Moist, cool conditions.
Used to be anyways, getting warmer conditions.
And then we've got the Aspen parkland.
And compared to the 30s down here, it's perfect.
Aspen parkland is is I'll talk to talk about that in a minute.
First of all, let's talk about the board.
The board.
We've got some of the nicest
and most extensive Aspen stands, probably anywhere in the world.
Sometimes 25, 30m tall.
And, of 100, 302 years old.
Protector of wood in these extensive stands
that go on for miles and miles and miles. And,
you can see the call structure in this, in this particular scene.
So boreal aspen is where most of the, the, the,
productivity that we're where we're trying to grow it.
And after logging or trying to fight it.
And when people are trying to do a crisis,
it's also based
on the Aspen parkland zone in the southern southern
fringe of the boreal forest and the springs of the grassland.
And in these areas, we're seeing problems with the aspen.
We're losing the aspen because of because of, the drought.
So first of all, the Oscars, a lot of sort of stuff started,
5 or 6m tall in many cases. And,
we we have this problem,
I guess, Doctor Sinclair showed this before lunch
where you got, drought, cavitation of, of these aspen stands.
We're losing a lot of the aspen stands in this zone.
So the rest of the rest of the few minutes that I have, I'm
going to talk about a bunch of research that we have promoting Aspen.
And, some of this will seem a lot to you because,
we're dealing with colder systems and and what you you are.
And we're dealing with more competitive species
probably than competitive, other competitive associated species.
Okay, first of all, we talk about a study
that we did on the root root structure of a hospital.
And we we did a bunch of these,
washout studies where we wanted to examine
what's going on in declining assets that are the root system.
So we had a dead ass to restart.
And out here, the roots in good shape, and we see them
roots of these roots of these declining stems.
Often we'll have a dead
tree, will often have live roots connected to the rest of the column.
So these, the rest of the column is still capturing and taking advantage
of the life of the roots of the dead trees we're seeing.
Root grafting at the base
of the stumps, commonly within column.
We don't see much room.
Grafting across plants, but within pharmacy group that we're seeing
original roots.
Sections that are 80 years old, as old
as the original original stands that are connecting the Aspen.
And most these places.
So this this is published and you can watch.
I'll give you some places where these are published and you can
you can get those if you like, like to see the parts.
That's that's project one
second project is on ceiling improvement.
And this is a, this is, common thing that we're seeing
in, in Western Canada.
We're seeing a large amount of Aspen recruits
into zones where we didn't have it before.
It's coming in.
It's coming in into places.
This was originally a jet plane or a large coal plant.
And and black spruce, stand in the upper foothills.
This zone is usually too high in elevation for the for the aspen to live.
And, but not anymore because probably
because of climate change, warming, warming up the summers in the spring.
We're seeing these aspen aspen seedlings,
coming in very extensively in these zones.
And we're, we're expecting to see a large amount of this in the future.
So we think that if you disturb the ground significantly, you get 1,000 pounds
per hectare of aspen coming in from natural seeding.
So it's a common thing to see it.
Here's a, here's a track from, from a site preparation from alpine.
But they also promoted Aspen to the chagrin
that the people were trying to go find.
They don't like this because the Aspen is coming in at a at a heavy rate.
And we're seeing that,
the mineral soil is, is a term we use to describe
where is the aspen relative to the amount of substrate available.
So it's five times as likely
to be found on mineral soils relative to the amount of mineral soil available.
Then something like deep organic substrates,
which is almost nothing
so shallow organics or organic mix, you'll find it.
So mineral soil we can we can get we can get aspen
seedlings established from quite commonly even on convex surfaces.
We did did that analysis of that as well.
The other thing we did is we we actually aged a bunch of these Aspen
we aged 60 of them in this in this population carefully aged
and cut them cereal section up the stem
and found out exactly how old they were.
And we found out that this was a seven year old standard that pictures taken.
And we have seen this all the way from 7 to 1,
and they were coming in every single year.
So this is not an uncommon event.
It happens pretty well every single year.
So the reason why we think it's so common here is
we got a lot of June and July rainfall right after see faster, see dispersion.
