Forest Forensics: A Field Guide to Reading the Forested Landscape

Take some of the mystery out of a walk in the woods with this new field guide from the author of Reading the Forested Landscape.

Thousands of readers have had their experience of being in a forest changed forever by reading Tom Wessels's Reading the Forested Landscape. Was this forest once farmland? Was it logged in the past? Was there ever a major catastrophe like a fire or a wind storm that brought trees down?

Now Wessels takes that wonderful ability to discern much of the history of the forest from visual clues and boils it all down to a manageable field guide that you can take out to the woods and use to start playing forest detective yourself. Wessels has created a key―a fascinating series of either/or questions―to guide you through the process of analyzing what you see. You’ll feel like a woodland Sherlock Holmes. No walk in the woods will ever be the same.

50 color photographs

Tom Wessels is an ecologist and the author of Reading the Forested Landscape and Forest Forensics. He is the director of the Environmental Biology program at Antioch New England Graduate School.