Dead wood: Nature’s invitation to your yard

Vines curl over the top of a wildlife pole thoughtfully incorporated into a front-yard landscape. [ Tyler Jones | UF/IFAS ]

Ferns grow inside a fallen log. [ Tyler Jones | UF/IFAS ]

Jiri Hulcr, a professor of forest entomology in the UF/IFAS School of Forest, Fisheries and Geomatics Sciences. [ Courtesy of Jiri Hulcr ]

Katy Deitz, a doctoral candidate in the UF/IFAS plant pathology department. [ Courtesy of Katy Deitz ]

Katy Deitz’s laurel oak was decades old, the trunk half the length of her body, when the hollowing effects of heart-rot decay rendered the tree unsafe to stand. Arborists felled the oak, and Deitz intended to grind the stump.

“I’m glad I didn’t, because one, it saved me money, and two, it brought a lot of diversity to my yard,” said Deitz, a doctoral candidate in the UF/IFAS plant pathology department.

Now saucer-sized fungi adorn the stump’s rim, and beneficial beetles burrow inside. Life – even after the tree’s death – flourishes.

Deitz and a handful of UF/IFAS-affiliated students, faculty and staff members are promoting the ecological benefits of dead wood through Neighborwood Watch, a new campaign involving academic publications, an informational website and surveys.

“We are trying to help people understand that there is a cycle to a tree’s life, and it does not end when the tree is still green and big,” said Jiri Hulcr, a professor of forest entomology in the School of Forest, Fisheries and Geomatics Sciences. “It really ends decades after that, when all the nutrients have been returned back into the ecosystem and into our soil.”

Between 2001 and 2023, Florida lost 28% of its canopy cover, according to Global Forest Watch. Trees toppled due to development, storms, disease, fires and harvesting. But not all required removal from the environment. Inspired by some European cities that value and preserve dead wood, Floridians are incorporating it into landscapes as brush piles, stumps, branches, logs, tall trunks denuded of branches (“wildlife poles” or “woodpecker poles”) and dead but upright trees (“snags”). Their efforts create much-needed refuges for birds, bugs, reptiles and plant species competing for space in urban environments.

An approaching hurricane spurred Wendy Wilber to remove a rotting, 150-foot tree from her yard, but she asked arborists to leave five feet of the trunk as a wildlife pole. Now Wilber routinely hears the rat-a-tat-tat of pileated woodpeckers.

“It’s always such a joy when I hear the knocking, and I know there’s a big woodpecker out here searching for beetles and beetle larvae,” said Wilber, coordinator of the UF/IFAS Master Gardener Volunteer program. “It’s a real pleasure to attract those birds to the landscape.” 

Hulcr refers to dead trees as “backyard apartment buildings” due to the diversity of life they support.

In fact, 25 Florida bird species – including the pileated woodpecker and the white-breasted nuthatch – require dead branches or rotting cavities to nest, according to an Ask IFAS document Hulcr and his colleagues published earlier this month. The document provides guidance about safety and strategies for working with arborists and homeowners’ associations. It also dispels myths related to termite and wildfire risks.

Through the Neighborwood Watch campaign, Hulcr and crew hope to present an alternative to the traditional, meticulously manicured Florida yard; a dramatic, nature-inspired landscape can be aesthetically pleasing, too. 

“If we remove all the dead and dying trees, then we really deprive the ecosystem,” Hulcr said. “We should take care of them. We understand there’s a lot of wisdom, there’s a lot of legacy in them.”

Learn more at neighborwoodwatch.org.

Megan Winslow, a public relations specialist at the University of Florida’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences (UF/IFAS) can be reached at winslow@ufl.edu