Who, What, Where, When & How



Who We Are

We are presenting the following information to the academic and public community as a forest ecology consulting team Phoenix. The following are the details of our group and project.

This WWW page was created by graduate students at the Yale School of Forestry (FES) as part of a class project for the course Methods of Ecosystem Analysis, that was taken by a small group of eager students during the spring of 1996. The students are all first year masters candidates, and ironically became acquainted in one of the first Yale FES academic activies - a local plant identification workshop in August 1995. We are under the esteemed direction (whip!!!) of Professors of Tom Siccama (Lecturer in Forest Ecology) and of Daniel Vogt (Lecturer in Soils and Forest Ecology).

What We Did

The students along with the wise guidance of their emminent professors embarked on (rekindled from the ashes) a project that was completed by a previous Methods class in 1974. The purpose of the 1996 Methods of Ecosystem Analysis class excersise was to collect new data on a forest that had gone through silviculture treatments (owned and managed for water yield by the New Haven, CT Water Authority) in order to compare the changes in the forest that have occurred in the past 22 years. Previously, field data on forest structure and composition was collected yielding a total of 34 SPECIES , and stored in Tom's office in Greeley Lab. We were interested in how the tree species composition had changed, how the density of the species had changed, and how the structure of the forest had changed.

The forest area in question is fondly known as Sea Hill, and located in North Branford, Connecticut, USA (GLOBAL COORDINATES HERE!!!). The study area is approximately XXXXXXXX hectares, and at XXXXXXX altitude.The land form that the forest is growing on is a drumlin (a geological formation caused by the glacial movement of rock and soil, and deposited in a large tear-drop formation).

How We Did It

After designing (in the classroom) a sampling procedure to match the type of data that was collected earlier in 1974, the group stomped through the snow in January-February 1996 and completed the data sampling field work at the Sea Hill drumlin. This data was then entered into a database, and corrected for errors by comparing original field sheets to printouts that were generated. We were finally confident of our data quality after much work. The final 'clean' 1996 data set included 711 total sampled trees, with 28 SPECIES identified in 1996 on the drumlin forest. Also, after walking around the drumlin, we were able to eyeball a few forest character differences from what we knew of from the previous class: The drumlin was divided roughly in two on a north/south axis by a former stone wall (very typical in New England as the field-to-forest conversion in the last 80- odd years). We interpreted this as a past land use difference. It made it convenient to use this fairly clear boundary, that divided the drumlin into approximately north and south halves, as another way to compare the forest composition around the drumlin.

The class was mostly interested in understanding the changes in the forest as a result of succession, disturbance, and land use practices (in this case silvicultural treatments).

TO SEE RESULTS OF THE DATA COLLECTION, COMPARISON, CONCLUSIONS AND AN EVALUATION, CHECK OUT THE SECTION ON THIS WEB PAGE An Analysis of a Managed Ecosystem: Comparison of Structure and Composition Over Time.