On Friday, the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) is scheduled to release the first of several sections of the Fourth Assessment Report, “Climate Change 2007”. This first release is of Working Group 1, The Physical Basis. Over the course of the year, the remaining Volumes will be released.

The TAR, the Third Asessement Report, was prepared and released in 2001. It’s a great guide to what to expect from this upcoming FAR. It is a fascinating resource. I haven’t read it in its entirety, but it is a wealth of basic information as well as a fantastic guide to how science and policy work. The dropdown menus make browsing for specific topics easy, and while the writing may appear dense it is nonetheless understandable.

As you can see from that link, the Assessment Reports are divided into four Working Groups: The Scientific Basis, Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability, Mitigation, and Synthesis Report.

Although this report is embargoed until its release on Friday, earlier drafts have certainly been working their way around and much has already been said of them. Representatives from participating governments will be vetting and approving the final release. The NYT gives its preview of the release: “New Warnings on Climate Change”.

In its last report, published in 2001, the panel concluded that there was a 66 to 90 percent chance that human activities were driving the most recent warming.

The shift in language in the current draft, while subtle, is substantive. If it remains in the final version, scheduled for release in Paris on Feb. 2, it will largely complete a quest that lasted decades to determine if humans are nudging the earth’s thermostat in potentially momentous ways.

Drafts of the report project a most likely warming of 4 to 8 degrees if the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere rises to twice the 280 parts per million that it averaged for many centuries before the Industrial Revolution.

The carbon dioxide concentration is now roughly 380 parts per million, and many climate experts say it will be extremely difficult to avoid hitting levels of 450 or 550 parts per million, or higher, later this century, given growth in populations and fuel use and the lack of nonpolluting alternatives that can be exploited at a sufficient scale to replace fossil fuels.

This FAR, conservative though it may be (and apparently omitting recent data on the Antarctic and Greenland glacier melting) is nonetheless very direct in its assertion that global warming is here. CNN presents a similar summary of what to expect:

Human-caused global warming is here – visible in the air, water and melting ice – and is destined to get much worse in the future, an authoritative global scientific report will warn next week.

“The smoking gun is definitely lying on the table as we speak,” said top U.S. climate scientist Jerry Mahlman, who reviewed all 1,600 pages of the first segment of a giant four-part report. “The evidence ... is compelling.”

Andrew Weaver, a Canadian climate scientist and study co-author, went even further: “This isn’t a smoking gun; climate is a batallion of intergalactic smoking missiles.”

Meanwhile, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA), new chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, is beginning to do the job his predecessor should have been doing for the last six years. The Committee is holding a series of hearings on the Bush Administration’s manipulation of scientific data, something that is very relevant to this issue of climate change. RealClimate has a short mention of this, with links to statements and testimony given yesterday, and the comments are quite interesting. And there’s more from the NYT on this.

Here’s something from the National Arbor Day Foundation. It’s an animation of the USDA Hardiness Zones that most gardeners and farmers make some use of. The animation shows the changes from 1990 to the present. We here in Athens are now in Zone 8. We were in Zone 7. Apparent Arborday had to go ahead and make its own animation because USDA hasn’t gotten around to making any changes in the last few years. Any day now, they say, the check is in the mail. No climate data suppression here, move on.

There is a lot going on now, finally, both in the matter of climate change and in the matter of the Bush Administration’s censorship of scientific work and deliberate misleading of the public on matters of public interest. Keep an eye out, there’s enough sunshine finally being let in to where we can begin to see what might be going on. We may expect that the Bush Administration will continue to harrass government scientists, attempt to censor scientific results, and block action, but more and more people are beginning to realize how corrupt, incompetent, and mendacious the Bush Administration really is.

Well, maybe a mini-Canada.


The mighty Sparkleberrysprings Creek roars in a cataract over giant rocks into a pool after a long fall of about 3 feet. The last few nights have seen temperatures down into the teens - that’s a significant number of *negative* degC! Why, yesterday the temps only got up to 40F (4C).

I had to look awhile but at the waterfall I did find this ice-coated fairy land, just being illuminated by the sun, so I was probably just in time.

The Gratiola which we discovered last spring is making its presence known, entirely submerged at this point in the clear creek waters. It must be the semi-aquatic equivalent of a terrestrial winter perennial.

And along the banks there are these tiny plants growing robustly.


Notice the squarish stems. The conventional wisdom is that this would make the plant a mint, but CW is wrong. There are mints without square stems and there are square-stemmed plants that are not mints. Glenn and I agree that this is a Galium of some kind, in the Rubiaceae, or madder, family.

It’s accumulated the pigments and tough succulence that suggests to me that it’s quite pleased to be in our subfreezing cold. You can see from the mosses its embedded in that it’s actually quite the tiny plant. As befits its identity, the leaves apparently emerge from the stems in whorls of six leaflets. Look closer at the older leaves (as Glenn points out) and there are actually two opposite leaves consisting of three leaflets each.

Oh these trickster plants.

Do you see any vibrant plants that are growing vigorously in what we, with increasing amusement, call the dead of winter?

I’ve been continuing in the routine of selecting seed accessions, photographing them, and planting them, as I described a few days ago. Thanks for the indulgence - I don’t intend any further major posts on this unless I run across something really spectacular. But it’s a rather large part of my current existence so it takes up time I would otherwise be using for other investigations.

(You might wonder why the apparent obsession with seeds. When Glenn and I started working together professionally, in the early 80s, we were looking at the late embryo stages of cotton seed. During this time, embryos within the seeds accumulate a large number of proteins that prepare them for a number of extreme changes, for instance, the ability to desiccate, lose 90% of their water, and survive that extremity. We hypothesized that at least some of these proteins, “Lea” proteins, for Late Embryogenesis Abundant, had to do with protection against this extreme state. We cloned and sequenced the RNA and DNA that specified these proteins. Later we began working with the molecular model plant, Arabidopsis thaliana, and recovered a number of mutants putatively deficient in the ability to desiccate normally, or move into dormancy. So some people collect stamps; we collect seeds. Consider yourselves lucky. Just thought you’d like to know. )

At this point, I’ve gotten through the “c” list, but that includes the large collection of sedges. That gets me through the first five boxes in the second row here, and comprises 82 accessions of probably 70 total species. (Longer term readers will recall the origin of the boxes.) In the post a few days ago I mentioned that I wasn’t very satisfied with the heterogeneous background that I got from using printouts of colored squares. A few folks made suggestions - FC suggested plastic, Robin suggested scanning, which in fact we have been using for some time for complete herbarium specimens, and it works very well but consumes more time for large numbers of reproductions. In the end it turned out that Post-It notes, the colored versions, have very nice background homogeneity even at very high blowups, and low reflectivity properties.

Here’s a few smaller pics (each opens up into a larger one, if you want) of some of the favorites in this latest series. By the way, I chose blue Post-Its for this series of 40 species, of which I present ten here.

Both of these are legumes, in the family Fabaceae, and they’re both Partridge Pea. I love the shiny black polyhedral shapes. They’re fairly large seed. The first is simply Partridge Pea; the second is Sensitive Partridge Pea, which has the property of quickly shutting its leaves when you touch them. Both of these were originally in the Cassia genus.


The left photo here is of Climbing Dayflower, one of several native Dayflower species. I liked the variation in the seed colors and wonder what the plants will look like that come from the differently colored seed. The right photo is of Spurred Butterfly Pea. The plant, also a legume, is a nice crawly thing that produces fantastically shaped pea-like flowers.


The highly ornamented seed on the left are of one of our native clematis, Devil’s Darning Needles, for obvious reasons. On the right we have the moon or snail-shaped seed of Carolina Coralbead, a pleasant viny thing that produces bright red berries.


Then there’s Glenn’s heroic acquisition and identification of sedges. There are hundreds of species of sedges - these photos are of my favorites, the cool season sedges in the genus Carex. (The warm season sedges are Cyperus. I think they’re rather vulgar.) These seed are fairly tightly bound to remnants of the inflorescence structure, the perigynium. The actual seed could probably be liberated from that structure, but why bother? I like the whole structure as it is.

On the left we have Dryspike Sedge, and on the right is Shallow Sedge. Our abbreviation for Dryspike is CYCARSIC, which amuses me, and the scientific name for Shallow Sedge, Carex lurida, promises dark treats.


A couple more sedges and that will do it. The left is of Muhlenberg’s Sedge, but the glossy seed are exquisite. And on the right is Owlfruit Sedge. The shape of these seed is unusual, but I’m not sure why they’d be called “owlfruit”. More like tadpoles.

I’m afraid I’m being lazy today, so I’m just going to post a documentation. This is probably one of four. The remainder I will eventually post on other days when I’m being lazy.

I’ve been taking panoramic photos of each side of Sparkleberry Springs Creek, imaging the slopes on either side of the creek. The thumbnails below (and they really aren’t large in terms of kb) link to a larger version that opens up into a new window (sorry for taking over your browser, I know it’s rude). I warn you though that *those* images are larger - generally about 500 kb.

These document the lay of the land along the southern half of the creek as it winds northward toward its fate at the Goulding Creek confluence. The green rectangle on the old familiar map below shows the region documented.


