Photos

Stakeholder workshop at Saginaw Forest 2008

The School of Natural Resources and Environment manages Saginaw Forest, a large patch of urban forest in Ann Arbor. Led by Acting Dean Dave Allan, a stakeholder workshop and visioning exercise was held on September 28, 2008 to discuss long-term plans for this forest. Experts in forest ecology, landscape architecture, K-12 education, and local land issues as well as interested citizens took part. See Bill Currie's photos from a walking tour of the forest taken by participants in the workshop.

Field work at the University of Michigan Biological Station 2008

See Bill Currie's photos from this field work. While living at the UMBS for the 8-week summer session in 2008, Elissa Chasen and Elizabeth Haber completed a forest stem map in the DIRT study (Detrital Inputs, Removal, and Transfer). Bill Currie and Alicia Lindauer-Thompson went along for the first few days to train them in the field. In the photo at right, Alicia (at left) is training Elizabeth, and undergraduate assistant, to identify whether a tree is a canopy dominant or sub-dominant.

Forests, Alvar grassland, and meadows on Drummond Island 2008

See Bill Currie's photos from Drummond Island, an island off of the east coast of the Upper Peninsula, Michigan. These are photos from Bill's trip with his son mountain biking where they passed through a diverse set of terrestrial ecosystems including a late successional beech-maple forest, a pure red maple stand, a spruce-fir / grassland mosaic, a wet meadow, and a rare type of grassland called an Alvar grassland (shown in the photo at right).

Field trip to coastal marsh research site, Point le Barbe, Michigan 2007

See Bill Currie's photos from this field trip in which a group of students and faculty visited this coastal freshwater marsh. Here there are large expanses of native marsh communities together with areas where cattails (Typha spp.) are invading. This is also a research site where Deborah Goldberg and Radka Wildova have set up plots to measure the rate of clonal growth (spread) of the native and invasive plant species.

Field trip to the FASET study site at UMBS 2007

Collaborators in the FASET study (Forest Accelerated Succession Experiment) at the UMBS met in summer 2007 to discuss research plans. A year later, in May 208, 8,000 early-succession aspen and birch trees were girdled (killed) over a 33 ha area to artificially speed the natural process of forst succession. This is an album of Bill Currie's photos from one of the investigators' planning trip to the site in 2007.

Field work at the University of Michigan Biological Station 2006

See Bill Currie's photos from this field work. Alicia Lindauer-Thompson, Bill, and Jim LeMoine worked out the methods to set up an accurate grid system in the forest and use a laser level and distance tape to complete stem maps, precise locations, species, and sizes of every tree in 1 ha grids (about 1,500 trees per ha).

Santa Barbara, National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS), 2005

Bill Currie's photos from two trips to the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) in Santa Barbara, CA, January and May 2005. Photos from the working group on 15N in forest ecosystems, plus those from an excursion with some colleagues to the Mission and the Botanical Gardens.

TRACE modeling workshop at UMBS 2003

See photos from an international workshop to explore the application of the TRACE model of ecosystem biogeochemistry to numerous forests worldwide, where 15N tracers had been applied in field studies to gain insight into N cycling and carbon-nitrogen interactions at the ecosystem level. Bill Currie and Knute Nadelhoffer co-organized the workshop, held at the University of Michigan Biological Station, with 13 participants from 9 countries. Photos from the workshop include a tour of UMBS, the PROPHET tower, and a trip we took to see an old-growth forest at Taquahmenon Falls on the Upper Peninsula.

This workshop was funded by the US Forest Service, Northeastern Research Cooperative (NERC) Program.

NERC-sponsored Woods Hole workshop on the fate of N deposition in forests 2002

See Bill Currie's photos from this workshop. The US Forest Service Northeastern Research Cooperative (NERC) Program sponsored this international workshop on fates of N deposition and forest responses to nitrogen deposition, held at the Ecosystems Center in Woods Hole, MA. Organized by Knute Nadelhoffer, Bill Currie, Linda Pardo, and Lindsey Rustad, thirty participants from more than a dozen countries participated. Participants also made an excursion to Martha's Vineyard to learn about the research of Chris Neill (shown at right, giving an introduction on the ferry ride) into its soils, forests, and land use history.

Field work climbing trees to sample C, N, 15N at Harvard Forest, 1999

See photos of field work in which we climbed trees and collected wood and foliage samples at Harvard Forest in central Massachusetts. The goal of the field sampling was to measure redistributions of enriched 15N isotopic tracers to test predictions and hypotheses generated by the TRACE ecosystem model that we developed for this purpose. To test model predictions, we needed to sample N throughout the cambium, including up into the canopy, and in high branches. We used Swedish tree-climbing ladders that are assembled in pieces to gain access all the way up into the canopy.

At the same time, we sampled litter layer, soils, soil solution, fine woody debris and downed coarse woody debris for C, N, and 15N to test model predictions of C/N interactions and isotope redistributions over the 8-year period that had elapsed from when the 15N tracers were introduced in 1991-1992.