A decade of tree growth in just under two minutes

Every year, forest landowners plant millions of trees across Oregon. Most are planted to replace trees harvested to make wood products. Others are planted to help restore forestland burned in wildfires.

Reforestation after logging is required by Oregon law, but that’s not the primary reason landowners do it: They plant trees because it’s the fastest way to ensure that the next generation of forests is established and thriving. Planting trees is also the surest way to provide forest benefits like clean air and water, wildlife habitat, carbon storage and wood products for our kids, grandkids and beyond.

At OFRI, we get comments from time to time from concerned Oregonians: “When they log that forest, it’ll never come back. It’s gone.” They worry that the forest down the road was cut five years ago and never replanted. Odds are that it has been planted, but the trees are small, and growth takes time. What if there was a way that OFRI could speed up that time?

Ten years ago, we had an idea. What if we could document a forest growing quickly? Like 10 to 15 years of growth in just a couple of minutes? It would require a timelapse of the sort we had never seen. We didn’t know if it would work, but there was only one way to find out.

We contracted with the photography engineering company I.R.F. Machine Works, Inc., to develop and install two weatherproof, solar timelapse camera units. Next, we partnered with Stimson Lumber to install our cameras in two areas of the Oregon Coast Range where the timber company had recently planted tree seedlings. One area was planted the year before; the other was planted seven years prior. If both camera installations kept working for seven years, we would, in theory, be able to capture the first 14 years of growth in a new forest. We turned the cameras on and crossed our fingers.

And they worked, for the most part! The cameras took anywhere between six and 118 shots a day. They survived gale force winds, ice storms and heat domes. We lost a few weeks here and there due to electrical or photo file issues. Once, a bird stole an external control button! We visited the cameras twice a year, to swap memory cards and give them a checkup. In total, between the two cameras, OFRI collected more than 175,000 images.

It took months to sort through the images, but eventually we assembled a short timelapse video called A Forest Begins. When you watch it, you can see that the Coast Range really is a fantastic place for trees to grow. The trees in the video put on two to three feet of growth each year. Bright green needles sprouted from the branches every spring. Before we knew it, the trees were tall enough and full enough to block our cameras, bringing the project to a natural end.

On the heels of our first multi-year timelapse project, we’ve begun a new one, in an area that was burned by the Beachie Creek Fire in 2020. We set up two cameras to compare a forest that was salvage-logged and replanted with one that will recover on its own. Who knows what it will show… check back in another 10 or 15 years to find out!

Jordan Benner
Director of Communications