PROJECTS ︎︎︎ Research

Ducktrap River Preserve
Maine 2025

I’m currently conducting a forest inventory and analysis at the Ducktrap River Preserve, a 1,400-acre property owned by the Coastal Mountains Land Trust in Midcoast Maine. The project focuses on understanding how the loss of key tree species—eastern hemlock, ash, and American beech—may alter forest composition, regeneration, and ecological function over time.

With one year of field data now collected, I’m analyzing patterns in tree diversity, structure, and recruitment to describe the current makeup of the forest and identify signs of stress or transition. This includes assessing vulnerability to invasive pests and diseases such as hemlock woolly adelgid, emerald ash borer, and beech bark and leaf disease, as well as the presence of invasive plants that may interfere with regeneration.

By synthesizing these findings, I aim to project how the forest community may change under different disturbance and climate scenarios, and what that means for the broader ecosystem—including the streams, wetlands, and vernal pools that the forest helps sustain. Ultimately, this research will inform management strategies that support the long-term health, productivity, and resilience of the preserve’s forests.

The next phase of this project will turn attention belowground to explore how the soil environment shapes forest health and resilience. Building on the inventory and pest monitoring already completed, I’ll be examining how soil chemistry and the fungi and bacteria that support nutrient cycling and plant growth affect the forest’s ability to recover from disturbance and disease.

This phase introduces environmental DNA (eDNA) analysis as a tool for studying the biodiversity of soil microbes. By combining soil chemistry measurements with eDNA data, I’ll investigate how microbial communities vary beneath healthy and declining trees, particularly American beech, which are rapidly succumbing to severe bark and leaf disease in this area.

Understanding these relationships between aboveground and belowground processes will provide a more complete picture of how the Ducktrap River forest functions, and how shifts in soil conditions or microbial networks may influence regeneration and long-term ecosystem stability.

Methods, maps, figures, and results are available to interested parties by request.

JP Raite

JP Raite

Writing

© JP Raite