Hi, I'm Sam Puddicombe.
I work with the Fish and Wildlife Department.
I was a part of this monitoring in 2023
and also analyzed and organized the data for it.
Well Eldridge created the study back in 2019.
So over the past three years,
we monitored 15 repairing tree plantings on A and R lands.
Specifically, we were looking at mortality,
natural regeneration as a function
of some pre-site conditions
or some conditions which were pre-planting, planting
and post planting variables.
So let's talk about it.
What button do I press to make it go to the next slide?
Press space bar?
That works great, thank you.
So why monitor?
I think we can all agree replanting is good.
We've been doing it, we are going to continue to do it.
So why spend all of this time monitoring?
And essentially we want to know if the trees
that we plant are surviving
and if any of the natural forest processes are starting
to reoccur via natural regeneration.
Essentially we wanna look at those two indicators
and see if they are related
to any variables we could potentially track so
that we can do this work better in the future.
Tree planting is sort of a bandaid solution
to a really large challenge, which is restoring all
of the repairing areas and floodplains.
So we're just trying to look as to what variables can we try
and recreate to create more successful plantings
and hopefully natural regeneration in the future.
So we've got 15 sites across the state.
They range greatly in size from way under an acre
to over eight acres, and they were all chosen
as good repairing areas for tree planting.
We did all of the planting between 2018 and 2021.
And in starting in 2019, we started to have the concept
of having a more in depth analysis.
And so we put in some more experimental plots
with some independent variables that we'll talk about later.
We did the monitoring in the past three years.
So all of our data is zero
through five years since the original planting.
Over the 15 plots or 15 sites, we've got 81 plots per site.
It ranges from one to 20 and they also greatly range in size
and they also greatly range in the number
of trees that we planted there.
So all is to say we have a great variability
within our data set and our sample.
So what did we collect?
Every tree had a unique ID that we put on it
and checked every single year.
We also monitored what species it was, its height
and it's vigor and origin,
which is the two most important indicators
for what we're about to talk about.
Essentially for us, for vigor,
we're just looking at dead or alive.
And then for origin we're seeing if we planted that stem
or if that stem was naturally occurring.
There was also a place for comments and photos.
We also collected plot level data.
This was mostly focused on the ground cover, specifically
how much thatch was there and what was comprised of.
This would be a very interesting data set to look at.
That is not what we're looking at today.
We're just pretty much looking at mortality
and natural regeneration.
So we were looking at the three sort of categories
of variables to measure natural regeneration
and mortality against.
And these were pre-planting conditions, planting conditions,
and post planting conditions.
Pre-planting conditions is essentially what was the site
before we got there
and we categorize this in our mind as high disturbance areas
and low disturbance areas.
So high disturbance areas is somewhere where there was a lot
of basically bare ground
before we got there due to some work
or similar event that occurred.
So this would be something like a cornfield
or a scoured stream bank from a flood event
versus a low disturbance area would be something
that's pretty well maintained
with being like a managed grassland or a hay field.
The pre-planning condition can change within the site.
What you see below in this photo is one site south
of Bethel, which is one of our larger sites where all
of the different colored points are different plots
that are also different pre-planting conditions.
So here's some photos
of different high disturbance pre-planting conditions.
It's kind of hard to see, but it's a bad photo,
but there's a cow in the background at the scoured bank one,
so that's pretty high disturbance.
And then here's the low disturbance pre-planting conditions.
You can see a lot of the grasses are still intact and tall.
We also have planting conditions,
so that's like what occurred at planting.
The most important one that we were looking at
is what we planted.
So if it was like a livestake
or a bareroot, a livestake would be like a willow cutting,
a bareroot would be something you got at a nursery.
We also looked at how we planted those in terms
of the spacing, who planted them in terms of the crew
and the density that we planted at.
So stems per acre.
And then finally we were looking
at post planting conditions.
So did we put exclusion fencing around these trees?