We start our hike at the lower right vertex of the rectangle, the southernmost part of the property. We’ll walk northward along this eastern slope, gazing across at the west slope across the creek. We’ll end at the upper right vertex (eight thumbnails later) and then hop across the creek to the upper left vertex and look back at where we were in the ninth panorama.

This is the portion of the property that seems to be the least disturbed for the longest period of time - probably on the order of one or two hundred years, judging from rough estimates of the ages of some of the trees. The species of large tree include the six very old beeches, a myriad of younger ones, as you can tell from the retained leaves, white oaks, northern red oaks, and tulip poplars. Understory growth includes hornbeams, painted buckeyes, a whole bunch of wild azaleas along the creek, and dogwoods. Phorbs include trillium, gall-of-the-earth, violets, cranefly orchid - the list goes on and on. This region encompasses where I’ve counted about 48 of those weird shaggy-bark white oaks, but there are quite a few normal ones too. Vines in this area include crossvine, some very old and large trumpet creeper, and woodvamp (Decumaria) but that is largely confine to sprigs that grow up the banks of the creek. There is some japanese honeysuckle, but not much, and this is not an area particularly infested by Microstegium. Along the creek I removed perhaps only a thousand or so plants last season.

Obviously I’m doing these in winter, as the density of vegetation in summer would not permit the vistas to be imaged. In the next eight, we’re looking generally west in the mid afternoon, so unfortunately the sun is a factor in all of these.

In this first one, the creek has emerged, at the bottom left, as a trickle and quickly broadens out to its moderate trickle size, making a pre-oxbow. The tulip poplar at the far right is quite large and has a very interesting concavity.


We’ve move a hundred feet or so northward. At the upper right you can see the rootball of a large northern red oak that fell last summer. The tree fetched up against one of the six old beeches and over the course of a year gradually slid down. It doesn’t appear to have damaged the beech.

This second image completes the first full slope upon which I’m sure a house would go were this property to be developed. As well, another house would undoubtedly go about where I’m standing.


This third panorama overlaps the second, so you can see the rootball of the northern red oak in it as well. At the right, the slope has begun to undulate in elevation downward and this would be the perfect property line for the aforementioned MacMansion.


This is the beginning of the second full slope, and at the left are two large old beeches. The second MacMansion sits right atop the hill, of course. In the foreground are several treefalls, oriented parallel to the creek, that just happened to occur over a period of years on top of one another. The first, a northern red oak, was probably ten years ago, the last, a 100-foot white oak and a very large sourwood, occurred as the remnants of Hurricane Ivan passed over two summers ago.


We move on. Sorry about the sun problems here. This completes the second broad slope, and there’s a gully marking the future development property line at the far right. I believe this slope is so broad that we could easily squeeze two MacMansions in here. What do you think? I’m sitting on the future site of yet another. So far we have five!


The gully is now on the far left as we’ve moved northward. Our third big slope, and the sixth development! That 200 year old beech on the left will have to go, of course.


We’re nearing the end of this little trek. The northern red oak fall that I’ve mentioned any number of times can be seen at the left. We’re below the kat sematary, far behind me on the fairy ring that overlooks this area. This third big slope across from me continues to the right, and what say let’s put a seventh MacMansion there?


The final panorama a hundred feet farther north, including some of the last one. The broad slopes are more or less at an end, and the cozy level you see nestled in at the right is not suitable for homebuilding. But I’m sure we could fix that with a big bulldozer!


This has gotten too long, just detailing the west view of the top half of the creek along about 800 feet of northward walking, so I won’t place the walk back taken on the far side seen in these photos. However let’s *do* cross the creek and climb the slope to the top as seen on the right of the above panorama. We’re now standing at the upper left vertex of the rectangle in the map drawing way above, and looking across at where we were in the last photo.

It seems silly to report that it’s cold this morning, at 26F (-3C) when the internets are telling me that in Ottawa it’s -32F (-26C). Just a little above that magic temperature where mercury freezes and degF equal degC! These guys wouldn’t care one way or the other:


These must be a species of Cladonia, or British Soldier lichen. (That, by the way, is Tom Volk’s excellent fungus website). The odd thing about these is the color of the apothecia, the fruiting structures on top of the gray vegetative body. Most British Soldier lichens have bright red apothecia. These are flesh-colored, and I haven’t found any internets photos that match them. Perhaps they’re just an early stage of the more normal color.

More than a year ago I wrote about the community of lichens atop a birdhouse, including British Soldiers, and won’t repeat the bulk of the basics here. Nor will I repeat the very interesting description of Cladonia found at Tom Volk’s site, except for a couple of interesting things about phylogeny and taxonomy.

The word “lichens” describes a polyphyletic group, that is, individual species of lichen are not particularly related to each other. Lichens have evolved many times. As a symbiosis between a mycobiont, usually an ascomycete fungus (cup fungi) and a phycobiont (an alga or cyanobacterium), a lichen is really an artifical organism. Able to reproduce asexually, a lichen can propagate itself as a lichen by throwing off tiny pieces consisting of both partners. Able to reproduce sexually, as you can see by those fine little apothecia, the lichen only reproduces sexually as the fungus. Spores released may germinate to form the pure fungus, or they may encounter an appropriate algal species and reform a lichen again.

Taxonomically, the lichen is given the name of the fungus. This is because each distinct lichen form is the product of only one species of fungus, but the alga inside could be found as the phycobiont partner in other lichen species.

The Cladonia species pictured above were a couple of individuals at the edge of a lichen forest. The tiny forest occupied an 8-inch square spot atop a large rock in the Kat Sematary. The little “trees” are less than a centimeter tall, and therefore probably five years old, or so:


Looking closely at the base of the lichens, the stone floor of the forest is littered with debris from the air, and from the lichens themselves:


This debris is decomposing, of course, creating a thin substrate on which the next community is emerging: mosses. Even now the lichens are creating the seeds of their own destruction. The mosses now appearing are a bit desiccated but in time will occupy more and more of the space until the lichens are finally in the minority. Of course it’s quite possible that an extremely hard rain to wash away the patient accumulation of thin soil, coupled with a long drought, could remove the mosses and reestablish the lichen community.

It’s hard not to lie down and gaze upon this tiny forest and picture little parties going on late late at night under a full moon. You can almost hear little druidic drums pounding away.

It’s probably appropriate that the subject refers to an Oscar Wilde play.

As you may know, Glenn and I have been considering putting our 40 acres under a conservation easement for its preservation in the future. (If you don’t know about this, you can find out more here and here.)

The excellent comments on the above posts generated a lot of questions that we will be asking of the land trust we’ve chosen to potential administer this conservation easement.

One of the things that became clear is that there is the likelihood of needing some kind of independent trust fund that can be used to augment protection of the property in the future. It became necessary to look a bit into the tax incentives for conservation easements as a source of money to create such a trust fund. It seemed reasonable to take those monies and funnel them back into means of ensuring protection.

Now IANATL, and these calculations are crude, but in reviewing the 2006 tax tables for individuals filing singly (as we must), or as married (as we cannot do), I find that there is a considerable discrepancy in the amount we could funnel back into the property as mandated singles, and as a forbidden couple.

In Georgia, the tax breaks for donating a conservation easement are fairly simple. You may deduct 30% of your Gross Adjusted Income (GIA) for six years, up to the difference in the value of the property with, and without, the conservation easement.

Let’s say that Glenn and I each have a GIA of $50,000. I’m not saying we do or do not, but that it’s a reasonable assumption for a great many professionals in our fields. Together we make $100,000, but of course by law that’s irrelevant, as we may not file jointly, so far as I know. Every single other aspect of our finances is held jointly, but when it comes to taxes, that’s forbidden.

The tax incentives, in our case, for this altruistic gesture, can therefore only be determined by *one* of our incomes. The total in this case, over six years, appears to amount to $22,500. That is what we can recover and put into an account to protect the property.

I suppose it’s asking for trouble to try to calculate the tax money a married couple could accumulate over six years and put into a trust fund, but here it is: $43,428. Compared to $22,500.

Now we’re not trying to make money off this - quite the contrary. But there is something basically unjust here.

Yes, I know, there’s the sanctity of marriage and all that, and that Glenn and I have been single men together for 29 years Feb 1 just doesn’t count for anything, but really.

I took yesterday’s long walk through the woods on leaves barely crackling, softened by nearly two inches of rain a few days ago. Photosynthesis is down, way down. In the hardwood forest that spreads through the hollow there are very few pines or junipers. A few desultory Christmas ferns and sprigs of Japanese Honeysuckle offer a little green but as yet there is no new growth. The predominant color is brown.

This is the time for mosses and fungi. Mosses provide the lion’s share of photosynthetic production and the majority of brilliant green that catches the eye.


Thuidium pops up now on many projecting snags and fallen logs. It’s always around, even in the summer when it is often dry and yellow, but now it’s lush. No wonder that it’s referred to as Delicate Fern Moss.

Mosses would probably be primary insect fodder but for two things - not all that many insects right now, and mosses do have more biochemical protections than we usually imagine them to have. Like the lichens that can also be seen, less vividly in most cases, mosses get all their nutrients from whatever is dissolved in rainfall. This unknown species is coating the base of a sweetgum, and indeed *all* the trees in the area have verdant moss coatings on their bases. It even favors the north side.

