My phenology site is a white pine northern hardwood forest. My site is by a stream, but the soils around it are mainly dry except when the stream is overflowing. I chose to classify it as an upland forest. My site is not at a high altitude, and it does not have a lot of oaks in it which lead me to classify it as northern hardwood. It does not have a lot of hemlocks or oaks, and it is not that rich, so I defined my site as a northern hardwood forest. My site had a lot of white pines, and not a lot of sugar maples or yellow birches, so I finally defined it as a White Pine-Northern hardwood forest.

My site has changed significantly since the first time I visited it way back at the beginning of this year. The majority of those changes have been caused by the changing of the seasons. First with fall and then with winter, I watched the leaves change, fall from trees, and I watched as the forest as a whole opened up. There have not been any permanent changes, but there have been a lot of temporary changes due to seasons. The biggest change is the thining out of the forest. The underbrush has all died with the decreasing temperature, and the ground is covered with a blanket of snow. This means that the forest floor is more open and easy to navigate. The topology of the landscape is much easier to see, and I can get a better feel of where I am in the forest. The river is almost completely frozen over which is a huge change to the landscape. If you stand still and listen you can still hear the trickling of water that indicates that the river can still flow underneath the ice. The organisms that don’t need to photosynthesize are still able to function as they could in the summer.

I am not able to clearly see the impact of the increased precipitation on the sub straight because of the snow cover. Luckily my site is on the edge of a river, and the edges clearly show the substrate where the snow has not been able to pile up and cover it. I can clearly see the subnivian zone on the edges of the river, along with the dirt sides of the bank which are very frozen. Right now the increased precipitation has not really impacted the substrate because all of the moisture is locked up in an unusable form. The substrate will be more saturated with usable water when the weather cools down and the snow and ice melts. Right now the ground is hard and all the water is locked up in ice. Very poor soil conditions for plants.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 7th, 2019 at 2:06 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.