Agenda - Environmental Policy Board - 11/06/2006

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management, type of disturbance, presence of non-native invasive trees, dominant trees and quality of the natural community. In order to find out something about the future forests and woodlands of Ramsey, we separated out information relating to those trees 4" or less DBH. Trees less than this diameter are traditionally known by foresters as regeneration. In this study, trees of this size class may represent trees planted by landowners or natural regeneration. Results Combined Data. A total of 55 tree species were represented by 2,333 trees. 870 trees were counted in the plots located in Areas 1 (244 trees), 2 (260 trees) & 4 (366 trees). 1,463 trees were counted in Area 3. Of the 55 species, 23 were represented by less than ten trees. The most common tree found was red pine followed by Siberian elm, bur oak, boxelder and Colorado blue spruce. Red pine made up 22.2% of all trees surveyed while no other species accounted for as much as 5%. Of some significance is the fact that only seven red pines were found in Areas i, 2 & 4 combined, while over 500 were found in area 3. Three invasive species, Siberian elm, common buckthorn and Amur maple together account for over i i% of the total number of trees. Rank 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 Table 1. Twenty Most Common Trees Species Pine, red Elm, Siberian Oak, bur Boxelder Spruce, Colo. blue Ash, green Buckthorn Oak, red Ash, prickly Ash, black Spruce, white Aspen Cherry, black Cherry, ornamental Crabapple Maple, Amur Maple, silver Pine, eastern white Redcedar, eastern Pine, jack Count Percent 517 22.2 114 4.9 113 4.8 102 4.4 102 4.4 89 3.8 84 3.6 79 3.4 76 3.3 75 3.2 75 3.2 74 3.2 72 3.1 71 3.0 68 2.9 60 2.6 58 2.5 56 2.4 56 2.4 45 1.9 Note: Caution should be used in any attempt to draw conclusions from the combined data. Different methods of sampling were used to obtain the information. Also, there is no indication the subdivisions used in this survey are representative of the City as a whole, these types of subdivisions or of any forested cover type. A complete tree list can be found in the Appendix. Area 1. The 244 trees counted in Area i represented 28 different species. However, most of the tree species tallied in Area i were found only occasionally or rarely - ten species were only represented by a single tree. Boxelder (16.8%), buckthorn (14.8%), bur oak (13.1%), prickly ash (9.4%) and aspen (8.6%) were the most common trees, in that order.