for hundreds of years americans have cut trees and farm the land and built roads houses and cities our wealth of natural resources helped to make america what it is today some say that ninety percent of america's virgin forest has been cut some trees still stand as a witness to our history birchwood village has a few of these trees birchwood resident and boy scout chad peterson live a tree survey of birchwood village over one hundred fifty volunteers including boy scout troop four thirty four no doubt they found some remarkable trees and listed a few champions too they came up with a report and estimated inventory of birch woods precious tree resources they say that the apple doesn't fall far from the tree chad's mother erika is a naturalist and inspired him in his so many residents got involved in the village now has a greater awareness of and appreciation for the value and beauty of trees erica peterson led a forest walk and discussed managing for healthy forests and open spaces i want to talk a little bit about community and the community of the forest as much like the community that we set up and the indicators of health and you can see a understorey to a force is made up of a mature canopy and then the the understorey underneath and then the ground from the ground level and all of those support one another just like in a city the foundations course of buildings and so on and i want you to as we go on this watch begin to see the forest as under an umbrella and in the big sense but also these small little micro communities and how healthy they are and i hope to show you things that you can do in your backyard to improve your forest or as you go on your walk through that the neighborhood here that you can say oh well that's not such a good thing and maybe we should think about that and do that or vice versa i brought along a picture of a  forest with a d n r in a variety of other ecological associations have mapped the entire state of minnesota and determine what the canopy or that the i'm growl of that whole area is supposed to look like or what it is starkly looks like live in the community it's really household to know the trees by their names in the kind of habitat they grow in and then suddenly the forest becomes filled with friends you know in a sense that you're acquainted with them and you can understand them and pick them out so we're going to head this way in the down this road the walk i'm taking you and is what some of the older people in the neighborhood have told me is the most historically significant forest in virtue it in a sense of the trees that are growing around here  mark cahill told me that everything was lag one hundred years ago for the community came in and so there are very few trees that are hundred years old but there are few and they seem to have been left around in this area anyway  so right off we've got an ash tree right here a box elder and those are some of the primary species of this area that we're going to see  oaks historically there were a lot more oaks but they're slowly being taken by oak well to over a long period of time here red oaks are more susceptible than white oak basswood is a treat it should be there should be quite a bit of best food in here if you look flower and then and then elderberry is back there and i wanted to point this out because you've got a native shrub which is the elder berry and you have unmanned native  invasive species the honeysuckle and there's three invasive honeysuckles in everywhere and you rarely ever find a native honeysuckle and i don't know that i'd even notice it and there's a lot of this all over for  and i don't feel like this is a serious threat like the buckthorn and some of the other things i'm going to show you if you have a chance to remove it and replace it then do that it's a direct and causes them to poop a lot more than usual and so they're spreading it all over and bikes aren't so you can last in the in the soil for a long time  looks like the emerald ash bore and really stressed out the last few years with drought and hot summers and that stresses out a tree and just like us and we get run down we get colds and that's what happens with something really wonderful here and i don't know who lives here but they've they've noted that there's a basswood tree coming up here and see how thick it is at the base for such a small height you know they've been polly shanks property and it was interesting so we did the tree survey they are the major understorey plant now and i suspect they're for us more southern midwestern species they're not native to minnesota native to the midwest yes but they are definitely spreading in this direction probably because of climate change they are a more southern species tolerate more heat and drought and probably will you know thank god we are next canopy species of some  with a blister rust we just got to be aware that sometimes white pine there going to come down with it it has a blister rust has a secondary host so it has to live it teenage years so to speak and gaspare wild current bushes and then it goes from that into a stressed or injured white pine tree and it works its way down the branch and the whole branch will die  turn rusty colored and you can see that right away you can sometimes staff it it's called an insect flag or a disease flag and you cut it off before it reaches the tree and you can see the tree so there are you know we've had some lifetime rust in the neighborhood i didn't see any of us here when i walked through the neighborhood so best thing is not to plant gooseberry and wild currents there is there is one kind that doesn't have those and holds the rust son chad started a champion she left her virtue and he's going to be really fun over the years to get reports of you know trying to find the biggest of every one of these trees in our neighborhood and the first olcott that was reported was th and the boys came out measured it's forty four inches in an archery survey forty four inches in diameter at d b a two is it called diameter breast height and anyway so they they measured this and they d not tell me what kind of ok it was that looks like it's a white oak now now that's what i want to know and i realize i really want to find the biggest trees in virtue and so i'm coming on all of you to go out and give me calls when you think you found a bigger one and we'll begin to expand the soliciting going to be really fun where as a group today we're going to add a list to the to add a the champion left that when we we had back there anyway so you know i'll be in on that mark