HEALTH AND CLIMATE RESILIENCE OF A WETLAND FROM A STAND OF RED MAPLES, WALLKILL VALLEY, NY

We cored a stand of red maples (acer rubrum) to investigate the health of a wetland on land owned by the Wallkill Valley Land Trust near New Paltz, NY. We sampled from a transect of ten maples going from dry land above the wetland to trees growing in about 0.5 m of standing water. Two trees that were above the wetland were both living with innermost rings dating to 1950 and 1970. Of the eight trees that were in the wetland the oldest had an innermost ring of 1923 and only one was still alive. The other seven maples perished between 1991 – 2015 at an average age of about 65 years. The years of death do not appear to correlate with distance into the wetland, and in fact the one living tree stands in the middle of the transect within 2 m of a tree that died in 2003. We were able to cross-correlate the ring growth patterns to both the county annual precipitation record and the Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI). While all the trees in this study clearly grew better in wet years, the two on dry land were more susceptible to drought than the ones in the wetland which only showed significant hardship during a major regional drought in 1965. Annual precipitation and PDSI are probably both sufficient proxies for water depth in the wetland, so it appears that, with the exception of 1965, the trees in the wetland had sufficient water cover to be unaffected by drought events. While at least two of the wetland maples certainly died prematurely, the wetland itself seems to have been able to maintain a healthy water level during all but the most extreme drought of the last century.