With mosses and lichens carrying on the bulk of the photosynthesis, everything else that grows and moves around is feasting on the remnants of a warmer season. Moisture stays around a lot longer, and the damp leaf litter and soaked fallen logs provide the perfect plate for fungi.

This possible phlebia was a colorful orange coating the surface of a fallen oak branch.


There are other signs of green, higher plant growth here and there. In disturbed areas the usual winter annuals are appearing and even flowering: chickweed. Sprigs of wild onions are everywhere on the floodplain. And through the trees can sometimes be spied a mass of bright green mistletoe or Carolina Jessamine. It’s not a dead time by any means but a precious time where things that go unnoticed during a warmer season make their presence known more vividly.

When your mama and daddy call you to see if you’re ok because you haven’t written a blog entry in two days you know it’s time to post something. *Anything*!

It’s that time of the year - time to start planting seeds. Actually anytime is generally okay, except with some seeds that have to be planted immediately, of course, like buckeye seeds. But perennials, at least, can be started anytime. The first problem is that, unlike cultivated garden seeds, native plant seeds often require a stratification, or winterizing treatment. The second problem is that Glenn has been very busy this year collecting and identifying plants (so why isn’t *he* writing blogs?), and so we now have close to 400 accessions. This weekend I got through A-B, plus a few miscellaneous, for a total of 40 plantings.

Half the seed are placed in pots as one would traditionally do and these will be kept outside exposed to the elements. The other half are put in little labelled envelopes along with a small amount of moist soil and then put in the fridge for a month or so. The former, because of the convenience of the timing, will offer a “natural” stratification of the latter half of the winter season. The latter will give a controlled stratification. The seed-soil mix for each packet will later be dumped onto the surface of a pot and watered into the soil. It’s a cover-your-butt sort of strategy.


The other thing I was doing was photographing seeds, which is fun because they’re all different, even when from closely related plants. Or maybe I should say I was *learning* to photograph seeds in situ, because I’m still not quite happy with the results.

The first problem was the background. White is seldom a good choice, and even black can often not be used, so I chose a few colors and printed them out in squares along with a scale:


They look like perfectly fine, even, homeogeneous backgrounds to the eye. A little glossy, perhaps, but suitable. And so they are, so long as nothing is blown to less than a couple of centimeters across.

Here’s a couple of the large, beautiful seeds from Crossvine, Bignonia capreolata. Crossvine is a relative of Trumpet Creeper, Campsis radicans, the native but invasive vine that makes those large, red, plastic-looking flowers that hummingbirds love. The background looks fine, here, but some graininess is evident even at this level of blowup. This photo was taken with ambient light provided at a 60 degree overhead angle by one of those spiral fluorescent light bulbs, using the “incandescent” setting. At that level and with the camera distance and ISO 200 and f/22 exposures were 5-10 seconds, so all of this was done with a tripod.

Just an aside: we give all our accessions nine-letter catalog numbers consisting of the first three letters each of the family, genus, and species. Thus Trumpet Creeper above is BIGCAMRAD, since it’s in the family Bignoniaceae. Getting engaged in any largely mindless project like this gives the mind room to be silly, and some of these abbreviated names become amusing. Crossvine, then, is BIGBIGCAP. It serves as a nice mnemonic aid, and is much easier to write on planting stakes.

How about using flash? Here are the seed of Purple Beggar-ticks, Bidens connata (ASTBIDCON). With a flash and macro the exposure time even at f/22 is only 1/40 seconds, but the camera’s internal flash is unfortunately directed from above at 90 degrees to the objects, so reflectivity has become a problem. The graininess of that nice smooth background is now very evident and even though this image is blown up no more than the BIGBIGCAP seeds above, the background is quite annoying. It’s made worse by the transition between the finer seed parts and the grain of the background. Why would anyone want to plant beggar-ticks? What a good question! It turns out that the plant is a multipurpose food factory for everything from lepidopteran larvae and adults to small birds and mammals, who like the seeds.

Indeed, Glenn has collected several other Bidens species. Below we have B. pilosa, Hairy Beggar-ticks (ASTBIDPIL, left), and B. discoidea, Small Beggar-ticks (ASTBIDDIS, right). Just check your dog at the door if you come to visit.

Here is one of the moderately large seed of Amsonia tabernaemontana, Eastern Bluestar. This degree of blowup really shows the problem with the background, but also captures the texture of the seedcoat, which at least has no fine hairs or awns. Amsonia is in the dogbane family, Apocynaceae, so the catalog number is APOAMSTAB. This is the family that the milkweeds, formerly Asclepiadaceae, have been moved into. Just about all plants in this family are poisonous - think Oleander!

One of my favorites: the Uncle Martin Plant from late last summer. It didn’t produce a huge number of seed, but enough to propagate a dozen plants, hopefully. This is Richweed, Collinsonia canadensis. It’s a mint, so it’s LAMCOLCAN. The seed are almost perfectly spherical and smooth, and roll off the working surface like BBs. Fortunately they’re large enough to still look good against the background.

Another lovely smooth and glossy seed, this time from Jumpseed, Persicaria virginiana. Sad about that background. This little collection of jumpseed includes some that still have their fruit walls attached. POLPERVIR, if you were wondering about the catalog entry!

Lots of our catalog entries begin “POA”, designating the family Poaceae, and so we’re talking grasses here. When I see POAARILAN, I know it’s Aristida lanosa, Woollysheath Threeawn. I love threeawn grasses, with their long assymetric projecting awns they give a plant maturing its seed a bristling fuzzy look.

Another threeawn - this time POAARICUR, Aristida curtissii, Curtis’s Threeawn. Look closely at that third long awn, and try to ignore the clamor of the background. The awn spirals around a bit before straightening out - quite different from the Woollysheath Threeawn above!

Here’s a favorite seed, that of RANACTRUB - Actaea rubifolia or Appalachian Bugbane. The rubifolia epithet gives an idea of what to expect of the foliage. The plant has been put into the Actaea genus - you may recognize it from its former genus name Cimicifuga. This plant made a great floral springlike display in the late summer. It was also fairly productive in these unusual seed, with their caterpillar appearance due to the mass of parallel, thin scales.

That should do it for the moment, although I could have put up ASTLACFLO, HYPHYPHYP, ROSAROARB, or FUMADLFUN. I’ve probably used up my banked savings in photos for the last couple of days though.

Temperatures throughout the day yesterday never got higher than a degree or two above freezing and precipitation occurred through noon. Conditions never became extreme but it was pleasant to see the thin patina of ice that formed over grasses, tree branches, and twigs. There was a subtle difference in the landscape color and reflectivity.

Thanks to all who commented on the matter of land trusts and conservation easements. Those comments generated a series of questions that I think are important to ask of any land trust organization (and are not really found in the usual FAQs):

Several comments addressed the effectiveness of a land trust in protecting a property it holds. Rightly, the word “forever” is challenged. There’s really no point in wasting money on protection if the protector is toothless. So:

What happens to the land trust and its obligations if it should become dissolved or ineffective? Can it dissolve in such a way that its obligations are moot?

What happens to easements and protection if the land trust dissolves or becomes ineffective?

How aggressively will the land trust pursue violations?

Are there possible situations in which a land trust would be ineffective in protecting the property?

Under what circumstances can the federal or state government ignore or invalidate the easement?

Several of these comments caused me to think about the purpose and use of the “donation”, which I mentioned as being not a donation of the land (something totally different and not relevant here), but a monetary donation, and a substantive one. The question is relevant because it may suggest that the original owner may have to investigate independent means by which requirements are met:

Is the “donation” used to create a sort of trust fund for the purposes of protecting the property from which it derived, and is that trust fund used *solely* for protection of that property only? If not, then how is that money guaranteed if it is necessary to protect that property?

The land trust requires an annual inspection. Does the money to fund that come from interest on the donation, or does it come from annual payment by the owner. Must we privately consider setting aside a trust fund that pays for these inspections? What if, for instance, a third generation owner is unable or unwilling to pay for that annual inspection? Does that invalidate the entire agreement?

I think the word “forever” can be tested by querying the land trust on the following scenario:

100 years from now the city of Athens, and its attendant asteroid belt, has crept eastward and surrounds the property. The city wants to put a highway through, or build on the property. The third generation owner is interested in the money involved. How does the land trust contemplate its future ability to respond to this?

Second, how does the land trust deal with protection of the property from random vandalization, such as encroachment by ATVs and general trespass? (Notice that this part of the scenario implies that the current owner may be absentee.)

Walter brought up the issue of inappropriate or unwelcome expectations by a land trust. Although I think we’re in agreement with our particular land trust on what we both expect, it should form another question:

What, if any, expectations are there by the land trust besides those specified by our tailored conservation easement agreement?

I don’t regard any of these questions as necessarily agreement killers, and none of us knows what the future holds, so I don’t want to be unreasonable. The rapture could change things, for instance, as could a downfall of civilization. (Actually I rather think the rapture would change things for the better.) I’m not expecting the land trust to prepare for these instances. There are some things here, the matter of the use of the donation, for instance, and the matter of the annual inspection, that *could* be agreement killers.

So far the winter weather has been rather disappointing. Temperatures this morning are still a degree above freezing and we’ve only had the tiniest bit of precipitation that was supposed to begin around midnight. Oh well.

