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- Native Americans have used maple trees for centuries, but warming climate changes sugar season
- High temperatures and extreme weather stress maple trees
- Syrup producers are taking steps that extend their season
- Maple season could start weeks earlier by the end of the century
For centuries, the Abenaki people of the northeastern US and Canada saw the maple tree as a gift from their creator, arriving just before spring when their ancestors' food supplies were low.
The sweet, amber syrup and the people who make it face an uncertain future. of the continent virtual Confectioners – revered for their sap and autumnal colors – cannot escape the changing climate.
Rising temperatures affect maple trees, bringing more extreme weather, earlier sap flow, shorter sugar periods and invasive insects. Some predict it may get too hot in parts of the northeastern US for the sugar bushes, as the Abenaki call them, to remain where they have stood for centuries.
When you add drought and disease, “you throw in multiple threats to these tree species and they leave the forest and weaken entire ecosystems,” said Andy Finton, director of landscape conservation for the Nature Conservancy in Massachusetts.
The good news is that maple syrup producers, working with university researchers and using newer technologies, have extended their seasons and increased their syrup harvest. However, long-term concerns remain for producers, natives and those who love trees.
For the love of trees
“Maples are the whole package,” Finton said. They either wear bright summer greens or fall greens bright orange, red and yellow or standing there with bare bark make their presence known.
“When you round a bend in the trail and you just see a stand of sycamores, they say, 'We're here, this is our forest.' It's usually just an amazing spot,” he said, “with shrubs and wildflowers and ferns.”
Trees are native to indigenous communities throughout the northeastern US and eastern Canada, said Dave Arquette, a member of the Akwesasne Mohawk Nation, Bear Clan, which crosses the St. River. Lawrence between New York and Canada. “When we thank creation and we thank the trees, we see the maple tree as the leader of the trees because it gives us sap for medicine and gives us maple syrup.”
Historically, women oversaw sap collection and sugar production, said Alexander Cotnoir, a citizen of the Nulhegan Band of the Coosuk Abenaki Tribe, which owns lands in Burton, Vermont. The George Washington University graduate student comes from “a long line of candy maples.”
His ancestors heated the sap in a series of soapstone pots over fires, then poured it into a trough and moved it back and forth with a wooden paddle to produce the sugar. Traditionally packed in handmade birch bark cones, sugar was lighter than syrup and easier to transport as the tribe moved on to farming, hunting and fishing grounds for the spring and summer.
Adam Parke, owner of Windswept Farm in Barton, Vermont, answered the call of the maple trees in his family's backyard when he was in the second grade. He tapped 60 trees, learning to anticipate the rise of sap at just the right moment to capture the first blush of sweetness.
“It's something that got under my skin, and it's been with me my whole life. I love doing it,” Parke said. He bought his 40 acre farm when he graduated high school and has been tapping trees for 43 years.
Over the past three decades, it has seen a 10-day shift forward in the confectionary season, he said. He notices that maple trees are reaching their fall peak more often than in the past.
“I think maples are under stress from climate change, although it's a long-term, slow process and it's very difficult to determine exactly what's happening,” he said.
Cotnoir's family also noticed an earlier sugar season and more erratic temperature swings in the spring, making it difficult to predict when we'll start hitting.
His science maple construction syrup
Even though sap season is over for this year, maple trees are busy preparing for next year. The trees are most active around the summer solstice, said Tim Rademacher, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Quebec who studies the effect of weather and climate on maple trees and the candy industry.
Their leaves capture sunlight and carbon dioxide and create the necessary sugar molecules that could eventually end up in a bottle of maple syrup. The average age of sugar molecules in syrup is about 3.5 years, Rademacher said, but they can be as old as 10 years.
Trees need rain while making sugar. A June drought means the sugar content is lower next year and more juice is needed to make the same amount of syrup, Parke said. “These wild swings in rainfall, drought and temperature affect how trees make their sugar and store their sugar.”
In recent times, winters have been shorter and milder. December brings less snow and more rain, he said, and that means less snowpack to protect roots from freezing temperatures.
In early spring, the right combination of cold nights and warm days helps create pressures on the wood fibers and vessels that draw sap up the tree.
Cold winters tend to produce higher sugar concentrations the following spring, Rademacher said. “It's very clear to us that the climate has a huge impact on exactly when the season will happen and how good the season will be.”
Winters with extreme variation, such as 60-degree temperatures in January, followed by deep freezes in February and March that quickly turn into hot springs, can disrupt sap flow and syrup production, Finton said.
Such weather-related issues were blamed for a 17 percent drop in U.S. output last year and a 21 percent drop in Canada.
In Canada, where a single red maple leaf adorns its flag, syrup production soared in 2017, then a harsh winter and early spring sent it to a three-year low in 2018. Production rebounded to a record high of 14.3 million gallons in 2020. before plummeting in 2021, prompting Quebec maple syrup producers to tap into strategic maple syrup reserves to meet demand.
Combating climate impacts
Climate change in the maple sugar era began more than a century ago and then accelerated in the second half of the last century, said Timothy Perkins, a research professor and director at the University of Vermont's Proctor Maple Research Center.
By the turn of the new millennium, it had shifted the start of juice production about nine days earlier, with a greater change in Massachusetts than in Maine, Perkins said. The transition from winter to spring began to happen so quickly that it had an even greater impact on the closing of the season.
Maple syrup producers and researchers have looked to technology for ways to extend their seasons and production. Improvements in vacuum tubes and drainage have helped them extend the amount of time the juice flows and have higher yields.
The pipes, connected to the taps on the trees, create a positive pressure to stimulate the sap flow and transport the sap to the sugar shacks, where filtration systems remove water from the sap and reduce boiling time. By keeping faucets and lines cleaner, Perkins said, germs can't enter the faucet hole and dry up the juice flow.
Climate models vary on how much a warming planet will affect the maple season, Perkins said.
A study by the Northeast Climate Science Center concluded that maple use could begin two to three weeks earlier by the end of the century, and the best areas for syrup production could move north. A report by the U.S. Department of Agriculture noted that the season could only go so far in some locations.
In the long term, the area of maples will shrink northward as temperatures rise, Finton said. Their abundance is projected to decline in southern New England, Pennsylvania, and other areas to the south as their range center moves north into Canada.
For indigenous tribes, changes to maple trees are just one of the threats to their traditional way of life. Ice fishing is also affected, Cotnoir said: “The amount of time we can go ice fishing is much shorter than it was when my grandparents were my age.”
These impacts raise concerns about their ability to continue growing, harvesting and preparing their cultural foods.
Although Arquette worries that the changing climate could mean the fulfillment of a prophecy he heard that maples would one day disappear, researchers are hopeful for the future. They see the plight of maple trees and producers as a call to action.
If the world takes quick action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and prevent the growing effects of climate change, they said, trees could survive and even help combat global warming.
“Nature is very resilient,” Finton said. “Give the trees a break, minimize the stressors on the forest and they will do the rest.”
Sugar maple can be a good tool, providing economic income and protecting forests, the habitats they provide and the carbon contained in them, Rademacher said. And that helps fight climate change where it happens.
Dinah Voyles Pulver covers climate change and the environment for USA TODAY. She can be reached at dpulver@gannett.com or on Twitter @dinahvp.