So I guess wouldn't podcast records or flat or something like that,
but seems were more likely to record on depressed microbes, topography.
And the main message is we think it's spreading upslope
into the Canadian Rockies from where it where it wasn't before.
And and we're we're just about because it's ready for publication.
The third area we worked on.
Recently was on the last while we're still still doing some work on this, actually,
following this up, where we we identified a bunch of carbohydrate storage
and mobilization in, in the aspen aspen cores
and where it where the carbohydrates
at different times of the year and different and different seasons.
So we have cores.
You can see them very nicely at this time of year.
We identified them and
then follow that same form,
cannibals, clones for a number of years
to, to,
measure things like root
carbohydrates and root stems and branches.
And, we did this, and some of the plants actually got defoliation.
I'm not going to talk about that,
but we'll we will publish that work eventually.
Okay.
The theory is the theory is that, you know,
the one of the things we wanted to look at was this whole issue of, that
leaf question and the growth of the Aspen in the, in the spring times.
The top of the aspen
is related to this mobilization of carbohydrates up from the roots.
Well, it's probably not the case.
We don't think we we don't see it coming from that, that source.
We don't see any depression from, roots, carbohydrates in the spring.
What we do see is a depression and a mobilization
from carbohydrates in the tops of the trees to drive the leaf rusher.
Okay.
So that's one of the things we learned from this.
The second thing is in the summertime, we see a large amount
of mobilization of carbohydrates down into the roots.
In the summertime.
And so the roots are just being filled right up with carbohydrates.
If you if you measure them
into late summer into early fall, they're full of carbohydrates.
But if you measure them again in really late fall,
at the time when things are just freezing up, the ground's freezing up.
They've blasted it all the way again because they grew a whole bunch of roots.
And there's nothing.
Carbohydrate reserves are pretty well right where they were,
at the beginning of the season.
So almost all the way back into into fall root growth
at that, at that, late in the late summer or the late fall.
So we're not seeing when I'm seeing this big groups,
mobilization from top to bottom.
We're seeing the roots once, the roots once they got the carbohydrates to hang on,
and they're using themselves.
So I always spring the early spring.
Spring prior to should flush with carbohydrates are really low.
And power structures.
Okay.
So you harvest and machine traffic is another another study.
So we wanted to follow this up a bit of business of,
whether or not the season of harvest is really important for
or whether whether or not Aspen can recycle very vigorously.
So we, we actually looked at winter, summer and fall logging to see whether
or not the aspen will suffer differently under those under those systems.
Okay.
And we actually wanted to compare it to the importance of soil disturbance,
because we know that winter logging has way less soil disturbance.
And then summer flooding.
There's way more there's way more disturbance.
So those two factors are confounded season and disturbance that can follow.
So we actually set up a study where we looked at those things simultaneously.
First of all, we we measured we set up this very large site as a 50 by 50 meter,
sections of forest.
And there's four of them here.
And they were like to get summer harvest, fall harvest,
winter harvest and harvest control.
And then we went into other parts of these blocks and the corners and places
where we had sort of, we thought was typical traffic and put in other plots
that we assessed after conventional harvesting.
And the way we harvest events is we harvest them with table skitters.
So we actually in the in those blocks, we didn't drive over
and traffic everything up.
So we came all the the logs out, didn't
drive over the cost of cutting with the chainsaw.
And then we compared that, we compared them for the long
and the short is that season of harvest is little different for all sectors.
Well, we all had about 50 to 60,000 tons per hectare of suckers and density.
Size in this area was pretty much the same.
So if you don't traffic it, it doesn't make hardly any difference at all.
So season of harvest.
And that really fits with the carbohydrate, results
that we just reported. Okay.
But the machine traffic did make a difference.
Density was not affected by by machine traffic.
This is conventional conventional machine traffic and no traffic.
And but the heights without the leaf area
and dry biomass, of the suckers was down
so they didn't grow as well for your machine traffic compared to,
compared to where it was traffic.
Season brushing.
And, you know, asked.
There's a large amount of discussion about trying
to try to,
control, but here's, here's
the different realities that we live in compared to you.
We're trying to control Aspen, and we want to do it with a brush size
and have slow growth rates now so we can establish conifers.
