Is there A RAINFOREST in New York? 

He hiked slide mountain alone, so every time you see a shot of him hiking it he had to go back to get the camera afterwards or when he was walking towards the camera go back after putting it down and hike that part of the trail again. He backtracked a ton (which as a hiker is one of my least favorite things to do) for footage for us, that's some dedication.

Mike is such a sweet old man oh my goodness. I absolutely love how much effort and care he has put into all of his research! Such a great video!

Upstate New York is truly a hidden gem of the US. I am so glad I had my exchange year there! I still remember visiting the Adirondack Mountains... what a great time!

Knowing both the Catskills and the Adirondacks, the Catskills have been far more extensively deforested than the Adirondacks. While the peaks of the Catskills were not always deforested they were stripped of their largest and most valuable trees. While the Adirondacks have greatly suffered there remains virgin forest that may indeed support the understory you are looking seeking in a rain forest in New York State.

As an octogenarian who grew up in the southern Adirondacks, I appreciated your comprehensive survey of the ecology of the Catskills, and find it corresponds well with the environment and geology with which I am familiar. Thanks for yet another excellent presentation.

Someone needs to digitize and preserve all of Mike's maps and records!

Hi from Italy!! I'm a plant physiological ecology student in Rome and your videos always stimulate a lot of critical thinking. It's amazing how you can be very easy to understand for people who aren't familiar with these subjects yet still keeping academic relevance. This video in particular has motivated me to investigate whether here in Italy we could have rainforests, as we do have some places with over 1500mm of precipitation that weren't under ice during the last ice age. I will be looking into this matter for sure. If you ever want to come to Italy for a video like this I'm here to host you! Italy is very fascinating from a biological, biogeographical and geological point of view. It's the most biodiverse country in Europe and we have lots of endemisms since it's a peninsula cut off from the rest of Europe by the Alps.

As a forestry student, please keep making videos about forest ecosystems. This was one of my favorite videos of yours!

Great video as usual! Nice to see that Michael Kudish is still hiking the Catskills. Regarding the boreal forest at the top of the peaks, I agree that it is not a temperate rainforest. However, it might be a boreal rainforest--some researchers have recognized this in the published literature (e.g. DellaSala et al 2011, including Paul Alaback as a coauthor). It is very likely that cool summer temperature is the cause of the boreal islands in New York Mountains, a topic my research group has researched extensively. If summers were warmer it is likely that drought-tolerant temperate tree species would be there. BTW the hanging moss is a lichen (probably an Usnea species)--we have them in boreal forests in Minnesota as well.

This is my favorite video you've ever done. PLEASE do more like this. Also, Mike seems like the greatest man ever and I wish he was my friend.

I’ve lived in the Adirondacks for 41 years, it is unlike any place on earth, there are so many secrets and so many mysteries. Great video.

I was in one of Mike’s first dendrology classes when he started teaching at Paul Smith’s College. Definitely one of the classes I most enjoyed. What a pleasure it would be to go out in the field with him again after 50+ years. I have to admit to being a bit jealous.

So interesting to learn about this stuff. Despite not living in the US I am highly amazed and interested in its nature and wonderful biogeography. Love your channel man

I'm an ecology student, and I just learned about the "moss" around 35:40 in class! It's actually a type of fruticose lichen, not a moss. While I'm not very good at lichen ID yet, to me it resembles a Bushy Beard Lichen, the Usnea genus. Edit: I think it'd be really cool to see you do a video on lichen, and it would fit right in with the other topics you cover! There's a very interesting story in there about air quality over the past 50 years, as lichen are some of the first to go when it drops.

Just came home from a night away in the Finger lakes and spent 4 nights in the Adirondacks. Upstate New York is so incredibly beautiful it blows my mind. I could spend the next 10 years just trying to find all the best places to see and explore.

I remember doing a stand analysis study with my field ecology professor Jim Winch while in college on Slide mountain and referencing Kudish's work. We were studying acid rain effects on Red Spruce populations. Our results at that time were alarming. This is a beautiful day hike from base to summit with a gentle to moderate grade. The changeover from deciduous to balsam firs is quite striking and surreal as you approach the summit. The view from the summit is fantastic on a wide open rock platform with views in nearly all directions. It is a great place to watch meteor showers if you can avoid a foggy night. The best time to go is in the fall as the leaves are changing colors at the base and the surrounding area. Bring an extra layer of clothing to put on near the top.

