The Woody Plants Philosophy
A forethought. . .
Woody plants is a unique
course, one the likes of which you will never
experience again in your college career. While at times
the course is strenuous and rather stressful, the memories and
knowledge you take away from this course will be among the
most valuable you have gained at this or any other university. We
focus on learning great amounts of material in Woody Plants,
both in lecture and in lab, but at the same time we focus
on having a little fun. Try to enjoy
the time you spend outside in lab . . . . few
courses allow you to learn out-of-doors for five hours each week.
Study hard, learn the plants, attend the lectures. But have
fun with it. You'll surely be rewarded. Learning
how to work hard and have fun is an integral
part of your Woody Plants experience. You'll be hard-pressed to find
a former student of this class -- whether he
or she did well or not -- who did not enjoy himself or
herself by the end. Thirty years of Woody Plants students can't be
wrong!!!!!!
Photo by D. Kashian
The Ecosystem Approach and
Woody Plants
One of the objectives of
the course is to learn the plants in ecosystems
of the geographic region of southeastern Michigan. Although
our focus appears to be the plants themselves, it is actually
the entire landscape ecosystem in which they establish, reproduce,
and maintain themselves. Plants are inseparable from
the life-giving atmosphere (above- and belowground),
physiography, and soil. Each plant species, therefore,
has a characteristic ecosystem or range of ecosystems of
which it is an integral and notable part. Landscape ecosystems
are segments of the earth's living skin, fully functional
entities -- units of nature on the face of the earth. Any
single perceptible ecosystem is a topographic unit, a volume
of land and air plus organic contents extended areally over
a part of the earth's surface for a certain time. Although
we concentrate on studying the plants of these units,
it is important at the outset to place them
in an ecological framework so we can understand
both the physical or abiotic context, as well
as the biotic context, in which plants grow. Because many
of the plants we study have wide distributions, we find
them growing in similar ecosystems in the western
Great Lakes Region, the midwest, or the northeastern
US and adjacent Canada. Thus, an understanding
of the ecosystems of southeastern Michigan
is not only a conceptual framework but provides considerable
understanding of plant-site relationships in eastern North America.
Landscape ecosystems, besides
forming a mosaic in local areas we visit, occur
at different spatial scales. Thus we conceive the landscape
as ecosystems, large and small, nested within one another in a hierarchy
of spatial sizes. The ecosphere is the largest ecosystem
we know, and it can be subdivided into landscape ecosystems
of different sizes. If we take as our focus a large regional landscape,
the size of the state of Michigan, for example, it can be
subdivided into a hierarchy of ecosystems. By studying its climate,
physiography, soil, and vegetation we divided Michigan's landscapes into
three hierarchical regional types: Regions, Districts,
and Subdistricts. Below the subdistrict level
there are further levels of ecosystem types
based on the basal landforms (outwash plains, old lake
plains, ice-contact terrain, and moraines) and types within them down to
the local level of ecosystem types that we observe as a mosaic
in our field labs -- swamps, bogs, ridges, lower slopes, river
floodplains, etc. Our field work in Woody Plants
takes place exclusively in Region I (Southern
Lower Michigan) and District 1 (Washtenaw) of
Lower Michigan (see figure 1 in course pack). Within the
Washtenaw District, we visit landscape ecosystems and
study plants in three different subdistricts:
Maumee (1.2), Ann Arbor (1.3), and Jackson
(1.4). The Maumee subdistrict coincides with the lake
plain of old Lake Erie and is characterized by flat terrain that
was once (before drainage for agriculture) poorly drained
except for sandy beach ridges. In Lab 4 at
Lawrence Woodlot, we'll see the distinctive
tree and shrub species of the seasonally wet sand lake
plain.
The Ann Arbor Subdistrict
(1.3) is characterized primarily by fine and
medium textured moraines. These are large features
of glacial drift that were deposited by the Wisconsinan
ice sheet as it stagnated in southeastern Michigan.
The soil has a matrix of many fine particles
(silt and clay) and is mixed with gravel, cobbles,
and stones; this unsorted material is called till. Most of
this land was cultivated because of its relatively good
moisture status and high fertility. Beech-sugar
maple forest once dominated the area, but now
they are exceedingly rare. In our first lab at Miller's
Woods, we'll see a small remnant of this landscape ecosystem
type and its distinctive flora. Bird Hill (Lab 6) is a
highly disturbed piece of moraine landscape. Radrick
Forest (Lab 2) is also located in this subdistrict
and illustrates both till and outwash kinds
of parent material.
Many of our labs (Waterloo
Recreation Area, Lab 3; Haven Hill, Lab 4; Stinchfield Woods, Lab
9) are located in the Jackson Subdistrict (1.4)
where ice-contact terrain prevails. This
landscape of hilly, broken topography with many swamps and
lakes supports an extremely diverse mosaic of ecosystem types
and plants. Plants relegated to the dry ridges and slopes
(northern pin oak, black oak) and those of poorly drained
swamps (bog birch, poison sumac, leatherleaf) are in close
juxtaposition to one another.
Throughout the course we'll
be placing the plants we study in an ecological
framework, the characteristic landscape ecosystems where
they grow and persist, their "home place". Wherever you
live and work, you can take with you this ecosystem approach,
therefore, to study the plants of the area in their regional
and local landscape ecosystems. It provides
the basis for understanding why plants grow where they do.