Nostalgia, mixed with a bit of curiosity, can lead to some important insights.
When Richard Karban, an ecology researcher at the University of California, Davis, decided to return to the forest he surveyed in 1977 — this time accompanied by his daughter Claire, a graduate student in ecology at the University of Colorado, Boulder — he expected to see little change. After all, when he first visited Whiteoak Canyon in Virginia’s Shenandoah National Park, he’d seen much the same tree composition that Lucy Braun described in her seminal book Deciduous Forests of Eastern North America, published in 1950. “At that time, my impression was that the forest hadn’t really changed that much,” Karban said.
In 2021, he was in for a shock. “We were quite surprised to see that since 1977, the forest had changed dramatically,” Karban says. Most of the mature chestnut trees had vanished — the victim of ...