This is so freaking cool to watch! What an honour it must be to meet and talk to someone who's dedicated his entire life to studying that specific region. I was blown away when he spoke about the native american tribes and their settlements

If you've ever been up to the High peaks in the Adirondacks its basically a rain forest up there, ridiculously lush

David Turan is my uncle. I have spent tons of time up on Mount Utsayantha and on the preserve. Always love it whenever I can spend time up there. It's such a beautiful place. Mike is a genuinely great guy and very knowledgeable. Every time you meet him he'll always go into some story telling you something about the area. Great work in this video and you've gained a new subscriber.

This is awesome! So glad I found your channel. I'm presently in Sidney, NY which is in Delaware County but prior to this I lived in an off-grid cabin on the "dark" side of Mohonk Mountain in Ulster County. Given your requirements, I definitely feel as though portions of Mohonk potentially (maybe almost?) qualify as a temperate rainforest. Very exciting!

I find something incredibly wholesome seeing the older and more recent generations interested in geography(and all the other terms) uniting together to solve questions like this.

About 4 years ago, I went to Spruce Knob, the highest point in West Virginia. As the name suggests, the peak is covered in conifers. However, you really don’t need to go far down the mountain to get to a deciduous forest, and I did think it felt like a temperate rainforest, although I definitely wasn’t being scientific with that conclusion, so I would love to see you explore the same region!

Mike is absolutely amazing. He's like Gandalf and the Hobbits all rolled into one person. 😁

The upstate forests hold a special enchantment, and now I have a deeper understanding for why that is. Also, NICE illustration with the intergrade butterfly hybrid! Thank you for featuring the deep knowledge, enthusiasm and dedication of Mike Kudish and Dave Turan. Great video. Subscribed.

Great, visiting forests in order to study them and discover new connections between factors that influence their formation seems like a dream job to me. Please continue with your work, I can’t wait for your next video.

Cutting out you talking and only getting Mikes responses is one of the simplest yet cleanest and professional parts of interviews people forget all the time. Great Job!

This is by far my favorite video you have done thus far! As a forester (from upstate) myself, you really brought to life the concepts and forest ecology interactions that make forests so amazing! Teaching people how to look at species composition and structure and observing how they change and why is what really opened my eyes to forestry! The way you explained something so complicated but in a thoughtful easy to follow manner is a gift! This video made my whole week. Thank you so much for all you do on your channel (best channel on RU-vid by far!) and I cannot wait to see what you do next!

Please do the West Virginia video! I’ve been in the area you described a lot, and I think there is some potential for pockets of rainforest. Even if you don’t find any true rainforest there are still some very unique areas in that region that could be worth doing a video on. Canaan Valley is probably the best example of a microclimate in eastern North America and it receives much higher precipitation and much lower temps than everywhere around it.

Mount Washington in NH has a part which feels a lot like a rainforest especially if you go up the Ammonoosuc trail. It's tall enough so you go above the clouds, and so the part where clouds hug the mountain is very wet feels completely different from other forests in New England. As you go up you can watch as a more familiar type of forest slowly turns more humid, the plant life changes, and there are cool places where rivers seems to run off of the edge of the earth. Might make for a interesting video topic!

As an Upstate New Yorker who grew up with the Catskills always in the background (and in the currently very wet Adirondacks at the moment), it's easy to think of our geography as kind of boring compared to other places. My grandfather used to take me around the woods behind his house up in the hills near Binghamton to look for frogs and salamanders. The floor of the forest there was a deep layer of moss, even through all that land had been cleared before my family bought it. It's nice to be reminded that there were always interesting things to be found in my own backyard, rainforest or not.

I’m so strangely impressed by Mike’s ability to translate thoughts into speech without any of the mental stumbling we all sometimes encounter, and more prevalently as we age. His mental vigor and clarity seems to reflect an active and enthusiastic mind.

This is such an amazing channel! It really brought back the child-like wonder I had for this beautiful planet and I can't wait to learn about and visit the amazing places we have!

The great love that Mike and Dave hold for this forest is so moving. The fade to black at the end of the panorama views was lovely too. Thank you for making this video and sharing it with us.

Most people: There's a bunch of trees over there. Atlas Pro and his subscribers: But why are they there? 🤔 This channel is so cool. Thank you for all of your work uncovering the beautiful truths behind our planet, and even beyond.