And the
idea is that, well, if you log, if you harvested or do this in wintertime
versus in the in the summer time,
you should have different results at the end with carbohydrate.
Here it comes up in this one again.
And we measured the carbohydrates in these.
And we, we.
We we did it.
We did this in spring summer as and winter
and again the little difference in the current
in winter, spring and summer in relation to, season of cutting.
We couldn't we could not see the difference.
We had ten, ten reps of, of a large,
multi multifaceted experiment
just published in Air Force volume that.
But we did see this kind of thing.
If you do cut
and Aspen stem, you're not going to get a good or very, very good Aspen.
But most of the response and after cutting and asking the same way, the press,
come back as stem sprouts and we know that they're likely going to have
root diseases or stem
diseases, associated with that.
Okay.
A fifth step, mother, study this one.
This one's related to fields.
And we have we have large amounts of stands
with large numbers of stands where we had hazel or sometimes alder
or sometimes you even come across this in a very thick is grass
growing in the understory of these mature aspen stands.
Prior to logging,
we cut these stands and we don't generally don't get, regeneration.
These are many.
These hazel stands probably have as much leaf area as the Aspen oversaw.
So huge amounts of huge amounts of, vigorous,
figures, from and in some cases.
So what we did is we get we have ten pairs of these stands
where we had a high density haze or 50,000 snaps per hectare, versus about
3500 sets per hectare.
We had ten pairs of them,
adjacent pairs that were within a few few meters of each other.
And we we locked these, we log these
and we carefully logged them into to not traffic here.
We didn't drive over these.
We just reached in with this other bunch or grabbed the logs.
I've never dropped scatters through them.
So there wasn't traffic issue compared to the area where there wasn't a hazel.
And then we were we measured a whole bunch of characteristics.
We measured the suckers, the sucker, regeneration.
We measured the root development.
We were interested in the roots of the aspen.
We because we thought our hypothesis was that the the Hazelwood
would essentially drive down the root biomass of the of the aspen stands.
The vigor
degree would be down because of this, this aggressive,
competition from the Hazel.
We then we measured, we actually went in and went to that, went into the stands
and we measured the roots and turns, dug some root pits.
And, when you have a graduate student only weighs
100 pounds, you have to get fossil fuels involved to help out.
And that's what we did here.
We we dug these.
There's a whole bunch of these tests with.
I think we had,
100 of these pits that were done.
What you get is, cleaned off a face, put a mylar sheet on it,
and then marked all the all the aspen and the
and the hazel roots on that sheet, and then brought it back to the lab
and did it and did council analyzes in terms of the distance above ground,
distance into the ground.
And what we found is there's a lot
there was a significant drop in insect density.
There's still lots of suckers, but they were.
Quite a bit, quite lower than where.
You didn't have Hazel, locomotive.
Hazel.
I, tended to be down, but not was not significant.
And so we were trying to we wanted to look at the roots
of pruning in relation to, to this problem as to why there would be less,
less, less, Hazel, less effort.
What we saw is that the surface roots, we had fewer
surface roots in the places where there was hazel, the aspen,
the aspen was driven down to lower levels, totally todas as many aspen roots.
But the surface roots were down.
And, when you look at the suffering, and that's probably what happens,
because you have the suffering is all from the surface roots and in our as well.
And that's why we we saw this decline in numbers,
another project looking at root warming and suffering.
We we did two different treatments here.
We cut roots,
we cut roots and we scraped roots
like logging equipment would do to see what impact that has on on suckering,
whether or not that's a positive thing or a negative thing.
And then we measured the numbers of suckers in the height of height of the.
Tallest suckers, and we had the suckers after us.
After growing.
And we did find actually greater numbers of roots.
Associated with wounds,
just about double the amount of, of, of,
of suckers that were associated with scrapes or severs
compared to the control.
So injury roots generate
more suckers or taller suckers and suckers with greater leaf.
And we published just recently in the nature by our
we're doing some other work on this that looks at even more damage.
More damage and more damage is is giving giving us
lots of suckers but miserable little scarring things.
They just don't grow properly. So
warts doesn't always mean good.
