Beautiful scenery Forest

A summer walk in the cool green forests at any of your 19 Metro Parks will inspire your imagination and stir your senses. Forests are the centerpiece of most parks, from streamside or riparian forests of towering sycamores and gnarly box elders to the dry ridge-top forests of mountain laurel and chestnut oak.

A forest is much more than a collection of trees. Our forests are also nature’s air filters. According to the American Forestry Association, an acre of trees uses about 2.6 tons of carbon dioxide per year and provides life-sustaining oxygen.

Metro Parks’ forests are an ever-changing home for countless species of insects, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals. Change in the forest sometimes takes place slowly over the course of decades, such as when a big old tree begins to die. It slowly creates a clearing for the sunlight to reach the once shaded forest floor.

This allows another tree to inch its way through the canopy. There it will take its place as a dominant tree until it also begins to die and the cycle continues. Other times, major change happens in a matter of hours. A huge number of park trees lost most of their branches in a devastating ice storm we suffered little more than a decade ago.