Having lived in the Catskill mountains my whole life and wandered the forests for years as a boy scout, I could have told you the Catskills couldn't be a rainforest because of the rocky soil. We get loads of rain, but as soon as it gets warm out, the soil drys up really fast if there is no water source anywhere nearby. That said, there are amazing swimming places, some even with decent cliffs to jump off of into cold mountain stream water. If you visit the state, be warned, NY is in the top 5 most expensive states to live in the USA. Cheers 🍻

Your best video to date! Hands down! Thank you! The Monongahela Forest in WV was a surprise mention. Definitely, explore that. But I will say I've been to the Smokies a handful of times and it is some of my favorite places in the world. The most recent visit was just a month ago when I went deeper into the national forest and was immediately overwhelmed by its beauty and it's "differentness" to in the Laurel Mountains of PA of which I'm accustomed too. I had incidentally visited the Smokies in the summer of 2017 after their fires that spring to witness the Great American Solar Eclipse. Fascinating how the peaks and ridges were vulnerable to fire but not the valleys. An exploration of the Smokies with your knowledge, curiosity and open-mindedness would be greatly appreciated!

I honestly don’t have much interest in rainforest and geography, but boy do I love watching people talk and discuss stuff they’re passionate about. Mike was impressive in every way

I'm so glad you made it around to the Monongahela National Forest. At so many points throughout the video when you referenced the Smokies and defining features of a rainforest as having an understory I kept thinking "what's so special about those features, that's just a normal forest" - not realizing my mental model of a "normal forest" was also another very wet area.

At the 13:20 mark, Mike pulls out a map of the precipitation in the Catskills. For decades I have fished, hunted, and toured around those areas. While hunting, we always joked about those mountains near Denning being part of a rainforest. Thanks for the insight, very informative.

Where my grandma lives in northern Minnesota is beautiful sugar maple forest and has a clear grass/forb, shrub, subcanopy, and canopy layer. The subcanopy is dominated by pagoda dogwood and ironwood. There are also some balsam fir, white spruce, quaking and big tooth aspen, American elm, and in the low spots, white cedar, and black ash. White cedar also act as a subcanopy species. The area only receives 25” of precipitation/year but the clay soil holds water well and the long, frigid winters keep it from drying out. That said you see a few standing dead paper birch and a few large old red oaks indicating it probably burned in the latter half of the 19th century.

Glad to se another video! I am incredibly exited for the possibility for you to travel and give a more indepth analasys of the places you educate us about. Hope you have a good weekend!

I was surprised that being a former Paul Smiths prof, he's down in the Catskills. It's a beautiful treat to have such a large, well-preserved area/State Park so close to a major metro. It provides the drinking water to millions. I'd like to see Tug Hill researched. It's a much larger area of > 55" precipitation. It's an insane snow belt. It's always funny to see the occasional car with feet of snow on it when you've had zero snow yourself. It's common for there to be no snow in Syracuse and lots of snow up there

The fellow you spoke with who made all those maps, you can tell him no, we're not at all disappointed at the beauty of what was in fact the baseline of the Catskills. It's absolutely stunning and makes me miss my youth running around the woods of the Poconos.

You're one of the only channels that can actually spur my interest in ecological studies like this, so keep it up man! In making these videos you're bringing more attention to ecology in general and that's a great thing! Can't wait for the next videos on this topic, if they come out.

This is the most I feel like I've learned and comprehended since getting out of high school. This was such an informative and eureka filled video. Thank you so much

This was such a fantastic and dynamic experience! I love how the breadcrumb trail leads us astray due to somewhat arbitrary definitions of “rainforest”. Truly a multidisciplinary approach to learning about an area from many perspectives! Please continue exploring potential areas of rainforest in the more temperate areas of North America!

So amazing to meet and talk with Dave, Mike, and the reserves and talk about the archives with them, I would be losing my shit seeing all those data sheets I would be glued to those for hrs looking at them, I know to they had such a amazing time showing off as well

There is something that I think is absolutely beautiful about the handdrawn maps Mike showed you.

Well done! Found an expert, did lots of homework, and explored in person. What a great amount of depth.

I've driven some of the back roads in the Catskills, there are some stretches of roads that are nothing but ferns and coniferous trees. Those roads were some of my favorites to drive down.

Im so happy to see you revisit the topic. Your original video on temperate rainforests was illuminating and i really enjoyed your foray into ur local wilderness. Upstate New York is very underrated, very scenic area (i spent quite a bit of time right across the border in CT), but more importantly it is an exciting new direction for your channel in my humble opinion. This video took this to new heights, you did an excellent job highlighting the geography of the area and giving the people that have spent decades studying it their own voice and personality

At 2:21 my brain got triggered at the "practicing skills" and i accidentally fastforwarded 30 seconds expecting a SkillShare ad. RU-vid really got me Pavlov'd, huh.

