U-M Biological Station Burn Plots

UMBS and most of northern lower Michigan was logged intensely in the past two centuries to build everything from ships to homes. Lumber barons cleared nearly all of the marketable timber and fires swept across the region before the establishment of UMBS.

The rapid, yet intense, history of logging began when Emmet County was established and the General Land Office Survey started in 1840. In 10 years, the population surpassed 300 and commercial logging of uncut timber was well underway. As many as 200 million board-feet of white pine, red pine, and hemlock timber were cut, according to the late Professor Burton V. Barnes. By 1896, lumbering reached its peak and declined steadily over the next few decades (Kilburn 1960).

Near Pellston, home to UMBS starting in 1909, fires engulfed areas of logged land consistently between 1880 and 1920. “No timber remained in the pine lands, and no attempt was made to guard against fires or even to put them out” (Kilburn 1960). Accounts claim that fires of unmarketable wood were started by farmers seeking to clear the land, the carelessness of transients, or other inadvertent causes. Fires kept the timber down, encouraged dense thickets of blueberries and huckleberries, and left the landscape devoid of trees.

"[T]he last of the logging involved the UMBS land and occurred in the winter of 1879-80. The winter was snowless... To transport logs, tracks had to be made of logs, a car built, and the logs carted downhill in railroad fashion to Reese's Bog and Burt Lake and thence by water to Cheboygan" - Jack Spray of Pellston (interview with Kilburn, 1960)

The first students and faculty to arrive to the U-M Biological Station in 1909 could never have imagined the research potential, resources, and impact for future generations of students and scientists.

The UMBS has now been recovering ecologically for over a hundred years. It beautifully demonstrates that good ecological research can be conducted on formerly damaged ecosystems. The disturbed ecosystem offers an ecologically interesting and unique context to study processes of succession, restoration, and global change (Wilson 1986).

Starting in 1911, Frank Gates, a plant ecologist and Professor at Kansas State University, studied ecological succession in many systems around the Douglas Lake area. His interest in Aspen-dominated forests and secondary succession led to the first burn plots treatment in 1932, a clear-cut and subsequent burn that was "very light and had little effect" (Thompson 1978).

“When that first experimental burn occurred, it was done out of curiosity. He wanted to know what kinds of trees come in immediately after major disturbances, so he decided to start an experiment,” said U-M Professor Emeritus Knute Nadelhoffer, former UMBS director.

The next attempt occurred in 1936 with a timber harvest and deliberate burn of remaining slash. With it, the UMBS Burn Plots were born. What followed is nearly a century of burns every 10-20 years on contiguous plots and a rich body of research on forest disturbance and succession in northern lower Michigan aspen forests.

“These burn plots are a time machine that allows us to look back at forests of different ages. They are a deliberately manipulated set of forests that have been, and will continue to be, a tremendous teaching and research resource.” - U-M Professor Emeritus Knute Nadelhoffer, 2017

University of Michigan Biological Station field courses provide students the opportunity to design, develop, and conduct their own research projects, often with opportunities to contribute to the long-term monitoring of ongoing research field sites.

Undergraduate and graduate students have collected data from the UMBS burn plots for their individual research projects in classes since the 1940s—especially in Boreal Flora, Plant Ecology, and General Ecology classes. Data spans across taxa and time.

Student papers are available as scanned pdfs on Deep Blue and in-person at the U-M Biological Station. Not all student papers contain raw data. The quality of experimental design, data collection, analysis, and writing also varies across student research.

Hear more about the power of long-term ecological research for student learning from UMBS Director and Professor Aimée Classen:

I am really excited about what we have accomplished over the last hundred years, but I'm way more excited about where we are going in the next hundred years - Aimée Classen, UMBS Director and Professor