But contemporary, human-caused climate change is rapidly reconfiguring this climate to a warmer one with less regular and more extreme events of rain or snow, making freakish droughts, early arrivals of spring, and warm winters more common. The extant maples have adapted, by and large, to climatically temperate conditions: warm summers and cold winters, with occasional dry periods interspersed with regular precipitation. Their evolution as a genus occurred through geographical radiation across the Northern Hemisphere, interspersed by extinctions and range retractions when climatic conditions became inhospitable.Ĭontemporary maple diversity is the result of this history and represents only a single, still snapshot from a larger, unspooling reel.

Like oaks, willows, and birches, among many other genera, the maples as we know them today differentiated from their nearest relatives at a time when the global climate was hotter and wetter than today’s and have since survived a long period of cooling and drying, including many ice ages.

Today, the maple genus ( Acer) extends its reach from Guatemala to Canada, the Mediterranean to Scandinavia, and Southeast Asia to the Amur Valley. There was no connection between stored carbon and increased stand biodiversity, but maintaining a biologically diverse forest reduces pest damage to maple, benefits wildlife, and may strengthen forest resistance to climate change.For all of human history and many millions of years before it began, the forests of the temperate Northern Hemisphere have been populated by maples. Surveys indicated that sugarmakers favored the new management style if their trees were healthier and lived longer. Differences were similar across cold hardiness zones and sites but not always by year due to normal yearly fluctuations in pest populations. Increased tree species diversity in sugarbushes using ecological management significantly reduced presence and impact of sugar maple insect and disease pests. Researchers also surveyed sugarmakers' attitudes towards non-traditional sugarbush management. They determined carbon sequestration using a USDA carbon calculation tool. Researchers estimated stand health based on tree crown transparency ratings. At nine sites (three each in USDA plant cold hardiness zones 3, 4, and 5) in New York, Vermont, and New Hampshire, researchers quantified pear thrips, maple leafcutter, sugar maple borer, maple trumpet skeletonizer, maple anthracnose, and eutypella canker incidence. NSRC researchers compared abundance and impacts of insect and disease pests between traditional management (90-100% sugar maple) and ecological management (25% of the basal area non-sugar maple). These sugarbushes produced sweeter sap per tree but were more vulnerable to pests and diseases, impacting long term health and sustainability of the stand. Historically, sugarbushes were monocultures of sugar maples with large crowns. A well-managed sugarbush is a unique ecosystem, producing maple syrup and providing rich habitat with significant environmental benefits, which can include forest biodiversity and carbon sequestration. In New England, maple is an important source of income for family farms.

Vermont maple tree types