The Silver Maple tree (Acer Saccharinum)

Today's post will be about the Silver Maple tree.  The Latin name for this species is Acer saccharinum.  Unfortunately, this tree can also be referred to by a lot of other names, including creek maple, water maple, soft maple, white maple, and silverleaf maple.  We like to stick to just silver maple.  Unfortunately, the Latin name for silver maple is very close to the Latin name for sugar maple (Acer saccharum), which can be very confusing for budding botantists (pardon the pun).

Here's a photo of a very large silver maple in Lincoln Park, Nebraska.  No, not Linkin Park.  

You can see that this tree doesn't necessarily need to grow beside creeks or water.  There's a large silver maple in Mactaquac provincial park that I should have taken a photo of.  There are actually a lot of silver maples in Mactaquac, but I'm thinking of one in particular by the new skating trails.

Within Canada, the range of the silver maple has a moderate overlap with the range of red maple, although red maple grows both further north and further south.  Here's a map for silver maple, courtesy of Wikipedia.  You'll notice that it doesn't extend too far into the Maritimes, but that's changing as the climate warms.  Residents of southern Ontario are quite familiar with this tree though.

 

Perhaps the most unique thing about the silver maple, in my eyes, is how deep the notches are between the lobes on the leaves (especially the two notches on either side of the central notch).  The leaves are very visually distinct from other maples.

 

 

The seeds of the silver maple come in paired samaras, like other maple trees.  However, quite commonly, only one seed of the pair will develop fully.  The shape of the seeds is also slightly different than some other types of maple.  Here's a beautiful photo, which came from a very nice blog post by the Michigan Nature Guy, which you should check out.  Lots of good info there!

 

Here are a few Fun Facts about silver maples:

1.  Silver maples are one of the first trees to wake up in the spring.  They are also important for bees, because they are one of the first trees to produce pollen in the spring.

2.  Silver maples can be "variably dioecious," which means that the trees can be male or female, or they can also be monoecious, which means that a single tree has both male and female flowers.

3.  Silver maple is a very fast-growing tree, often adding two feet per year.  But if you're planting it near your house, we recommend that you be careful.  It has a very large strong root system that might seek water and compromise your foundation.  Try to keep it at least 15-20 meters away from your house.

Silver maple is a fun tree to plant, when seedlings are available.  We've included silver maples on several of our projects.  It's a great species for restoration projects, especially when moist soils are available.

Thanks for reading!

- Jonathan "Scooter" Clark

www.replant-environmental.ca

Replant.ca Environmental is a Canadian company that plants trees for carbon capture and builds community forests.  We also plant trees in national, provincial, and municipal public parks to mitigate damage from wildfires, storms, insects, and forest diseases.  We operate thanks to numerous small contributions from the general public, in addition to larger project sponsorships from businesses and corporations around the world.  If you'd like to learn how to show your support, visit our donations page.  Even if you aren't able to make a contribution, we very much appreciate when people are able to share our posts or our website link on social media, to help spread the word about the work that we're doing!

Teachers are welcome to use content from this post for their classes.  If you know a teacher who might like to use this information, please share it with them!  The more that people learn about trees, the better our world will be.

To learn more about the various species that we plant, visit the conifers page or the deciduous (hardwoods) page on our website.  Thanks so much for your interest!

Incidentally, our organization is often seeking additional land for our carbon capture projects.  Please visit this link if you might know of a recently-harvested property that we could rebuild into a permanent legacy forest.

 

  

Creek Restoration Tree Planting in the Elephant Hill Fire, British Columbia

Our organization performed some creek restoration work in central British Columbia this past August (2021).  The work was done in an area in central British Columbia, in the Kamloops region, in an area that had burned during the Elephant Fire in 2017.

 

The Elephant Fire was an enormous wildfire that occurred in central BC in 2017.  By the time it was finished, it burned 191,865 hectares.  For our readers that understand acres, that's just shy of half a million acres.

