Maple Regeneration: Monthly Maple REVIEW

July’s REVIEW piece lands on the subject of maple regeneration.  Put simply, how do big trees make baby trees and what factors promote or inhibit that process.  This review comes courtesy of a doozy of a 2021 titled paper “Complex drivers of sugar maple (Acer saccharum) regeneration reveal challenges to long-term sustainability of managed northern hardwood forests.”  The team of authors, all from the mitten-shaped state to the north, was led by Catherine Henry from Michigan State’s Department of Forestry.

It goes without saying that it requires a whole bunch of seeds to hit the forest floor in order for a single tree to reach maturity decades later.  But just how complex is the regeneration struggle for sugar maples?  After all, despite a lifespan of 300 years give or take a century, if mature sugar maples do not replace themselves with seedling, sapling, and teenager sugar maples, the ultimate goal of passing one’s genes on to the next generation will fail.  Henry et al. examined research plots in 141 different forest stands to dig into factors related to sugar maple regeneration throughout northern Michigan.  The study sites were all managed with single-tree selection silviculture for decades, a forestry practice that is commonly regarded to be a great tool for regenerating and recruiting sugar maple.  It is important to note potential geographic differences between the study’s region and Ohio; not everything will necessarily apply to our state, but we can learn from their findings as well.

Sugar maples are generally considered to be shade tolerant tree species, and that is a fine way to categorize them from a 30,000 feet above the surface of the earth perspective.  Zoomed in up close however, a simple shade tolerant descriptor is insufficient.  Sugar maple regenerate best under conditions of intermediate canopy openings, and successful production of seedlings and saplings is optimized in larger single-tree gaps that are maintained or increased through time.  The truth is that while maple seedlings are technically shade tolerant, more light is required as regeneration grows into sapling sizes and beyond.  Prolonged deep shading stunts out maple regeneration, and it is important to remember that shade doesn’t just come from overstory trees; ferns, dense midstories of beech, and invasive plant infestations can all starve a cohort of seedlings of the light they require to become saplings and ultimately larger trees.  In addition to growing space, variables of deer browsing pressure, site quality (related to soils), and competing vegetation were considered.

The very first line of the study’s Results section reads as follows: “Stand-level sugar maple regeneration was highly variable within and among size classes.”  It goes without saying that nature contains tremendous variation, and this statement reinforces that idea.  Examining one forest stand and anticipating the next forest to behave identically is foolish, and taking one study and assuming that it directly applies to a novel new region is equally foolish.  All that said, there are absolutely some lessons to be learned.

Maple regeneration was most successful at intermediate basal area levels and at sites with intermediate quality.  Imagine an upside-down U where the peak is in the middle and the start of the curve and end of the curve are low, that’s essentially what the graph would look like.  This plays well with the Goldilocks analogy that we like to use for sugar maples – sugar maples favor conditions that aren’t too _______ but also aren’t too ________, just like Goldilocks didn’t dive straight into a bowl of scalding hot or freezing cold porridge.  The study had some educated guesses as to why this may be.  Excessive basal area (a forest stand that is overstocked) and too many sugar maples in the overstory casts deep shade that even the shade tolerant maple babies can’t survive.  Too few mature maples in the overstory may be limited by seed availability and more easily overwhelmed by deer browse pressure (see photo above).  Low quality sites for sugar maple, duh, did not have a lot of vigorous healthy sugar maples.  But high quality sites were often associated with higher deer densities that likely led to overbrowsing of seedlings and smaller saplings.  An additional explanation is that overstory maples grow so quickly on high quality sites that canopy gaps quickly close thus reducing understory recruitment.

https://oregonforests.org/field_collection_item/485

The study is published in the journal Forest Ecology and Management, and authors are encouraged to write a rather in-depth closing section called “Implications for management.”  In these parting paragraphs, Catherine Henry and her colleagues boldly comment that single-tree selection silviculture – a system that ought “to produce ample sugar maple regeneration” – is failing.  While the study’s results were highly variable, factors of deer overbrowsing, site quality, light limitation, and seed availability confounded attempts to successfully recruit sugar maples to the sapling size class in nearly 70% of plots.  The solution is not easy or obvious.  While the authors point to silvicultural harvest methods that open more growing space and release more light into the understory – namely uneven-aged group selection and even-aged shelterwood harvests – they acknowledge a different approach may exacerbate other problems (denser shrub densities, higher success of undesirable species).  Regardless of harvest method, a parting recommendation was that managers take deer population management seriously through increased hunting take or use of exclusion practices, such as wire fencing or natural slash walls.

