TAIPEI: A year after their habitat's closure due to typhoon damage, maple trees in the Owanda Forest Recreational Park (OFRP) in central Taiwan's Nantou County have begun to flourish again, a forest ranger said yesterday.

The OFRP, a canyon west of the convergence of the Ta Nan and Wan Da Pei rivers, is famous for its maples. Every autumn, the scarlet and vermilion maple leaves in Owanda flutter down from the trees and carpet the ground, attracting large crowds of visitors.

However, the park's maple tree section has been closed since September 2008, when half of its maples were inundated with water, sand and silt washed downstream by torrential rain brought by Typhoon Sinlaku.

Chen Chi-jung, a section chief at the Nantou Forest District Office of the Forest Bureau under the Council of Agriculture, 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 four hectares to six 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 noted 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 five meters deep in sand or silt," Tseng said.

He recalled that his team monitored a sample area where 262 of the trees have either been waterlogged or buried by sand. "Only 15 of them had withered and died as of June," Tseng said.

In contrast, he went on, 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, accumulated sand in the region increased again, which led to the death of most of the remaining mountain cinnamon and zelkova trees, while most of the maple trees have miraculously survived, Tseng said.

Moreover, he added, the sand burial actually helped the maples avoid grub infestation, as most of the insects that proliferated following the waterlogging died under the sand.

Over the past year, Chen said, the park administration has rebuilt typhoon-damaged hiking trails in the Owanda area and has set up new security installations.

With temperatures becoming cooler in recent days, Chen added, the forest park is planning to re-open the Owanda maple forest in early December.

China Daily/CNA

(HK Edition 11/12/2009 page2)