Paul Bass Photo
De Anda: Regeneration nation.
Joshua De Anda knelt to pull weeds amid a forest of oak trees — that towered, for now, barely above his knees.
In the process he has been helping his city and his country figure out how to enable the “king of trees” to thrive again and truly tower in its indigenous habitats.
De Anda was doing the work in a field he helped clear and plant in Edgewood Park near the Edgewood Avenue Bridge.
That is one of eight parkspaces cleared this spring and planted with 1,200 white oaks and chestnut oaks by a crew from New Haven’s arbor-ardor Urban Resources Initiative (URI) and ex-offender training EMERGE program. Two are in Edgewood Park, the others in East Rock and near Yale’s Upper Westville golf course.
The clearing and planting and stewardship of the eight plots are taking place as part of a multi-state Native Oak Regeneration experiment hatched by the U.S. Forest Service. Yale has contributed $25,000 for a post-grad student working on natural areas, and the Wilderness Conservation Society has contributed $69,000 to support URI’s participation in the climate-adapted research with the U.S. Forest Service.
The goal is to see under what conditions different kinds of oaks can thrive again in areas where they reigned for centuries but are no longer cropping back up after their forebears die, thanks to a changing climate and hungry deer.
The stakes are high not just for humans who love parks, but for 1,500 species that rely on oaks for survival, and for the natural storage of carbon, said URI team leader Chris Ozyck (pictured above).
“All our forests are under assault from different diseases and climate change. A lot of people think forests are static. They actually move as climate change happens. We know this from the glacial era. They’re thinking: Let’s do a long study with thousands of oaks planted in all these different cities to seek which ones do better, and if assisting them makes some sort of sense,” Oyzck said.
“Oaks were in New Haven pre-Colonial times. They are indigenous. The king of trees. Oaks are 300-year trees or more: They spend 100 years growing, 100 years standing still, 100 years dying. A lot of people think: Birds eat berries. Berries aren’t around all the time. They need protein. Where is the protein? In insects. The trees are loaded with insects.”
To start the project, URI gathered and sent acorns to a Forest Service facility in Tennessee. The URI/EMERGE crew cleared the park plots, pulling up invasive species, erecting a fence to keep out deer.
Then the Forest Service sent up the saplings with a map of four-by-four locations designated for each by a randomized computer program. The crew dug “sleeves” in the dirt to slip in each red or blue or yellow-tagged sapling. Now, as occurred on Wednesday morning, the crew returns to tend the area, continuing weeding, maintaining the fence.
But they’re not to water the trees. Part of the idea is to monitor the soil and see how each tree fares in order to apply the lessons in future replanting on a larger scale.
Years before this started, Friends of Edgewood Park volunteers were already on the case. Group stalwart Frank Cochran (pictured) had noticed on his wooded walks how few new oaks were popping up. He realized deer were eating the buds.
He started by “picking up acorns on the sidewalk” and scattering them in the woods, including by the old “archery field” clearing down the slope from the Yale Avenue side of the park. Some new oaks have begun growing. That field is now one of the eight regeneration project plots.
URI has given the Friends leftover saplings from the project. On Wednesday morning the group was at work clearing an area adjacent to the newly fenced plot to plant more of them along a hillside. (Watch volunteers Margaret Conable and Karl Mini successfully bring down a towering dead tree on that hillside at the end of video higher up in this story.)
The Edgewood Park oak project has regenerated not just the trees, but the spirit of at least one crew member, De Anda. He’s in his second summer interning with URI and about to graduate with his degree from the Yale environment school.
De Anda said he’d spent much of his time in recent years inside offices doing save-the-planet work.
The pivot to outdoor work with URI has changed the trajectory of his career. And recharged him.
“A lot of us can get overwhelmed with the the problem of climate change, whether it be personal impact, natural disaster,” he reflected. “It can be scary, anxiety producing. That can push us to overdo ourselves and get burned out.
“Doing this on the ground work has forced me to slow down. It has been a way to heal and replenish myself.
“I feel great. I’ve found my pace.”
The National Forest Service’s Max Piana (a Yale forest school grad) is coming to town on May 6 to discuss the project and give away baby oaks for New Haveners to plant in their yards. The talk, at East Rock Park’s Trowbridge Center, begins at 11 a.m.
Nothing quite matches the oak in generating seeds and nuts for wildlife. But ironically, wildlife poses a big challenge to regenerating oak forests. As this article points out, the growing deer population just loves to browse oak saplings. It's great to put a fence around an urban plot, but that's not feasible outside cities.