Anyway, we were walking along one of the trails that everybody uses, and came to an area where a bunch of trees had fallen. It was about four trees, maybe as many as six. There were no large storms that I remembered during the summer, or before that, at least not something violent enough to take down that many trees, especially since one of them was about three feet in diameter. Which by the way is a pretty large tree for that particular forest. I went off the trail, since that is how I prefer to go for walks in the woods, and went over by the area with the fallen trees. I noticed that they were near a dried up stream. I could tell because it was an area that had nothing growing and the rocks were washed clean of any dirt and had no moss growing on it. Also the dirt in the dried stream was a reddish color, like clay. I found this interesting, that the same area that had fallen trees, also had a recently dried clay stream.
Another thing to note is that the summer was kind of a weird one. We had a really dry period, with no rain at all, then a week or two where it rained everyday, then it went back to dry.
I went home and looked up some of the reasons that trees collapse or fall, especially since I didn't think it was from a storm. Nothing really came up. I then looked up the effects of drought on trees, since it had been a particularly dry summer. What I found was pretty interesting. On this page (http://txforestservice.tamu.edu/main/popup.aspx?id=1283) I found some information about areas that have soil with a lot of clay in it. On the page it said "Soils with a high clay content will hold water much better than sandy soils. Trees growing in clay soils tend to be shallow rooted and may be more severely impacted by prolonged drought than trees growing on loamy or sandy soils where roots will grow deeper. Most of a tree's feeder roots that absorb moisture and nutrients are located in the upper 12-14 inches of the soil. When a clay soil dries out, the impact on the tree can be great since the tree is not "accustomed" to sending roots deep into the soil for moisture and nutrients."
I found this to be very interesting, and developed a theory of what caused the trees to fall (although I am not sure that I am right.) What I think happened is that the trees, since they were growing in clay, had very shallow roots. They suffered quite a bit during the dry period in early summer, because there roots did not go down far enough to pull out moisture. Then when the rainy period came, the soil and clay surrounding their roots might have partially washed away and caused the trees to become unstable and fall. Finally the weather returned to dry and the stream dried up.
Again, I am not sure if this is what happened, but the facts seem to fit.
I think that this would be something that I could teach to students as well. Seeing the fallen trees made me think more about how much the weather effects what grows around us, and how plants adapt to their surroundings. Talking about the fallen trees could be a good lesson to teach to students.
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