What is causing the trees in the interior of belle isle to Die?

I've visited Belle Isle for many decades - since a child. I have favorite trees I've photographed. The interior of the Isle that you can access from two winding roads was always tree dense with the occasion deer hiding within the stands.

Visited recently and immediately noted that many of the interior trees as well as some flanking the ponds are dead! They never having come out of winter dormancy. The concentration is along the inner isle tracks. Anyone else notice?

It's been happening for a while but it IS very noticeable now.

https://planetdetroit.org/2020/08/di...twoods-forest/

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/winds...wilt-1.3991951

I will upload photos I took in a bit......

It's from the flooding that has occurred the last few years. You can see it in the small islands on the interior lake across from the coast guard station. Theres a ring of dead along the shore, and live trees in the higher center of the island. The roots can only take so much water.

Even during non-highwater years, the eastern wooded area of Belle Isle was almost like a bog, with a high water table, and a wetlands appearance with standing water. So this flooding is not surprising, when the island is just a few feet above the river level.

Before the flooding, there was a terrible rash of oak wilt running through the island. And before that, EAB.

The state's botched canal "restoration" project sure hasn't helped. Exposed the woods to high river water levels resulting in long term flooding and left the canals as overfilled green cesspools of sludge.

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Originally Posted by ndavies

It's from the flooding that has occurred the last few years. You can see it in the small islands on the interior lake across from the coast guard station. Theres a ring of dead along the shore, and live trees in the higher center of the island. The roots can only take so much water.

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For several months, the high water levels flooded the most of the east end of the island. At one point, the flooding covered the Strand, Lake Okonoka, Woodside Drive and the woods over to Central. Even the road right next to the Coast Guard station was covered with water.

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Originally Posted by EastsideAl

The state's botched canal "restoration" project sure hasn't helped. Exposed the woods to high river water levels resulting in long term flooding and left the canals as overfilled green cesspools of sludge.

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I agree, btw the Lake Okonoka habitat restoration project was the Friends of the Detroit River. Their biggest mistake was when they ran into permit problems for the culvert that would run under The Strand. Without having the permit to install it, they pulled the steel plates that closed off the Blue Herron Lagoon from Lake Okonoka. Months later they got the permit. Even with record high water levels in the region, removing the plates didn't help.

Because of high water levels in the area, last summer the DNR had a seasonal coffer dam installed to stop the Blue Herron from flowing into Lake Okonoka. It lowered the water levels in the island but this is why there's stagnant water in the canals.




For some reason in 2011, when the EPA removed 150 feet of shoreline between Blue Herron and the Detroit River, they didn't install any type of dam. To me, that would have been the logical place for one.

The worst part to me is that they seemed to base the estimates for their project on river levels that were already out of date and didn't seem to have consulted anyone who had lived on the lakes over the long term or who had any historical memory of Belle Isle. My family has had a cottage on Lake Erie for over 70 years and in that time the water level has seen huge fluctuations, from giving us 30 feet of beach to collapsing our bank and taking down trees. The one constant has been change.

Those plates were there for actual reasons, not just to screw up their ecological visions, however admirable they may be. A big reason was the flooding that occurred in the same place in the '70s, to much the same result, as anyone who spent time on the island in those days would remember. The plates in fact stopped it from severe flooding again when water levels got high in the late '80s.

The water was going to get high again of course, as it always does. But these spreadsheet utopians decided to "fix" the island's water system, first by opening the lagoon without regulation to the river's flow, then by removing the very thing meant to protect the system from the effects of river level fluctuation just at the moment when the water was rising like crazy. Now, we have dead trees, a destroyed woods, and flooded stagnant canals full of weeds. I could just scream.

Eastside Al and JRiordan, Thanks for the honest posts about what actually happened. This was a total debacle by the DNR, Coservancy, and the Army Corp of Engineers. All those "learned" minds, and no caught, pointed out, or listened, that you can't open an enclosed area to a seven mile an hour river flow without a way for the water to exit that area.

Here are some photos I recently took. The trees look really bad.....

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At the last pre-Covid lockdown, DNR, Conservancy, and John Q. Public meeting, the concern about forest destruction was brought up by one of the audience members. The DNR replied we'll just plant a new forest. No joke. I'm on the island a lot. Those trees and the dead trees you see next to the pond islands, and around the Belle Isle perimeter were all killed by the flooding.

Zacha341, those first 2 photos are on Central. Closer to Lakeside the road was under a foot of water and had to be closed. I'm not surprised by the aftermath. Thank-you Sam Lovall and Friends of the Detroit River. With friends like these, who needs enemies?

^^^ This amount of water is even a bit much for the Weeping Willows that are abundant on the island!

Satellite photos from 2017 show it pretty clearly.

There is not enough carbon dioxide [[CO₂) in the atmosphere, and it's effecting life all around the globe!