Bringing this review home to Ohio, what are the over-arching takeaways.  While there are undoubtedly more to consider, I’ll quickly point to 3 recommendations.  #1 – Deer can destroy even the best laid plans, our state mammal HAS TO BE managed.  The best possible silvicultural plan can quickly unravel with too many deer.  #2 – Cutting a single tree here and a single tree there is not likely to recruit your next generation of syrup-making trees.  #3 – Work with a state or credentialed forester to develop a management plan for your woods.  They will understand the complexities and caveats to navigate a timber harvest and help you balance your objectives against the impacts of the past, the conditions of the present, and the goals for the future.

 

Spotted Lanternfly: Monthly Maple REVIEW

June’s REVIEW piece is going to come with a request, but first the topic – spotted lanternfly.  The main question of course is this – will spotted lanternfly impact sugarmakers?  The answer put simply and to quote Brian Walsh from Penn State University’s Extension team, “we don’t know, we don’t know, we don’t know.”  While that answer may not be comforting or assuring, it is absolutely certain that lots of work is being done to pursue better answers and there is plenty you can be doing as an individual producer to get ready for your likely “not if, but when” encounter with the invasive spotted lanternfly.  Why do I say “not if, but when”?  Look at this distribution map sourced from New York State’s Integrated Pest Management website.  Spotted lanternfly moves with efficiency and moves with coverage.  I don’t see many holes within the infested range where it has not been found.

“Impacts of short-term feeding by spotted lanternfly on ecophysiology of young hardwood trees in a common garden” was published in 2022 by Emily Lavely and a team of researchers among whom the aforementioned Brian Walsh is a co-author.  The paper can be found in the journal Frontiers in Insect Science.

Here is a webinar recorded through Penn State University last November that spotlights some of the key findings from this paper as it relates to maples and maple sugarmaking.  The recording is pushing 2 hours long, but the meat and potatoes of how this research experiment fits in to our current understanding of how spotted lanternfly impacts maples can be found between the 41:00-48:00 minutes mark.

Before I summarize the relevant take home message from the Lavely et al. study, it is worth noting that the experiment used small sapling-sized trees to document the following findings.  What would those findings have looked like if similar work was conducted on larger diameter tapping-sized trees?  In a nutshell, some short-term intense feeding by spotted lanternfly in the autumn impact stored sugars in silver maples immediately, but has no near-term effect on red maples.  Looking at the following spring after overwintering, silver maples rebound but the red maples in the study showed sugar reductions of up to 40%.  Unfortunately, sugar maples are an even larger question mark, but a fall feeding preference list for spotted lanternfly definitely includes the perennial gold standard species for making maple syrup.

So, what can you do in the near-term to brace for impact, be a tiny part of the solution, and be a first observer/reporter for your area?  Here are 3 practical things to consider.

1st – Learn how to identify tree-of-heaven (Ailanthus altissima) and CONTROL it.  Tree-of-heaven sits atop the summer feeding preference list for spotted lanternfly and is an excellent (or terrible, depending on your perspective) location to observe spotted lanternfly.  Tree-of-heaven is an invasive species in its own right and is notoriously aggressive and difficult to eradicate.  The Ohio Invasive Plants Council has a nice fact sheet that can help you learn how to identify tree-of-heaven, here’s the Ailanthus control sheet from Woodlands Stewards, and Rutgers University has another fantastic resource for how best to control this non-native pest.  Your first action item in short – identify tree-of-heaven and do your best to eliminate it.  By eliminating the preferred host for spotted lanternfly summer feeding, you reduce the chance of your nearby maples being next on the menu when autumn arrives. 