It’s probably fairly clear from this blog that Glenn and I have a great affection for our 40 acres. We’ve protected it and managed it somewhat. As we’ve learned more about it, it becomes clear that it has potential for becoming old growth forest, and even more of a rare gem someday than it is already for us. So we’re concerned about the future of the land beyond our lifetimes. We haven’t done all this just to let some creep come in and cut everything down and build a 100-home subdivision.

For some years we’ve been considering putting a large portion of the 40 acres of property under a conservation easement. The gray areas below are one tentative assignment covering all of the hardwood and creek areas, and the entire hollow and floodplain to the south and west:



We investigated this in detail in 2001 with the Oconee River Land Trust, one of the major land trust organizations in the area, and one that is well thought of. The ORLT specializes, as the name implies, in protecting land adjacent to the Oconee River, the major river that drains the watershed of Athens and the western portion of Oglethorpe County. We’re of interest to them because Goulding Creek is a tributary upstream to the Oconee River, and therefore a part of that watershed.

At that time, we invited two of the Board, the legal representative, and a retired forester, to hike and examine the property and give a review of the details of entering into such an agreement. This was the first step, and then the ORLT Board of Directors had to discuss and vote on the suitability of the property. We were not too surprised to find that they were interested.

Unfortunately, the economy crashed at that point, and we didn’t feel sufficiently confident to take on the financial responsibility, and there the matter sat until late last year, after we finished paying off the mortgage. Glenn went to an open house for ORLT members to re-open discussions and was pleased with what he learned. Apparently several area neighbors have already placed their properties under such a trust, and Glenn was able to get their direct and favorable impressions.

The ORLT link above gives a brief summary of what a land trust and conservation easement are, and here’s a nicely written detail of Georgia-oriented easements.

There are apparently 3 dozen such land trusts in Georgia, holding conservation easements for the protection ( by the end of 2005) of 131,000 acres of land: farms, wetlands, wildlife habitat, forests, and watersheds. Land trusts, such as the ORLT above, often specialize in a local area such as a watershed. In our area the Broad River Watershed Association is another land trust that holds and maintains conservation easements associated with that watershed to the north and east of us.

A conservation easement is an agreement between a landowner and a land trust to forever limit the uses to which the property can be put. It may be, as in our case, that the easement will be written to prevent the logging of forest, and the development of the property for subdivision and housing. You can write the easement any way you want, with some restrictions. First you’ll probably have to restrict in one or more ways to accomodate state and federal laws, and second, your land trust probably has a certain philosophy that you’ll have to address in your easement.

The land trust then monitors and provides legal protection for the property. To fund that process, the land trust requires a donation, which is not small. The investment of finances underscores that the motivation here is to protect the land, and not to make money from potential tax benefits. This isn’t to say that there aren’t tax benefits, but they are rather small and temporary. The ORLT page has an easily understood explanation of tax benefits and how they might be determined.

So now you’ve limited the uses to which your land can be put, and there are consequences to this beyond the obvious protective ones.

First, the conservation easement does not prevent the property from being sold or inherited.

However, and secondly, in a purely practical and monetary sense the land is no longer as valuable as it was. Protecting the old hardwood forest here, for instance, means that that timber is no longer of interest to those who might wish to own the property for such harvest. If you’ve denied subdivision and development for housing, clearly no one interested in doing that would care to buy the property. So you’ve automatically reduced the number of potential buyers for the property should you decide to sell it, and selling it becomes more difficult. And as well, the dollar value of the property is similarly reduced, as you cannot include features (such as trees for timber) in that value assessment since they can no longer be used. (This is the basis for tax benefits, by the way - the assessed value of the property goes down and that “loss” can be declared for a limited number of years. Indeed, trying to overvalue the property is illegal.)

Third, the appeal of your neighbors' properties is greater, and their property values increase informally. People like to buy property next to land protected by an easement, since it’s an assurance that there will be no development of that land (if that’s what the easement specifies). They’ll pay more for such adjoining properties.

There are more ramifications of entering into a conservation easement but for most people the first two will be the most relevant considerations. Clearly you don’t agree to a conservation easement for financial gain. On the contrary it costs money directly and indirectly to do so. The motivations must be primarily altruistic, at least for ordinary private landowners to do something like this.

So this is my understanding of the outlines of such a thing. I do have questions, and a few minor reservations. And perhaps my altruism is “not quite there” as I still have an irrational resistance to anyone but the two of us controlling what can be done with the property. I say “irrational” because none of that “control” can be greater than anything that we would impose ourselves anyway, and because that “control” is an inaccurate concept anyway.

I would be curious to know if anyone has entered into, or considered entering into, and even rejected entering into, a conservation easement. What motivated you? If you rejected the idea, why? And if you have entered into an agreement, what do you think now?

We have mildly interesting weather developing over Thursday. It’s one of those rare times when moist air from the gulf meets cold air from the north over northeast Georgia. It’s my self-protective measure that nothing will come of this, but there is a 50% chance of ice pellets on Wednesday night and Thursday morning. The temperatures aren’t going to get cold enough for anything much to stick around but the mere precipitation is fun.

As I did for Ottawa a couple of days ago, I now do for Athens. One thing’s for sure, I won’t have that much to say about snow.

The data plotted below come from an Athens weather archive page at NOAA’s Southern Region Headquarters website.

Despite the “Southern” part of that latter site name, there is a clickable US map that might give clues as to archived climate data for your area. I originally found this page by simple searching for archived climatic data. It isn’t quite so easy to copy and paste data into Excel as it is from Environment Canada, nor is archived climate data easy to find for many US cities without having to pay for it. Worth searching for though.

A quick description of how I’m acquiring the data. It is, unfortunately, not possible to simply download an Excel (or other spreadsheet) of data. In this case I’ve had to highlight and copy the monthly table and paste it into a text file like WordPad, then save it. Then I can open that text file with Excel and copy and paste into the appropriate place in the real Excel workbook. From that point on the data are manipulated for massaging and plotting as always. To save a plot once I’m happy about it, I capture it using a photoshop program, then resize it and save it.

Onward!

Just to summarize what follows:

Ottawa: 45.40N, 75.72W

Temperatures: Winter temperatures have increased by 2.1 degC since 1970. All other seasons show an increase in temperature, with spring the least: 0.8 degC. All seasonal temperatures have been on the rise since 1900.

Snowfall: Seasonal snowfall has been in decline since 1995, most precipitiously since 2000. Last year’s winter brought it very nearly to the lowest point since 1900. We’ll have to wait and see what happens this season.

Precipitation: Annual precipitation has decreased by 5% since 1970. I haven’t done a seasonal analysis yet.

Athens: 33.26N, 83.24W

Temperatures: Winter temperatures have increased by 0.8 degC since 1970, an acceleration from 0.3 degC since 1900. All other seasons show an increase.

Snowfall: Such as it is, we haven’t had snow in the last ten years.

Precipitation: Spring rainfall has declined by 1/3 since 1970, and winter rainfall has declined as well, about 11%. Summer and autumn rainfall have increased but not to an extent to compensate. Overall, rainfall has declined by 4% since 1970.



Temperatures

Here are the mean annual temperatures, in Celsius, for Athens from 1900 to present. As on the Ottawa entry I’ve done a 5-year running average to smooth out the short term noise a bit, and have defined the climate year as September through August, in order to get seasonal snows together in one block.

On this plot, I also show our incidences of annual snowfall. The scale on the right goes up to 250 cm, not that I think it will ever happen, but because that was the Ottawa scale so I thought it would be fun to use it. Notice that we haven’t had any significant snow in the last ten years, but there have been years in the past when we’ve had more than 25 cm of snow in a season. Just not lately.



Notice also that the annual mean temps (16-18 degC in our case, compared to 6-7 degC in Ottawa!) have been trending upward from the crude point of view of a straight line through the data, at 0.0024 degC/year. Over 106 years annual mean temps have increased a total of 0.25 degC.

On this plot you can readily see the extremely warm temperatures of the Dust Bowl period, 1920 to 1938, something that wasn’t very visible at all on the Ottawa plots. And you can see the cold, wet climate during the 60s and 70s.

Let’s look at the temperature change since 1970, the standard period for doing so. There are no dramatic periods of unusual cold or warmth, simply a continuous rise in temperature at the rate of 0.0095 degC/year, a rate of rise four times greater than the overall 106 year period. That rate of rise over the last 36 years adds 0.34 degC since 1970. This is just slightly greater than the 0.0088 deg rise since 1970 in Ottawa.



This composite breaks the data down into seasons - winter is DJF, and so forth. The left panels show the seasons overall since 1900 and the right panels show the seasons since 1970.



Since 1900 there has been a slight increase, most in the winter season, for winter, spring, and autumn. Summers have been slightly cooler since 1900. However since 1970, the period of largest annual increase in temperatures, winter claims the lion’s share of the increase, 0.8 degC, nearly 2/3 of it. This was also true for Ottawa. Most of the temperature increase over the last 36 years is due to warmer winters, here in Athens. And contrary to the 106 year period, summers, though only 1/3 the rate of increase of winters, have increased average temperatures double that of spring and autumn.

