6 minute read
THE FOREST FOR THE TREES
Learning from the iconic bald cypress tree
The Forest for the Trees
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BY ARABELLA SAUNDERS
BLAND SIMPSON STANDS IN THE CENTER OF A 20-FOOT CAROLINA SKIFF, balancing one L.L. Bean-clad boot on a vinyl seat as he talks about bald cypress trees.
To his left: A drowned cypress forest on the Roanoke River, and two boats full of students from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who are on a field trip in Plymouth for a class entitled “The Changing Coasts of Carolina.” Simpson, an NC-bred writer, serves as co-professor for the course alongside marine scientist Brent McKee.
As Simpson explains how tree rings can help scientists learn about climate history, his hands move like an orchestra conductor. His voice is soft and rhythmic, like the current lapping against the hull of the boat. Snarled grey cypress trunks tower over him as he speaks.
“How many of you have been down east like this?” Simpson asks. “Down into Swamp Country?”
Only two students raise their hands. Simpson smiles.
“Welcome,” he says, and motions out toward the trees. “We’re glad you could be here.”
“I THINK IT’S A GREAT RESOURCE TO USE THEM,” Dr. Brent McKee says of the cypress trees he’s taken his students to visit at the Roanoke River – the same type of trees that can be found all along coastal NC, including the Outer Banks. “Not only to see them for their beautiful majesty but also to use them to help us understand the last couple of hundred years in terms of climate.”
In the mid-1980s Dr. David Stahle, a University of Arkansas professor, began working on a National Science Foundation project to build climate-sensitive tree ring chronologies across the southeastern United States. The project led him to the Black River, a tributary of the Cape Fear River near Wilmington, NC. On that visit, Stahle and his team discovered bald cypress trees that were more than 1,000 years old.
The scientists were thrilled. It was rare to find trees that old outside of places like the redwood forests in California.
“I mean, in this business, the older the better, right?” Stahle says. “We were trying to get a long sample of climate variability to place the modern era in a natural background.”
Stahle is an expert in dendrochronology – which is the science of dating events, environmental change and archaeological artifacts by using the characteristic patterns of annual growth rings in timber and tree trunks – and the findings at Black River in the 1980s helped Stahle and his team reconstruct soil moisture variability across North America.
In 2011, Stahle visited the Black River again, this time for a fellow researcher’s master thesis. After several return trips, they published a paper in 2019 entitled, “Longevity, climate sensitivity, and conservation status of wetland trees at Black River, North Carolina,” which revealed their finding
Bald cypress trees like these specimens found on the Scuppernong River in downtown Columbia are a common sight on the waterways of eastern North Carolina. Photo by Cory Godwin.
of the oldest known living tree in the eastern United States. The discovery of this 2,624-year-old tree led to bald cypresses being named the fifth oldest tree species in the world.
To put that in perspective, that one tree predates the medieval legend of King Arthur, the Norman conquest of England, and even the religious revelations that led to the creation of the Muslim holy book, the Koran.
“There are trees, and then there are exceptional trees,” Stahle says. “That’s what we’re talking about in Black River, North Carolina. This is one of the greatest natural areas left in the United States.”
The trees are fascinating for their age, but also for their usefulness to climate scientists. By analyzing the growth rings, researchers can get closer to answering important questions about periods of drought or episodes of extreme precipitation.
“The modern instrumental rain gauge record is of course used to address those questions, too, but really it’s only 125 years long,” Stahle explains. “Trees are proxies.”
Bald cypresses are especially sensitive to climate and rainfall, so the insight they provide can also help scientists measure the rate and magnitude of climate change – and better understand the ultimate consequences of those changes on our modern weather patterns.
And sometimes, the information buried inside those ancient trunks brings up new questions that no one ever thought to ask before – such as Stahle’s discovery that periods of catastrophic drought coincided with the disappearance of the Lost Colony on Roanoke Island in 1587 and the failed Jamestown settlement attempt in the early 1600s, potentially contributing to the ultimate demise of both ventures. But the idea that weather can shape the course of history isn’t anything new, of course. The Nature Conservancy protects more than 16,000 acres in the Black River basin that are McKee estimates primarily used for research. Stahle and his team that the oldest of believe there are much older trees there as well that they just haven’t found yet – and there are the Roanoke River still thousands of acres of unprotected land at cypresses was Black River that Stahle urges North Carolinians to get more serious about protecting. growing when Genghis Khan THE TREES THAT MCKEE, SIMPSON AND THEIR STUDENTS visited along the invaded China, Roanoke River aren’t quite as old as the ones approximately found in the Black River, but they’re not exactly spring chickens either: McKee estimates that 800 years ago. the oldest of the Roanoke River cypresses was growing when Genghis Khan invaded China, approximately 800 years ago. The bald cypresses outside of the Black River area aren’t typically as healthy either. Many of the cypresses along the Roanoke River and other locations in northeastern North Carolina, like the Outer Banks, are dead – either as a result of saltwater intrusion, the logging industry, or some other human-related cause.
“A lot of times, those ghost forests are caused by big storms that bring in more saline waters, which kill the trees,” McKee explains.
But that doesn’t mean these younger, less spiffy, or even dead trees aren’t still valuable to scientists. “You can see both the width of the tree rings, the density of the tree rings, and you can look at isotopes of oxygen in carbon,” McKee adds. “All those things tell you about temperature, precipitation, drought and so forth. They’re still perfectly good trees to examine.”
More locally, bald cypresses are a fairly common sight on and near the Outer Banks, including locations in Kitty Hawk’s Sandy Run Park, the Albemarle Sound, the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge, and the North River Game Lands in Currituck and Camden counties.
To spot an ancient cypress, Stahle suggests being on the lookout for certain characteristics: relatively large and heavy limbs, hollow voids, dead limbs in the canopy, and a massive root system.
“They’re the gift of nature,” Stahle says.
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RAY MATTHEWS
19502022
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