A year after its closure because of typhoon damage, maple trees in the Owanda Forest Recreational Park in Nantou County have begun to flourish again, a forest ranger said yesterday.
The Owanda park is famous for its maples. Every autumn, the scarlet maple leaves in Owanda flutter down from the trees and carpet the ground, attracting large numbers of visitors.
However, the park’s maple tree section has been closed since September last year, when half of its maples were inundated with water, sand and silt washed downstream by torrential rain brought by Typhoon Sinlaku.
Chen Chi-jung (陳啟榮), a section chief at the Nantou Forest District Office of the Forest Bureau, said his office was originally worried about the fate of the park’s maples when Typhoon Morakot battered Taiwan in early August.
“We supposed that the section might shrink even more because of typhoon damage ... Much to our amazement, however, the area has actually expanded because soil and silt brought down by a series of typhoons in the past four years have filled and raised river and creek beds in the region,” said Chen, adding that the maple section of the park has expanded from about 4 hectares to 6 hectares.
To gather more information on the impact of the inundation on the maple trees, the Nantou Forest District Office commissioned Tseng Hsi-yu to conduct a field survey earlier this year.
Tseng said that maples tend to grow in river valleys.
“It is truly a miracle that so many of the maples in Owanda have remained alive and vibrant despite having their trunks buried up to 5 meters deep in sand or silt,” he said.
He recalled that his team monitored a sample area where 262 of the trees had either been waterlogged or buried by sand.
“Only 15 of them had withered and died as of June,” Tseng said.
In contrast, he said, more than half of the 100-plus mountain cinnamon trees and the 200-plus Zelkova formosana trees in the same region had died by June.
After Typhoon Morakot sand accumulated in the region again, killing most of the remaining mountain cinnamon and Zelkova trees, while most of the maple trees have miraculously survived, Tseng said.
Moreover, the sand actually helped the maples avoid grub infestation, he said.
With temperatures cooling in recent days, Chen said the forest park is planning to re-open the Owanda maple forest early next month.
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