Scott Hall:
Time now to talk about the history of our forest, where we try to take an in-depth look at some natural resource based issues important to our region. We not only discuss the issues, but we also try to highlight some creative initiatives related to the topic. In our current series, we're focusing on the history of our local forests. And John Almendinger joined us last month to talk about how glaciers influence the types of forests we have in our region. And John is back now, joined by Mark Jacobs, our producer for this series. And Mark's also a retired forester from Aitkin County. And Mark and John, welcome back.
John Almendinger:
Thank you.
Mark Jacobs:
Good morning.
Scott Hall:
Hi. So, we're going to start off by asking John <laugh> about this mapping project he's involved in. John, you're involved in the pre-settlement forest mapping project. What's that all about?
John Almendinger:
40 years worth of work, <laugh>. Wow. I've been telling people for years, "It's been 30 years: It only took me 30 years!" And I realized, I started in 1980. <laugh>. My math is a little off. We started in 1980 at the University of Minnesota, and we wanted to make digital versions of the public land survey records. These records required the surveyors to record notes about the natural features of the land as they surveyed it. And of course, the land had to be surveyed. It could be sold or dispersed among private citizens, or sold often by investors that didn't quite live here, <laugh>, so they had to take fairly detailed notes about what they saw and what they recorded so the lands could be sold. So, it was sort of like going on Amazon or something like that and saying, "Hey, that 40 looks pretty good to me. Maybe <laugh> I'll buy that." So, they recorded an awful lot of stuff about the vegetation. I wouldn't say a snapshot in time. It took from 1846 to 1908 to survey the entire state.
Scott Hall:
62 years.
John Almendinger:
So it took quite a while, but it's a vision of what the state looked like. They recorded all kinds of things about the land as they saw it. Mostly to dispense of the land so it could be sold and settled, with an emphasis on timber and agricultural [uses]: what the land might be able to produce for the people who were gonna settle it.
Scott Hall:
Do you think it's accurate to say the landscape was largely unchanged by the native populations that live here?
John Almendinger:
I would say it was largely maintained by them. They were very clever about doing things, and there are some big differences. I know Mark wants to finish with some, "How is the world now spectacularly different than it used to be?" So, I think maybe we'll get to that. But there are definitely some big differences about the way we have managed the land ("we" meaning people of European descent) compared to native people.
Scott Hall:
<affirmative> Say, Mark, you were land commissioner and a forester for many years. What did this survey (and also the project that John's worked on with mapping) mean to you as the land commissioner and forester?
Mark Jacobs:
Well, it was always very interesting. John kept us up to date on what was going on with it while he was working in our county. So we even had access to some of the maps- the early versions of the maps- so we could kind of look at what some of our pre-settlement forest look like in Aitkin County.
Scott Hall:
Okay. Well, okay, I've got a question here. What is the Marschner map?
John Almendinger:
This is a story in itself. People may find this interesting. Francis J. Marschner has already done this in 1929 and 30. He somehow read these notes, and made a map for the state of Minnesota. It's a one to 500,000 scale map, which probably means nothing to anybody listening to the radio right now, <laugh>. But a map of Minnesota at that scale is about two and a half feet wide and about four feet tall. And, it was a hand drawn map. There are two sets of these field notes that the surveyors turned into the surveyor general, which was in Dubuque, Iowa, and later moved to St. Paul. There are two sets of these notes. There are 200 volumes that hold these notes where they were jotting down about trees and everything else. And there're also plat maps of every township in the state making up these maps. So, they knew what the vegetation was like where it crossed survey lines, which are every mile. So the mile grid of sections.
John Latimer:
So that was the grid. One mile.
John Almendinger:
One mile grid.
John Latimer:
They'd make a north south line, and then they'd go back and come one mile over and make a north south line...
John Almendinger:
It's not quite like that. The subdivision started in the southeast corner, would go north a mile, then connect to the line east and west. The principal meridians were surveyed first. Then the standard parallels were added later by really good survey crews. And then the townships were done, and then the townships were subdivided.
Scott Hall:
So this Marschner map must have been really useful to you.
John Almendinger:
We don't know why it exists necessarily. Marschner moved to the states in 1920s, we believe. He worked for the Department of Agriculture. He was a cartographer from Austria and studied in Berlin. He came here and he saw these notes: the two handwritten copies, one went to the surveyor general in Washington DC. One went to the surveyor general in Dubuque, Iowa. And he said, "This is so cool, I can make a map out of this." And he did! We have no idea how he did it. He read all these notes, (or apparently read most of them). 200 volumes. Wow.
Yeah. First of all, if you're interested in the history of this, (and I will leave this with John) there's an article by a man named Tim Brady in the Minnesota Conservation Volunteer. If people are interested in tracking that down, or if they're interested in seeing the plat map of their township, you can go to the Bureau of Land Management right now, and you can see those on your computer. You would need special software to download it and actually make a map. But you can see the image.
Scott Hall:
Really? You can look at it though.
