The List In the background we see old-growth in Four Holes Swamp, home to the oldest documented baldcypress (Taxodium distichum) in South Carolina. (photo ©2007 Neil Pederson)
The List In the background we see old-growth in Four Holes Swamp, home to the oldest documented baldcypress (Taxodium distichum) in South Carolina. (photo ©2007 Neil Pederson)
The Eastern OLDLIST is a franchise database of OLDLIST, a database of ancient trees and their ages. The purpose of this list is to identify and highlight maximum ages for species in eastern North America. This list will contain only well-verified or well-documented tree ages, often verified against other records.
The oldest trees world-wide are typically conifers living in arid to semi-arid environments or at elevational/latitudinal treelines. The oldest known tree in the world, Pinus longaeva, lives in a combination of these extreme environments (Schulman, 1954). In contrast, eastern North America is generally warm, moist, and dominated by broadleaf species. Maximum tree ages in this region are often much less than other regions, and are often overlooked. Nevertheless, Thuja occidentalis, Taxodium distichum and Juniperus virginiana) can attain surprising ages.
These pages are intended to inform scientists, naturalists and general dendrophiles. Other than roughly ten to twenty main species in eastern North America, it can be argued that little is known about species longevity and persistence in the forest within the region (Pederson et al., 2007). Undoubtedly there are great things and surprises to be learned in these less-well studied species; just check out the maximum age of Nyssa sylvatica!!! We would like to also characterize the distribution of ages for species across space. In some places, like the Piedmont or Lake Ontario physiographic provinces or places like St. Lawrence and Mississippi Valleys or say, Mississippi, old trees might be hard to come by. Therefore, we especially encourage submissions of tree ages from highly impacted areas where ages might not be near the maximum age for a species. We hope to use this information to deepen our knowledge of these forests and help us predict how forests might change in altered climatic and ecological conditions (see Loehle, 1998; Loehle, 2000; Dayton, 2003; Schmidly 2005).
Please submit old ages and photos of old trees to Neil Pederson
For technical issues, email John Peterson