Arboretum Landscape Teaching Aid Series: A Fence Long Gone Marked A Boundary (3.19498)
Date: 1940 – 1960Creator: Watts, May Theilgaard
Type: Drawing
Description:Primarily textual teaching aid depicting Arboretum landscape. This material shows how a fence once marked a boundary through a forest.
Header: A fence (long gone) marked a boundary through a forest (long gone)
Text and illustrations from top to bottom:
- [Depicted in stylized scroll] The Record:
- 1. A long row of trees: red oaks, white oaks, and ironwood [an illustration of a row of trees]
- 2. the soil profile on both sides of this row [arrow pointing right to illustration of a cross-section of soil]
- Interpreting the record:
- 1) Because red oaks and ironwoods belong in rich (mesophytic) woods, and
- 2) because a thin layer of black soil on top of clay is typical of forests in this area (but not of prairies) and
- 3) because there would have been forest-margin trees, like hawthorn, if this fence had edged a forest - We read the record as above [arrow extending upward to header]
Extent: 1 sheet
Morton Forestry Plots: Minirhizotrons and Roots (3.63437)
Date: 2019Type: Dataset
Description:Minirhizotron tubes were installed in 18 Forestry plots covering 13 species around The Morton Arboretum in the early summer of 2018. Beginning in spring of 2019, images are being collected on a roughly bi-weekly to monthly time scale from the tubes using a minirhizotron camera. From these images, the seasonal growth patterns and lifespan of fine roots can be monitored.
Final datasets will be made free and publicly accessible through the Fine-Root Ecology Database (FRED; http://roots.ornl.gov/). Raw data may be made available with reasonable request.
Morton Forestry Plots: Dendrometer Bands and Woody Stems (3.63438)
Date: 2019Type: Dataset
Description:"TreeHugger" Digital dendrometers were installed on 87 trees across the 18 core Forestry Plots in April of 2019. From these, measurements of stem diameter will be recorded every 15 minutes continuously across the year. The measurements have an accuracy of approximately 50 microns, enabling the monitoring of both seasonal patterns of stem growth as well as diurnal patterns of stem shrinking and swelling associated with water loss and gain within the tree trunk.
Raw and cleaned data may be made available from the Root Lab with reasonable request. Final datasets will also be housed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
Morton Forestry Plots: Phenocams and Leaves (3.63439)
Date: 2019Type: Dataset
Description:Time-lapse "Phenocams" (Trail Cams) have been installed around the Arboretum targeting the 18 core Forestry Plots. These cameras capture a series of images of the leaf canopy 5 to 24 times each day throughout the year. The recorded images will then be analyzed by the field-specific software, PhenocamW64, which will estimate a greenness index representing the timing of leaf production, senescence, and relative density of tree canopy across the year.
Raw and clean data may be made available from the Root Lab with reasonable request. Final datasets will also be housed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
The Impacts of Fine Root Mass and Soil Nitrogen Availability on Nitrogen Uptake Rate in Trees (3.67056)
Date: 2019Type: Dataset
Description:
Recent developments in Earth System Models have granted researchers attempting to model global climate change significant new ability (Fisher et al., 2017). These models use carbon dioxide output and sequestration rates to calculate atmospheric CO2 levels and the Earth’s potential to trap heat (Dybzinski, 2019). However, the models are only as good as the assumptions they make; due to a lack of research into the topic, different terrestrial models commonly make contradictory assumptions about the roles of nitrogen availability and fine root mass in a tree’s rate of nitrogen uptake, leading to inaccuracy and inconsistency (Dybzinski et al., 2019). As most of North American tree growth is nitrogen-limited, the rate at which a particular species is able to absorb nitrogen is critical to its ability to grow and take up carbon--and to the models aiming to predict these rates. In this study, we attempted to quantify the true roles of each factor in tree nitrogen uptake rate and predicted that nitrogen availability would have far greater effect than fine root mass. In 18 single-species plots at the Morton Arboretum, we obtained the nitrate and ammonium availability per area, fine root mass of target species per area, and nitrogen uptake rate of the plot’s target species trees per area. We found that there is blankity blank relationship between fine root mass and uptake rate and absolutely blank relationship between nitrogen availability and uptake rate. We hope that these results will be incorporated into existing ESM models to allow for more accurate assessments of forests across the world and to inform efforts to understand global carbon sequestration.