On a recent Friday, a group of University of Minnesota students, urban forestry faculty, and Extension educators came together to plant trees at the Urban Forestry Outreach and Research Nursery on the St. Paul campus.
It was unseasonably warm and sunny, which felt appropriate for the task at hand: this was the beginning of new research on the resilience of trees normally found in warmer climates hundreds of miles away.
As project partners gathered to get started, they chatted and shared treats. Gary Wyatt, Extension agroforester, even brought extra American sycamore, chinkapin oaks and shagbark hickory trees from his home planting for folks to take and plant on their own properties.
Seventy-five seedlings had been laid out in careful rows, ready to be added to the landscape. UFOR researcher Ryan Murphy kicked things off by leading the group in a review of proper tree planting and protection techniques. As the team got to work, Liv Rosten, an undergraduate student with the project team, found mycorrhizal fungi on a post oak sapling. The tree, which had been potted on the St. Paul campus awaiting fall planting, had already started forming associations with other organisms — confirmation that the experiment was well underway.
By the middle of the afternoon, more staff had come out to help, and one could hear singing and laughing in the field as they worked. “The joy of getting our hands dirty while planting trees felt really good,” noted Angela Gupta, Extension forester. “Next year we’ll check for survival, monitor growth, and look for signs of use by other species.”
Testing climate-driven choices
Climate change brings a lot of uncertainty, especially when it comes to forestry. Which species are likely to thrive as weather patterns get warmer, wetter, and more severe?
Trees can take an incredible amount of time, money and resources to grow, so people want to make sure that they are making wise decisions about choosing which species to plant in city parks, residential yards, and woodland lots.
Extension has recommendation lists of native tree species expected to adapt well to these changes, but that’s only part of the story. Some species won't do so well, and we’ll need to create refugia or protected spaces if we want them to persist on the landscape.
Then there are species from nearby ecosystems that are modeled to have “migration potential” — trees that could eventually find a foothold here if habitat becomes suitable.
Trees such as the American sycamore, persimmon, sassafras, post oak, eastern redbud, and pecan are all native to the Eastern Deciduous Forest, a huge forest ecosystem that stretches from Florida in the southeast to Minnesota in the northwest. While these species can be found in nearby states like Iowa, Illinois or Michigan, they are not natively found in Minnesota.
As our forests start changing in response to the shifting climate, these newcomers are poised to expand their range toward us as conditions here become more hospitable. Many of these new-to-region species have already been planted by urban and exurban forest managers for some time, with varying levels of success. The experimental plot on the St. Paul campus aims to gather data on these species and others to help make better predictions about their performance.
An opportunity for students and researchers
This project is part of an ongoing research and outreach collaboration between the Urban Forestry Outreach and Research Lab (UFOR) and Extension Forestry and was made possible through a generous donation from a woodland owner interested in supporting Extension’s work around forest climate adaptation.
As these trees grow, future students and research staff will track their development and monitor their interactions with the local environment, such as which pollinators visit their flowers, what birds nest in their branches or eat their fruit, and whether fungi in our soils form beneficial relationships with the trees.
In addition to studying their climate adaptability and use by local wildlife, project researchers will carefully monitor these species for any signs of invasiveness.