Did we treat them with herbicide?
Those were pretty much the only two things
that we were doing that affected it
post the trees going in the ground.
So our metrics.
We're mostly looking at survival and,
or rather mortality and natural regeneration.
And if we have time, we'll look sort of at density,
which completes the picture.
So mortality, we're looking at that purely of planted stems,
so not the natural regenerating ones.
So what we see here is our data
that we collected from 2021 to 2023,
and we can see an increase of planted stem mortality
about 10% each year
with 2023 having a 25% average mortality.
Two things of note is I have no idea how good
or bad 25% mortality is on par with other tree plantings.
And then you'll also see that the standard deviation
on this graph along with every single other graph I'm about
to show is huge and there's a reason for that
and we'll talk about it later,
but basically the variability within our data is very large,
which is something important to note.
So looking at it at our first variable,
which is the pre-planting condition, you can see
that there is an effect
or there is differences on
what the pre-planting condition was versus the mortality.
Pointing out some outliers there, untreated knotweed.
That was one site.
Unsurprising that there was a high mortality
in an area of untreated knotweed,
but looking at those factors of disturbance
that we were talking about before, things like hay
and managed grasslands
and athletic fields, those are all low disturbance area
and are kind of spread across the mortality spectrum
versus corn and berm cut
and dirt road, those are all high disturbance areas
that are on the lower end of the mortality.
I did put those together, amalgamated the low
and the high disturbance areas so that you can kind
of better see the trend.
And it's not a huge difference, it's about 10%, again,
with huge standard deviations.
So it doesn't seem that significant in the graph
on the right, the left, yeah, I guess your right.
And but I separated it out to two underlying variables,
which were hay field
and cornfield, which were sort of our most robust data sets
for pre-planting conditions.
And there you can see a much larger difference
in that a hay field, which is a area
with a low disturbance,
had a 35% mortality versus a corn field, which is an area
of high disturbance, had only around a 10% mortality, 11%.
Other planting conditions or going into planting conditions.
We looked at the type planted.
Here you can see
that there is also not a significant difference
between livestakes and bareroots.
Livestake, again, something like a willow stake,
only has about a 10% mortality increase over bareroot,
which is a pretty big indicator of something
that's successful for something that's quite a bit cheaper
and easier to maintain or to get ahold of.
And then also I think the most fun thing
that we see here is
that the volunteer plantings had a much lower mortality
over all of the professional and fish and wildlife crew.
So if you can get 'em, get 'em
because apparently they're better.
So if anything else, not a significant difference
between these variables.
Other planting conditions we looked at were spacing
and density.
Oh, okay, great. Three minutes remaining.
I can't see a great difference between any of these.
Okay, so we're gonna keep on going
to post-planting conditions.
Similar story for herbicide
and exclosures, not a tremendous difference that we can see.
And okay, get a few points on natural regeneration.
Natural regeneration, which we looked at as a function
of stems per acre,
naturally occurring as a function of time.
We also saw increase over the three years
that we were looking and the most important thing in terms
of a finding was definitely related
to the pre-planting conditions.
Here we see a much more segmented
of the low disturbance areas
having a low natural regeneration
versus the high disturbance areas
having a higher level of natural regeneration.
Here the differences between planting
or between occurring average stems an acre are much higher
with the high disturbance areas having
around 500 stems an acre naturally regenerated
versus the low disturbance areas only having
around a hundred.
This is even more apparent within the core corn hay example
that I showed for mortality.
In terms of planting conditions, again, we didn't see
anything that was too concerning in terms of some variables.
How much time did you say I have left?
One minute. Okay.
Bringing it over to the takeaways here,
which I would like to leave with was that yes,
the higher levels of disturbance we saw had higher levels
of natural regeneration.
That was the variable that seemed to have the most effect.
And then I really want to point out
that this was an incredibly patchy dataset.
So natural regeneration does seem to be patchy.
