Deeply Disturbed: The Emergent Forest of the Future with Peter Del Tredici

Name: Deeply Disturbed: The Emergent Forest of the Future with Peter Del Tredici
Start: 2025-09-18T19:00:00-04:00
Location: Elmwood Community Center West Hartford

Schedule

Thu, 18 Sep, 2025 at 07:00 pm

UTC-04:00

Location

Elmwood Community Center West Hartford | Hartford, CT

In person and onZoom
The northeastern United States is a naturally forested landscape and has been so for thousands of years. In his talk, Peter Del Tredici will present an overview of the recent history of the forests of the northeast as impacted by natural disasters, shifting land-use patterns (urbanization and suburban sprawl), introduced pests and pathogens, invasive species, and climate change. He will speculate on how the “emergent” forests that develop in response to these factors differ from those that have existed in the past and what the implications are for our future landscape.
Peter Del Tredici holds a BA degree in Zoology from the University of California, Berkeley (1968) and a Ph.D. in Biology from Boston University (1991). He has been doing research with woody plants since 1972, first as a research technician at the Harvard Forest in Petersham, Massachusetts and then for 35 years at the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University in Boston where he worked through 2014 as Plant Propagator, Curator of the Larz Anderson Bonsai Collection, Editor of Arnoldia, Director of Living Collections and finally as Senior Research Scientist. During his time at the Arnold Arboretum, he has made numerous seed collecting and ecological research expeditions to China, Japan and Korea. Peter was also an Associate Professor in Practice in the Landscape Architecture Department at the Harvard Graduate School of Design from 1992 through 2016. and taught in the Urban Planning Department at MIT from 2016 through 2019.
He has published more than 100 articles on a wide variety of botanical subjects including: the taxonomy and cultivation of Magnolias, hemlocks (genus Tsuga) and Stewartias, the history of plant introductions from Japan and China, and the morphology of basal sprouting (resilience) in temperate trees. His PhD thesis (1991) was on the ecology and evolution of the Ginkgo tree, and he is now considered a world authority on the ecology and cultivation of this amazing tree. Recently, his research has focused on climate change and urban ecology which resulted in the publication of the widely acclaimed, Wild Urban Plants of the Northeast: A Field Guide.
In 2013, he was awarded the Veitch Gold Medal from The Royal Horticultural Society “in recognition of services given in the advancement of the science and practice of horticulture.”