2nd – Indicate your support to the IR-4 project that you want to see more spotted lanternfly research conducted focused on potential impacts to maple and maple syrup production.  This requires you logging on to a website and formally indicating your support, but please scroll down to the bottom of this post and follow 6 quick and simple steps to engage IR-4 and put this topic front and center on the funding agency’s radar for the next round of awards issued in September.  Again, to hear more about this why IR-4 mechanism is so crucial, listen to minutes 41-48:00 on the Penn State webinar linked here.

3rd – Keep your eyes out for spotted lanternfly and report suspected observations immediately.  Here is a current map of Ohio counties with known spotted lanternfly infestations.  You can link to the Ohio Department of Agriculture’s reporting hotline through this ODNR webpage.  While most press releases show the adult winged spotted lanternfly, detections during the hottest summer months are more likely to be the nymphal stages (shout out to NCSU, my alma mater for the nice graphic below).  Being on the front line of early detection helps ensure agencies can respond as quickly as possible to new outbreaks and share information as effectively as possible.

 

6 Simple Steps to Support Spotted Lanternfly Research through IR-4. 

1) Visit this link: https://ir4app.cals.ncsu.edu/Ir4FoodPub/IS_Search

2) Click the down arrow on the upper-left yellow box labeled ‘IS Number’ and select the option ‘IS00441’

3) This will auto-populate Brian Walsh’s research proposal to pursue effective and safe spotted lanternfly controls on the bottom part of the screen.  Click the live link ‘IS00441’ under the box “SUPPORTING/SIMILAR REQUEST”

4) You will be transferred to a new page where you should enter your email address and go through the verification code process as directed.  You will be given the option to register for future use, or to not have your information saved for future use.  Your choice here does not impact your ability to voice support for this project.

5) Enter more information about yourself (enter “Individual Maple Producer” under Affiliation if you’re unsure how to fill in that field)

6) Finally, comment into the “Additional Reason for Need” box and click Submit.  The text box has a small character limit that won’t allow you to type more than a couple complete sentences.  This is what I submitted, feel free to copy-paste or create your own short indication of support.

Spotted lanternfly (SLF) is poised to impact maple producers, particularly those producers with a prevalence of red and silver maples in their sugarbush. Many Ohio maple producers fit this scenario and need options to combat SLF in order to preserve profitability and tree/forest health.

For more information: Look back at posts recapping Amy Stone’s presentation at 2021’s Ohio Maple Days on spotted lanternfly: Part 1, Part 2.

Change Over a Century: Monthly Maple REVIEW

Here is May’s edition of our feature Monthly Maple Review.  Once a month, we review a research article to spotlight key findings, investigate curiosities, and uncover important implications for Ohio’s maple producers.  Please comment below if you have thoughts, ideas, insights, or questions.  If you stumble on to a new maple article and want to see it highlighted in a Monthly Maple Review, please reach out to me via email – karns.36@osu.edu.

Phenology, put simply, is the study of nature’s timing.  A couple years back, we did a special article series on the use of growing degree days (GDDs) to monitor and predict the progression of trees and shrubs in Ohio.  Typically, sugarmakers are most keyed in and interested in whether maple trees are early, right on time, or late to produce the sap runs we convert into maple syrup.  But phenology gets at much more than just the time of year we make syrup.  Leaf out, dormancy, seed development, emergence of different insect pests, fall color change, and leaf drop are all elements of the annual cycle of plant phenology.  Phenology is a topic we keep coming back to you, but it’s interesting, it’s important, and it’s complicated – so we are back again!

This month’s article, published in March of this very year, is titled “A Century of Climate Warming Results in Growing Season Extension: Delayed Autumn Leaf Phenology in North Central North America.”  Authors Kellen Calinger and Peter Curtis (both Ohio State University researchers in the Department of Evolution, Ecology, and Organismal Biology) published their study in an open-access journal called PLoS ONE.  Open-access meaning, if you want to read the full paper, you can access the article here.

The methodological approach for this research paper is particularly interesting and clever.  A farmer named Thomas Mikesell from Fulton County, OH, collected data from the years of 1883-1912, meticulously recording phenological and meteorological information that was preserved in a massive 700+ page publication that is still accessible today.  Kellen and Peter, the modern day researchers from Ohio State, used Mikesell’s observations as a baseline to compare data from 2010-2014, a full century later.

