Extension foresters, Eli Sagor and Angie Gupta, explain how healthy forests rely on rural-urban collaboration
We ain't got a barrel of money. Maybe we're ragged and funny, but we'll travel along singing a song side by side.
Eli Sagor:Forests touch our lives in a lot of different ways. Forest management and the wood products economy is really important to our rural communities, particularly in Northern Minnesota because that's where the woods are. So forests are important for a lot of reasons. Economic, ecological, the tourism economy is largely our forests and wild places.
Angie Gupta:There's never been a time in Minnesota's current forest history that there wasn't co development and a relationship between the humans on the landscape and the forests and trees. Whether they manipulated it or fruit crops or nut crops like acorns and walnuts and hickories, or they were using it to heat and build their structures. So there's always been this relationship with the forest. And in some ways, I feel like our modern society has somehow convinced ourselves that we're separate and not a part of. And so I think that gives us both the opportunity and the responsibility to think about how what we do nourishes that space.
Angie Gupta:And we can do that both in the urban settings with the decisions we make and
Ellen Wolter:in the rural settings and in the places in between. That's Eli Segore and Angie Gupta, foresters with University of Minnesota Extension. They join me to discuss the impact of from managing forest ecosystems to producing wood products to supporting wildlife and biodiversity, and its impacts across Minnesota and how interconnected rural and urban forestry ecosystems really are. The work they do is not just about forests in Northern Minnesota, but the ways in which our entire state is impacted by our forests our economy, our ecology, climate, tourism, the products that we buy and sell, and the structures that we live in. Angie and Eli also explained how plant choices and woodland steward management practices in urban settings influence rural forests and vice versa, and how forestry has been a place where people have found common ground.
Ellen Wolter:Because what happens in our urban environments often influences our real forested environments, and what happens in our rural forested environments impacts our urban areas.
Music (Jim Griswold):When they've all had their quarrels and parted, we'll be the same as we started, just to travel along singing a song side by side.
Ellen Wolter:This is Ellen Wolter from the University of Minnesota Extension. Welcome to the side by side podcast. What is forestry? How do you explain that to somebody like me that's just has no clue?
Eli Sagor:Basically, forestry is caring for and tending our forested ecosystems. Forests produce a huge amount of stuff that we use in various ways. We hike through the woods and enjoy seeing what we can see and hearing birds and seeing finding mushrooms and seeing wildlife and all those different things. And foresters care for those lands. Forests also produce a huge amount of wood products.
Eli Sagor:We all live in houses. The vast majority of those houses or other buildings are built out of wood. Forests and woods and wood are natural climate solutions. They are when trees grow, they pull carbon out of the atmosphere. Atmospheric carbon is the biggest is the driver really of global climate change.
Eli Sagor:And so foresters care for our woods. Angie, anything you would add to that?
Angie Gupta:Yeah. I would just, add that foresters do all of those things. Absolutely. But woodland stewards, whether they're owners or volunteers or just people that love and can contribute to the stewardship of those lands, can also do a lot to help forests be productive and healthy. And so it doesn't need to be confined to just foresters doing this work.
Angie Gupta:And getting maybe to the point of the podcast, what happens in urban areas influences what happens in rural areas and vice versa. And that is absolutely true with treats and forests as well.
Ellen Wolter:Well, we've already touched on a couple of things that foresters do, but what else do foresters do?
Angie Gupta:I do a lot with terrestrial invasive species. And so think that could be buckthorn or garlic mustard or wild parsnip or emerald ash borer or jumping worms. But I think this is part of the general approach to woodland stewardship and good healthy ecosystems that foresters think about a lot. And I think this is another space where what happens in urban areas influences rural and forested areas. So 85.5% of the eighty three invasive trees, shrubs, and vines in the Midwest Of The United States are associated with horticulture.
Angie Gupta:So what we plant in our yards and gardens really influences what happens within our landscapes. And I spend a lot of time working with volunteers, so think master gardener, master naturalist, woodland stewards, so people that own or manage their woodlands, or people that have these large or not large, landscapes in their homes that they love and tend, and trying to help people make great ecological decisions based on principles of forestry, whether they're in large forests, which we commonly define as 20 acres or greater in Minnesota, or they're much smaller landscapes because we have a lot of ability to influence these ecosystems at a bunch of different scales. And so as a forester, I talk about that a lot as I as it relates to invasive species and invasive species prevention.
