Comparison of Spot: Past and Present

Present

A crow cries out across the forest, the only bird call I hear. It’s a stark difference from when I had first stopped to marvel at its beauty in the fall, with the songs of birds ringing throughout the forest. The trees from the understory are barren, as well as the ground which has lost all its woody species. The branches of the pines are also noticeably dryer than they were before winter. The inaccessible water from the snow with the lack of humidity has caused the trees to become brittle to the touch. The precipitation levels are still the same just in a different state of matter. The substrate has thus changed from the fertile soft forest floor it once was to a cold hard dirt with no decomposition in progress, limiting the amount of humus at this time.

Past

Natural Communities

Looking at Wetland, Woodland, Wildland in the Champlain Valley, I discovered that the natural community of my phenological site is a White Pine-Red Oak-Black Oak Forest. I discovered this through looking at the composition of the forest around my site, which was mostly Eastern White Pine, and looking at the landscape layers of Centennial Woods. The landscape layers of Centennial are that of sand, from the Glacier Lake Vermont which washed up a sand plain. But, Pine-Oak-Heath Sandplain Forest are only on flatlands while White Pine-Red Oak-Black Oak Forest are on slopes near the sand plain. My spot sits on a slope making it the latter with a majority species of pine.