Among the tree species selected in their study (they chose 7 in all), no Acer maple species were chosen unfortunately.  However, the beauty in this study’s approach is the real focus on this month’s review.  It is both elegant and simple to think that someone’s observations over 100 years ago could serve as such a significant monument in time to understand how conditions shift and change through the decades, even centuries.  Sometimes science gets complicated, complex, to the point of absurdity it seems.  This is a pleasant reminder that there is profundity in the simple as well.  Write down your observations, allow time to pass, make more observations, and compare.  Simple.  Done.

I believe there is a lesson here for us all – take notes, jot down curiosities, record all the important dates from every sugaring season.  And most importantly – save those scribbles and notes in a place where not only you, but the next generation too, can find them and propel your own personal learning journey.  Just in case you don’t recognize the common name “white maple” – that’s silver maple.

If you’re from northwest Ohio, or even just from the upper quarter latitude of Ohio, I strongly suggest you peek at this table to see how your observations jive (or don’t jive!) with Mikesell’s observations back in the late 1800s.   What conclusions do you draw?  Are there big differences for each observational category – first fully formed leaf, in full leaf, in blossom, fruit ripe, and complete change of foliage?  Or are some categories different, but some phenomenon right on schedule and unchanged?  It is important to remember that phenology is driven by a host of factors (as we noted in our March Monthly Maple REVIEW) – shifting climate is one factor, but precipitation plays a role, active and recent weather events/trends, photoperiod (fancy name for day length), and more.  Observations that have not changed much on the calendar are likely responding to more static and unchanging factors such as photoperiod.  Observations that do differ, those are more likely triggered changing climate and other more dynamic factors.

If you’re not from that part of Ohio, dig up those old records that your dad’s dad kept back when he ran the sugarshack in years bygone.  Rifle through the old drawers of dusty old spiral-bound notebooks.  Flip over the back of black-and-white photographs to see if there is an inscription that reads “first boil, 1952.”  All those memories are also records, and we learn about the present when we look to the past.  So I guess this review is less of a review and more of an admonishment – bear witness to the power of data collection and long-term record keeping.  Participate in keeping notes.  If nothing else, those notes will be curiosities to be pondered years down the road.  At best, meticulous notes and records can help you make sense of the dynamic, cluttered, and information-dense world that we live!

 

Talking with the Trees: Monthly Maple REVIEW

A brief introduction to this relatively new feature – Monthly Maple Review, which is now in its third month.  Once a month, we review a research article to spotlight key findings, investigate curiosities, and uncover important implications for Ohio’s maple producers.  Please comment below if you have thoughts, ideas, insights, or questions.  If you stumble on to a new maple article and want to see it highlighted in a Monthly Maple Review, please reach out to me via email – karns.36@osu.edu.

After a more technical and heavy academic discussion of factors influencing bud break in sugar maples during our March review, I decided to explore a peer-reviewed article that draws from a much different perspective.  Biosemiotics is the study of signs and meaning in living organisms and systems (as defined by Springer Publishing – Springer has curated a quarterly journal dedicated to this topic for 15 years).  Biosemiotics, put more simply, asserts that life is based on signs and codes – a statement that straddles the line between science and philosophy.  Food, Care and Sugar Maple Stand” by Jonathan Hope was published in 2021 in the journal BiosemioticsThis article does not present any experimental research or new study, but rather challenges us to think about maple trees and our relationship with maple trees in a different light.

When we anthropomorphize, we assign human-like attributes to non-human objects or organisms.  For instance, a talking candlestick or feather duster imparted with human emotions in the movie Beauty and the Beast is a great example of anthropomorphizing.  In recent years, popular books such as The Hidden Life of Trees have popularized the idea that trees may have the ability to communicate and respond to one another through local and more extended networks.  This progressive notion certainly challenges a more narrow view of trees that relegates them simply to living cells constituting trunks, roots, leaves, and an annual cycle of growth.  Sugarmakers certainly hold trees in higher esteem than just such a rudimentary and crude description, it is after all maple trees that we put on a pedestal to admire, cherish, and prize them!  But trees communicating?  In the more human sense, that might still be a stretch for many of us.

