Hiking around Western NY is a spectacular way to experience nature. If you know what to look for, a forest’s ecology soon sends you through time. Through the successional transitions of forests on the Eastern seaboard, you can describe specific temporal disturbances, from invasive species/pathogens to the more direct human influences like land transformation.
Multi-cohort stand development is a fascinating, predictable process that too has specific patterns we can observe. Multi-cohort stands are forest landscapes with nested groups of similarly aged trees (cohorts). Separate cohorts form as minor external disturbances remove dominant canopy individuals. Gaps created allow different potential cohorts to succeed these disturbance events.
We can easily identify early sectional species, as well as species that dominate, older, shadier more closed canopy systems. Zooming in on a species biology, we can identify species traits that are selected for as a stand develops. From seeing the patterns of early-stage stand initiation all the way to the old growth stage with everything in between. If you hike through a multi-cohort stand, you will find these patterns of discrete disturbances events of the past.
By making these spatial and temporal observations, we can begin to see what a forest is, was, and may become.