Sugar Maple Has Defined Michigan's Forests for Centuries. Its Own Seedlings Are Replacing It.

The seedlings do not know what they are ending.

Every summer for 25 years, researchers at Michigan State University walked the same ground in Manistee National Forest counting newly sprouted trees. Nearly 190,000 seedlings. Ten species. A quarter century of quiet evidence. What they found is that the forest Michigan has is not the forest Michigan is growing.

Sugar maple is the tree on the syrup bottle, the source of fall color, the dominant hardwood of the northeastern canopy. It is losing in the seedling layer. White oak, red maple and black cherry are gaining. The replacements tolerate warmer, wetter conditions better. Sugar maple does not tolerate them well at all.

Michigan holds three times more sugar maples than Vermont. The species has defined the region's forest character and its autumn economy for as long as there have been settlers to notice. The 25-year seedling data does not suggest it is vanishing. It suggests it is being replaced, slowly, in the layer of the forest closest to the ground, where the next century is being decided right now.

The forest has done this before. After the last glaciation, spruce and fir gave way to maple and beech; the record survives only in pollen cores. This one is being written down.

What fills the gaps sugar maple leaves behind is not yet certain. What is certain is that something will.

Read the full story at Michigan State University, May 26, 2026

Hot Take: The forest has been rewriting itself since the last ice age. The difference now is the pace, and that someone is counting.