Precipitation

We can do the same thing with precipitation, i.e., rain. In these plots, annual rainfall (Sep-Aug), is given in millimeters, to correspond with Ottawa data. One interesting thing to note is that Athens gets, on average, about 1250 mm per year (49 inches) compared to Ottawa at 850 mm per year (33 inches). I had no idea that Ottawa only got 2/3 of the precipitation (including snow) that Athens gets. Ottawa is practically a desert , well ok, maybe not.

Athens, like Ottawa, has been seeing a decline in overall precipitation over the last 30 years: for Athens this amounts to 58 mm over 36 years, or 2.3 inches (more than 4% decline). For Ottawa the decline is by 43 mm over 36 years, or 1.7 inches (a 5% decline).

Let’s just go straight to the seasonal composite:



Over the last 36 years, winter and especially spring rainfall has declined substantially, by 47 mm (1.9 inches) and 143 mm (5.6 inches), respectively. Winter moisture has been in decline since 1900, totally a quarter less now than it did in 1900, but it’s spring that is troublesome. Since 1900 spring has remained more or less even, but in the last 36 years it’s declined by more than 1/3 expected.

Summer and autumn rainfall has increased: summer by 81 mm (3.2 inches) and autumn by 52 mm (2.1 inches). The summer and autumn rainfall increase does not make up for the winter and spring decrease.

This deficit in winter and spring rainfall, especially in conjunction with warmer winters and springs, must perturb the ecology considerably. Large trees do require moisture in the winter, especially when the winters are warmer, and especially in the spring, when they’re leafing out. And spring flowering plants absolutely require moisture in the spring, and we’re getting less than 2/3 of that moisture than we did back in 1970.

The usual disclaimers about cycles apply, and the dates have been chosen to accomodate these.

For the last three days the temperatures have been breaking 70 degF. Cloudy and moist, but warm - I was mildly shocked to walk outside yesterday morning and find that it was warmer outside than in.

Yesterday’s walk netted a brown grasshopper (!) flying from ground to tree, but otherwise groundbased animal life, except for possums, have not been directly observable. It’s there though. The moist mud and sandbanks have revealed that racoons at least are having quite the evening parties down to the creeks:


That must have been a monster of a racoon. The track was 3.5 inches (9 cm) long. Possums, which I sometimes think of as Morlocks, are also in abundance as revealed by their near-humanlike slender prints.

I’m always in search of the elusive bobcat track and one of these, also about 3.5 inches (9 cm) long), always gives my heart a little flutter:


But it’s not to be - if you can draw an X cleanly between the toepads it’s a canine. Probably a coyote though it could be a dog.

This set still puzzles me. It’s not drippings from above. There aren’t the toe-markings of a bird. The tracks are tiny, about half a centimeter long, but proportionately quite deep, as though made by something heavier than you would expect.

Any ideas?

Today is Martin Luther King’s birthday, and as it turns out it actually *is* his birthday today. It’s one of those recognized holidays that I actually spend time pondering upon - and in this case it’s the notion that one person can actually have an abiding influence for the better. It seems such a simple thing, that one person could do something, and yet in the everyday chaos, confusion, and distraction it really is not an easy thing at all.

So I’m thinking - let’s visualize a couple of simple goals that would, we hope, make things better. These are my goals, of course, and not necessarily yours. But to my mind much that disturbs me comes down to these two things.

I personally would like to see a *lot* less influence by hard right-wing religionists on policy. By this I don’t mean religion in general, but ugly, mean-spirited ideas as articulated by the likes of a Jerry Falwell, a Pat Robertson, or any of the recently disgraced theomaniacs, and their followers.

Second, but most important, I would like to see more people intelligently aware of and involved with crucial environmental problems. I don’t see this so much as trying to get people involved with huge, monumental problems, but more involved in small, local ones - something right in their own backyard.

I wonder - is there any one person anyone can think of who could today come close to the stature of a Martin Luther King able to rise above the seething surface of ignorance and coherently, convincingly address one or the other or both of these goals? I can’t think of anyone, and yet certainly the second one seems so paramount.

I thought for a little while about writing this, and then decided of course! It’s written, in part, for those who live in the deep south and can’t necessarily find climate change in the data, since it’s not happening very fast here. It’s written for those who don’t realize that climate data are available online and can be analyzed by the simplest of programs (excel) to satisfy your curiosity. And it’s written for those who without ever having looked at a plot of changes over a century will still come up with the same tiresome “cycles explanation”. Not that there aren’t cycles, but once you start looking at a century’s worth of data, the only cycles of importance become those that last for centuries. The cycles that last for centuries merely beg the question, not answer it, since the effects are upon us for generations.

While we’re at it, let’s throw into that category the idiots who invoke climate of millions of years ago, when the continents were arranged differently. And just let’s add to those idiots' intellectual crimes that they smoothly overlook the rate of climate change - more than a degree Celsius in a century, as opposed to a similar change over thousands of years. Let’s look at some real data from a place that might be undergoing changes far more drastic than I might see looking at Athens weather.

Bev and I have been talking for some time about analyzing Ottawa winters, and yesterday I did a huge amount of cutting and pasting from various weather stations that report to Environment Canada. There are an astonishing number of such stations, but most have only reported for a few years and none, at least around Ottawa, has full reports since 1900. So I’ve had to piece together the weather data for three stations. The details are given at the bottom, and a link to downloading the excel file is also given.

If we’ve been paying attention, we know that the major upward trends in temperatures are felt (currently) in the North. As a resident of the lazy southeastern region, my similar data analyses of Athens, GA have not afforded much in the way of upward trend indicators. So it seemed reasonably to duplicate the effort on a northern city area, and since Bev lives somewhere in the Ottawa area, that seemed a good choice.

I warn you that this is heavy in graphs, but they’re all essentially the same so it should be possible to get an idea of things at a glance. Each is about 10 kb (the advantage of pngs!) so the total is less than one of my larger photos.

Temperatures

Here’s the plot of annual mean temperatures in and around the Ottawa area. The temperatures are not smoothed. They’re plotted directly:


It’s hard to see much trend here. There’s the huge dip in annual temperature from 1932 to 1940, and what happened there? There’s also the interesting point that annual Ottawa averages are around 6 degC (43 degF), whereas for us here in Athens annual mean temps are around 17 degC (63 degF). Brr!

Let’s look instead at the 5-year running averages. Running averages are used to smooth out the data and give a clearer picture of trends. The extremes, higher or lower, are suppressed, but the trends are enhanced. From here on out I use 5-year running averages. Five years is enough to give a good impression of trends on that order, without wiping out longer term cycles. Here’s the above graph when subjected to a 5-year running average:


The 1932-1940 dip is much clearer here, and more importantly the upward trend in temperature, even given that huge dip, over the last century is also clear. The slope of 0.0088 degC per year establishes a long-term increase of 0.9 degC, or 1.7 degF over the last century.

But we can also look at the 1971-present temperature changes, and this is justified on two counts. First, it’s standard in climatology to use that period in order to compare changes. And the reason that it’s standard is clear from the above figure - decade-long cycles are present in the data and are therefore accounted for. It’s pretty clear that the average annual temperatures have gone up from 5.5 degC to 6.7 degC, 1.2 degC or a little over 2 degF in a 36-year period.


I haven’t presented them here, but I have looked at the seasonal contributions to these temperature increases and they’re available in the excel file I’ve linked to at the bottom. Over the years since 1900 the traditional seasons have all four increased in temperature, but by far the major increase has been during DJF winter: 0.019 degC per year. This is followed by MAM spring: 0.011 degC per year. Summer and autumn have also increased but not quite to these extents: 0.0066 and 0.0026 degC per year.

Snow

Let’s look at snowfall. Again, the stations I found haven’t updated since summer 2006, but we can look at snowfall since then, and then wonder what it’s going to look like when this season’s data are added in a few months.


I should say that in all of these plots I’ve used September through August as the calendar year. I did this to accomodate snowfall, since it made more sense to plot December’s snowfall along with the next months of January and February in the following year, rather than lumping them together with the previous Jan and Feb of the same year, but 8 months previous.

From 1969 until 1974 there was a large increase in snowfall, which is in keeping with that period of colder, wetter climate throughout the Northern Hemisphere. (We could talk about “global dimming” through aerosol pollution here, but that would just make the subsequent increases following cleanup even more frightening.) The decade of the 1990s showed a similar, not so large increase in snowfall, but since 2001 snowfall has been declining substantially. That’s not a very long time period, and so it could certainly be a part of a cycle. Taken in conjunction with the increase in temperature though, the decrease in snowfall has more meaning. The decline has been nearly to the lowest point in a century and has occurred from a high in 1995 that was not very unusual.

Overall in the last 106 years snowfall has decreased by 0.048 cm per year, which doesn’t sound like much, and it isn’t. However look at the period from 1971-present. There has been a decrease, even including the 1990s, of 0.64 cm per year. There is a decline of 23 cm of snow since 36 years ago.


Overall Precipitation

Let’s look at total precipitation over the last century. Average precipitation has increased by almost a millimeter per year, which over 106 years leads to 10 cm more precipitation per year, now.


Since 1971 though, precipitation has declined by 1.2 mm per year, and this is the value of looking at the long term and at the short, recent term. Total precipitation may involve a cycle that goes up and down in more than mere decades, perhaps a century or more.


