"Maples tend to survive even extreme amounts of damage."
Tim Perkins
plant biologist
The ice storm in late March dealt a hard blow to northern Michigan’s maple syrup producers, damaging trees and cutting production short.
The Northeast United States experienced something similar after an ice storm in 1998. But research there points overwhelmingly to recovery for sugar maples.
In Michigan, maple producers are facing partial or total tree crown loss in their sugar bushes. That crown is the engine of a maple’s sugar-making factory.
Sugar maples in the Northeast suffered similar damage in 1998, but even trees that lost 50% or 75% of their crown tended to regenerate that crown, in some cases after only three years.
“The trees look really odd,” said Tim Perkins, retired research professor and former director of the University of Vermont’s Proctor Maple Research Center. “They look like lollipops because they're just stems with all these branches and leaves coming out of the stem, but they do actually serve the function of producing sugar for the tree and providing energy for the tree to grow.”
Perkins said what makes maple great for tapping also makes them good at recovering from natural disasters.
“The injured parts of the tree don't ever recover themselves. What they do instead is grow new tissues around the wound,” he said. “They compartmentalize the wound, or wall off the wound. That's why maples tend to survive even extreme amounts of damage.”
They’re good at keeping the rot resulting from a wound contained. They generate new growth and continue producing sugar, unlike many other trees.
“It's probably an adaptation to being damaged by wind, by ice, by snow: breakage happens all the time in the forest” Perkins said. “It's also an adaptation in young trees to being browsed … very heavily by deer, and they have to be able to re-generate their branches and leaves.”
Perkins said many of the trees damaged in the Northeast — even ones that were completely stripped of branches — recovered.
He says it’s likely Michigan’s trees will recover too, as long as they’re not hit with other stressors in the meantime. And while maple producers wait to see what happens, it’s best to let the trees be.
“One of the things that we learned from the ‘98 ice storm was people who didn't have the extreme amount of damage where the trees are all toppled [over], should be cautious about going in and salvage cutting trees that are still standing,” he said.
Perkins’ advice to Michigan maple growers whose trees were damaged: Give it a little time and see what happens. Within 10 years, he said, many of those damaged trees could very well be back to their full syrup-making potential.