You did a FANTASTIC job with this video. As someone who wants to travel around the US studying botany in the field, you are seriously lighting a fire in me to go to upstate NY. Please do a video on the Midwestern oak savannas. It's another type of ecosystem that Americans tend to be surprised that we have here and they are a real treasure to explore for their biodiversity.

What a kind old guy, his records should be digitized and preserved! Call a local museum!

As someone living in the Tongass National Forest, the glaciation thing is interesting. Here the soil is similarly thin for much of the same reasons, but the rainfall is so excessive that despite this we still have this incredibly lush temperate rainforest. That said, much of upstate New York also gets much colder than most of Southeast Alaska, which I'm sure hinders the growth of some of the more specialized flora you can see in temperate rainforests too.

I suppose given what you've stated that perhaps in a few tens or even hundreds of thousands of years the Catskills can eventually be considered temperate rainforest once enough soil is laid down.

I wish there was a comment system on Nebula, because I love watching there but sometimes I need to come back over to youtube just to comment and like. Especially on your videos! I loved this. Everything about this video showed off your strengths, and I loved the inclusion of the nature preserve team so much! I would love to see another video like this in the future, as it was just so enjoyable. I especially enjoyed your choice to work with Michael Kudish and showcase this man's life's work. It was touching to see him have his spotlight and be able and willing to share all the information and material he had gathered over his time with this place. Thanks so much for the dedication you bring to your channel. There's a reason you're my favorite youtube creator!

I live in New Delhi at the edge of a hilly forest and even though I kind of new instinctively that it's not a rain forest. I was feeling a lil jealous that you were gonna prove that New York has a rain forest. But by the time you found that multilevel patch at the foothills I was rooting for it to be a rain forest. And then I realized at the end of this video that geography of my forest is also too rocky and lacking in soil.

I love your video! I was grown in similar mountains in Europe and your previous (about Temperate Rainforest) made me think about my area. In opposite to Catskills my mountains were not transformed in glacial period, but they were transformed almost completely by human - only very small pieces of forest on the peaks were left intact. Precipitation is about 1400mm/y around peaks, but might be closer to 1200. Maybe 1000 years ago our forest could be somehow close to temperate rainforest :D Greetings from Poland!

one of the most interesting and isolated temperate rainforests is the karri and karri-tingle forests of southwestern australia, in particular the karri-tingle areas around walpole have many rainforest endemic gondwanan relictual species that are restricted to just the small patches of giant old growth tingle trees on the coastly facing slopes of the few small hills in that area, theres velvet worms, giant pill milipedes, tiny trapdoor spiders, ancient lineages of harvestmen. the orographic effect aso allows for some small areas of tall karri trees to growth on the slops of the porongurup range, an extremely ancient granite bedrock outcrop (1.5 Billion)

You really need to check out temperate rainforests in the UK - even though they are typically formed of oaks, they appear completely different from normal deciduous woodland. This is partly because they aren't defined by an "understorey", but instead by the presence of "endophytes", i.e. plants/lichens which can survive while living on other plants. This means that, in temperate UK rainforests, everything is green - trees are moss-covered, lichens hang from branches, ferns grow fully within niches on living tree trunks.

This video blew me away. The map of fire resilient species ... It's just so cool to be able to see the settlements.

This man i'm sure is single handedly getting me through my environmental science degree.

Being from the Hudson Valley I wish more people knew how beautiful most of New York is, and just how much beautiful forest we have.

absolutely an amazing video! I've been watching your channel since you had about 5,000 subscribers I think and the way you look at subjects like biology, ecology, geography, and cultural anthropology is very similar to myself, and reminds me why I have such a deep love for the world around us! Can't wait for the next in the field video!

I live in the temperate Ozarks region. I feel like, I think I've always naturally understood 'understory' as the 2 to 5 in high "underbrush", i.e Snowberry plants, mayflower, indian rice, ironweed flower, etc., where our midstory is made up entirely of trees that could theoretically be big tall mature trees one day, but will really only ever be that stunted middle story here in NW Arkansas. It's forest grass, then snowberry, then the that stunted middle level before the oaks and pines that consists of various cherries, dogwoods, hickories, etc., then pretty much oak and historically natural pine make up the overstory.