Ellen Wolter:What is an invasive species, and and why is this a bad thing?
Angie Gupta:Yeah. So an invasive species is a non native species that causes economic, ecological, or human health harm. And so that's the basic definition, our climate ready woodlands work. We created many lists for people that are worried about preparing their woodlands for our future climate. And some of that work is quite interesting because we have what are called migration potential species on there, species that are not considered native to parts of Minnesota today, but may do very well in our future climate.
Angie Gupta:And so those are all native to the Eastern United States, this larger ecological region in which Minnesota sits, but it does sort of beg the question of what's native and non native in some interesting ways. And so I think that's worth, reflection and consideration as we plant things and we care for them and we tend them. Right? So how can we do that with the most ecological impact that's good for the environment and Minnesota and the critters that use Minnesota without causing trouble, without becoming an invasive species? Right?
Angie Gupta:How do we how do we sort that out?
Ellen Wolter:Eli, what about you?
Eli Sagor:It's interesting. So Angie talked about woodland stewards, people who own two, five, ten, fifty, one hundred acres of woodland. Those woodland owners are a big part of our extension audience. But my personal work focuses more on professional natural resource managers. And so that's kind of the other end of the ownership size spectrum.
Eli Sagor:So Minnesota Department of Natural Resources employs hundreds of foresters and wildlife managers and fisheries managers and others, all of whom collectively manage about four and a half million acres of forest land. And so they're operating at a really large scale. They're thinking about responsible forest management. They're thinking about ways that through timber harvesting and other land management activities, we can replicate natural disturbance patterns like catastrophic wildfires that used to be a little more common in our forest ecosystems, but for obvious reason related to danger and property damage, we try to minimize those harmful effects of those disturbance. So I'm working with folks most often who manage very large swaths of land as multidisciplinary teams, taking input from wildlife managers and forest managers and fisheries and all the others, ecologists and others to come up with good plans, good prescriptions, we call them for how we're going to manage those public lands and large private ownerships.
Eli Sagor:So we're all kind of on the same team.
Ellen Wolter:How would you explain why forestry is important?
Eli Sagor:It's important in so many ways. You know, most of us live in houses that are held up by wood that are built out of wood. We might have wood floors, wood cabinets, all the different things that we depend on. When trees grow, trees are 50% carbon by dry weight, then all of that carbon comes from the atmosphere. So as foresters and land managers, we want to keep our forests growing quickly so that they're pulling a lot of carbon out of the atmosphere and storing that carbon in their tissues.
Eli Sagor:And then if we use those tissues, if we use that wood to build houses, we're, you know, the full cycle, we're pulling carbon out of atmosphere and then storing it for a long time rather than releasing it back into the atmosphere. And so that can pretty quickly get pretty technical and complicated. But that basic simple kind of overview tells the story reasonably well. And so for those of us working with forests and thinking about caring for our woods, we never used to think about carbon, but we do think about it more now. And one other thing I'll mention is so much of our economic activity as a society has shifted to urban environments recently, and a very large share of wood products economic activity mills, timber harvesting, obviously that's where the forests are happens in rural areas.
Eli Sagor:And so forest management and the wood products economy is really important to our rural communities, particularly in Northern And Northeastern Minnesota, because that's where the woods are. So forests are important for a lot of reasons. Economic, ecological, tourism economy is largely the backdrop for that is our forests and wild places. And so forests touch our lives in a lot of different ways.
Angie Gupta:I recently read a book called The Tree Line by Ben Rawlins, and it was interesting how he framed it. So throughout much of human civilization, humans have been most successful in forested regions of the world. So there's this really interconnection between forest as both a resource for food and shelter and firewood to literally keep us alive through the winter and human success as a species. And I think in some ways we've sort of lost track of that as we've separated ourselves from the woods. But here in Minnesota, as the glaciers retreated, indigenous communities followed them.
Angie Gupta:So there's never been a time in Minnesota's current forest history that there wasn't co development and a relationship between the humans on the landscape and the forests and trees. And those humans have really throughout Minnesota's history used that landscape. Again, whether they manipulated it to have space for large grazers like bison and deer for which they could survive the winter, or they manipulated it for fruit crops or nut crops like acorns and walnuts and hickories, or whether they were manipulating it for maple syrup, or they were using it to heat and build their structures. So there's always been this relationship with the forest. And so I think it's important to remember that.
