LOCALadk Magazine

Jerry Jenkins, Northern Forest Atlas Project T he Adirondacks contain about fifty species of deciduous trees. Only twenty are common, and only ten are found throughout the park. If you are learning Adirondack trees, these ten, plus the conifers in the winter issue, are the place to start. Since these trees are common, they occur in many different places and mixtures. But they still have characteristic ecologies, and knowing these ecologies will help you to know which trees you are likely see and why. Sugar maple, yellow birch, white ash, and beech, are long-lived trees that can grow to great size. They, with red spruce and hemlock, are the common dominants of old, undisturbed forests. Sugar maple and white ash require fertile soils. Yellow birch and beech are more tolerant. Beech, however, is much damaged by a bark disease and no longer produces mature trees. The rest are shorter-lived and tend to grow in young or disturbed forests where there are gaps or openings. Red maple is perhaps the commonest canopy species in harvested woods in the park, and striped maple the commonest understory species of open woods. The aspens are successional species that use root sprouts to invade burns, old fields, and other large openings. Black cherry, less common here than maple or aspen, is a bird- dispersed go-anywhere species. It likes gaps and river shores, and can be common in old burns. Paper birch is both a successional species and a disturbance species. In the valleys it grows in abandoned fields. In the mountains it grows in stunted, upper-slope forests where there is repeated damage by wind and ice. The photos in this series come from a set of Adirondack tree and shrub posters that will be published later this year. If you are interested in helping us test prepublication versions or would like to use them with classes, please contact jcjenkins@hughes.net. Adirondack Ecology 3: FOREST TREES coarsely scalloped brown, sharp coarsely scalloped coarsely toothed long, slender, sharp slender point broader point glossy surface low, rounded teeth broad base Beech, Fagus grandifolia Quaking aspen, Populus tremuloides Big-toothed aspen, Populus grandidenta Sugar maple, Acer saccharum

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