LOCALadk Magazine

Yew Red pine Jack pine Pitch pine Hemlock White pine White cedar Red cedar Juniper White spruce -tamarack • •••• Oaks • -Š ‹ Œ … … ……Ž … -•„• ‚ •„‹ • •-Š‹ ' ••‚ base-rich rocks Common juniper Hemlock White pine White spruce Red cedar Pitch pine Red pine Wintergreen Bearberry Partridgeberry drought wetness, early frost drought, infertility thin soils T he Adirondacks contain 14 cone-bearing trees and shrubs and about 22 other evergreen shrubs and creepers. I show the distribution of 23 here. They are worth seeking out: good fall and winter companions, dark and fresh and strong, and I commend them to you. The conifers in particular, because they are both ancient and successful, have lessons to teach. They are, on the one hand, genuinely old. There were conifers in North America before the dinosaurs, and pines and junipers here when the dinosaurs were at their peak. But they also are, unlike most old groups, genuinely successful. Today there are few places in North America where you will not see at least one conifer, and many, like the Adirondacks, where you will see a dozen or more. Their success, for the most part, comes from toughness rather than competitiveness. Few conifers can outgrow the deciduous trees, but many can outsurvive them. Their thick needles allow them to tolerate frost and drought and their resinous wood resists pest. They can photosynthesize in short pulses when conditions are good, and shut down when they turn bad. They are poor at short-term growth, but good at conserving nutrients and growing slowly, in small increments, over the long haul. In survival, the long haul is what matters. Translated into ecology, this means that conifers often dominate the places where resources are limited or unreliable, and deciduous species the places where resources are plentiful and reliable. A map of conifer distribution, in other words, is a map of ecological stress. This is clearly true in the Adirondacks. All our conifer-dominated habitats have some mixture of stress and unpredictability. The rocky hills are extremely dry. The ravines have thin rocky soils, and the bogs and alluvial corridors are wet and have late spring and early fall frosts. The mountain woods have thin, peaty soils and can be very wet. The alpine areas get lots of cold and wind, and are alternately wet and dry. The diagram shows how our conifers distribute themselves across these habitats. Three are—white pine, hemlock, and red spruce— generalists with wide ecological ranges. All are forest dominants that can grow to great age and size. The white pine is a gap species that requires disturbance to reproduce, and most abundant at at low and medium elevations. The red spruce and the hemlock are old-growth giants: shade- tolerant, fertility-requiring, at home with rocks and moisture. Hemlock Adirondack Ecology 2: Conifers and Evergreens By Jerry Jenkins, Northern Forest Atlas Project 54 Winter 2014

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