Angie Gupta:And in some ways, I feel like our modern society has somehow convinced ourselves that we're separate and not a part of. And and we are a part of and we have been a part of. And so I think that gives us both the opportunity and the responsibility to think about how what we do nourishes that space and and how we can use that space responsibly. And we can do that both in the urban settings with the decisions we make and
Ellen Wolter:in the rural settings and in the places in between. There does seem to be or feels like there is a disconnection between people and the land in ways that can be harmful, think, if we're not understanding where things come from and how important it is to protect where those things come from. What does forestry look like in a more rural area?
Eli Sagor:Forests are really interesting in comparison with, let's just say agriculture. So in agricultural systems, and I think this is a fair, I'll take criticism from my ag colleagues. So if we're trying to produce a certain crop, we try to produce that crop and not too much else. Anything else growing amid that crop, we often try to control or manage. That doesn't mean necessarily completely eliminate, but at least manage it.
Eli Sagor:So they're very simplified systems in an ecological sense. Our forests are really very different. Our forests are native ecosystems. And in some ways, can be hard unless you're looking carefully to distinguish a managed forest from an unmanaged forest. And of course, there are exceptions to that red pine plantations, where the trees are in rows are easily distinguishable from natural forests.
Eli Sagor:But that's a tiny share of Minnesota's forest resources. I think it's one or 2% of our forests are in plantations like that. And the other 98 are much more like native diverse ecosystems. So what does forestry look like in rural areas? Well, it looks a lot like natural managed or excuse me, natural ecosystems.
Eli Sagor:A big difference is that, again, in many ways, try to make those we try to strike a balance between caring for these natural, diverse ecosystems and using those systems to meet human needs for wood products, for beautiful places to recreate and watch birds and hike and hunt. So we're trying to balance those things. And one way that we try to balance that is we use the term capture mortality. So if trees die on their own and fall, they serve important ecological benefits. That's great for all kinds of invertebrates and insects and salamanders and other things.
Eli Sagor:That happens all the time and we're happy to have some of that. But to the extent that we can use timber harvesting to capture some of that mortality, in other words to harvest and use wood that would otherwise fall to the ground and decompose, we try to do that. And so we try to minimize the impacts and loss of forest resources to natural disturbance, and we try to emulate natural disturbance through our forest management activities. So there are some species like red pine that historically would regenerate an almost single species stands after a catastrophic wildfire, meaning a wildfire that destroys just about all the living trees. Species like Jack pine, in fact, are evolved that they have these tightly closed pine cones that only open up when they're exposed to heat, which is ecologically brilliant.
Eli Sagor:So a fire comes through, kills everything, those cones open up because that's when they open, they drop their seed on an environment that has nothing else growing or shading or competing with those jackpines. They even have a pulse of nutrients from all that ash and they grow like crazy. You get these almost single species stands. Well, we try to avoid the kind of destruction that comes from uncontrolled wildfires by replicating or emulating that disturbance through harvesting. So that's why we clear cut.
Eli Sagor:If we clear cut those stands, it's not the same as a fire, but it's similar in important ways. It creates similar ecosystems for birds, for example, that depend on open ecosystems. It creates similar environments for some tree species that need full sunlight. They can't really grow in shade, but they can grow in that kind of environment. And so that's kind of what forestry looks like in rural areas.
Eli Sagor:So it varies depending on forest type and what we call silvicultural systems, what kind of forest management that stand is undergoing. But in a lot of cases, forestry looks like natural, healthy, vibrant, diverse ecosystems.
Ellen Wolter:And would you say that it's it's ensuring that that ecosystem is being maintained in a natural, vibrant way?
Eli Sagor:Yeah. In a lot of ways, that's really true. There are a few conditions, forest conditions that are not all that natural when you see trees in rows. Okay. You know that that's a human influenced system.