The maple producer who understands the multitude and complexity of factors that impact a maple tree’s growth, health, vigor, and day-to-day performance through a sugaring season is keenly aware of just how responsive maple trees are to stimulus.  Jonathan Hope – the article’s paper – proposes that this keen ability to respond to changing signals and environments is a testament to the mindfulness of maples.  Enjoy the following passage.

“Running a sugar shack requires that producers learn how the biological engine of the trees works, or more precisely, that they understand the behavior of the trees…Understanding how maples groves function also requires that the sugarmaker learns, or becomes familiar with, what [Aldo] Leopold calls the ‘language’ of wildlife – through ‘semiosis’…this language could refer to many types of sign relations.  In other words, learning the language of trees depends on one’s readiness to admit that meaningful things happen to/in them.”

When we view trees as having and responding to a unique set of signals and languages, we also begin realizing that trees are connected to the soil, are dependent on and connected to the subsurface and surface water cycles, are potentially harmed and injured by non-native pests, are life providers and habitat for many native organisms, are intimately linked not just to the seasons but also to minute changes in weather and climatic conditions, …  What are those intimate links, those connection points – of course, these are the essence of ecology.  Everything is linked to everything else.  Are humans interwoven and part of that web and outside and distant from that web of connections?  I’ll let you answer that.

If we anthropomorphize and grant trees the ability to communicate, to respond to external stimuli, and to profoundly influence organisms in their sphere of influence, then perhaps it’s not a stretch to take the following quote serious.  “Humans can take care of each other, of other animals, of plants and natural environments; and inversely environments, plants and animals take care of themselves, and sometimes, take care of humans.”  I don’t believe this way of thinking is a big stretch for many maple producers.  We absolutely love our trees, and we understand that we are profoundly and deep rooted to our maple woods.

Here’s one final line from the article – certainly a far departure from a technical and verbose experimental study.

“So many relations interlace in a can of maple syrup…Maple sugar producers intervene on the forests and tinker with their semiosis, harnessing, and participating with the ‘energy pathways’…of food and care.  Eating and caring have always been marked by commensality.  Maple sugaring shows once more that this togetherness extends far beyond the limits of the human.”

What Triggers Bud Break? Monthly Maple REVIEW

A brief introduction to this new feature – Monthly Maple Review – we review a research article once each month to spotlight key findings, investigate curiosities, and uncover important implications for Ohio’s maple producers.  Please comment below if you have thoughts, ideas, insights, or questions.  And if you stumble on to a new maple article and want to see it highlighted in a Monthly Maple Review, please reach out to me via email – karns.36@osu.edu.

Bud Break in Sugar Maple Submitted to Changing Conditions Simulating a Northward Migration” by Ping Ren and colleagues.  This article was published in 2021 in the journal Canadian Journal of Forest Research.

In our first Monthly Maple Review, we looked at producer attitudes and behaviors regarding climate change and its projected impact on maple.  For this our second installment, we focus on how a simulation experiment predicts climate change will effect bud break in sugar maples.

As climate shifts and range-restricting thresholds follow, plants and animals must adapt and keep up with changes or risk being left behind.  Many organisms are well-suited, at least from a mobility standpoint, for keeping up – take birds and their gift of flight for instance.  Other species likely face serious challenges; the American pika is commonly pointed to as an example.  Pika are small, marmot- or groundhog-like creatures that live in treeless alpine habitat in the Rocky Mountains.  It is easy to imagine pika being literally stranded on mountain peaks above timberline unable to migrate and keep up with shifts in suitable range.  Many plants are also considered less adaptive to shifting conditions and may not be able to move into higher latitudes or elevations necessary to keep up with suitable growing conditions; sugar maples are no exception.

In emergency scenarios, assisted migration is a solution whereby humans literally help other organisms keep up with shifting climate conditions.  Already, experiments have been conducted with many plant species, including some trees such as the whitebark pine, to verify suitability of growing conditions beyond the current limits of the species distribution.  Will sugar maple or other maple species need a special assist from us?  No one knows for sure, but studying what factors drive bud break is a small step to understanding if they are likely to need our help in the future.