and i found it scarred over you can see that there was a strike here and then it started shoot over you to measure at this one like there's another lightning strike there's a white oak why don't now so we still need to find the biggest red oak oh this is a mountain ash with the you can smell it the flower maple and it's very damming at maple species and throughout the neighborhood again we have a little tinge of that floodplain kind of forest in through here and silver maple tends to grow where it's wet warm moist it's a and with the white it's starting to get a white flower there very yeah and look out big it is a lots of times it's kind of messy in the sense that lots of it dies during the winter and then it always sprout new ones you can go in and cut out the old and let selective cut in here and that means they went in and an arborist or somebody identified x percent of the trees to remove an eye i am not familiar with why they did that or what seedlings when young trees coming in and they cut out a lot of that and you can see immediately what starts to come in the white flour and garlic mustard and you get buckthorn and you have a fair amount of young ash trees are probably now what we should be promoting given the emerald asked for coming and we also have a soundman c e o we got solomon seal come in and which is another good thing to see  there's a fair amount of a cropping up in virtue it was planted as an ornamental it's a team feet high and send out sixty foot runners so it it's a runners were literally go underneath city street and come up on the other side and if there's a crack in the city street it will expand the crack and grow through it and it's not used by a while i space is the other thing that's really bad about it is you can see right where this set is compared to there spray and you can actually there's a little injector that you can inject right into the stem this spring or you can in the fall time break cut it off of the clipper and poor poison down the hole the stand or the best thing is if you can't do any of that is just not let it go to flower and because it gets fourteen feet high you can also use a spray you know on the foliage but it's so high they suggest that through the summer cut it several times those days alone if it you can spray it great ships and somehow started to show up and it's doing really well as most invasive to do because there's no natural predator to it and the way it has expanded across you know states is by people and travel it will only fly a short distance but if it's in firewood it gets transported or if it's in packing crates or something like that it lands on your windshield and then it gets down underneath the windshield wipers and you drive you know mile or two and then it comes out that's how it expands it kind of is an interesting life cycle in that it it arrives as a flying adult and it usually is in the tops of the trees and it lays its eggs up there they get into the the in between the bark and the tree and they like all of those dutch bugs and so on they  a very twisted as shape so it is pretty easy to identify once it gets in there and that season you start to see a decline in that tree and every year for two to three years you'll see less and less canopy in that tree so there are signs so when you these right now look six and popped but they have this look about him when they are infected with the emerald ash bore the tops of the tree and then i talked about how the trees sprout from the base and when you cut them down for some reason when an ash tree is infected with emerald ash bore its turns sprouting like crazy on the base it's a survival mechanism it just knows it's going to die decline and it's sending up new shoots so if you suddenly get a big ass tree that sprouting from the base then you probably should investigate for emerald asked for because we know they're going to get hit try to preserve these and we have incredible ash trees along the lake shore gorgeous ones in people's  backyard so if found the prefer in our wilder is especially on the public lands if we can get rid of the ashes in those areas that means we're going to give ourselves a little bit of a buffer space still produce even though it's pulled out of the ground will produce a seed a viable seed so at this time of year when it's blooming like go ahead and pull it but you've got a bag and dispose of it properly which is probably the dump or you can add in even a burning they say if you dig a really deep hole and stick it down and that worries me though so that you know it's it's you can see where it's already started to form it's a little scene that's a little lawn pad there now you can identify it comes a several different varieties this this right here and here that's next here's garlic mustard and it looks very similar in some cases to creeping charlie at the edge of your woods so it's first in this little  you get garlic mustard established in you're forced it's far more invasive than both look at just think i don't remember seeing that like that two years ago and here you can see we should have there is a fifty six inch diameter cottonwood and we didn't measure this it was significantly less than that one and it's right on ha and because it's very tough bark in the end they're big and fires would go through bare and that's why they did really well and in fire areas that had burnt i want to we get those cottonwood saints i mean we get millions of cottonwoods of seeds but i'm trying to remember that seed is only viable for an x amount of hours and i'm going to yeah it's a very fit little amount of hours and in that amount of time it has to land bare ground with no competition i suspect we may see some as the lake levels have dropped we'll probably through legislation to be put on the base of the sheep list and a lot of people were encouraged the planted by nurseries is a beautiful understorey read in the fall a little but when you go for a drive out in the country it's growing crazy under the power lines and the old railroad grades i mean it is so thick nothing else is coming in in those areas and a lot of the scientific areas and  feet and a diameter of fifty six inches that one is surely well over one hundred years old chad peterson said in his report that good stewardship of any natural resource requires an understanding of its size  that the forest provide significant social environmental and economic benefits the little seedlings of today could become the old giants of the future with little understanding and care they could stand as a witness to what we do today