Percent Snow

Finally, let’s look at the percent of total precipitation that is snow. Over the last century snowfall has declined from 2.7% of total precipitation to 2.4%, not a huge decrease, apparently:


And in the last 36 years, the amount of snowfall as a percent of total precipitation has not changed very much. But it’s also important to remember the overall decrease in total precipitation and snowfall in the last 36 years, apparently canceling each other out. Precipitation still falls as snow - there’s just less of both.


This is just a cursory look at the data in the broadest ways. We could look at the data seasonally, for instance, rather than the less dramatic means over a year. And of course it’s only for one location. The increase in temperatures though, especially that of 1.2 degC in the last 36 years, is apparent, and that’s probably the most significant point here.

The majority of the data comes from Ottawa Mcdonald-Cartier International Airport, since 1939 to present. I was a little disappointed to discover that no one seems to be presenting online monthly data after about June 2006, so that’s where the analysis ends.

The other two sources that were used to piece things together are Renfrew Sand Point (1930-1959), and Ottawa (pre 1900-1935), which provide a good overlap. All three locations are fairly close to each other, so I simply call them “Ottawa”. The data can be obtained through the search routines at this site.

It should be possible to download the full canada.xls excel file (268kb) that I’ve constructed here.

Some days a focused agenda doesn’t happen.

In 2005 these deep woods daffodils, flowering yesterday, were noted in flower on Feb 10. I have a photo in my 2006 pic folder dated Mar 2. It’s probably just some kind of cycle.


On the way down past the kat semetary, I ran across this artifact. Most of the time, such treasures are partly buried, and bear the patina of age, but this apparently contemporary object was just lying atop ground I’ve been over dozens of times. Did a big bird drop it? Did it fall out of an airplane?


The rains of the last week have washed away much of the silt layering the creek beds, leaving beds of gravel exposed:


So I got on my PPE boots, which turn out to be marvelous for wading in knee-deep cold water, sieved, and brought up 3 gallons of gravel. I wonder what’s there?


The evening was taken up with a few hours of firefighting training. We played with the lime green truck, the Margaritaville, engaging the drive transmission into the pump. We tested out the new nozzles, spraying lots of water. Then we went up to the Clarke County line to fill the truck with water from their hydrant. We do it the easy way. Rather than intravenous injection of water from the hydrant, a couple of us sit on top of the truck holding on tightly to the connected hose and direct the flowing water directly into the tank. This affords us with the opportunity for fun, as our all-too-clever hydrant man schemes: "Und now, ve turn zis up all the way and launch zem into space!"

We seem to be back in a normal winter mode here, after a couple of fairly heavy rains and fronts moving through. Actually, though the last few weeks have been perceptibly warm here, the nature of our weather here in the southeast doesn’t peg that as particularly unusual. We must look to our northern friends to find that the last few weeks have been unusually warm indeed, and they are right.

Aforementioned northern friends will smile indulgently, but I’ll say anyway that the temperature this morning was 26 degF. Of course, it will probably get up into the 50s on a bright sunny day today, but that’s winter in northeast Georgia. The rains in the early part of the week have done a fairly good job of flushing out the creek of accumulated sands and I think I just might go rock hunting today. But that’s not what we’re here to talk about.

A few days ago Bev observed an aspen with a strange affliction - an aspen with a ring of diseased bark far up the tree. The larger photo gave the impression of the bark exploding outward. It brought to mind a similar, though not identical, observation I’ve made of a number of tulip poplars Liriodendron tulipifera around here.

Liriodendron tulipifera, which I habitually call tulip poplar, but also goes by a number of other common names (yellow poplar, tuliptree, tulip-poplar, white-poplar, and whitewood) is very common around here. It’s an important lumber tree because of its fast, even growth, its fine straight grain, and lightness and strength. For honeybees, it’s also THE honey-flow tree around here in May. A little north, honey comes mainly from sourwood, and a little south it comes from tupelo, but for us the main tree is tulip poplar.

If tulip poplar were a part of the climax forest our forests would probably be called hickory-oak-yellow poplar forests, but tulip poplar seedlings require a lot of light. Consequently you won’t find a lot of young tulip poplars in a mature growth climax forest, though there may be, as there are here, a large component of very old trees that established themselves when the forest was young and open.

I say the growth of tulip poplar is even and rapid, and that’s generally true of younger trees. If you search for photos of tulip poplar, you’ll mainly get examples of younger trees that do indeed grow straight, but on our property with its population of large old tulip poplar trees, there are many examples of twisted and bent trees and of trees with a lot of large holes and concavities (for instance, this one). And then there’s the one to the left, which brings us back to Bev’s observation. This old tulip poplar is covered with what now appears to be a form of canker, and although they don’t form a ring around the trunk like Bev’s picture shows, they do have the same general flavor.

A closeup of one of these many cankers shows that it’s primarily the bark that gives the appearance of damage. As in Bev’s photo, the bark appears to be exploded outward, although it doesn’t look like it’s because of any unusual growth beneath the bark. At least in this season, there’s no evidence of the oozing or dried exudates you normally expect with a canker.


At first I thought that all of these lesions were of the same size and age. But I can make out, looking at the very first photo above, the shadows of what appear to be one or more emerging lesions in the middle lower third of trunk. And perhaps the base of the tree shows the end result of much older lesions:


The base of the tree is completely opened up here into a large chamber, and there’s another smaller chamber around the circumference about 120 degrees to the right. There’s still a lot of healthy growth in back and that seems to be sustaining the majority of the tree. The tree doesn’t seem to be particularly stressed, as evidenced by the hundreds of fruit remnants at the tips of the branches, the results of high density flowering last spring.

The closest I have been able to come to the explanation for this is a fungus called Nectria, described on the University of Minnesota Extension page. The first photograph on that page looks like an early stage of what I’m seeing on the tulip poplar here. This fungus is a broad-host fungus, and tulip poplars and Bev’s aspen are both included in that range.

From that page is a description of something to look for in the spring:

In spring and early summer, pink or cream colored, cushion-like reproductive structures (sporodochia) form on the surface of tissue infected the previous year. Other reproductive structures, perithecia, are formed in late summer to early fall (Fig. 3). These structures are initially red colored, later turning brown or black.

And from the previous link, which, by the way, is an extremely useful site for a great many tree species:

Species of the genus Nectria have been associated with stem cankers. Incidence of this disease and mortality from it was greatest on low-vigor trees.

So the fungus, if that’s what it is, is not a benign pest, but one that at least at this level of infection, is probably a terminal problem.

By coincidence, or maybe not, Mike at RealClimate has a post today on the matter I wrote on yesterday.

It overlaps and extends beyond my expertise some of the questions and points folks made here.

I’m not trained in the field so I’m not confident enough to always point out contradictions but it did occur to me that El Nino and its effect on the jet stream was not a sufficient explanation for this year’s anomalous warmth in January, for two reasons.

First, as Mike points out, we had the same anomalous warmth *last* January, in the throes of a La Nina. Second, the tendency is (as I understand it) for El Nino to yank the jet stream southward, yet many of the “explanations” for this January warmth have invoked the jet stream tucked away in the far north, a bizarre explanation attempt to my mind.

Not so, as I discovered here, and further I point to the recent storms we’ve had here in the south due to the jet stream being exactly where I suppose it to be (see today’s picture here).

Indeed we are expecting 30-40 mph winds today because that jet stream, as in the above pic, is streaming eastward right above us.

So what do you think?

Some of us take it day by day, and some of us want some idea of what to expect. This Seasonal Outlook page from NOAA’s National Weather Service Climate Prediction Center is pretty cool for those who want to plan ahead.

There is a lot of interesting stuff on the left sidebar, but let me draw your attention to the six blue panels atop the map. These are outlooks for various times in the future, from 6-10 days up through 3 months. Place your cursor above the temperature or precipitation link and the map for that category will appear in below the mouseover.

Or click on the link for extra options. Here, for instance, is the 3 month outlook with regard to temperature for Jan-Feb-Mar:


The numbers on this map are NOT temperatures, rather they are probabilities. The colored regions indicate below normal, above normal, or equal chance of either above or below, and the probabilities are associated with these three states. CPC’s explanation is here.

For instance, Robin and Roger’s hauntings have a 40-50% chance of above normal temperatures over the next three months Jan-Feb-Mar. Looks like Bev’s temps, extrapolating into Canada, are up to 60% chance of being above normal for the next three months.

In our case, we have a 33% chance of normal temperatures. This may sound odd, but what it means is that the other 67% is split between possible higher or lower than normal temperatures - in other words, an equal probability of any of the three states. So on average we should experience normal temperatures, just as on average Robin and Roger should experience above normal temperatures, with lower probabilities of experiencing normal or lower than normal temperatures.

You might want to take Jan out of the picture and project ahead a month by selecting the Feb-Mar-Apr option (just keep in mind that confidence degrades the farther into the future you go). If I do this I see essentially the same picture.

Here’s a similar map for precipitation, again for Jan-Feb-Mar:


Robin and Roger have an equal chance of above or below precipitation, while Bev is sitting up there with a 33% lean toward lower preciptitation. Pablo’s good news is that Lake Margarite is sitting close to a region of higher than normal precipitation. We’re right in a narrow region of equal chance sandwiched between lower and higher than normal precipitation.