I just hiked up Hunter Mountain in the Catskills the first weekend of November. Most of the forest floor was made up of leaves and pine needles, except for a very wet portion just beneath and to the west of the summit of Hunter Mountain, and along the ridgeline "bushwack" to Southwest Hunter Mountain. In these places there was dense moss, including pillow moss, and some snow/standing water still present. We commented at the time that these micro-biomes felt like a rainforest!

NEW VIDEO! I really love this channel and a lot of thing it does. Btw, can you make a video on the Biogeography of plants. I don’t think there’s any particular videos on that before and while I can research it it can get quite difficult. It would be really interesting!

So weird for me to think that the local forest fragments/forest parks in and near my city here in Wellington, New Zealand are literally rainforest. I don't really see the forest here as rainforest but it certainly is all over NZ. Albeit with some drier areas

This man reminds me of my grandfather who recently passed at 93. He was an engineer at Exxon so not quite the same subject lol but the attention to detail these people had back in the day was incredible

This is hands down the best geography channel on RU-vid. What a brilliantly assembled, engaging, and super satisfying video. Thank you for sharing your passion with the world, Caelan!

I just have to say that i really admire your dedication and thet sweet old man who helped you. You both are great such rolemodels.

Fun fact about the Catskills: They're built on a geologic formation known as the "Catskill delta," which was a river delta from a river off of the early Appalachian mountains. This region, which was subtropical at the time, just so happened to be home to the very first forests on Earth, back in the Middle Devonian period, which grew on swampy river deltas. So, this forest grows atop the ancient remains of Earth's first forests.

What a kind and passionate man! That was his life’s work and you let him explain it and are showing it to the world. You truly impacted his legacy and memory, great work!

Living in the Kaaterskill's is an amazing blessing, just yesterday crossing Ashokan I saw a bald eagle bully a red tailed hawk on the way to a hike. I can't wait to follow your footsteps up Slide Mountain next week, and I definitely can't wait to meet Michael! Thanks for sharing!

The Catskills might not have any rainforest, but I still think they're pretty neat! I hope one day that topsoil can get thicker so this region can once again achieve PEAK BIODIVERSITY

Did you see any old chestnut stumps? Do a video on The American Chestnut! There's even some still alive on an island in Michigan! Also those random berries on the trail was an invasive Japanese bar berry.

It’s always nice to see a fellow New York resident talk about the Adirondacks. I’m on the doorstep of the Adirondacks and always wanted to explore more of it.

Watching this after getting home from my job in stamford was such a trip! Great work, I’m so glad someone is taking about these great mountain ranges!!

This is EXACTLY the type of video i adore

I'd love to see a continuation of this in WV. And, being a Pacific NW girl myself, I'd be interested in what potential temperate rainforests we might have on this side of the continent, maybe with a further continuation...

we need to get this man everything he needs to do his wonderful treks to all these places. This was an amazing video, and I love how you put everything together to figure out what makes a rainforest. Definitely looking forward to your next trip to inspecting other potential rainforests. I think what you're doing is going to be improving the sciences greatly.

We've been having incredible rainfall on the island of Key Largo, FL for the last few years. When I moved here in 2010, our tropical hardwood hammocks did not have very many understory trees even though we have plenty of species that are happy to grow at the right height. The forest floor was clear with a thin layer of soil and some sticks. Dry spells were frequent, especially in the "winter" months. Now there is an incredible tangle of dead wood, bushes and smaller tree trunks that is very difficult to hike through. This is in spite of there being very low light making it to the ground. We're dealing with an explosion of invasive reptiles which mostly sucks for our native reptiles. The substrate is thick and spongy, often concealing holes that are unpleasant to step into by accident.

Love this video!!! One of the criteria for temperate rainforests is very problematic it seems. If absence of fire adapted species is an indicator of rainforest ecosystem, then the coast redwoods of California would no longer be a rainforest because of the presence of fire and fire adapted species

What part does average annual snowfall play in your definitions? For example, in your first precipitation map, the spot in the Adirondacks I recognized as an area that receives heavy lake effect snow. How does one convert inches of snowfall to inches of rain? What impact will that have temperate v boreal forest?

I spent a lot of time in this area especially slide mountain and hunter mountain and another part of the Catskills that my family used to have property in. This is a really awesome video and it's great that you made it.

My grandfather was Jerome Thaler, who wrote the Catskills weather book you featured. I never thought I'd see anyone cite his book! I would have loved to have sent this video to him.

I look forward to the possibility of you covering arctic rainforests! (and/or why they today no longer exist.. or?)

You should check out the temperate rainforests of Yakushima japan. its interesting because its on the same latitude as Jerusalem and is surrounded by the subtropical islands of Okinawa!

