For my Fall 3-week course I took a geology course. For my final lab for the course, I decided to go into the woods and measure 100 Loblolly Pine tree trunks to find the average circumference of those 100 Loblolly Pine trees in order to be able to find the age of the top two thickest trees.
The processes basically went like this. I got a friend to come with me into the woods and to help find the trees do measurements, then I went and analyzed the data. I logged all the circumferences into a chart on MS Excel, and created categories for each of the measurements to fall into such as 1-2 feet, 2-3 feet, 3-4 feet, 4-5 feet, and 5-6 feet. That way, when I went to make a graph, it wouldn’t have 100 bars for the 100 trees I measured because they would all fall into the catagory of however large their circumference was. From there, I did more analyzing and research, because it’s usually almost impossible to get the exact age of a tree without cutting it down and counting the rings of its trunk. The forula I ended up using was circumfrnce of the trunk divided by Pi to find the diameter, then multiply the diameter by the growth factor, which happened to be 2.19 in order to estimate the overall age of the tree. I only did this for the two thickest trees I found. the tree that was 6 feet around was estibated to be around 50 years old, and the tree that was 6 feet 9 inches around was estimated to be 56.5 years old.
Then I moved on to the importance of why I was doing the experiment and research to start with, which was to show trees and forests roll in climate change, biodiversity, and to talk about the negative impacts of deforestation.
Lex: This is really helpful information about the relative age of the loblolly pines in the Guilford Woods! It suggests that tract was planted some time around 1970, perhaps somewhat earlier.