gum           10
Hickory        76
Persimmon    1
Tulip Poplar   54
Red Maple     97
Red Oak        18
Sassafrass     17
Sugar Maple 115
Walnut             3
White Oak       32

The overstory is stocked with a fair number of quality oaks but if I were to harvest those trees at this time the odds of oaks remaining a dominant tree in the canopy are very slim.  The beech and maples would take over I think.  I am actively killing most of the beech saplings under the oaks.

I will check in a few years to see what the growth rates are.

Oak seedlings and saplings are having a tough time.  There is good regeneration but the deer harvest them fairly intensively this time of year.  I have planted a few hundred red and white oak in the tops of the last trees harvested.  Those are protected and the deer have yet to find them.
As I count trees I spray invasives and beech saplings with Garlon 4 mixied in Ax-it.  The invasives I have are:
mulit-flora rose
japanese honeysuckle
autumn olive
japanese stiltgrass
japanese knot weed
ailanthus - just a few and I aim to keep it that way.
pawlonia - same as ailanthus
I may also eliminate a stand or two of spicebush

So far I have not found any garlic mustard or kudzu though both are within a mile of me.

Sorry it took so long to answer you.  I really thought I posted this a couple of days age but apparently all I did was type it out.....

I enter all this data into an excel spreadsheet and then use the table tools to analyze the data. 

We used to be able to attach spreadsheets to our posts.  I have forgatten how to do that so if it is still possible and anyone is interested I would be glad to post what I have so far.  All I need is for someone to tell me how to do it.  I tried the upload but I got an error message that .xlsx files were forbidden.

[Dodgy Loner]

Mountaineer - take a sharp knife and cut into the bark on #3.  If you can cut easily into the bark, and the cut surfaces are a rusty reddish brown, you've probably got slippery elm.  However, if the bark is rock-hard and difficult to cut, it's most likely a hickory.

I agree that the split is a little clean for an elm, but my own experience with splitting elm is that it's rather easy when the logs are small, but becomes exponentially more difficult as the logs get larger.  To me, the heartwood band looks too reddish and too wide to be hickory.

[Jeff]

I tried the upload but I got an error message that .xlsx files were forbidden.

Not forbidden, just never added as an extension as .xlsx files are the new version.  You can attach them now.

[OneWithWood]

Alrighty then  8)

Here it is for your viewing pleasure and constructive criticism:

Well, DanG - Here is the error message I got

File Name/URL Error Message
1. Tree Inventory 2008 data manip.xlsx Forbidden file extension.
2. Tree Inventory 2008.xls Exceeded filesize permitted by CPG

If anyone is interested I could attach it to an email

[SwampDonkey]

Looks to be a typical maple-beech-ash forest, only you have oak and hickory substituting for yellow birch.  With your ash, basswood, butternut and walnut you must have some moist gully areas or down slope flats with good lateral flow of water and percolation, but not really saturated lowlands on a landscape basis.

We only get cherry mixed with maple when there were firewood cuts to make big openings. Elm here will grow in red maple low land forest, but not in sugar maple dominated ridges. Possibly in gullies with fir and white spruce and cedar, but usually near the base section of the gully.

What was the density? Did you use a fixed radius plot? What radius? How many plots?

[OneWithWood]

Norman Upland to be precise.  Well drained ridge tops (White Oak) steep slopes with Red Oaks about midway down, Cherry in the ravine bottoms, ash, maple, beech scatterd throughout.

[SwampDonkey]

Sounds like what I envisioned, each region has there own land classification.  Surprised cherry is in the gullies, the other hardwood would tower above it up here. Only survives here in more open forest.

[mountaineer]

i cut into the bark and it seems pretty hard. when i look closely at the wood, the outer layer looks rotten or dead. (the white part.)  is the inner portion the heartwood? it looks to be in good shape its the outer area that is rotten or dead looking.

[SwampDonkey]

Yeah outer bark is dead, inner is live. Not heartwood, but phloem wood. A little deeper is cambium and deeper still is sapwood then heartwood where dead wood is, which tends to be darker. Sapwood  is confusing because it's xylem wood that conducts mineral salts and water up the tree and are living cells, but heartwood does the same only it is dead and more inefficient because of deposits that build up. The actual sap flows down the tree in the phloem between the cambium and outer bark.

[Lanier_Lurker]

To me, the heartwood band looks too reddish and too wide to be hickory.

Yep, the heartwood does not look quite right for hickory now that I look closer.  And the bark is kinda sorta close but not a dead ringer for hickory either.

If you say it "cut easily" then it might not be hickory.  If this wood has been down a while (as you suggest) and is not green - and if it were hickory - then there would be little doubt when you tried to cut on it.  That DanG stuff is *hard*.  >:(

[SwampDonkey]

Yeah, W ash is hard but easy to split in comparison.