Eli Sagor:But in most cases, no. You know, these natural diverse systems. And part of the reason for that is that we don't know what's going to happen in the future. In order for us to maintain healthy, productive, diverse, resilient forests in the era of rapidly changing climates and introductions of invasive species and all kinds of other changes to our forests, we have to hedge our bets a little bit. So when we're planting every year, if we're planting soybeans or corn and we find that things are getting drier or conditions are changing a little bit, maybe this year I'll choose a different seed than I planted last year because I think over time, maybe these seeds will adapt better.
Eli Sagor:So you can quickly shift your management. When we're growing trees in Minnesota, I mean, the shortest rotation, we call it from establishment to final harvest might be forty five years. That's a long time and you have to make decisions now for the full life of that stand. And many species like red pine or oaks or other long lived species, we're looking at much longer than that, two to three times that long from planting or establishment through final harvest. So we have to maintain diverse systems because we don't know there could be a bug like emerald ash borer that takes out one species.
Eli Sagor:So we better have more than one on that site so that if we lose one, we have others that can kind of serve and fill those ecological niches. So our forests tend to be quite diverse, and that's not an accident. That's intentional.
Angie Gupta:There's also something called succession that we talk about. So if you think of succession at an ecosystem level like prairies, our early successional grassland ecosystems, and those in Minnesota are often kept in place by less precipitation, less rainfall. So when we get warmer and wetter over time, which is what we've been experiencing and what we're likely to experience, that natural succession is to then move it to trees. And Eli talked really well about many early successional types of trees, those that need that all that sunlight so that you would have a prescribed burn or a timber harvest in order to get those back. But over time, those ecosystems without the disturbance may progress to a different later ecosystem.
Angie Gupta:And that those are more common in Southeastern Minnesota, and I think those are the types of trees that you commonly see preferred in urban landscapes as well. So I'm thinking of oaks and walnuts, and oaks are kind of a early to mid successional species. Some of them really need a lot of sunlight, and they do really, really well in burns. Others can persist with much less sunlight, which is a characteristic more common than later successional species. Maples, they don't do well in burns.
Angie Gupta:They do much better in shade. And so it's interesting in Southeast Minnesota and even very actively managed forests will often be done with just a thinning. You're taking out only a small percent of the canopy. That's a different forest type. And in many ways, those are the types of trees that you see in our urban environment as well.
Angie Gupta:Not exclusively, but particularly with the deciduous canopy in our urban environment, so those trees that lose their leaves. So it's there's a lot that goes into what a forester thinks about, and a a landowner's goals can significantly influence what we might think about or recommend for for people doing stewardship. And so those goals, again, can be applied at all different scales across the landscape, whether that's rural or that's urban or that's Southeastern versus Northern Minnesota.
Ellen Wolter:Well, thinking about ecosystems, why should somebody in St. Paul care about forestry and what's being done in Northern Minnesota?
Eli Sagor:Well, it's a great question. And I think they should care for all kinds of reasons. One is that all those people who live in St. Paul or Minneapolis or St. Cloud or Rochester or Duluth or whatever, Minnesota has a really active culture of getting out of town, getting into wild places, and really connecting with natural spaces.
Eli Sagor:A lot of people hunt. A lot of people in Minnesota love to grow things in their gardens, whether it's for food or just beautiful horticultural kinds of things. And we all depend on healthy, vibrant, rural communities and vibrant urban communities. A lot of us have cabins up north. We might live in more urban areas and vacation out in the woods.
Eli Sagor:And foresters are really caring for was they're not just producing crops, they're producing wildlife habitat, they're producing products that we can use, they're producing jobs in rural areas, so others can live there. Minnesotans really understand and value and connect with wild places. And someone's got to care for those wild places. I mean, again, in an environment where we have invasive species and changing climate and all these different things, it's really important for us to be engaging with and understanding and noticing changes in nearby nature, sharing that information where we have it and caring for those ecosystems through active management. That's more essential now than ever.
Eli Sagor:And it doesn't matter if you live in the city and you're depending on a consistent wood supply that's affordable and domestic and renewable. Or if you live in rural areas and you see those trees and forests every day, it's all important wherever we live. And we really rely on these ecosystems across the state.
Ellen Wolter:Angie, why should folks in Northern Minnesota or in Central Minnesota or other areas of the state care about the work that's more urban, that sort of urban forestry work?
