Cut pine stumps become nurse sites yielding semicircular stilt-rooted trees

Evidence

Both white pine and spruce stumps can serve as nurse sites. About a decade after cutting, the wood just inside the bark on the top of these stumps decays to the point where it can support a ring of moss. The moss provides a good germination site for small-seeded, shade-tolerant trees like hemlock, spruce, yellow birch, black birch, and balsam fir. The roots of these trees grow down just inside the bark of the stump, often wrapping around it. Once the stump decays away, what is left is a stilt-rooted tree, whose roots grow in a semicircular pattern that approximates the diameter of the original stump. — Tom Wessels, Forest Forensics, 143

Categorization

• XREF: Stilt-root semicircular pattern lets a reader infer the original stump diameter; direct link to the trees-infrastructure bridges/grafts article imagery.