The essence of Ping Ren and team’s experiment was to examine bud break under controlled conditions while varying temperature and photoperiod (also known as day length).  The experiment’s most basic hypothesis was that “photoperiod outweights temperature in initiating bud break when the chilling requirement in unfulfilled.”

To understand the study’s results, we first need to wrap our minds around 3 main environmental factors, or signals – the variables we believe most plants are responding to when they wake from winter dormancy and start to stir towards bud break.  First, winter chilling – more intense and longer periods of cold during the heart of winter contribute to chilling.  This deep freeze is what resets the annual clock of trees and influences the trigger of growth reactivation.  Perhaps it is worthwhile to think of chilling as similar to a human experiencing a prolonged session of deep sleep.  Second, spring temperature – this is just what it sounds like.  In a simple system, cooler spring temperatures may wake plants from deep sleep more slowly than a rapidly warming and sudden onset of spring (check out a series we did in winter 2022 on growing degree days to better under the role of spring temperature).  And finally, photoperiod – more commonly known as day length.  The most important thing to note on this final factor is that while any given year might vary in terms of winter chilling or spring temperature, length of day is fixed and will always be fixed regardless of where climate change takes us.

While each factor in isolation is relatively easy to understand, it is the complicated interactions between winter chilling, spring temperature, and photoperiod that likely determine the actual timing of bud break in a species.  This study ran 2 experiments that essentially confirmed the hypothesis that sugar maple bud break is more determined by photoperiod than by spring temperature when the requirement for chilling is not met.  Let’s put that another way – during winters that do not put sugar maples into a deep sleep for long enough (winter chilling), day length has more of an effect on bud break timing than how cool or warm spring temperatures are.  In other words, the experiments confirmed the authors’ central hypothesis.

Let’s unpack that a bit more and talk about some take home messages.

Resetting a sugar maple’s internal clock is accomplished primarily by meeting the chilling requirement – being cold enough for long enough.  When that chilling requirement is not met, it takes additional and louder signals to wake up a tree from dormancy to initiate bud break.  While this might sound a bit counterintuitive, the fact is that waking up a tree from a deep sleep is easier and more predictable than trying to wake up a tree that has been tossing and turning in its winter bed.  Under changing climatic conditions, warmer winters may result in unmet chilling requirements that ultimately result in delayed bud break thereby shortening growing seasons.  But remember, winter chilling is just the first consideration.  What about spring temperatures?

At face value, most sugarmakers understand the effect of a warm spring – trees break bud faster.  In a cool spring, buds stay closed longer and the sap season might last a bit longer too.  In a worst case scenario, climate change wreaks complete havoc on winter weather not allowing sugar maples to adequately chill and temperatures jump back to springtime highs so quickly that any sap season is effectively crowded right off the calendar.  That’s where day length seems to play a crucial and important role.

Think of day length/photoperiod as a speed governor on a go-cart.  I hate so-called governors growing up.  I wanted to ride my go-cart at top and dangerous speeds, but my parents set the speed governor so that I could only drive certain speed limits.  When spring temperatures warm abruptly and it seems that the sugar maples might break bud extraordinarily early, length of day pumps the brakes and slows down that process regulating it closer to normal.  Essentially, photoperiod may be a crucial regulating factor to keep sugar maple bud phenology more on track than would be expected otherwise.  In the authors’ own words – “Because day length will not change under climate warming, photoperiod becomes ultimately limiting when bud break in sugar maple occurs too early.”

So where does that leave us?  Will sugar maple need our help in assisted migration as conditions change faster and faster into this and coming centuries?  Time will tell, but if this study teaches you nothing else – you can certainly walk away with 2 big takeaways.  First, trees are remarkably complex organisms.  And second, trees have a few tricks up their sleeves!

Climate Change & Maple: Who Cares?! Monthly Maple REVIEW

A brief introduction to this new feature – Monthly Maple Review – we review a research article once each month to spotlight key findings, investigate curiosities, and uncover important implications for Ohio’s maple producers.  Please comment below if you have thoughts, ideas, insights, or questions.  And if you stumble on to a new maple article and want to see it highlighted in a Monthly Maple Review, please reach out to me via email – karns.36@osu.edu.