Angie Gupta:What happens in our urban environment often influences our forest environment. So I've said about invasive plants, that is super real. So I think that matters a great deal. I think that a lot of policies are made in urban areas that impact rural areas. So the more we can all understand this complicated issue that is forestry, the more those folks in rural areas can help bring along our urban friends and family, then I think the better off we are to reduce those tensions that sometimes come up.
Angie Gupta:You know, things like wildfires. Last summer was pretty good for us. The summer before that, maybe you remember all of the red flag days and all of the forest fires and the poor air quality. And the city folks are living with that air quality as are the rural folks, and those air quality issues are coming out of forests, commonly far, far away from Minnesota, but not always. And so what we do in those forests matters for everyone.
Angie Gupta:Forests, they need that active management. And, again, the forests in Minnesota have had stewards on them since the glaciers retreated. So it it isn't like this is new. It's like we need to do it in a way that makes sense today, and we all benefit when we do that well. And so I think it's just really critical to remember that.
Angie Gupta:And it isn't about us versus them. It's about us together, and we can all make a difference. We'll maybe do it in different ways. If you're a rural person, you know, have you looked for invasive plants? What are you doing about that?
Angie Gupta:What are your goals? Is it game management? Is it timber income? Is it you trying to reduce the soybean aphid density on your soybean field adjacent? Because buckthorn is a overwintering host for this really important agricultural pest.
Angie Gupta:If you're in a city, I get lots of people like, I wanna plant a prairie yard because I want more pollinators. And I find myself saying trees are the giants of pollinator habitats. An oak tree can support hundreds of different species of pollinators. And so if you couple that with a native understory planting that the leaves can settle and can support caterpillars and larvae throughout the complicated life stages of our native insects, now you have a robust ecosystem locally. And certainly, I get a lot of questions from city folks about pollinators.
Angie Gupta:The other thing is that I have been doing a lot more explicit eco anxiety work, and that is coming from all sectors. So whether you're in town and you're worried about heat island impacts or lack of ecosystem diversity, or you're in a rural area and you're worried about the impacts of or really high storm damage or high precipitation levels. Like, we're all experiencing this together. And I think it's important to remember that, again, we can all make a difference. We just might do it a little differently.
Eli Sagor:I mean, in the Twin Cities, it's been hard to miss the loss of green ash trees. They're mostly green ash in the cities over the last five to eight years as this wave of emerald ash borer comes through. Emerald ash borer is a non native insect that decimates green ash. It kills them within about five to eight years of establishment. And so our native ash have not adapted well to it.
Eli Sagor:Up to now, Emerald Ash Borer is basically understood as an urban problem because so many of our urban trees are ash. They were really, really widely planted in the 70s. And now they are mature and big and beautiful and dying from EAB. Well EAB is now becoming a gigantic issue as it migrates across the state and affects the million acres or so and the billion or more billion with a B ash trees in our forest ecosystems outside of communities. And it's going to have a massive EAB and the loss of ash are going to have a massive ecological impact in Minnesota.
Eli Sagor:And a lot of the wild ash are in places that people don't go much wet forest that you can't really hike in. You can't really canoe in. They're not that wet and you don't visit all that much. So they're easy to overlook, but they're extremely important ecologically and economically. And so this issue that is best known to a lot of people in urban areas as the reason why they no longer have a nice big ash tree in their front yard is also a giant rural issue.
Eli Sagor:So the connections are really abundant. But unless we experience them directly ourselves, they may not connect or resonate with us quite as much. So the loss of urban ash is just one great example of how we can learn from the urban environment, how changes are affecting our rural and native forests as well.
Ellen Wolter:You both have mentioned a few times our changing climate and increased wildfires, changing weather patterns. I'm curious how this is impacting your work, how you're adapting.
Angie Gupta:About three years ago, the Extension Forestry team really started down a project that is now known as the Climate Ready Woodlands Project, and we had been hearing really clearly from our woodland stewardship audience. So mostly private woodland owners, but certainly professionals were worried about how we can prepare our forest for this different future climate. And we heard really clearly from our small woodland owner audience that they really cared about pollinators. That was a big point of interest. And then it turns out lots of people just love lists.
Angie Gupta:Like, I just wanna do the right thing. Can you tell me what that is? And so we went back to the drawing board and did a lot of deep thinking about this because it was clearly an area of need, but one for which the research was still fairly immature. Forest research takes decades pretty much by default. So by the time we have answers decades later, we have like, what have been we using to make decisions throughout the decades of that research?