If I look at the Feb-Mar-Apr picture, there’s not much change for anyone.

If I were using this as a planting guide, I would go ahead and plant early and not worry too much about watering, at least through June. However, as I look ahead into summer, the 3-month outlooks centered around July and August suggest normal precipitation but higher than normal temperatures for us.

All this of course could go by the wayside as new teleconnected events occur. The current outlook probably includes the effects of the current El Nino, but projecting into the summer and fall is probably dangerous since no one knows if this El Nino will be followed by a La Nina, and that could change things substantially. CPC gets around that by averaging over years with and without La Nina, but once a La Nina is known to have occurred CPC would change that strategy (I guess!).

Yesterday I mentioned the use of the US-EPA Enviromapper to locate air and ground and surface water testing locations. In the next to last screenshot I showed a picture of the area and two such testing locations within or close to our property. Since these are claimed to be wells 200+ feet deep I thought they’d be easy to find, especially since the latitude and longitude coordinates are given.

So I set off with the GPS to locate them. I found the exact location for well #5 - right at the dogleg our driveway takes before it proceeds the next 500 feet down to the house. There was no evidence of digging in that area (and I’ve done some work there so I know it’s not a matter of being a mere 25 feet off, the degree of error that my GPS unit professes).

I didn’t fully search out the other site #6 but can tell that it is a bit farther north and west, probably on the next door neighbor’s property.

As I mentioned you can click on the site number to find information at the USGS (United States Geological Survey) site: here’s what you find. Not much, but enough to make it clear that the given coordinates are suspect.

First, the USGS-given altitude above sea level is at least 100 feet higher than I know from several sources that particular position at our driveway is. USGS claims 735 feet and my guess is that position is more like 624 feet. Second, of course, there’s no evidence of a 240 foot well dug there.

However, 500 feet west of that position there is our home well, supposedly 500 feet deep. So it’s my guess that this site #5 refers to that well, and that the data were automatically supplied as registration information of some sort when the well was dug. Somehow the data found their way to USGS.

A date for the record on that page above would have been nice. Indeed, it jars me considerably that there is no date on the webpage. That is certainly the most expected piece of information on any sort of documentation of this sort. The only time our well water could have been tested would have been around the time it was dug, 1991.

It is odd though, if my explanation is the case, that these are the only two groundwater/surface water testing sites mentioned. There are, after all, 15 or so individually well-supplied houses along that mile stretch of access road.

I suppose the disparity in GPS coordinates with the USGS-given coordinates could be due to the GPS technology, unavailable in 1991. The reproducibility in my unit has been excellent for repeated visits to many locations, so I place a reasonable amount of trust in it. (I’ve also located our property boundary markers using it.)

As for the information immediately accessible, all it appears to be is the depth at which groundwater was found. If chemical analyses or flow rates are a part of it, it doesn’t appear on the page.

UPDATE: I take that back about water analysis. USGS (United States Geological Survey) does maintain water quality data for some sites available online at its National Water Information Service, but you must search. (Indeed, the first link above is fascinating - put in your state for recent updates, such as this one. I find that we are part of the “Piedmont Aquifer System”:

The PAS is a major aquifer in the eastern United States that follows the eastern foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. It underlies portions of Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Delaware, New Jersey, and southern New York. It provides drinking water for 7 million people.

Notice that “7 million”. You’d think there were more than 7 million people in those states, and of course there are. Most people get their drinking water (if not from bottles) from surface water - rivers, lakes, and so forth. Surface water and its quality is a whole 'nother ballgame. Relatively few tap ground water sources, which since we do (of necessity), are of interest to us.

The second link goes to a search page here. I checked the boxes for state and lat/long coordinates. That delivered me to a page where I could specify the coordinates of the corners of a box. I checked the “decimal degrees option” and then I put in coordinates such that my location was centered, more or less, and the corners different by 0.2 degrees. This produced a page with five site hits (none of them our well, but three of them close by). Here you can select an output, and submitting delivers you to a page with water quality data, here.

Notice that the data are from 1965. The data are fairly limited, to pH and hardness and some ions. Oddly iron is not a part of the analysis. Still.

Here’s something I would hope we can all use. I would in fact be interested in what readers can find out about their areas - I suspect you will discover things you might rather not have known.

Yesterday I mentioned a little travelogue I wrote last year on our way back. I’d intended to bring this up in that post, but decided to defer it until Bev of the Sharp Eyes inquired of the very photograph there that I was curious about:


Outside of Irwinton, in Wilkinson County, Georgia, along US 441, there are at least a half-dozen of these bright green ponds. We’ve seen them on our way to and from for at least the last six years. Glenn suggested they might be associated with roadwork, which has been going on for at least that long. Whatever the source, that green looks very chemical to me. I decided to dive into the jungle of the US EPA and Georgia EPD to see if I could find out what it was.

A little googling didn’t net very much information about hazardous waste dumps along 441 in the area. I also wasn’t able to find any direct information about these particular sites and finally concluded tentatively that they are surface pit mines for kaolin and other clays.

If you’re in the US, there are two places (at least) to go for environmental information, The United States Environmental Protection Agency, and of increasing importance the Environmental Protection Division in your state. In Georgia the EPD is part of the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, and can be found here.

US-EPA has an excellent interactive website which includes their interactive Enviromapper. That last link puts you in the position of entering your zip code and discovering interesting things about the people and companies that are putting things into your air and water. Here, for instance, is the map detailing the area in the photo above:

And here is the legend key for the colored sites on the map. Along 441 there simply aren’t any indications of sites that might fit the criteria that the photograph shows.

The GA-EPD site doesn’t have the convenient interactive features of the US-EPA site, but information can be found. Here’s a portion of a map including Wilkinson County (the green ponds) that comes from the section detailing hazardous waste sites.



Those four numbers are detailed reports on the hazardous sites and those reports, including the precise location of the site and the last known owner’s name and address, can be explored at the above link.

None of the reports associated with those four numbers indicated a site along 441, and so refer to other sites. The nature of the hazardous wastes were alarming enough, listing dozens of heavy metals and organic chemicals finding their way into the groundwater.

So my investigations have not really turned up anything nefarious about those green ponds, and I think it likely that they are clay mines. From the GA-EPD site under the entry “Land” is an excel file that includes permitted mining sites for all counties in Georgia, and in Wilkinson County there are a great many such sites listed.

Naturally I had to look up my own county, Oglethorpe. From the US-EPA Enviromapper here’s the large map of the county:

And here, again, is the legend for the attributes I chose to be plotted. The red square with the red circle inside is our immediate area, blown up below. The circle is the approximate location of our property. In dark black I’ve added the names of the sites indicated. On the actual Enviromapper the sites are each linked to whatever information is available and the names pop up as you move the mouse over the site symbol. Most of the sites have to do with chicken houses or dairy farms. Of interest to us is the Martin Marietta Aggregate site - this is where they mine gravel, seemingly innocuous though the huge trucks do move much faster down Wolfskin Road than they should.

Here’s the promised blowup of the red-squared area from the part of the Enviromapper that details where ground and surface waters are tested:


The red polygon indicates our property, roughly. The sites numbered 2, 5, and 6 are groundwater testing sites, and on the US-EPA Enviromapper they come complete with GPS coordinates. Each symbol is also linked to what should be further information, but in each case there is no information concerning results that can be found at those links. The groundwater is tested via a 200-foot-deep well, and at least one and possibly two (sites 5 and 6) are on our property.

Huh! This is interesting. Today I break out the GPS and search for these. Given a 200-foot-deep well, you’d think I should be able to find evidence for them!

Finally I went to the GA-EPD site again, and checked out the Hazardous Waste Sites for Oglethorpe County. Once you get into populated areas such as Athens or Atlanta, there are dozens and hundreds of such sites indicated and detailed (as you’ll see below). For our area there’s just one: #10706.

Oddly this came up about eight months ago when our nearest neighbor asked me if I knew of this site - he’d just heard of it and was alarmed. I was able to locate the information at the GA-EPD site and send him these details, but at the time did not further investigate the wealth of information available.

This site #10706 is at the intersection of Wolfskin Road and US78 about 4 miles north of us. Here’s a screenshot of the report:


The black star on the map indicates the site.

Note the gruesome details, including owner and map location (the red square approximates the map of our little corner of Oglethorpe that I presented above). I was able to locate the owner by googling, and discovered that she is also owner of the property which is, ironically, a cleanwater business.

Given the anarchy of the area, and the appearance especially of the chemicals tetrachloroethene and p-dichlorobenzene, my suspicion is that someone dumped solvents from drycleaning wastes into a possibly old well on her property and that it then made its way into the groundwater. She is most likely a victim of that kind of vandalism.

I mentioned before that State Environmental Protection Agencies are becoming increasingly important, perhaps in keeping with the philosophy of the last few years of states rights vs federal power. Whatever the reason, the hazardous waste site just above was not indicated in any way on the US-EPA Enviromapper. As I also indicated, more than a few links from symbols on the Enviromapper go to pages that give no information at all on results of testing, for instance.

While the Enviromapper is an impressive piece of interactive information in theory, it’s incomplete and lacking in many promised details. There appears to be a short circuit in communication between (at least) the GA-EPD and the US-EPA, or perhaps the US-EPA is not able to do its job in updating the Enviromapper.