Okay, last time physical barriers
where we wanted to look at this issue of physical barriers and suffering
and whether or not it's things that are actually stopping
and preventing the suckers from moving out of the soil
or moving through their substrates above the soil,
are important forces in subtle.
And so we we,
looked at a particular is a problem with a grasp of how an across the rifle
omnibus grass notice inhibits suffering of asthma.
And we've got lots of examples of this where we have
where we had an Aspen stand, it had came across the in the understory.
The grass, dominates the site.
And the suffering comes in very poorly.
It grows very slowly.
It's very, very poor for performance.
So we think part of the problem is called soils.
And so that's a given.
We're going to I'm not going to I'm going to move on from there.
But we did do well.
We did do an experiment.
And we have an experimental system here where we grow aspen and root plot
root, window boxes within its root.
And these were the boxes for three years, grass.
And we've come across this in the window box for three years.
And you asked what works
if you fertilize and water it quite well, grows quite nicely in this situation.
We actually couldn't see any difference in root mass or anything like that.
And we fertilize.
We did have had a fertilization treatment in this experiment as well.
The main point I want to get across here is that the the come across this,
really slows down the
suffering of the in terms of, in terms of its movement out of the,
out of the, the soil as well
as its growth once it got out of the soil.
And this is, this is what essentially we have.
Numbers are suckers in relation to come across this principle.
For us, it's a no counting process.
And there was fertilization or no fertilization.
If you if we have immersed suckers, they actually got out of the soil
versus suckers that were formed but never got out of the soil.
Okay.
So these suckers here are in the soil.
They never they're never make it out over a 50 day period after after start.
So they're still in for all these together.
There's no there's no difference across any of the treatments.
But there is a difference in terms of whether or not it's come across this
or no come across in terms and numbers that get out of the soil.
Okay. Just about about
the main
thing that's going on, we think, is this is that the, the, the dense sods,
the dense sods and are acting as a physical barrier that are stopping
this coarse, thick, fleshy aspen
sprout from getting out of the soil.
And we get the same thing.
We did another experiment where we did it with aspen litter
above the soil, and the aspen litter prevents the aspen from growing.
Once it gets out of the soil and it slows it down by 2 or 3 weeks,
that's a big deal in our part of the world where we have a very short crisis.
Okay, no effects.
No effects of numbers of suckers come across.
This is a physical barrier,
resulting in fewer suckers getting out and come across is delayed.
Delayed emergence is the later delayed emergence.
And we're seeing the same problem on logging decks in places where there's
a lot of a lot amount of slash and debris on the site,
the physical barrier, we think is very important.
Okay.
And here's some of the people who helped fund all this work.
And if you've got any questions, I hope I got time for 1
or 2. Yes.
Maybe I'm just I didn't hear quite right, but, so you had logged.
The logging equipment.
Didn't seem to stimulate a lot of extra suckering,
but when you went in and injured, the was a stimulated.
Suckering and a separate study
when I personally been on the ground in, South Dakota, where I saw
some logging equipment going up there was, there was massive sector coming up
and we lost the and other parts of this,
region, some brute ripping and getting a lot of suckering.
Maybe you could explain the difference or I've missed something between those two.
Yeah, I think that,
that's an interesting problem with logging, logging and other wounding.
I think if you have a simple wound, simple wound,
such as with a site preparation equipment where you have a nice long time
cut through the soil or something like that,
you probably will stimulate a net.
There'll be a net stimulation of suffering if you've got a large
and extensive amount of wounding on and aspens on aspen root.
We're seeing that,
if you come and dig that root that that root up in in a month,
it's got, it's got multiple pockmarks of wounds.
And you can see the, the fungi and the blackening of the stems
of the roots along those areas around every one of those wounds. And,
so I think there's a distance factor here that's important.
And how much and how much,
how much reserves.
It's got to fight off that.
Fight off that, that disease has disease
vectors that are, that are entering every one of those wounds.
Yes. It's,
spring leaves up instead.
The stem and mostly twig and upper
and upper, foliage, upper crown.
That's what we saw.
After the leaf off, we see a depression in carbohydrate concentration there.
We don't see it in the weeds.