John Almendinger:
Yep. You can go see the images. And anyway, Marschner made this map a long time ago, and it has been the touchstone for setting conservation goals for virtually everybody: Forest Service, DNR, County land managers, parks, everybody has used this. When people say, "My gosh, we've lost X number of acres of wetlands in Minnesota. We gotta do something about this." Well, how the heck do you know? We've known since 1930 (and especially in 1974 when the map got republished by the North Central Research Station for the Forest Service) the answer has been, "Well, you looked at Marschner's map."
Scott Hall:
So, Mark, I think John's partially answered why we want to understand pre-settlement forests. Is it so we can do restorative work? Or is it just to understand the history of change on the landscape? What do you think?
Mark Jacobs:
Well, a little of both. I mean, we used it in its early stages to compare, "Okay, what are our forests like now? And what were they like then based on what we had?" And then when we did our long-range management planning, we kind of tried to set some goals. Obviously, we had a lot less upland conifer, like pine and all that. So, we had an initiative that we wanted to increase that over time. Not that we were ever gonna get back to that pre-settlement situation, but move kind of in that direction.
Scott Hall:
<affirmative>. How would you move toward that pre-settlement direction?
John Almendinger:
I don't think that's ever really been our goal. At least, not necessarily, because all that stuff's changed and we got climate change to deal with now. But, it does tell you something about the potential of the land that is sometimes semi-erased. I mean, we've had a lot of rotations of Aspen, for example, and it's hard to know. We had, say, a white pine initiative years ago. Is this a good white pine site? How would you know? Most of it's gone. There're some stumps out there, but you could look at the survey notes, and if it was chock-full of white pine historically, maybe that's a good place to do it. We've also learned a lot about natural succession. We've done some fancy stuff with the diameters and stocking densities of the trees that we can get out of these notes. So, we've learned a lot about how forests used to work. The big question now is, "Can they still work that way? Do we even want to make them work that way again?" But those are all important things for people to know. And, by golly, if you're going to restore something, we ought to know what we're talking about. So, facts matter.
Scott Hall:
Yeah.
John Almendinger:
Facts do matter, which is why I got interested in this. I mean, the one thing that has always been a bit mysterious about this is, "What in the heck did the surveyors actually mean?" The legend of the Marschner map is talking about groves, cane breaks, brushland, swamps, marshes... What really were those things? Which leaves open a lot of interpretation. The conservation-minded person might say, "Oh, this is what this was, and by golly, we need more of it." And a person more interested in using the land might have a totally different concept about what those words meant. So, a lot of what I've been doing is trying to lend some more scientific basis to it. So the map I'm working on is different from the Marschner map because we have published three volumes of books that are field guides to the native natural vegetation of the state. So, if somebody's interested in restoring vegetation, now there's guidance because they can go, "Oh, I know what a northern mesic forest looks like now." There'll be a map of where they used to be. And now there are species lists. There are the descriptions about how they worked. So, now there's just a lot more guidance about how you might go about restoring it, maintaining it, or even it might be more valuable timber in the future. We're looking at climate change. So, that's why I'm doing it, because I think it's gonna be a lot more guidance, especially in the area of forestry. But, farther west, there are just habitats that are totally gone from the land.
Scott Hall:
Mark, I know I think over half of Minnesota's forested lands are privately owned. Is this something a private landowner can use?
Mark Jacobs:
I really think it would be limited use. I think if they were getting a management plan done on their property could certainly be part of the picture. But at the scale of somebody owning 40 acres, I'm not sure that it would be particularly useful.
John Almendinger:
There's gonna be some scale issues. We really only know what it was like along a section of a line and we're trying to make a map. So, in both cases, the clerks in the offices that made these plat maps originally, what Marschner said they looked like on the interiors of these sections, and what I'm gonna end up modeling, is a bit on the imaginative side. We only know what they saw along the line.
Scott Hall:
Wow.
John Latimer:
So you're looking at one line, and then you're going over a mile and looking at another line, and you're trying to interpret what might have existed between them.
John Almendinger:
Yes. And so, we'll be modeling the county soil survey. Polygons will give us the polygon structure, and then we will probably do some adjusting based on LIDAR.
Scott Hall:
What's LIDAR?
John Almendinger:
Oh light. Oh, you would have [to ask]. It measures accurate topographic [distances].
John Latimer:
Imagine a map of the surface of the ground without the trees and whatnot. You just get the elevation changes.
Scott Hall:
Kinda three-dimensional though.
John Almendinger:
I can't remember the acronym at the moment. [It's LIght Detection And Ranging!]
Mark Jacobs:
John, what are some of the major differences? Were there any surprises when you started digging into it?
