Project Overview
Commodities
- Additional Plants: trees
- Miscellaneous: syrup
Practices
- Crop Production: forest farming
- Sustainable Communities: local and regional food systems
Proposal abstract:
Climate change is shortening winters in the northeast in turn initiating earlier sapflow during the maple season. Larger maple operations responsible for installing many taps may adapt to this pressure by tapping earlier in winter dormancy, ensuring they capture sap when it begins to flow. We know that the tree’s wound response is temperature dependent and diminished during dormancy. Trees respond to tapholes, and other wounds, by compartmentalizing the affected tissue and surrounding area, results in the cessation of sap flow, thus the name Non-Conductive Wood (NCW). It is vitally important to the tree that this portion be minimized in volume by generating a rapid and robust wound margin. In the context of maple sugaring, not all tapping practices generate the same volume of NCW yet the sustainability model is fundamentally tied to the relationship between the trees annual increment and the volume of NCW generated. This project aims to quantify the non-conductive portion of sapwood generated in response to tapholes installed at 6 different points throughout the dormant season to understand this relationship if one exists.
Project objectives from proposal:
Objective 1. Establish relationships between taphole wounding and timing of installation as they apply to the maple sugaring industry. The response variable will be the volume of NCW generated by tapholes installed at 6 different time periods within dormancy. These data will let us determine whether there is a difference in NCW formation across the 6 treatments, and if there is, where the greatest differences are.