This was fascinating. Thank you so much! And thanks to Mike and his team, their work is beyond impressive, I'd love to meet him!

This video was really interesting and well done. I live near the White Mountains over in New Hampshire, and you had me looking at rainfall and climate maps for that area too. It's very similar, with rainfall that technically exceeds 55" per year, but the areas are also unable to retain the water. In fact, there are a couple small areas that get over 80" of rainfall per year, but due to other factors those are the much less biodiverse Alpine Zones. They contain unique flora compared to the areas around them, but lack diversity.

I would say good indicator species for you in this instance may have been Paw Paw(Asimina triloba), which is a midstory tree native to the area, only sharing relatives with species found in China/SE Asia. Paw Paws also are not fire adapted, and require deep moist soil for their large taproot. Everything about this plant and its fruit says "forest with lots of rain" to me. Another indicator species may be Prunus serotina, but they are more prevalent and difficult to ID species on. Also another thought, the collection of tree species you have today on the east coast lack the supercanopy, to suppress the upper canopy, the American Chestnut (Castanea dentata) is functionally extinct, no longer ever reaching full size of the "Sequoias of the East". In my opinion this would potentially make it harder for the midstory to get some sun from under the thick overstory, with no competition. Not to mention the greater variety of all sizes of animals that paw paws and chestnuts could support, by increasing forage. Additionally, while i am a firm believer that the last glacial maximum is one of, if not the most impactful weather related climate condition in the US. I would harbor a guess that there was more soil, and detritus on the ground in pre-colonial times. Potentially having been severely degraded due to sudden erosion from clear cutting 100-300 yrs ago, and collection of dead wood for fires by early settlers. So just saying there is not enough soil really doesn't capture the whole picture. Especially considering the pre-colonial range of American chestnuts, and their habit to prefer steeper than average slopes.

5:40 it’s not about temperature and rainfall being related. It’s about the fact that he’s defining a “temperate rainforest” so any hotter and it becomes a tropical rainforest lol

I just moved to the Hudson Valley area, and have been marveling at how different the forests and plant life is here. This was really interesting, thank you!

one of the most interesting and kinda heartwarming parts of this video was the evidence of where the native people lived and how they shaped the ecosystem for hundreds if not thousands of years, i really don't know why it made me so happy edit; oh my god i've gotten farther into the video and the parts about the islands of boreal forest is also really really cool. i think i just love finding evidence of the past in the present, seeing how things change over time is just so cool, i love it. edit 2: i just thought about how maybe in the future these areas might become rain forests. i'd really love to see if that's something we can predict! this video is just amazing!!!

Just a fun fact, according to NOAA’s NCEI, the wettest county in NY is Ulster County with 47” of rain annually looking at the 1901-2000 mean (most NY counties were are between 35-45”) but these are county wide estimates so it’s definitely good looking at more specific maps as precipitation ranges in a tight areas. But there are certainly areas that get more than 55” of rain annually in NY as this video showed. Not to mention some individual years you can get way more than 55” for instance in 2018 most mid-Atlantic states such as NJ and NY got way more than 60” of rain annually, where they are typically 40-50” annually so it be interesting to see how much rain the Catskills or Adirondacks get in some wetter than average years. One important thing to think about is with Global Warming. As our planet continues to get warmer due to human activity at a rapid pace, it be interesting if New York and other Northeast areas could see tropical rainforests (too warm for temperate rainforests) conditions if we see a Global Warming of 4°C. Another thing with Global Warming is that in a warmer global climate causing more precipitation in the eastern US, it could compensate for the lack of water retention the soils have in New York and there could be temperate rainforest conditions by late 21st century. Or not even looking at climate change, maybe give it a few more thousand years and eventually temperate rainforest conditions can invade New York. The reason is the last glacial cycle was too recently, relatively, but considering we have many tens of thousands of years of interglacial ahead of us we could see temperate rainforests take over much of the Northeastern United States. So it’s really just time.

So happy to see yet another video on the topic. Ur an amazing creator

I love how happy Mike is sharing his passionate work with AP

This is right in my backyard, and I didn't realize the Catskills were so magnificent this close to my hometown! For me, the revelation of a boreal forest so close to Binghamton was astounding. I had previously thought the closest Boreal forest was the north slope of the Adirondacks. Can you do more on the Boreal forests of New York State?

Honestly, all these terms are arbitrary, a place with 1399 mm of annual precipitation is no different from a place with 1400 mm