There were huge standard deviations and there was,
because there was huge plot by plot level variants.
And even if you were like in those plots, you would've seen
that those natural generation regenerated corners
were pretty segmented to one area or the other.
Pre-planting condition also did affect mortality,
but it seemed less so you could see that most
within the hay corn example,
which were our most like robust data sets.
And then regarding planting
and post-planting conditions,
all of those variables did not seem as significant.
But there's still some pretty big takeaways from there,
which is that volunteer planting does not seem
to increase mortality.
So they're a great option.
Livestakes do not seem to have
that much of a significant increase in mortality,
only 10% over bareroot.
So they also should be considered as a very viable option.
And then herbicide and enclosures, I don't think,
I think there was too many confounding variables
to make many conclusions about that,
but we did not find them particularly helpful,
at least within our study.
So it's worth noting
that maybe they shouldn't be considered
like the most important aspect of success.
Yeah, so there's other graphs to talk about,
but those are the main takeaways.
(audience clapping)
[Announcer] Well, does anybody have any questions?
Right, I see a question over there.
[Audience Member] When you said yeah,
the herbicide treatment,
that was post-planting, right?
I mean that was, you came in
and herbicide around the seedlings?
Yeah.
Every two years a glyophosphate application
around the plant.
Hopefully around the plant.
I mean drift is a thing, but you know.
No, I just wondered because you know,
most of the corn fields probably
were no-till herbicide treated beforehand.
I wondered what it would do, you know,
if you did like a site prep where you treated, you know,
even if there wasn't corn there, herbicided it
maybe the year before and then went in and implanted it.
Something like that might be helpful.
Yes, you are certainly correct.
Someone in the room has already thought about that
and a lot of this data is in support of work
which is already being done
that I think we'll speak about in a moment.
But yeah, our glyophosphate application was post,
yeah, definitely there were pre-glyphosate applications
like in corn fields.
[Announcer] Any other questions?
First off, great presentation Sam.
I had a question about deer herbivory,
is there any data collected with that
or can you speak anecdotally if there isn't?
Is that a big issue?
Yeah, definitely at certain sites we saw that.
That was more put within comments so
that if we did see something that was dead
or not vigorous, we would often put like beaver brows
or deer brows or something that we thought was the reason
for its mortality.
And that's why I think that exclusion fencing dataset
is not super helpful for just looking at mortality
or natural regeneration.
I think it would be more interesting to look at growth
or other variables that we kept track of
because I don't think it tells the full story on yeah,
how it prevents, you know,
potential larger mammal herbivory.
[Audience Member 2] Sweet, thank you.
I just had a question about other factors
that you may have looked at
and weren't able to present on things like the connectivity
of the floodplain or the incision ratio of the river.
Did you look at any of those factors in addition to the tree
and treatment plots?
Definitely anecdotally.
And then I would say we had a couple sites
that were restored floodplains, so areas
that we intentionally would know
that the water would be moving through.
One, most of them were through like berm removals,
so that did change the hydraulic connectivity.
So we did track areas that were going to be, you know,
getting flooded quite frequently by the river.
How those did, that was a pre-site condition, I believe.
Just one that didn't have a level of a,
like a disturbance particularly assigned to it.
And then also anecdotally, some of the areas
that got flooded, I mean we know they got flooded
because they just, part of them weren't there anymore.
We did see actually like really high levels
of regeneration there in particular.
So yeah.
[Announcer] This will be our last question
Also other conditions like how like the weather conditions
during planting
or like did you find particular species that you found,
you know, had higher survivorship, any other conditions
or you know, anything that you found that stuck, you know,
stood out?
Yeah, I mean this data set is pretty huge
and these were just a few variables within it.
I did not take the time to look at it for this presentation,
but that is something that we're definitely curious
in asking.
And in terms of whether at planting, I mean
that would be definitely just another thing to add on top
of it that you could get from looking at weather forecasts.
But yeah, that would be very interesting.