Steve Voelker

This lake has mostly small logs so they would not be worth $. Large logs cut in the late 1800s can be worth money, but permits would need to be filed with the DNR and/or the Army Corps of Engineers depending on the body of water. Taking small samples for science seems to not ok.

Some dendro efforts of logs in lakes in Canada have extended chronologies beyond 1000 yrs. 2000 yrs may be possible with many years of effort.
Logs buried under the water table can last for thousands of years but those conditions are relatively rare compared to lakes.

Yes, at least hundreds, probably thousands of years of significant OC storage.

If anyone wants to look it up it is Trout Lake.

It is a unique setting.

If it were not for an earth dam it wetlands connected to the lake would drain both North into Lake Superior via the Au Train R. but mostly drain south to Lake Michigan via the Laughing Whitefish R.

Overhead image of a densely forested lake shoreline. The water is very clear, so logs can be clearly seen down in the water. The lake is shallow and narrow. The forest shows a lot of conifer canopies that are brown (the image is from early spring) but the canopies are all green in summer imagery from later years. This indicates a lot of the trees are tamaracks. Many of the logs are often curved, from growing out over the water indicating that there are also a lot of northern white cedar.

I spend arguably too much time looking at lakes in Google Earth

However, today I came across a lake that has more submerged logs than I have ever seen. This one 50 m section has >200 logs visible.

I estimate there are at least 7,000 logs preserved in this remote, undeveloped lake in MI's U.P.

*shuddered

I involuntarily shuttered and held my breath when I clicked on the photo and it all suddenly became visible.

Synthesis efforts can be great if they shed new light on an old question.

I would not be co-author of a synthesis if the main findings just reiterated that conifers tend to be older than hardwoods and harsh environments tend to produce older trees.

This is surprising. I and many dendro co-authors have a MS in review that also investigates causes of tree longevity that cites Schulman in the second paragraph and has >2X as many species. I believe our study will be more comprehensive when it comes out, hopefully later this year.

Reconsidering space-for-time substitution in climate change ecology - Nature Climate Change Ecologists often leverage patterns observed across spatial climate gradients to predict the impacts of climate change (space-for-time substitution). We highlight evidence that this can be misleading n...

New paper out on the dangers of using patterns across spatial climate gradients to predict what will happen with changing climate. That includes species distribution modeling. Space-for-time substitution can be misleading in sign, not just the magnitude of effects.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I really hope SOU hangs in there. It is a wonderful small school in a fantastic place for biology/ecology and performing arts.

I was once a post-doc there -- the only post-doc at the university. Perhaps the only post-doc ever...

Pantropical tree rings show small effects of drought on stem growth Increasing drought pressure under anthropogenic climate change may jeopardize the potential of tropical forests to capture carbon in woody biomass and act as a long-term carbon dioxide sink. To evalua...

How do tropical #trees deal with droughts? The answer is published today in @science.org

Our pantropical #treering analysis revealed 2.5% growth reduction during #drought years. Yet, growth declined by >10% in 1/4 of 500 study sites, and in hotter & drier regions.

doi.org/10.1126/scie...
🌍🍁🌐
(1/4)

An isotope diet study that might make you squirm.

Scientists Say New Government Climate Report Twists Their Work A new Department of Energy report “fundamentally misrepresents” climate research and leaves out key context, multiple scientists cited in the report tell WIRED.

NEW: i spoke to nine (!) scientists across several disciplines whose work was cited in the new Department of Energy report that downplays the severity of climate change. all of them say their work was misrepresented, cherry picked, and/or lacked context —

This DOE report is best understood through the lens of a well-known saying: “process is product.” In other words, the final document reflects the process that created it — including, most importantly, who was selected to write it. The authors of this report are widely recognized contrarians who don’t represent the mainstream scientific consensus. If almost any other group of scientists had been chosen, the report would have been dramatically different. The only way to get this report was to pick these authors. The report they produced should be thought of as a law brief from attorneys defending their client, carbon dioxide. Their goal is not to weigh the evidence fairly but to build the strongest possible case for CO2’s innocence. This is a fundamental departure from the norms of science. A lawyer is expected to represent their client zealously and selectively, presenting only the information that strengthens their case and leaving it to the opposing counsel to present the other side. In fact, a lawyer who stood up in court and gave equal weight to both sides of a case would be considered professionally negligent, possibly even disbarred. In science, the standard is the opposite. Scientists are obligated to engage with the full range of evidence, especially that which might contradict their hypotheses. Ignoring contrary data is not just bad practice, in some cases it can rise to the level of scientific misconduct. Scientific credibility depends on a willingness to base conclusions on all of the evidence. When scientists cherry-pick data or misrepresent the balance of evidence, they are violating a core principle of the discipline. In this report, the authors are firmly in lawyer mode. They sift through data to find the few examples that support their narrative while systematically ignoring the much larger body of evidence that contradicts it. In conclusion, this report does not appear to be a fair assessment of the state of climate science.

