![]() Just looking at the drone photos, you can tell how is going into a bowl there and then spilling over into the forest,” said Bingham. But so far, the woods have been inundated. The project was designed to reconnect “Belle Isle’s internal waterways to the river and restore the Wet-Mesic Flatwoods forest to enhance habitat for a great diversity of animal and plant species,” according to the project website. “When they opened up Lake Okonoka, that water just whooshed in,” Bingham says, referring to the Lake Okonoka Habitat Restoration project. It’s also home to several species of concern listed by the MNFI, including the threatened Pumpkin Ash ( Fraxinus profunda) and special-concern Shumard Oak ( Quercus shumardii).īingham, a Detroit-based arborist, and co-owner of tree service company Singing Tree, estimates that roughly a third of the forest’s overstory has died since the floodwaters began rising in the spring of 2019. ![]() Belle Isle’s woodland represents one of the largest remaining examples of this ecosystem type. ![]() But it represents the types of specimens that are being lost here in large numbers.ĭrone photographs show masses of dead canopy trees on Belle Isle, especially where Lake Okonoka has inundated the island’s Wet-Mesic Flatwoods ecosystem, a swampy type of forest that the Michigan Natural Features Inventory lists as “imperiled” in Michigan. The oak was likely killed years before the flooding that has hit much of the woods on the eastern end of the island. Kevin Bingham estimates the age of a dead oak tree, a piece of which is being used to block off a flooded portion of Belle Isle’s Central Avenue, at 195 years.
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