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Aspens In A Changing World

By Justin Caudill, WDA/WLCI

As a member of the Wyoming Landscape Conservation Initiative's (WLCI) Coordination Team, I have had the opportunity this fall to tour two Aspen Restoration Projects. These projects are financially supported through partnerships with other agencies and entities and the WLCI. The main purpose of this article is to share some of the information I have acquired while attending these tours.

  • Aspen trees use less water than conifers; a conifer will use four to five times more water than an aspen tree.
  • Conifers do not lose their needles over winter and hold snow and ice on their branches. This allows for sublimation, where a solid such as ice or snow transitions into a gaseous state without becoming a liquid, meaning water is lost into the ambient atmosphere.
  • Conifers grow and block out sunlight choking out other plants, preventing undergrowth in a conifer stand. Compared to aspen stands, which allow much more sunlight to reach the soil surface, have a richer understory of shrubs and herbaceous species. The forage in a stand of aspens can be up to six times as rich as that under coniferous forests. An aspen stand has three to four layers of vegetation, ranging from small trees like juniper and chokecherry, to shrubs like snowberry and serviceberry, to wildflowers, grasses, and sedges.
  • Aspen leaves, twigs and bark are very nutritious, which elk and deer use to overwinter. Black bears, cottontails, porcupine and snowshoe hares feed on bark, buds and foliage.
  • The root systems of aspens lay dormant under soils dominated by conifer populations, waiting for a surface disturbance and removal of conifers to provide sunlight allowing aspen ciones/shoots to grow.
  • Due to past fire management practices, the disturbance of fire in most forests has been selective for conifer forests. This action has slowed the normal rotation between dominant tree types from about a hundred years, to hundreds or even thousands of years in some cases.
  • Newer fire management practices allow fires to burn in controlled patterns, reestablishing a more normal disturbance cycle and allowing sunlight to reach the forest floor. This stimulates the dormant root systems of aspens, providing new growth of aspen shoots and stands.
If you have any questions or would like more information on aspens or WLCI, contact Justin Caudill at 307-352-0378.