Jamie Howell
   Staff Writer

On Friday, March 18, Dr. Saskia Van De Gevel gave a talk on some of the endangered tree species of North Carolina.

Dr. Van De Gevel is a professor in the department of geography and planning at Appalachian state University and her talk included three case studies she’s been involved with in NC.

Dr. Van De Gevel stated at the beginning of her lecture that all species vary in what types of conditions they can survive in. “So we would be characterized as generalist[s],” said Dr. Van De Gevel, “Because we can live in a lot of different ecosystems.”

She went on to explain that certain tree species “can live in cold regions, warm regions, even really dry regions.” She also explained, however, that “many of the tree species that live in the southern Appalachians only live here and can only live here.”

Dr. Van De Gevel stated that there are many techniques to study trees but that using tree rings can be especially useful because it is “an approachable science that can be as simple or complex as you’d like.”

The first of her three case studies, stated Dr. Van De Gevel, was focused on assessing the logs of what they thought were American chestnut trees in the Blue Ridge Mountains of NC.

Dr. Van De Gevel called the American chestnut trees “historical legacy trees” because they can grow to be extremely large. She exhibited this by showing an image of a chestnut tree spanning as wide as the five people standing in front of it.

According to Dr. Van De Gevel, in the 1930s a fungus took out much of the American chestnut tree population in the eastern part of NC; this incident was called the Chestnut blight.

She stated that only 1-3 percent of trees in the eastern U.S. are American chestnut now and they are much smaller than they used to be.

Dr. Van De Gevel said that she and her research team were asked to go to Bluff Mountain to study fallen chestnut logs but they turned out to be northern red oak trees.

She stated that although the project turned out differently than they expected they still managed to create the oldest record of northern red oak tree growth stretching back as many as 400 years where previous records only go back about 100 years.

According to Dr. Van De Gevel there were not many suppressed or younger northern red oak trees meaning that there aren’t enough trees to replace the older ones. She expressed that this is a problem because the northern red oaks in the area provide for much of the wildlife.

“The stagnant growth of newer northern red oaks,” stated Dr. Van De Gevel, was caused mainly because the area has over the years been “hammered by ice storms and severe wind

storms.”

The second of the three case studies that Dr. Van De Gevel discussed was focused around an endangered hemlock community in the southern Appalachian Mountains.

According to Dr. Van De Gevel it’s a small area and not much research was done until they got there. She stated that the main focus of the study was to discover how climate affects hemlock trees depending in their age.

Dr. Van De Gevel explained that she found out that older trees in the area tended to grow at a greater rate overall and that younger trees were more susceptible to drought conditions.

Hemlock trees were endangered mainly by hemlock woolly adelgid which is an insect, said Dr. Van De Gevel. According to Dr. Van De Gevel the woolly adelgid haven’t devastated

the hemlocks in the Southern Appalachian Mountains like it has in other places yet, but that

could change in the future.

The final case study that Dr. Van De Gevel went over in her lecture was centered around the red spruce and Fraser fir tree populations on Roan Mountain.

According the Dr. Van De Gevel statewide logging in the 1930s “Dramatically altered the composition and structure of the forest.” She stated that the Fraser fir trees came back dramatically but “the red spruce just didn’t bounce back as fast as Fraser fir.”

The forest used to be 40 percent red spruce, said Dr. Van De Gevel, but now is only about 20 percent and there are practically no younger red spruce trees. “This is not a good sign for red spruce in the future,” said Dr. Van De Gevel.

The red spruce is doing well everywhere else, she stated, and it held strong in the area until large scale logging began in the 1930s.

According to Dr. Van De Gevel the next case study that she and her colleagues will be working on is a composition of ten different species of tree and how they respond to climate change.