Peyton Joachim measures the circumference of a tree Thursday, Sept. 21, 2017 in the Lilly Dickey Woods in Brown County. Staff photo by Carol Kugler
At a glance
Lilly-Dickey Woods is now owned by Indiana University and was a gift 75 years ago of two Brown County neighbors, J.K. Lilly, a scion of the founder of Indiana pharmaceutical manufacturer Eli Lilly and Co., and Marcus Dickey, personal secretary and biographer of Indiana poet James Whitcomb Riley. The two donated adjacent plots to then-IU Chancellor Herman B Wells in 1942. Wells made a promise that the forest would remain in a natural state for use in art and biological research. The woods is closed to the public.
For more about the IU Research and Teaching Preserve, go to www.indiana.edu/~preserve.
Deep in the woods of Brown County, Mark Sheehan and Peyton Joachim don vests full of equipment and hike up hills and scurry down ravines. They stop on the uphill side of almost every tree to measure its diameter using a special measuring tape, and then either check an existing tag or place a new aluminum tag around the base of each tree.
They are working in 90-degree heat, with insects buzzing around their heads, to document all the trees in the five plots, called quadrats, that remain. In all, there are 625 20-meter quadrats within the 62 acres that are being studied as part of a Smithsonian Institution-funded project that is collecting data from forests around the world for scientists to study. The project, Forest Global Earth Observatories network or ForestGEO, has 51 long-term forest study sites in 22 countries around the world. At each site, the same precise measurements are taken of trees, with that data being compiled by researchers at the site and then uploaded to a database.
From June through August, Sheehan, a technician in the Indiana University biology department, led a four-person team that cataloged each tree with a diameter of 1 centimeter or more at breast height, which is 4.5 feet from the uphill side of the tree’s base. Since classes at IU began in late August, it’s been Sheehan, Joachim and a few others who are working to complete the project. Sheehan expects to finish the final quadrat today.
When the project is completed, almost 30,000 trees will have been measured.
The 62-acre area of the forest can only be reached by hiking for almost an hour or riding in a jeep down a rutted, log-strewn dirt road. Large old-growth trees tower overhead, shading the forest floor where the researchers climb the hillside to begin cataloging trees in a new quadrat, this one on a hillside not far from a grove of young pawpaw trees.
“It’s the oldest trees and it’s the least disturbed area,” Sheehan explained of the plotted area. He estimated some of the trees — red and black oak, black gum and pignut hickory — could be 160 years old.
“The work that we’re doing is only descriptive work,” he said. “It all gets put into a database that can be mined by researchers all over the world.”
This is the second time the trees within the plot have been cataloged. The first time was in 2012, and that information is now part of the ForestGEO database.
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