To put that into perspective, the average amount of ground in BC burned by wildfires each year between 2010 and 2016 was less than the size of this single fire.  Stanley Park in Vancouver is 405 hectares, so this fire was the size of 473 Stanley Parks.  New York City's Central Park is 341 hectares, so this fire was the size of 562 Central Parks.

Here's a graphic (courtesy of NASA) that shows the location of our project.  This satellite imagery was taken on August 22nd, 2017, while the fire was still active.  Note that North is not quite vertically oriented to the top of the map:

 

And for those of you who are unfamiliar with Clinton or Cache Creek, they're in south central BC (alongside Highway 97), as can be seen in this graphic from Google Earth:

 

Various governments, NGO's, and corporations have been working hard for the past few years to help reforest this wildfire.  That work will continue for a few more years, due to the sheer size of the burn.  Tens of millions of trees will have eventually been planted by all of the various entities combined.

A lot of the work done to date has been concentrated on land parcels that were already established within the provincial forestry GIS system.  Some of these areas were never-harvested Old Growth Management Areas, and some were previously-harvested forestry cutblocks.  However, because the Forest and Range Practices Act of British Columbia prohibits logging alongside creeks and within stream buffers, the areas that have been replanted to date often exclude those important strips.  Unfortunately, the wildfire did not respect the same boundaries.  We now have a situation where a lot of forest creeks and streams now have no tree coverage, which is bad because these watershed features are the most important parts of local ecosystems.

Our goal for 2021 was to target some of those creek buffers, to help restore the vegetation belt.  The areas that we worked in [to date] were almost exclusively pure conifer stands before the fire, so even though we planted thousands of trees on this project, we limited this phase of the project purely to conifers.  Although we love to plant deciduous species on many of our projects, we also need to mimic nature, which informed the final prescription.  The conifers will also provide better shade opportunities in the late winter and early spring, moderating the severity of the spring freshet.  In future phases, however, our goal is to include cottonwoods, trembling aspen, birch, and rocky mountain maples.  And luckily, these species are all starting to regenerate naturally too, which is very helpful to the local watersheds.

 

 

What is especially unfortunate is that as large as this fire was, it was only the third-largest fire in British Columbia in 2017.  The Hanceville Fire and the Plateau fire were both significantly larger.

If you'd like to learn more about the Elephant Hill fire, here are several media articles:

thenarwhal.ca/bc-forest-fires-restoration-secwepemc

www.coastmountainnews.com/news/rancher-helps-find-cattle-in-elephant-hill-fire

wildfiretoday.com/2017/07/31/elephant-hill-fire-in-british-columbia-grows-to-194000-acres

www.coastmountainnews.com/news/2017-elephant-hill-wildfire-most-likely-cause-by-smoking-materials

www.kamloopsthisweek.com/local-news/foi-documents-offer-closer-look-at-cause-of-elephant-hill-wildfire-4445360

You can see more photos of our 2021 tree planting work in our public 2021 Planting Photos folder on Dropbox.

 

Thanks for reading!

- Jonathan Clark

www.replant-environmental.ca

Replant.ca Environmental is a Canadian company that plants trees for carbon capture and builds community forests.  We also plant trees in national, provincial, and municipal public parks to mitigate damage from wildfires, storms, insects, and forest diseases.  We operate thanks to numerous small contributions from the general public, in addition to larger project sponsorships from businesses and corporations around the world.  If you'd like to learn how to show your support, visit our donations page.  Even if you aren't able to make a contribution, we very much appreciate when people are able to share our posts or our website link on social media, to help spread the word about the work that we're doing!

To learn more about the various species that we plant, visit the conifers page or the deciduous (hardwoods) page on our website.  Thanks so much for your interest!

Incidentally, our organization is often seeking additional land for our carbon capture projects.  Please visit this link if you might know of a recently-harvested property that we could rebuild into a permanent legacy forest.