Angie Gupta:And so myself and colleagues in extension forestry, mostly Anna Stockdead and Emily Dombeck, went and reviewed the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources' really great silvicultural data. So the and that's data and inventory work from Minnesota's forests. And we used the US Forest Service Tree Atlas data, and that included information about all the trees in the Eastern United States and how they're likely to do in our various future climates based on a variety of models. We combined all of that data, and we ended up coming up with four different lists for each of Minnesota's 11 ecoregions that we defined. And for each ecoregion, there is one list of climate ready native trees, so trees native to that ecoregion that are likely to do well in our future climate, Climate ready or native understory plants, understory plants in Minnesota today in those ecoregions that are likely to perform well in our future climate.
Angie Gupta:Then we ended up creating a list that were called the refugia list, so those are native trees that are unlikely to do well in our future climate, but still have a lot of ecological value. Some are very beloved trees in Minnesota. But if we wanna keep them productive on our landscape, we might, as woodland stewards, need to do things to help them along through this change in climate. And then a group of trees that are migration potential. So not native to the ecoregion today, but native somewhere else in that eastern deciduous hardwood forest that are likely to do well in our future climate.
Angie Gupta:And if people are interested in experimenting with those trees, they are new. We don't know how they're going to perform, but they may do well in our future climate. And then recognizing that people really cared about pollinators, we took every single tree and plant on that entire list, all of those lists, 44 lists, and we cross referenced to make sure that they were beneficial for some little critter in Minnesota today. So whether that was a pollinator, an insect, a small mammal, or a bird. And it was actually really comforting to see how large many of those ranges of little critters are and many of the ranges of our of these plants are and how in different places in The United States those ranges overlap.
Angie Gupta:I find that to be heartwarming. There is opportunity. The ecosystems might rejigger, and they might look a little different, but that doesn't mean they'll be less robust or less resilient or less capable of doing the things that we want. So that was exciting. It was a huge heavy lift.
Angie Gupta:So we did that, and then we had it peer reviewed, and we learned some things, and we made some changes. We also incorporated the principles of eco anxiety into all of that work because I think that's why many people were coming to us. They were very worried about the future climate or worried about the impacts they're seeing on our ecosystem today. And so we really wanna empower people with hope and agency. Like, we can make a difference, and we can make a difference and make the world a better place.
Angie Gupta:And so let's do it. And so as a result, there are lists for every ecoregion in the state to help people make great decisions, and they can be applied to a yard that you're wanting to transition to native trees and understories or to forests on a larger scale. And we've been running last year, we ran several participatory science projects to answer critical questions about those species, mostly the migration potential species. So some of the questions that we know need answered are, can they survive in Minnesota today? And will they become invasive?
Angie Gupta:So we're asking people to help us sort that out using participatory science. We're really excited about that work. And then right now we're just finishing some work related to agroforestry. So how can we responsibly get these climate ready species into agroforestry practices to make that sector more resilient in this changing ecosystem.
Ellen Wolter:Angie, are those available publicly where we can link to some of those?
Angie Gupta:Yeah. The climate ready woods lists are all publicly available. So I will I will send you an email with that link. And then we're working right now on the agroforestry recommendations. Those are not complete yet, and I can absolutely send you a link to all of our participatory science work.
Angie Gupta:We're gonna all those projects will continue on this year and actually for the next several years in conjunction with the urban forestry outreach lab at the University of Minnesota. So super exciting.
Ellen Wolter:Eli, how has your work changed at all?
Eli Sagor:It's very similar to a lot of the things that Angie was just talking about. The biggest change as we think about climate change and the really important need to start helping our forests become more resilient and able to adapt to a changing climate is just dealing with uncertainty. So as we talked about before, forestry is a really long term undertaking. As we think about establishing forests now after disturbance, whether it's a harvest or a windstorm or a wildfire or some other kind of disturbance, we have to be thinking about how we can set that forest up not only to thrive and grow well today, but also to be healthy and productive and resilient forty, fifty, sixty, eighty, one hundred years from now. And on some level, that's just ridiculous.
