Welcome to the UConn Extension Forestry Blog! We are excited to share UConn Extension Forestry work here. In addition to our own initiatives, we collaborate with many partners on a wide variety of projects from landowners and land managers around Connecticut to researchers and the UConn community here in the UConn forest.
The maple syrup is not so well-known as UConn’s ice cream… but it should be! At the end of each winter, members of the UConn Forestry and Wildlife Club bring out the taps, buckets, and tubes to collect maple sap. They bring it to the sugar house and boil it down to make syrup. Uconn has a few stands of forest dominated by sugar maples (Acer saccharum), and we call these “sugarbushes”. Sap is collected on these locations, boiled down at UConn’s own sugar house for teaching others about the process, and of course for the production of delicious forest products! If you happen to catch our syrup for sale at a CAHNR pop up shop or other event, know that all the proceeds go back into the stewardship of the UConn forest.
The following document was prepared by the Yankee Division of the Society of American Foresters (SAF) in 2020, in response to public sentiment and misinformation suggesting that the cutting of trees was not in keeping with goals of mitigating climate change and sequestering/storing terrestrial carbon. Sounds forestry practices are in fact some of the best tools we have to maintain healthy forests and their function as mitigators of the impacts of climate change and collectors of carbon. It is also the means by which we can preserve biodiversity and provide sustainable and renewable products (timber, maple syrup, etc.) while also meeting carbon and climate goals.
The entirety of SAF has gone on to adopt similar positions, as collected on their website.(more…)
The Slow Storm: Tree and Stand Mortality in CT during 2018 from drought, insects and diseases.
by Thomas E Worthley, UConn Associate Extension Professor, Forestry
During the last decade most tree-related front-page-newsworthy stories resulted from disruptions related to severe storm events that caused power outages, transportation disruptions and property damage that folks will long remember. Such events are sudden and dramatic, are certainly newsworthy and result in visible changes in our landscapes and neighborhoods. Less sudden and dramatic, but perhaps more intensively and extensively altering our wooded landscapes visibly and ecologically, is the slow and relentless “perfect storm” of weather patterns, invasive insects and opportunistic pathogens the last few years causing severe and extensive tree mortality, most noticeably in eastern CT. We are witnessing a landscape-scale change in forest species composition, age structure and stand condition such as not been experienced in a generation.(more…)
