Forest Service Explores Moving Trees to Save Them from Hotter Weather

[NickB79]

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/forest-service-explores-moving-trees-to-save-them-from-hotter-weather/

Never has a swamp white oak thrived in the Superior National Forest. The lower Great Lakes? Sure. Even Missouri and Kentucky.

But the cold weather forest in northern Minnesota is a place where only the hardiest trees can survive winter: black spruce, jack pine and quaking aspen, to name a few.

Rising temperatures, however, are changing that equation. And it's prompted scientists to consider whether certain warm weather trees could find a new home in the 3-million-acre forest, which itself is expected to heat up over the next several decades.

One possibility? Swamp oak. It's a candidate species for what may be one of the Forest Service's most ambitious climate adaptation efforts to date — the physical relocation of seeds and seedlings from more southern latitudes into warming northern forests.

[I_UndergroundPanther]

1. Seedlings

I thought for a minute they were going to dig up and move full grown trees.. I pictured a big tree removal machine in a swamp..duh oh. Still a funny image.

[hunter]

2. I've definitely notice a change in California plant communities since I was a kid...

... half a century and more ago.

All the environments I was familiar with as a kid seem to have shifted about a hundred miles north.

My wife's parents built a house in the Sierra foothills. My great aunt and uncle lived about sixty miles south of there at a similar elevation. The wilderness around my wife's parents' house is looking more and more like the wilderness around my great aunt's and uncle's house as I remember it as a kid.

I now live a few hundred miles north of the place I lived as kid. My parents once owned a small farm in Southern California, about the same distance from the coast. The place my wife and I live now is looking more and more like that.

[NickB79]

3. Oaks in northern Minnesota, pecans in the Twin Cities

My Minnesota-hardy pecan nuts just started to pop out of their pots today!

And my bald cypress, tupelo and flowering dogwoods are all leafing out too.