Eli Sagor:And it's impossible. I don't know what I'm going to be doing in five years, let alone twenty. Our forests, who knows what the weather climate, anything else is going to be like, there's a limit to our ability to plan and to see the future. So the way that foresters deal with that is to plan for uncertainty is just to recognize that we're in this for the long term and we don't know what that future is going to be. And to some extent foresters are used to this.
Eli Sagor:We've been doing this forever, but in other ways it's new. So as Angie was talking about the really great work that the Climate Ready Woodlands team has been doing to identify species and kind of crosswalk what do we know the deep ecological knowledge we have about these native plant communities? What species grow there? Under what conditions? How does it change over time?
Eli Sagor:And then thinking about projected future climate conditions. And these species belong here and can thrive in this ecosystem. But in the future, maybe just this sub subset are more likely to do better under the conditions that we think we might have in the future. That same kind of thinking underlies forest management today. And on one end of that, you can't plant stuff because you think it's going to do well in fifty years, but it's going to die next winter because it's too cold for it now.
Eli Sagor:You can't do that. But you don't want to just plant the things that we've always planted. You have to be thinking about increased risk from invasive species, incoming diseases and changing climate conditions. And so we see more mixing, hedging our bets, more diverse ecosystems intentionally managed that way by foresters. You see some integration of species that are near native rather than purely native.
Eli Sagor:Angie talked earlier about, well, these definitions are a little bit fluid and can be interpreted in different ways. But we hear foresters talking a lot more now than even earlier in my career, even just a few years ago, about working in some species, maybe from a little further south and a little bit further west, because that's where the climate of today is more similar to what we expect for the climate of the future. But that too has to be balanced against some really important considerations. Moving species is how we end up with so many invasive species. And so we have to be careful of that.
Eli Sagor:So the recommendations that our team is making with respect to species movement are very cautious. We don't want to create problems. We want to try to solve them. And there are also some really complex issues associated with treaty rights. So our American Indian cultures and societies and nations that are very active in land management across Northern Minnesota have treaty rights.
Eli Sagor:When they signed treaties with the US government one hundred and seventy years ago, they reserved many rights to use land across the entire treaty region in certain ways. We have an obligation under those treaties to make sure that they have the ability to do that. We consult with tribes a lot when we're doing forest and land management well. We are consulting well with tribes to make sure we're respecting those treaty rights and accounting for the perspectives that our tribal partners have in terms of maintaining healthy, viable ecosystems. And in some cases, that involves really not doing too much species movement because that could impair or could be seen as detrimental to certain cultural aspects that are enshrined in those treaties or other considerations.
Eli Sagor:It's really nice to try to balance and manage diverse ecosystems. But when you're dealing with a resource that is heavily tied to our culture and identity and economic activity and all these other things, you're trying to manage complex ecosystems and also complex social and economic systems. And a lot goes into that. So in a nutshell, all we can really do is to understand that we don't know what the future is gonna look like. We know it's gonna be different from today, and we have to be proactive and creative in ways that we in thinking about how we can give up some control, but hope to set up our forest ecosystems to be all of those things, resilient to whatever might be coming down the pike, to continue to grow vigorously and productively and remain functioning, diverse, thriving ecosystems in their own right now and in the future.
Eli Sagor:So climate adaptation, climate change is everywhere in forestry. You can't get away from it. It's a central consideration in everything we do, even if we don't know exactly what it's going to look like in the future.
Ellen Wolter:I imagine the science changes rather quickly. It's a lot of monitoring of the science.
Eli Sagor:That's
Ellen Wolter:I'm curious if you find cultural or social perspectives that change and what kind of tensions you run into there.
Eli Sagor:One of the things I love about forestry is that there's a lot of common ground that we might otherwise see divides in our society. So people who deal with natural resources a lot understand that it's important for people to be involved in these ecosystems. The world has changed and ecologically, the world has changed. Climate has already changed in really meaningful ways. And whether you're dyed in the wool environmentalist or a person descendant from four generations of loggers and you work in the woods yourself, there's a broad understanding that we need to be actively managing these ecosystems.
Eli Sagor:There might be differences and there certainly is a range of perspectives and what might be the best way to manage them. But that's more in the details. People who might in other aspects of their lives see the world really differently tend to see forestry in the same way. I don't see a lot of climate change denial in forestry anymore. Loggers see that winters are getting shorter.