I would therefore recommend that for more complete information, you locate the Environmental Protection Agency in your state - again, in Georgia it was the Environmental Protection Division under the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, and that might help you locate the counterpart where you live.

Mark will be watching this too, I think.

We’re under a tornado watch until late this afternoon. The air does indeed feel close, warm, and still - definitely not a January-feeling day. The tiny squares in the image below are lightning, and that too is something of a rarity on a winter day in northeast Georgia. From Weather Underground:

The trip back went smoothly, 6 hours and 305 miles. The eight of us remaining packed up, made our farewells, and Glenn and I departed at 7:30 am. It’s a great pleasure being around our friends of 30 years for a week. We get along very well - during the day people go their own way, largely, and at night another one or two of us prepare the evening meal, which is always good since the evening’s chefs present what they like best.

And yet it’s also a pleasure to take our leave, with the knowledge of contrasts that once again points out for me the difference between being temporarily comfortable with friends and being permanently comfortable with Glenn.

Similarly it’s a pleasure to be in a different place, with characteristics completely different from those at home. The flat low land, ocean, marshes, dunes, and tidal creeks are not something we see at home (not yet, anyway). The barrier islands and their surrounding environments overwhelm me, knowing as I do how rich they are in diversity. And at the same time, sadden me, knowing as I do how precariously they exist from day to day as decisions are made that will almost certainly affect them adversely.

And yet it’s again a pleasure born of contrasts to return home and begin to see the rolling hills, terrain creases, and hardwood forests. For awhile after returning everything seems strange and much more beautiful than I recall it before leaving last week.

Last year I photographed a little travelogue of the way home, so I won’t present that here. We did encounter thick fog continuously for the first 120 miles, all the way up to I-16, and that bedevilled us considerably. Five of the cats assembled immediately on the front porch when we drove up, and dogged our trail up to the car and back down as we unpacked. Far from the usual anecdotes about cats ignoring or wreaking vengence upon their returned human companions, ours won’t leave us alone, and of course that is a very satisfying welcome.

However pleasant the vacation, it’s always good to get home.

As always, Glenn and I hope to get an early start. For Robin at the Dharma Bums, we’ll be pumping about 70 pounds of carbon into the atmosphere.

Yesterday’s post brought in some comments, among them Bev’s description of a Canadian winter these days. I just happened to run into CNN’s Lighthearted Suggestion that all is well in Whoville.

"I’m not complaining. I can take this," said Rudolph Williams, a doorman in New York City who normally wears a hat this time of year but stood outside in 50-degree weather with his shaved head uncovered.

“The Earth is recalibrating itself: Last year, we had a cold winter, and it’s balancing itself out now. In January, it feels like the middle of April.”

We might want remind the ignorant but opinionated Mr Rudolph Williams of the dangers of a faulty memory. Here’s last January. He seems to have forgotten about it, but I didn't:



As for “recalibration”, here’s the trend in temperature change for the winter months, DecJanFeb, for the last 30 years, since 1976. Golly, there’s not a hint of blue there!

(There will be those who cry “foul”, you haven’t included the 1940 and 1960 decades of cooling. Well, that would be the point, wouldn’t it? Those decades of cooling, offset by 10 years, haven’t precisely surfaced in the last 30 years, have they? Oops!)



But don’t worry. According to CNN:

The weather is prone to short-term fluctuations, and forecasters said the mild winter does not necessarily mean global warming is upon us.

....

“No cause for alarm. Enjoy it while you have it,” said Mike Halpert, head of forecast operations at the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Prediction Center.

Whatever the explanation, Amanda Dickens was enjoying the weather Wednesday at Baltimore’s Inner Harbor as she ate lunch outside with her husband and 3-year-old son.

Temperatures there were expected to reach 60 degrees.

At the Marovitz Golf Course in Chicago near Lake Michigan, 30 people teed off between 9 a.m. and noon, when there are usually no golfers at all this time of year.

Except, perhaps, for last year!

Leonard Berg, the course’s superintendent for maintenance, gestured to the fairways with pride: “Normally this time of year there would be a brown singe to it. Look at that nice emerald green.”

At New York’s Brooklyn Botanic Garden, the “everblooming” cherry trees are flowering more fully than usual, producing thousands of blooms instead of hundreds.

Hope they enjoy it as much this summer!

Today is our last full day at Jekyll. Four of our group left on Tuesday morning and the rest of us will depart tomorrow. You might have thought you wouldn’t see this until later, but you were wrong!

Despite the late November and early December snowfalls and ice storms, December turned out to be very warm for most of the country east of the Rockies.

Here’s the monthly summary of the climate of the month of December, here in Athens and US-wide.

As in October and November, we had one major rain period that put us at the verage for the month. Even though we broke a 120-year low on December 8, December was 2-4 deg warmer than average. Here’s a summary, for our area:

June was a study in contrasts for Athens. July was simply been hot and dry, in August we had couple inches of rain above the average for the month, and in September we were two inches below average. October, November, and December have in the end afforded us just the right amount of rain. We are 20% below normal for the entire year.

And now, the details:

From the National Weather Service Climate Prediction Center, this is a plot of mean temperature anomalies for the US. That’s the difference in the average temperature for this August above or below the average for September over many years, plotted in colors. The anomalies are in Fahrenheit.


December was warmer than average for much of the country, ranging from 2-4 degF
above average in the south up to 8-10 deg warmer than average in the northern US from Montana to Maine. An El Nino, such as we are in, might predict warmer than usual weather for the north, but perhaps not this warm - as for last year in January (when we were actually in the grip of a La Nina) the intensity of warmth seems out of place.

Much of the country’s midsection got a considerable excess of rain during December. Again from the National Weather Service Climate Prediction Center, this is a plot of mean precipitation anomalies for the US:


For Athens:

We just about reached average rainfall for all three months of October, November, and December. We were, again, drier than average early on, but two rain periods toward the end of month helped to make up for the earlier dry period.

Here is the plot for our monthly accumulation of rain here in Athens for the month of December. The red line is the average over 80 years of Decembers, and the river of peach defines the standard deviation range. Blue areas mean above-average; mustard areas are below. For 2006 we didn’t break above the lower
standard deviation.


Here’s a similar plot for the entire year, and there’s a lot of mustard. We finished up for the year with only 39 inches in an area that expects on average about 49 inches of rain annually. We are therefore about 20% below normal for the year:


Here is my plot of high temperatures for the month of December in Athens, showing that we broke a record for the low on Dec 8. As usual, the black dots are for the 15 years 1990-2004 (black dots), 2006 (green line), and 2005 (red line).


In the end we had 11 days during December above the 17-year average for that day. That is significantly different from the average 5 days above average temperatures experienced during December and matched only in 1998 and 2001. There were 5 days when the lows were at least one standard deviation below the average low, and that’s similar to the average number of below-normal nights over the last 15 years.

Geekstuff:
NOAA’s weekly ENSO update tells us that a good strong El Nino continues in the Equatorial Pacific. It’s still expected to continue to intensify for the next 1-3 months, and will probably last well into 2007.

A Happy New Year to everyone. True to form, I didn’t push myself to stay up until the midnight mark but then I was probably the first one up on east coast so things do balance out.

Today is to be rainy, and that’s ok. Yesterday was warm and pleasant and my agenda, once again, was to try to catch the outgoing tide at its maximum rate of outflow. I arrived at the north end a couple of hours before low tide and although the outgoing currents were fairly strong I seem to have missed it again. Tides along this part of the Atlantic coast are semidiurnal mixed, with two highs and two lows per 24-hour period. With six hours between extremes I should probably try to arrive a little before the halfway point.

With the full moon on Wednesday will come the greatest range between lowest low and highest high. Here along the South Atlantic Bight that range will be 8.4 feet, which is fairly extreme.

The sandy flat across from the inlet at low tide, upper photo, and a couple of hours before low tide, lower photo. High tide will cover the entirety of that sandy area:




My secondary agenda was to go back over the maritime trail and collect seed samples from some plants I had found the previous day. That was quite successful and I was pleased when Glenn and I later found that I had uncovered a new woodoats species, Chasmanthium nitidum, Shiny Woodoats. I love this genus of modest grasses, with their single long spike of florets and geometrically pleasing fruits, and you’ll recall our C. sessiliflorum, Longleaf Woodoats, that is found on our property.

I located a nice Vaccinium colony, probably V. stamineum, and along with Yaupon Holly (Ilex vomitoria) collected a healthy number of berries. There were also several stands of leftover mint spikes which remain to be identified but may be Teucrium canadense, American Woodsage, or Canada or American Germander, take your pick. It would be nice to have coastal accession of this modest plant.

I spent some time toying with these likely Boat-tailed Grackles, or maybe they were toying with me, at least until they discovered that I offered even less food than entertainment. An intelligent and inquisitive bird that even I can’t mess up photographing:


Boat-tailed Grackles are a species, Quiscalus major, now considered distinct from Great-tailed Grackles (Quiscalus mexicanus) although they were previously lumped into a single species, Cassidix mexicanus. My old bird book shows them under the previous name, and gives their range as strictly Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico coastal, and Floridian. Apparently the range has been moving farther and farther northward over the last few decades, and this site has a neat animation of that progress. Each frame is a decade of bird counts beginning in 1900.