Posted: Wed Mar 23, 2011 9:00 am
Joe,
I hope this is not twisting the thread like a game of telephone, but when I lived in North Carolina in 1974 I did visit a tiny remnant of old growth piedmont forest adjacent to the Smithfield "kiddy Park". This would of course probably be different from what was along the coast, but two things struck me about this possibly 3 acres of forest: 1. The diversity was incredible. Nowhere else in the piedmont have I seen such diversity. and
2. The trees were immense. I noticed a Loblolly pine( Pinus taeda) that was certainly over 12' in circumference and Sugarberry (Celtis laevigata) trees a little smaller in circumference. In one spot I saw the largest( both tall and wide) I have ever seen of several species. I was not measuring anything in those days, but when I took my 14 year old son by there in the 1990's there had been a bad storm with high winds just the previous week. The ground was littered with the trunks of gigantic tulips, short leaf pine(Pinus echinata), loblolly, and several species of huge oakes as well as many other species. I suppose they were destroyed partially because it was such a small isolated stand that it was more subject to wind damage. Anyway in some relation to the thread, I wonder what effect man, including indigenous man has had on the climate in the Eastern United States?
I hope this is not twisting the thread like a game of telephone, but when I lived in North Carolina in 1974 I did visit a tiny remnant of old growth piedmont forest adjacent to the Smithfield "kiddy Park". This would of course probably be different from what was along the coast, but two things struck me about this possibly 3 acres of forest: 1. The diversity was incredible. Nowhere else in the piedmont have I seen such diversity. and
2. The trees were immense. I noticed a Loblolly pine( Pinus taeda) that was certainly over 12' in circumference and Sugarberry (Celtis laevigata) trees a little smaller in circumference. In one spot I saw the largest( both tall and wide) I have ever seen of several species. I was not measuring anything in those days, but when I took my 14 year old son by there in the 1990's there had been a bad storm with high winds just the previous week. The ground was littered with the trunks of gigantic tulips, short leaf pine(Pinus echinata), loblolly, and several species of huge oakes as well as many other species. I suppose they were destroyed partially because it was such a small isolated stand that it was more subject to wind damage. Anyway in some relation to the thread, I wonder what effect man, including indigenous man has had on the climate in the Eastern United States?