Course participants examine a beech tree.

Trees of the Eastern Temperate Forest
Tree Identification, Recognition & Forest Ecology

August 20-24, 2012
Hosted at the Highlands Nature Sanctuary in Southern Ohio

"It was like finally learning the names of your great life-time, silent friends. I have studied at several fine colleges and universities but no course equalled this one in which the forest was the campus and Nancy the professor."

-Gail, 2011 Graduate of Trees of the Eastern Forest

Introduction

Although the temperate forest of the eastern United States claims well over 200 species of trees, learning just 40 to 45 of the predominant ones will allow you to travel anywhere into the forest heartland - from New York to Tennessee - and identify with accuracy 90-95% of the standing trees you will see. In fact, you could even travel to Europe and eastern temperate Asia and be able to recognize nearly all the trees by their family and genera.

The single most important thing a person can do for the sake of eastern forest education and conservation is to learn the  trees. With just a bit of earnest effort, you can achieve the foundations of this useful skill in just one week's time, successfully joining a group of citizens making up less than 1% of America's eastern population. Although most citizens can recognize over 300 brand logos by sight , few can name more than one or two trees on the species level. In fact, you could say that a person steeped in forest-literacy  is just about as rare as an old-growth forest! This course is an effort to begin adjusting these statistics. Intimate knowledge is always the first step to positive conservation action.

 

Beech Leaves - Arc of Appalachia

You will learn the majority of the common, widely distributed broadleaf and associated evergreen trees in the eastern temperate forest by both common name, and, if you are really motivated, by Latin. We will be concentrating not only on the forms of the leaves, as a clue to ID,  but particularly on bark and growth characteristics.

We will be in real-life situations where the forest trees are towering above your head and you must employ other skills to identify them than merely having leaves in your hands. By the end of this program, with a bit of mental effort and repetitive practice, you will be able to identify a minimum of 25-45 tree species in challenging situations, depending on what level of mastery you choose to aspire.

You will also learn trees' ecological relationships, their qualities of wood, their beauty and crown shape, and lots of interpretive stories we hope you will remember and share because we LOVE trees and we want you to spread your knowledge with others in your circle of influence. We will be taking a habitat and age-successional approach to tree identification, so that your knowledge will gain depth and application in the context of a woodlot's particular geography and history. By learning the forest "alphabet" of individual species you will be trained to begin to read the forest's hidden script -- gleaning from a quick glance a wealth of information about the forest's soils, history, age and health.

We will nurture and encourage the beginner (how well we remember being there!), and push the experts to higher mastery. We hope this course is the beginning or a continuation of a lifelong avocation.

Sunlight through trees - Arc of Appalachia

Who is this course designed for?

Teachers, nature enthusiasts, naturalists, outdoor educators, biologists, adventurers, home school parents, and students of biodiversity. No previous experience necessary except an undying curiosity about the natural world. This is an excellent opportunity for deep, holistic, field-oriented cross-discplinary education.


Learn about the forest... from inside the forest.

This course is sponsored at the 2000-acre Highlands Nature Sanctuary in southern Ohio, the largest of the Arc of Appalachia Preserve System's 14 preserves, and the Arc's main headquarters. The Sanctuary's central natural feature is the Rocky Fork Gorge, a vertical walled dolomite canyon that is lush with ferns, liverworts and mosses. The preserve region is a natural paradise of rare and common ecosystems and has many different successional stages of forest growth. The Sanctuary features the mixed mesophytic forest of the greater Eastern Forest. Also called the "mother" forest, it is a forest type that showcases the highest diversity of trees of any other in the eastern United States. Within a day's walk or short drive, we can visit old growth forests, abandoned farms reverting into successional communities, karst topography with caves and springs, boreal remnant species from the ice age, fens, wetlands, limestone bluffs, sandstone/shale Appalachian hills, and nearly every tree species that can be found in the Midwest.

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