Eli Sagor:They might use slightly different words to describe that or the reasons behind it or whatever, but the changes are obvious to anyone who's paying attention regardless of your politics. That can break down some barriers and create much more of a sense that we're all in this together, that we all have common interests. And that's one of the things that really appreciate about people who work in forestry and about the discipline in general.
Angie Gupta:And I'll add, I do think I think in some ways our Climate Ready Woods work has actually helped to move that conversation forward a little bit. So it was interesting when we first launched the list that we had those migration potential lists. They were a smidge controversial, and it became clear that the two biggest points of anxiety for many people were, one, was it irresponsible to recommend, which wasn't entirely what we were doing, but fair criticism, these species for which we didn't know if they could survive in Minnesota today. Right? Like, would they die in the next real winter?
Angie Gupta:And then the other one was, well, what if they become invasive? And both are fair criticisms. Right? I don't wanna minimize either. But interestingly, they are mutually exclusive.
Angie Gupta:Right? So if a species cannot survive, it will not become invasive. And so it was just sort of interesting to sort of reflect upon that. And so when we reframed our list a little bit to make the migration potential ones more clearly experimental. And then we added that component that said, look.
Angie Gupta:Help be a part of the solution. Like, tell us if these species are already out there. How many of these are already present on our landscape and so we can understand some level of can it survive today? And it turns out particularly in our urban areas, a number of species are commonly sold in trade and commonly in urban areas. So really think of things like eastern redbud is very commonly in trade and planted in the Twin Cities Metro.
Angie Gupta:Well, that's on our migration potential list. Some others, a Tulip Tree, a Yellow Poplar. It's not super common up here, but it's in trade, so we're finding some of those. Some other species that are definitely in trade, so think Red Maple, those aren't migration potential in Southern Minnesota, but they are in areas of the North, and they're commonly in trade. So we were able to say, look.
Angie Gupta:There is evidence that these things are surviving. And then we went a little further and asked if you have these species and you're actually tending and stewarding them, can you look for, are little critters using it? Because that means that they're part of the ecosystem. That's maybe good news. The bad news is if the little critters, so think rabbits and deer, are eating them all and killing the trees, okay.
Angie Gupta:Well, we gotta sort that out. Right? That's a stewardship thing. We can do things to protect our trees. And if they're showing signs of invasiveness, are they spreading really aggressively?
Angie Gupta:We wanna know that too, right? And so it turns out that there was this consternation, which was real. But when we selectively looked at it and realized that we can engage the community at large, all of us really, to help answer those questions, it became a lot more empowering. And this is where I wanna give a shout out to tools like the smartphone app iNaturalist. So the more people that are just paying attention to our ecosystem, and you can do that really effectively using iNaturalist, the more we can all begin to realize what's out there.
Angie Gupta:We can begin to appreciate it in different ways. And particularly the iNaturalist app, which does a really wonderful job of suggesting recommendations for identification if you don't know what you're looking at for anything that has ever lived. So not just plants, but insects, mammals, scat, pine cones, seeds, all the things, then researchers like myself can use that data to understand where species are, what's their distribution and density that can be really valuable. So our participatory science projects use that platform very, very commonly, and it's just a great way to, on a walk, to say, oh, what is that? I wonder.
Angie Gupta:And you can take a picture. You can put it in the app, and you can likely know straight away what the answer is, or at least a best guess is a super powerful tool that all of us can use to become more engaged with our environment.
Ellen Wolter:Thanks, Angie and Eli, so much for joining today. It's been such a great learning experience for me, and I know it will be for our listeners too who I I don't imagine many of them are foresters. So I really appreciate you taking the time today.
Eli Sagor:Thanks for having us, and thanks for doing the podcast. I love the show and really appreciate your having son.
Ellen Wolter:Thank you for listening to Side by Side. We welcome your emails at sidebyside@umn.edu. Side by Side is a production of the University of Minnesota Extension and is written and hosted by me, Ellen Walter. Special thanks to Jan Jekula, who designed our wonderful logo, and Jim Griswold, who sings and plays guitar in our opening and closing credits. You can find episodes of side by side wherever you get your podcasts.
Ellen Wolter:We'll be back next week with another episode. I'm Ellen Walter, and this is side by side.
