Growth of Invasive Trees

Part of our work saving the bottomland hardwood forests is quantifying just how bad our invasive woody species actually are.  In that vein, we established a group of marked (natural recruits) invaders out on our Trail C at Woodlands Trail three years ago and have been looking at their demography each year since.  This allows us to estimate the rate at which these species couple take over the canopy if left unchecked.

We have marked all of our trees with spray paint and located their exact positions with our sub-meter GPS.  Last year we had the brilliant idea to actually put numbered aluminum plant tags on these suckers.  The only issue we discovered this season was the growth rate of these trees is such that these wires holding the metals tags to the tree sometimes could not keep up with the phenomenal growth in the girth of these trees.