I've been getting a lot of requests for comments on the DOE report "A critical review of the impact of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions on the U.S. climate". Here are some initial thoughts. More will come later.

Cantharellus - Wikipedia

I had no idea how many species of chanterelles there were. Apparently it is many. One of the cited papers (from Tom Volk, RIP) notes 3 species within 20 meters in western Wisconsin.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canthar...

And in Houghton, less than a week later! This photo from two days ago show a peak which is way in advance of normal, in mid-August.

I can smell this picture.

I have not seen anywhere whether the memo applies o just the main research stations within each region or ALL the many field offices and forest science labs or some mix. The northern research station does not even have a primary station location, it is broadly distributed.

Screenshot from Reddit. User is zensnapple, posting 6 months ago. Thread says "How to turn off Google AI Overview in Chrome SOLVED Open Chrome and put chrome://settings/searchEngines in the search box. A tab will open which brings you to Search Engine > Manage Search Engines and Site Search. Click on the Add button by the Site Search update. A box will open. Fill in the form with the following: Name: AI Free Web Shortcut: @web URL: {google:baseURL}search?q=%s&udm=14 You’ll now see AI Free Web in the list of search engines. Click on the three stacked dots on the right side of AI Free Web on the list. Select Make Default. From now on, google functions pretty much like it did back when it was good. Good luck out there."

A while ago, we started a #FixItFriday tradition. We keep a running list - large & small, digital & analog, anything broken or annoying - and work on it together.

Today's 30-second fix: to remove AI "preview" from search results, here's the setting for Chrome users: www.reddit.com/r/techsuppor...

In littoral zones red pines would lose more wood to decay faster (more sapwood) but my guess is that red pines preserve better overall because they sink more often and are less likely to be exposed to physical degradation by ice and wave action.

It seems like loggers or logging companies would have known this, but maybe not.

It makes me curious.

Does anybody know if land with red pines was worth less than that dominated by white pines or whether logging crews preferred white pine over red pine because of this reason? (8/8)

This has ecological and historical implications

Historically, this means that when loggers cut the Great Lakes pine forests they would have lost a significant portion of their red pine logs just because they were more prone to sinking before they could be driven to a mill and cut up (7/8)

More red pines at depth was somewhat expected
because red pines have denser wood and thicker sapwood

In other words, red pines are more likely to sink because they have more cell wall and water water per unit log volume, whereas white pines have more air per unit log volume (6/8)

Two lakes is not a huge sample size. However, such a huge difference in red/white pine ratio is unlikely from chance

One lake never was logged whereas the other was part of chain of lakes used to transport logs cut during the exploitative logging era. Both had more red pines at depth
(5/8)

Across lakes sampled in this region (Huron Mts) cross-dated littoral zone pine logs were 4% red pine and 96% white pine, and for these two lakes it was 5%/95%

However, when we sampled deeper in 2024 this ratio for cross-dated logs changed dramatically to 50% red pines and 50% white pines! (4/8)

With training, our crews could often, but not always, differentiate sunken pine logs from hemlocks or white cedars based tree form, texture and smell (chop into the wood with a hand axe)

However, differentiating between sunken red and white pine logs was difficult so we sampled both (3/8)

Last fall we found that white pine logs from the deeper zones were significantly older on average. This means we should be able to extend our ~800 year white pine chronologies by sampling deeper parts of each lake.

However, only this summer did I cross-date red pines (2/8)

As many of you know our lab has been collecting logs out of lakes in the UP of Michigan.

From 2020-23 we sampled mostly pine logs from the littoral zone (shorelines <1.5 m depth, <10 m from shore)

In 2024 we sampled trees from deeper waters, 2-5 m depth, from two of the same lakes shown here (1/8)

Come work with us! We are looking to fill a PhD (mountain forest management) and PostDoc position (forest adaptive capacity, w/ @juditlecinadiaz.bsky.social). We'd be happy to have you as part of our dynamic team!

PhD: www.lss.ls.tum.de/fileadmin/w0...

PostDoc: www.lss.ls.tum.de/fileadmin/w0...