You have probably read about it, but U Mich. studied the Oak-Hickory forests in Kentucky and found evidence it could have been a result of the active management by precolonial people. Those tree nuts used to feed more than just local fauna. They posited the people who lived there, who had already been documented as using fire to cut their roads, also used controlled burns to keep out unwanted tree and brush species.
Our property was logged before we bought it. The loggers made ZERO effort to leave any trees alive that where too small to mill. Hundreds of small oak and hickory trees cut down, broken, bark skinned off, roots destroyed by tracks. These logger’s children will have to find another way to make a living.
Haha! I called it. It's more: Maple and beech are bad bullshit! Beech produce edible mast too and in fact, oak are in the same family as beech. Maple trees quite literally water plants growing near them through hydraulic lift.
The edible mast from Beech doesn't even begin to compare to the quality & variety of mast produced by red/white oak spp. FIA data from 2017 says that red maple is the abundant tree species in the U.S. (25 billion trees); we are in no shortage of red maple and it's doing a lot more harm than good in taking over these mixed hardwood/pine-oak forest types, especially in Southern Appalachia.
Thanks you so much for putting this on youtube!
You have probably read about it, but U Mich. studied the Oak-Hickory forests in Kentucky and found evidence it could have been a result of the active management by precolonial people. Those tree nuts used to feed more than just local fauna. They posited the people who lived there, who had already been documented as using fire to cut their roads, also used controlled burns to keep out unwanted tree and brush species.
Our property was logged before we bought it. The loggers made ZERO effort to leave any trees alive that where too small to mill. Hundreds of small oak and hickory trees cut down, broken, bark skinned off, roots destroyed by tracks. These logger’s children will have to find another way to make a living.
Haha! I called it. It's more: Maple and beech are bad bullshit! Beech produce edible mast too and in fact, oak are in the same family as beech. Maple trees quite literally water plants growing near them through hydraulic lift.
The edible mast from Beech doesn't even begin to compare to the quality & variety of mast produced by red/white oak spp. FIA data from 2017 says that red maple is the abundant tree species in the U.S. (25 billion trees); we are in no shortage of red maple and it's doing a lot more harm than good in taking over these mixed hardwood/pine-oak forest types, especially in Southern Appalachia.
Oak is far more valuable to insects than Beech.
Red maple is already the dominant tree I'm the US. We definitely need more oak and hickory regeneration