STORRS- Two professors, a master's candidate and a research assistant walked into a forest.
Their boots crunching in the snow, the research team made it to their experiment, a young stand of sugar maples and other species that has been thinned out and wired with sensors.
"They are swaying more," said Jenna Klinck, the master's candidate, who analyzes how trees react to forest thinning and build up strength afterward.
The group has monitored this site for more than a year as part of its efforts to learn how managing the deeper section of roadside forests could reduce outages from major storms.
Tree management plans from the state's two electric utilities largely ignore this slice of the state's forest — from about 10 feet to 100 feet in — even though researchers and the state's top forester say a significant number of outages are caused by trees falling into the lines from farther in the forest.
"When the big storms come, these trees get a big gust and they can't withstand it," said Mark Rudnicki, assistant professor of forest ecology at UConn. "We want to then change that forest edge structure so that doesn't happen as much."
Trees just inside the forest are generally weaker than the ones along the road that are adapted to wind because they are not regularly exposed to it. To fix this, the team is focusing on thinning out the forest, giving the choice remaining trees more room to grow, which will slowly make them stronger.
The research, though in its initial stages, hopes to offer a management plan, called Stormwise, that mirrors the type of in-depth community-centered approach to tree risk that led to the Firewise program to address wildfire risk.
And the snowy patch of forest might hold some answers to how this could work.
In August 2012, researchers attached sensors to the trees, measuring how they sway back and forth in the wind. A year later, foresters thinned the trees, exposing them to more wind. Though the initial thinning exposes the trees to more wind, the stress pushes them to get stronger and the swaying should lessen.
Just feet inside the forest, many trees lack wind strength because their growth is focused vertically to reach sunlight. When stronger storms blow through the usual protections of the outer forest, the inner, less stable trees topple.
"If you expose a tree to more wind, it will respond by changing its growth strategies, its priorities," Klinck said. "Instead of focusing on trying to grow taller, it will increase woody growth to the stem, the bowl and to the root structure, really wherever it is feeling most stress from the wind it is going to strengthen those areas."
Rudnicki said the stress changes the shape of the trees and the properties of the wood itself. The trees develop thicker rings and the tree becomes more flexible. "Trees do phenomenal things when you start to acclimate them to the wind."
He has researched how trees collide into one another to absorb wind energy during storms.
"There's a lot of wind energy absorbed by collisions," he said. "Until you get a sudden burst, and you're all alone and you can't rely on your neighbors anymore. We want trees to be more independent, more self-stable."
One difficulty to this process is it requires more time and resources. The forest would need to be examined, rather than merely trimmed back. Towns would need planning. And homeowners would need to sign off on any work. But the process would not need to keep pace with the five-year trimming plan. Rudnicki said the deeper forest management would operate on a 20- to 30-year cycle.
When the forests are thinned, the researchers plan to arrange that the wood be milled on-site, when possible, for lumber to be sold to support the program or to compensate the land-owner whose trees were cut.
Stormwise has two other experiment locations — one in Portland and another in Litchfield — where the trees have been thinned to stimulate growth and strengthening. They hope to establish two more sites wired with sensors in coming months.
The researchers see the project as something to be added to existing trimming practices.
"Some of the trimming that's already been done along the forest edge is something that I may not find all that objectionable right now," said Thomas Worthley, assistant professor of forestry at UConn. "What I would seek is that in addition to that wouldn't we also manage 100 feet in."
Rudnicki said the existing trimming policies will likely improve the electric grid but it won't address the problems he and others have seen with the interior forest.
The researchers share worries about the public's view of trimming and management. Those worries have peaked in recent weeks, causing the utilities to request additional meetings with regulators on the policies.
"What we fear is that even with the enhanced trimming, during the next storm that comes along there is going to be this tree that's 50 feet in that falls outward, and people are going to say, 'You went through all this trouble trimming trees and they're still falling down,'" Worthley said.
Rudnicki added, "They're going to be so turned off about the whole business that they won't listen to a more nuanced approach … that's my worry."
State Forester Christopher Martin called the Stormwise project an "innovative" approach to protecting the grid from strong storms. According to input he received from tree wardens throughout the state, Martin said the forest outside of the utilities' protection zones caused a lot of the damage.
"What took out the power grid wasn't necessarily within 8 feet of the lines. It was trees 40 feet off from the side of the road," he said. "Those storms that hit us — Irene, Sandy, the October snowstorm — they were of a different breed, and there's a recognition that no amount of roadside tree trimming that would have given us resiliency."