A Changing Climate in the Maple Syrup Industry: Variation in Canadian and U.S.A. Producers’ Climate Risk Perceptions and Willingness to Adapt Across Scales of Production” by Anna Caughron and colleagues.  This article was published in 2021 in the journal Small-scale Forestry.

The maple syrup industry is on an undeniable collision course with changing climatic regimes – shifting tree composition, more unpredictable and earlier sap seasons, and potential reductions in yield are all staring back when we look into the future.  This list represents just the tip of the looming iceberg, and more southerly producers anticipate an even rockier path forward as evidenced by some impacts that we can already talk about in the present tense.

Anna and her co-authors are not the first team to survey climate-related issues amongst producers, and perhaps we will review other similar papers down the road.  But one interesting angle, beyond the normal suite of factors like age or education or political affiliation, that this study examined was producer scale.  Does producer scale impact willingness and ability to adopt climate-adaptation practices in maple production?  Let’s first clarify what a climate-adaptation practice is.  Consider the effects of shifting tree composition in Ohio.  That shift will likely lead to increased dominance by red maples.  Adapting to that effect would be to tap a diversity of maple species, not just sugar maples.  Failing to adapt to shifting tree composition could lead to reduced tap quantity because of unwillingness to tap anything except a sugar maple.

With that point clarified, two over-arching findings stuck out to me.  First, nearly 90% of all surveyed producers agreed that maple syrup production is closely linked to climate, and only 15% of small producers (<2,000 taps) believed climate-induced impacts would be a net positive to their operation.  How often does that lop-sided a percentage of folks agree on something?  Not often.  Second, larger producers are more willing to adopt more climate-smart adaptation practices than medium or small producers.  And guess what, political affiliation had nothing to do with any of the above.  Yes, you read that correct – climate and maple is apolitical.

Before we dive into the specifics, know that it took 10,000+ taps to be categorized as a large-scale producer in this study.  Quite frankly, most US producers in this study were small or medium, and most Ohio producers would certainly be “small.”  A final caveat, before we dive into a few specifics, is that among the 354 survey respondents in the study, only 12 hailed from the Buckeye State.

Canadian producers, which are also more likely to be the “large” producers, are more apt to fertilize their sugarbushes and practice intensive silviculture, but significantly less likely to increase the number of trees they are tapping.  I can see the practice of fertilization.  Personally, I believe all maple producers – regardless of scale, should practice active silviculture in their maple woods.  The goal of active silviculture after all should be healthy maples!  The last point about tap quantity is a hard one to understand…until you discover that rules enforced by the Federation of Quebec Maple Syrup Producers prohibits most producers from increasing their tap count.  Given that most large producers are also Canadian, the pattern of stubbornly maintaining tap count then makes some sense.  I certainly learned something new with that fact pointed out to me.

“Medium” producers were more likely to tap earlier, implement rigorous sanitation practices, and stay up to date on latest research finding than “small” producers.  Multiple factors could be play as “large” and “medium” producers increasingly differentiate from “small” producers.  I’ll quickly highlight just one factor as I grapple with the study’s findings.  Some “small” producers are undoubtedly hobby producers.  Making syrup is fun and as soon as it seems like work, well…where’s the fun?  I can easily see why an individual producer with 100 or 2 taps would decide not to invest in high vacuum efficiencies.

Putting aside scale of producer and applying the lens of producer age, we learn that tapping red maples and using high vacuum systems are less likely among older producers.  Only focusing on the practice of tapping red maples, this fits within the pattern of a traditional no-no generationally passed down.  Not until more recently has University research been dedicated to documenting production potential in alternative maple species.  What’s that saying about “old dogs?”

I’ll wrap this review up by pointing a finger back at myself – a maple educators.  This sentence from the study speaks for itself, “Only 20.9% of producers…thought that information on climate change impacts on the maple industry was easy to access.”  Yikes, that is a huge wake-up call and harsh criticism for the University community.  Hopefully this site can help address these knowledge gaps for Ohio maple producers, and this Monthly Maple Review series is part of the solution.