John Almendinger:
There are surprises everywhere, Mark. It's amazing how the world has changed. The biggest one is that the land used to be much wetter, and that the contrast between wet and dry is very sharp now. So, we had lots and lots of land that was in my interpretation, spring wet. So, we had tons of land around here that was swampy involving species that you wouldn't see normally in what we would call an upland. It was mineral soil, but it was really wet and it was tamarack. We had lots and lots of upland tamarack. It grew with aspen. Now you don't see that combination of trees commonly now. But aspen and tamarack grew together all the time, especially in the meadow lands around here. There's a 1927 paper by a guy named Stallard who said, "Oh yeah, aspen and tamarack go together all the time." He said, "There's a vegetation type like that."
And upland cedar: we had lots and lots of upland cedar. It just doesn't exist anymore, except maybe on the north shore. We had lots of that. We had thousands and thousands and thousands of acres of brush land along the prairie/forest border, which I would say was probably maintained largely by indigenous people. They used it, it burned all the time. We have virtually no brush land habitat left in the state for a lot of species, like prairie chickens and stuff like that. Maple is hardly mentioned at all. Now, we got maple forests everywhere. Everywhere. So since fire protection, we have developed a lot of hardwood communities and climate change is very much favoring them in the future. So, I totally expect that hardwood forest in the future will become more and more important to forestry and possibly some other industries like maple syruping.
Tamarack was by far the most abundant tree in the state. You would think it's white pine if you go to the local cafe <laugh> and look at the pictures. White pine is only about 6% of the original trees: tamarack, by far [was more common]. And it's just taken a beating. First by saw flies. It's had all kinds of insect disease problems. And now, we got just hundreds of thousands of acres standing dead now in Lake of the Woods County. The river bottoms- they're all silver maple now- [they] weren't [before]. They were elm and ash, historically, if not open meadows and alder bottoms.
Scott Hall:
Wow. It's really changed a lot. Well, okay, you said that it was a lot wetter- are we in a trend of things are drying out more?
John Almendinger:
Well, yeah, we're in a trend getting drier! <laugh>. Okay. That's what the climatologist say! You need Bob to come back, <laugh> for a cameo here.
John Latimer:
We're basically talking about drainage, aren't we? We're talking about wetlands, right?
John Almendinger:
We're talking about the road ditches, the ditching of the peatlands, agricultural drainage. I mean, I'm looking at stuff that were tamarack swamps in Aitkin County. I'm going, "Oh yeah, that was solid tamarack swamp." And you look at the air photos and it's all farmland now. You're going, "how are these guys doing that?"
Scott Hall:
Because they ditched and drained...
John Almendinger:
And I think it was organic enough that it probably burnt down to the mineral soil and including maybe a lot of the tamarack stumps. I mean, it must have come out pretty easy. I don't know. Some old guy would <laugh>, the historian would have to tell me how that worked.
John Latimer:
Sorry, I'm an old guy, but I ain't that guy.
John Almendinger:
<laugh>. Well, some of that's amazing. The other thing is that we have for years tried to restore savannahs because there's a similar map in Wisconsin by a guy named Finley. A lot of people have done this after Marschner.
Scott Hall:
What's a savannah again?
John Almendinger:
Well, that's a good question.
Scott Hall:
Uh oh, here we go.
John Almendinger:
Savannahs are basically prairies with scattered trees. The Nature Conservancy people are gonna hate me <laugh>, because we have been restoring savannahs for years in Minnesota. And the vegetation of Wisconsin came out, and they're describing these savannahs. They mapped many of them and their pre-resettlement map by Finley. The word savannah doesn't occur in a single note in Minnesota. There are 812,043 notes that I've read <laugh> and tried to make some sense of it. The word savannah doesn't appear, apart from the Savannah River (the proper noun for the Savannah River <affirmative>) and Savannah Portage. We had brush land, we had openings, we had prairies, we had scattering timber, which might be savannah lite. We had all kinds of stuff. But the word doesn't appear. Are we restoring something that never existed? I don't know. Maybe savannah's a perfectly fine word for oak openings. <laugh>, We had lots of them! But I think it was patchier. The orchard-like vision of what savannah is probably isn't too accurate. It was probably patches of brush in little low areas and then prairie. But, going through these records is worth it to get a more accurate picture, <affirmative> of what it is we're trying to accomplish.
Scott Hall:
Well, we have to close the conversation now, but maybe that's a good one to close it on. What are we trying to accomplish? Mark? <laugh>
Mark Jacobs:
Just increase our understanding of what our forests are all about. Looking back, we can get a sense of what they used to be. Like John mentioned, I don't think it's realistic to recreate that. And I think the perception that this was a wall of white pine from Little Falls to the Canadian border certainly isn't true <laugh>. Right. And it just gives us another tool to do a better job.
Scott Hall:
On that note, we have to say goodbye for now, but we'll have more conversations related to this, won't we? Mark?
Mark Jacobs:
You bet.
Scott Hall:
And thanks for your great work in producing this series for us. That's Mark Jacobs, retired land commissioner and forester from Aiken County. Mark joins us once a month for programs about our forests. And John Almendinger, always good to see you.
John Almendinger:
Yep. Nice to be here.
